Yes, “Wrecking ball.” That’s the expression Tennessee Senator Bob Corker used to describe President Donald Trump, in a recent interview for Politico. Corker’s intention was to describe the flailing President as a powerful leader wrestling with destructive foreign policy urges. He didn’t mean to make us all imagine what Trump might look like naked in a Miley Cyrus video.
Thanks, Bob. 
If that wasn’t enough, Corker also wants to ‘massage’ Trump’s ‘nuggets.’ No, he actually said that.
Hello, people of the future.
By the time you read this, we will have elected a new president. I hope you’ll be reading this and that Shit Creek hasn’t escaped its embankments and flooded us with millions of tons of Clinton emails and Donald J. Trump neckties. I hope Russia hasn’t decided to invade us while we weren’t looking, because the only thing I know about survival came from watching Red Dawn, and I’m not really cut out for the having-to-pee-in-the-woods way of life. I hope we haven’t woken up to riots.
I haven’t been one of the ones saying that if Trump wins, I’m going to Canada. I’m too lazy for that kind of commitment. My passport’s expired. I’m not stockpiling ammo. I can’t ever remember what gauge the guns are, so I’d end up with a closet full of the wrong kind, and I don’t think I’d be good at selling shotgun shells on the black market because I’m not one of those people who always knows a guy. I’m not moving out into the woods. Sure, we talked about it, but I just got a YMCA membership so I want to get my money’s worth from that. Also, I just bought a bunch of produce, and I’m not sure how techy the Canadians are about bringing collards into the country. Let’s not forget they sell milk in bags. I actually haven’t decided if that’s a positive or a negative.
My brother-in-law lives in The Hague, and we talked about crashing with him. I mean, all the Dutch seem concerned about legislating is the wearing of veils and headscarves, so I guess it must be pretty quiet over there. The problem is I have no balance, and riding a bike everywhere would not be good for me. Or anyone within a three-mile radius of me. Oh, and also I believe that clothing isn’t something a government should regulate unless one is serving in an army, and I’m pretty committed to that whole freedom of religion thing, so it’s really no good.
Dwong19 | Dreamstime.com
Miley Cyrus
I just Googled “what to do if Trump wins” and got a list of celebrities who said they were leaving if Trump is elected. Barbara Streisand, Raven-Symoné, Miley Cyrus, George Lopez, Chelsea Handler, and Amy Schumer are a few. In the interest of being fair and balanced, it’s good to know there might be something positive from a Trump reign. If Clinton won, the Oath Keepers have promised Civil War. I wonder if I am waking up to an America where Miley Cyrus is tweeting about weed from Cape Breton? I’m not entirely uncomfortable with that.
I think this morning we all woke up relieved the election is over. I think we woke up tired. I think we woke up wondering if we need to push the credit card payment back to make the mortgage on time. I probably woke up this morning realizing I forgot to get coffee. I probably woke up because my dog was whining to go out. My husband probably woke up because I accidentally popped him in the head because I was dreaming that I was in a fistfight with a beaver (that has actually happened). We all woke up this morning just like we have hundreds of mornings before, and we’ll fall in bed tonight just like the hundreds of nights before. I’m not saying the election didn’t matter. I’m saying I’m trying really hard not to quote the Who about new bosses and old bosses because it seems trite.
My father told me never to vote against anything or anyone. Vote for something or someone. I was able to do that this year, just like I’ve been able to since my first Presidential Smackdown in 1992. Some years it’s harder than others, but no one ever said democracy was easy. If it were, everybody would have one. I don’t mind that other countries roll their eyes at us. It’s not like they don’t have shenanigans. Milk in bags, remember? Italy elected a porn star to parliament. North Korea’s run by the kid who sat in the back of your math class and ate his own boogers. There are people in Britain who honestly didn’t know that voting to leave the European Union really meant they would leave the European Union.
Perhaps we’ll see how close we came to ruin and make better choices next election cycle. Maybe we’ll realize all politics is local and start making better choices at home, which will eventually trickle up to better national choices. Of course, maybe every reality “star” will see how easy it is to come close to the presidency, and we can look forward to Honey Boo Boo 2032 billboards.
Here in Memphis, we’ll go on grinding. It’s what we do.
Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.
“Sensored”
Rep. Barbara Cooper and Rep. Johnnie Turner of Memphis and Rep. John Ray Clemmons of Nashville filed a hostile work environment complaint against Rep. Susan Lynn last week after she gave members of the Tennessee’s General Assembly a DVD titled “America’s Mosques Exposed! Video Evidence They Are War Factories.” In her response, the Mt. Juliet legislator misspelled “censor” three times and said she was trying to help a preacher share information any person googling things like “Mosques are war factories” might find on the internet.
