Me again. Still at Daytona. Since Juan Pablo Montoya accidentally set the track on fire, I thought I'd bring up another Daytona-related story instead.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney apparently visited Daytona on Sunday when the race was supposed to run. A reporter asked Romney if he followed NASCAR, and he responded: "Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners."
Bless his heart. No, really. Just the other day, trying to relate to voters in Michigan, he mentioned that his wife owns several Cadillacs, and that he drives both a Ford AND a Chevy. (Of course he does. He probably drinks Coke AND Pepsi, roots for Dan AND Dave, and assures us that it's both live AND Memorex.)
The thing is, Romney is way, ridiculously more wealthy than most Americans. And there's not a thing wrong with that. Being rich doesn't make him a bad person or a potentially bad president, any more than growing up poor or middle class automatically makes one a better person or leader.
I don't need my president to be exactly like me. I just need him or her to be able to listen to and respect people with different points of view.
If Romney wants to appeal to voters, trying to pretend he's just like them isn't the way to go - because he's not. I genuinely hope he figures that out, because I don't think I can handle a 50-50 chance of a Santorum presidency.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Daytona 500 Live Diary
The first two hours...
12:03: Both Waltrips are in the booth. What did I do to deserve this? I can’t explain why these two men annoy me so much. They’re both knowledgeable and more insightful then a lot of the guys who do this. But I just can’t stand either of them. Recordings of their voices run in a continuous loop on the loudspeakers in my personal version of hell.
12:04: There’s rain in the forecast, so we need to get a weather report from a weather guy who’s so metro he makes Michael Waltrip look like Bruce Willis. He wants us to know that after this shower there’s a biiiiiig area of “rain-free air.” Please, please keep cutting to him throughout the race.
12:15: Dale Jr. is in the booth! I’m still not sure how I feel about his beard, which made its debut last year. I think I like it. It makes him look older. He seems confident, which is a great sign.
12:21: Ooh, ooh, it’s a commercial for Valvoline NextGen motor oil, which is 50 percent recycled. I just read in the paper this morning that the Roush cars are all going to use it this year. Apparently they used it last year, too, because the commercial’s angle is basically “I DARE you to call me a tree-hugging weenie – watch Carl Edwards win!”
12:24: It’s time for the always-awkward pre-race concert. Ok, earlier this month, a lot of people whined that Madonna appeared to lip-sync during her Super Bowl halftime show. Of COURSE she did, just like I assume Lenny Kravitz is doing now. Stadium sound systems are universally awful, just because the sound bounces around such a huge area. Also, it’s doubtful that they’re really playing those guitars right now. It’s 60 degrees and raining, and those conditions do not make instruments happy. By the way – Lenny Kravitz? Can we send a copy of this to every uninformed blogger/sports writer/commentator who uses interchangeably “NASCAR fan” and “toothless KKK member who only listen to Hank Williams Jr.”?
12:33: Ooh, ooh! The trailer for “G.I. Joe”! Now, I’d pay money to watch Dwayne Johnson read his grocery list, but you’re throwing in Bruce Willis, too? Yes, ma’am. (I have an idea… can we put Johnson and Willis in the booth instead of the Waltrips? I feel like I would enjoy that a lot more.)
12:35: Now it’s time for Mikey Waltrip’s contribution to the broadcast, a segment reporting on the “silly season,” which refers to all of the off-season shuffling of drivers and crew members. It’s actually a nice piece, aside from a really awful gimmick where they make various drivers pretend they’re at a press conference. Painful. Guys, the Oscars are tonight, and there’s a reason y’all weren’t invited.
(About that – Rick Santorum’s campaign is sponsoring Tony Raines’ car today, and so both David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos asked him about it in interviews earlier this morning. Gregory actually asked Santorum which he’d watch, as if you can only choose one, and as if there are deep cultural and political indicators attached to the choice. Well, I’m watching both, because my political identity isn’t tied to my entertainment choices.)
12:38: Trackside interview with Kyle Busch, and Darrell asks him if he’s okay after crashing earlier in the week. Come to think of it, Waltrip asked Dale Jr. about crashes, too, and he spent some time in his opening going over the week’s various wrecks. Why is he suddenly obsessed with this? I mean, he didn’t just suddenly notice that racing occasionally involves crashes. I’m starting to wonder if Waltrip is laying the groundwork to be the eventual chief spokesperson on NASCAR safety standards or something. Maybe he just bought stock in a seatbelt company.