“A citizen who was unable to get to the capitol on his own asked for me to distribute a video for him. Therefore, I take full responsibility for the distribution of the video. I saw no reason to sensor [sic] the individual. … The individual is a preacher, an historian, and an author. The legislature … is a forum for ideas and a place to share information on all subjects. We do not sensor [sic] information and we do not sensor [sic] citizens.”
Lynn, who shared the anti-Muslim propaganda and may not know what the word she misspelled means, continued, “On many occasions I too have received information from both legislators and citizens that I found offensive. But I did not run off and file a lawsuit in an attempt to make political hay. I simply discarded the material.”
Neverending Elvis
Over the past month, Fly on the Wall has highlighted several stories about the decline of Elvis culture in Las Vegas. That shouldn’t be mistaken for a decline in Elvis culture generally. In this past week alone, Scotland hosted a three-day Elvis festival, and Miley Cyrus got an Elvis tattoo shaped like a heart. Or maybe a tongue.
Sometimes, you just need a big, dumb comedy.
Every year or so, Seth Rogen gets the mutated remains of the Freaks and Geeks crew together to make a big, dumb movie. Sometimes, as in the case of 2013’s This Is the End, these larks are among the most free and most fun comedies of the 21st century. Sometimes, as in the case of last year’s The Interview, they cause an international incident and bring a major Hollywood studio to its knees.
The Night Before is unlikely to be as effective at turning another page in our unfolding William Gibson-cyperpunk-dystopia of a reality as The Interview, but it’s actually a much better movie. Where The Interview was a reworking of the mostly forgotten Chevy Chase/Dan Akroyd vehicle Spies Like Us, The Night Before is a mashup of After Hours and It’s a Wonderful Life. The angel, in this case, is a supernatural weed dealer named Mr. Green played by General Zod himself, Michael Shannon, who appears to be trying to imitate Steven Wright. It’s one of those great bit parts that can make or break a movie like this, and, unlike Neighbors, Rogen’s massively overrated summer comedy that is inexplicably getting a sequel, The Night Before makes them count.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, and Anthony Mackie in The Night Before
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Ethan, whose parents died 14 years ago just as the Christmas season was getting underway. His two best friends, Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie), took him out to party on Christmas Eve to keep him from feeling lonely, and a tradition was born. But these days, the boys don’t get out much any more. Isaac is a successful lawyer with a baby on the way, and Chris plays in the NFL, so this is going to be the last year of the traditional debauch. Ethan’s life never took off, and he’s working as an event server dressed as an elf. When he’s demoted to coat check, he gets the opportunity he’s been waiting years for. He swipes invitations to the Nutcracker Ball, a massive, secret party that is the hottest holiday ticket in New York. Meanwhile, Isaac’s wife, Betsy (Jillian Bell) gives him an early Christmas gift: a box of assorted drugs so he can put the tradition to bed in high style.
Naturally, the three friends’ trip to the party weaves an intertwining tapestry of social disasters. Rogen gets the best scene with a psychedelic paranoid crisis in a bar bathroom, but Gordon-Levitt gets plenty of mileage using his prodigious acting gifts to mug for the camera. Mackie comes off as a little stiff next to comedy vets like Lizzy Caplan, who plays Ethan’s love interest, and Mindy Kaling, the subject of an epic cell phone mix-up, but he’s an agreeable screen presence.
The Night Before is a 21st-century studio product, full of product placement, Save the Cat screenwriting beats, and Miley Cyrus cameos. Strangely enough, that studio is Sony, whose post-hacking survival I publicly doubted. Sony survived, even though many, including the studio’s chief executive, lost their jobs. But somehow, Rogen and James Franco, who has a cameo in The Night Before, are still making pleasantly stupid studio comedies. I hope somewhere, an angel got his wings for that one.
© Luis Lopes Silva | Dreamstime.com
Hope Solo
Wow! Did you see that? No, not NBC telling Donald Trump that he was fired or Miley Cyrus posing nude again. I’m talkin’ about the U.S. women’s national soccer team putting a wrecking ball through Japan and winning its first World Cup in 16 years.
I’ll own up to my soccer ignorance. I tried to learn the game when the Memphis Rogues were filling the Liberty Bowl back in the late 1970s, but that was more of a good excuse to sit with your rowdy friends and get blasted. I even tried to play the game back in grade school but I kept getting kicked in the shins, and I refuse to participate in any sport that causes personal pain. I like to watch it, though, and what I saw last Sunday was spectacular. In the words of finals attendee Joe Biden, “This is a big fuckin’ deal.” After that match I was thinking that maybe women ought to govern for a while. But then people would scream, “I want my country back.”
My wife and I set aside all pending responsibilities to be certain we would be in front of the TV to watch this game, but almost before we could change the channel, the United States had scored. Then scored and scored and scored again. Our gesticulating and screaming frightened the dogs almost as much as the previous night’s fireworks. When Carli Lloyd kicked that 54-yard goal, we lost our minds.
Has anyone ever seen a kick like that before? Maybe the NFL could polish its tainted image by hiring the first female field-goal kicker. Going in to the match, we didn’t even know the players’ names, but we do now. Lloyd, who had struggled in earlier matches, scored the fastest goal ever and had the first hat trick in World Cup history. Aptly named goalkeeper Hope Solo won the Golden Glove award for allowing only three goals in seven games. The U.S. women’s national soccer team is the first to win three World Cups and in the process got payback for Japan’s World Cup victory win in 2011. What an inspiration this must be for girls everywhere and for women’s sports in general. People used to criticize soccer for lack of action. Not anymore.
Truth be told, I felt a lot more patriotic on the fifth of July than the fourth. I watched all the usual festivities and squirmed through Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA” for the thousandth time, but I don’t participate anymore, because downtown Memphis on the Fourth of July is no country for old men.
But we ate hot dogs with relish, both literally and figuratively, and as it turns out, it wasn’t necessary to go downtown at all. The continual massive explosions around our neighborhood made us feel like we were right in the middle of the official display. The family pets turned into mad dogs, alternately howling at the ceiling or trembling in fear. There was a meme going around on social media that said that on the Fourth of July, the citizens of Memphis can play their favorite guessing game: Is it fireworks or gunshots?
The truth is, Independence Day, like Halloween, has become just another opportunity for grown people to get drunk and run wild. Is this the way we demonstrate patriotism? What those women did on that soccer field, playing for their country, was patriotic. The soldiers who serve us and the families that support them are patriotic. Blowing up shit is not patriotic.
In full disclosure, I’m not much of a patriot. Samuel Johnson in 1775, and Bob Dylan in 1983, said “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and I tend to believe them. Most of the patriotism I had was kicked out of me during the Vietnam War era, when we had a paranoid-schizophrenic president who refused to listen to legitimate protests or admit that he was wrong. I didn’t feel very proud to be an American back then. When Nixon’s conservative “Silent Majority” hijacked both what it meant to be patriotic and the American flag as symbol of the divisive “my country, right or wrong” sentiment, the flag turned into a pro-war symbol or a bumper sticker indicating loyalty to the administration. It was then when I realized that you can separate love of country from whoever happens to be in power at the time.
Politicians use patriotism for their own cynical purposes, so it’s illogical to pledge allegiance to a transient regime with an ideological agenda. I can simultaneously love my country while opposing the politics of those who would use patriotism like a cudgel. But after that incredible victory in the World Cup, I have found something to be patriotic about — devoid of war, politics, or division — just joy. That group of women did their country proud, which is something we can all relish.
Randy Haspel writes the Recycled Hippies blog, where a version of this column first appeared.
Neverending Elvis
According to Belgian news sources, “Elvis Presley was de allereerste twerker,” while the Spanish-speaking press notes, “El ‘twerking’ lo inventó Elvis Presley.” For the English-only types, here’s the gist of this super-hot international news item: Memphis’ rock king, Elvis A. Presley, was the original twerker. The source of this stunning revelation was none other than Nashville twerk queen Miley Cyrus, standing up for her God-given right to shake but not break what Sears & Roebuck don’t make.
“Elvis, he wasn’t wearing the outfits I was wearing, but he was coming out and he was doing like the OG twerking,” Cyrus said to Australia’s Sunday Night. “Like, no one wants to admit that he was twerking, he was.”
Will Cyrus’ multiple anachronisms overshadow her underlying point that her dirty dancing has exposed some not-very-well-hidden gender biases? Can she convince percolator purists that booty-bumping is an ancient and honorable tradition reaching back at least as far as 1954? Are people in Belgium and Australia really still talking about twerking?
Dees-Licious
Memphis-raised artist Shelley Fisher, “The Down Home Diva,” brings her one-woman musical The Hebrew Hillbilly to the Jewish Community Center Thursday, September 4th. The Hebrew Hillbilly chronicles a Hollywood odyssey that begins in the “heart of the Mississippi Delta.” Singing with the Wonderland Band, Fisher scored a hit with a disco version of TV’s “Wonder Woman Theme.” Most notably she penned “Dis-Gorilla,” the jungle-themed follow-up to superstar Memphis DJ Rick Dees’ 1976 hit “Disco Duck.”
Sample lyrics: “A foxy lady in a bright red cape/ Caught my eye and really drove me ape/ All of a sudden, I was acting deranged/ My hair was growing wild/ I was looking strange/ She said I’s the one/ Who would name me thriller/ Cause she was searching for the Dis-gorilla.” They just don’t write ’em like that anymore.
Miley Cyrus doesn’t cause rape. Rapists cause rape.
A couple weeks back, the Flyer published a Viewpoint by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen in which the author essentially blamed rape culture on women expressing their sexuality, à la Miley Cyrus’ twerking performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Richard Cohen
Writes Cohen, “But let me also suggest that acts such as hers not only objectify women but debase them. They encourage a teenage culture that has set the women’s movement back on its heels. What is being celebrated is not sexuality but sexual exploitation, a mean casualness that deprives intimacy of all intimacy.”
And this excerpt came after he wasted at least 500 words blaming the Steubenville rape case on “a teenage culture that was stupid, dirty, and so incredibly and obliviously misogynistic.” In Cohen’s mind, it was apparently a teen culture influenced by pop artists who proudly (albeit somewhat clumsily) twerk.
The infamous rape case involved football players from a high school in Steubenville, Ohio, who, after drinking all night at a party, inserted their fingers into the vagina of a drunk, passed-out girl, all the while bragging on Twitter, slut-shaming her on YouTube, and Instagramming disturbing pictures of her being carried by the wrists and ankles, her head hanging loosely and her hair dragging on the floor. The girl has no memory of what happened to her.
A recent piece in The New Yorker, which Cohen cites in his piece, made the case that media and blog reports of the incident, some of which claimed the girl was gang-raped, may have been overblown. The investigation revealed the football players did not have full-on intercourse with the girl. But to hear Cohen tell it, the girl was simply “manhandled.” And somehow, that incident happened because teenage culture debases women.
Penetrating the girl in any way is more than manhandling. It is a sexual assault. It had nothing to do with pop stars and everything to do with young men who felt entitled to use and abuse a young woman for their own pleasure.
Why those young men made the decisions to violate that girl, I can’t say. But rape or any sort of unwanted sexual advance is never, ever something a woman (or her teenage culture) asks for, as Cohen’s column would suggest.
I’ll admit that Miley’s decision to wear a flesh-colored bikini and rub her business all over Robin Thicke at the VMAs was embarrassing but not because, as Cohen writes, it “set the women’s movement back on its heels.” The performance was awkward and poorly executed (had Lady Gaga done the same thing, it likely would have gone over more smoothly), but it did nothing to undo the hard work of feminists past.
And it certainly did nothing to encourage or make light of rape among teenage fans. How one can look at Miley’s tongue-wagging, butt-shaking performance and think “rape” is beyond me. Women displaying their sexuality, no matter how crudely, is not a cry for rape, and the fact that Cohen would go there just shows how much of a misogynist he really is.
A woman should never be blamed for inviting rape, or in Miley’s case, blamed for setting the women’s lib movement back so far as to make it okay for a man to have his way with an innocent, drunk girl.
If a teenage culture that makes light of rape even exists, and I don’t believe it does, it’s not the fault of a style of dancing. It’s the fault of young men who think it’s okay to fondle and photograph an unconscious woman who has no idea what’s being done to her. The football players involved in the Steubenville case came from a small town where the high school football team was glorified and aggrandized to the point where its stars were celebrities who felt they could do no wrong.
The problem likely lies in a culture (not just a teen culture, mind you, but one perpetuated by adults) that focuses more on high school athletics than academics and, in turn, teaches men from a very young age that so long as you’re popular and athletic, you can get away with anything.
Cohen blaming the degeneration of teen culture on Miley Cyrus is no different from his parents’ generation blaming the collapse of morality on Elvis’ iconic hip swiveling. But wait, Elvis was a man. So I’m sure Cohen wouldn’t agree with that.
Bianca Phillips is a Flyer associate editor.