12:47: Interview with last year’s surprise winner Trevor Bayne, who just turned 21 last week. What a wonderful young man. He’s talking about visiting Kenya in the off-season.
12:49: Time for a talk with Jimmie Johnson. (How is he the only Johnson in this sport anyway?) He’s talking about wanting another 500 win – hey, cheating appears to be good luck, so maybe this is your year – in part because Chad Knaus couldn’t be there for Johnson’s win in 2006. He’s “not in any of the pictures.” Um… Knaus wasn’t there BECAUSE HE WAS SUSPENDED FOR CHEATING. Stop acting like his grandma died or something.
12:52 – Jeff Gordon interview… aaaaand the Waltrips want to talk about crashes. (I’m telling you – stock in a seatbelt company.) His family also went to Africa in the off-season – to Rwanda, where he does some charity work. I’d like to add this to the Lenny Kravitz concert footage in that package we’re getting together for the anti-NASCAR bigots.
12:57: Finalmente! The interview Fox has been hyping for the last hour is here! Danica Patrick is the third woman to start the 500, and so of course Darrell Waltrip asks her about her crash in the Gatorade duel. My thoughts on Patrick – it’s extraordinarily hard to transition from open wheel racing to stock cars. Indy cars are like rockets, whereas driving a stock car is like wrangling a baby elephant. So far, I think Patrick’s going about it the right way, easing into the Sprint Cup series and learning from those around her. I’m preemptively pissed off at all the people who don’t really watch racing that often, who don’t remember how NASCAR chewed up the likes of Dario Franchitti, who’ll say horrible sexist crap if Patrick doesn’t lead all 500 laps.
Patrick’s 10 Super Bowl commercials are “the most by any celebrity.” Each Waltrip calls her a “girl,” which since Darrell just mentioned that she’s about to turn 30, is demonstrably inaccurate.
1:06: talking about Kasey Kahne, now officially a Hendrick driver. Mikey calls him a “kid.” So at least his infantilzation isn’t confined to one gender, which I guess is something.
1:10: Opening ceremony… brb.
Aw, Matt Kenseth’s daughter had her hands over her ears. Not a reflection on the national anthem sung by the guy from Train, which was wonderful. It’s just that it’s REALLY loud down there. Also, it continues to freak me out a little that camerapeople are swarming around the drivers and their families during the invocation and anthem. They can’t exactly shoot from far away. That camera is within four feet or so from Driver X, his wife and his minor child. There’s no way, absolutely none, that I could handle that. I would kick someone.
1:16 Metro Weather Guy is back!!! There’s a rain-free area south of Daytona, but still a lot of moisture headed our way. Now comes the time when the Fox broadcast people have vamp to fill the air time. Hilarity ensues. In this case, “hilarity” means “some of the most excruciating stuff you’ve ever seen on live TV in your life.”
1:26: Interview with reigning champ Tony Stewart – why wasn’t this part of the regularly scheduled pre-race program? I love Stewart. He’s so grumpy, and he very clearly has a limit to how much he’ll put up with Fox Sports’ goofy pre-arranged “improvisation.” But it does prompt another good discussion of how last season ended, which was Hollywood epic. Seriously, will not ever be topped.
1:30: Brad Keselowski still looks 12, bless his heart.
1:38: Now the Waltrips are singing. Way to ruin a really fun interview with A.J. Allmendinger, who – alas – got married in the off-season, and not to me. Sigh. One less cute man who’s willing to sing in public.
1:42: Mike Joy says “the ceiling has lifted off to the southwest.” I would’ve preferred hearing that from Metro Weather Guy, but whatev.
1:50: Hmmm… the Richard Petty “King’s Speech” segment is pretty awesome. Great idea, and well executed. Except that “The King’s Speech” was the big Oscar winner a year ago, so the timing is odd. (And there’s also the fact that Fox Sports just took an historic speech that inspired a nation to defend itself in war and turned it into a promo for a sporting event, which is… something.)
The last three hours, or, NyQuil and an interminable waste of time:
2:11: I think I’ve seen Kevin Harvick one time, one of those “walking through pit road” shots. Why aren’t they talking to him? Oh, because Darrell Waltrip needs to talk about Twitter instead.
2:13: Kasey Kahne is still on the market, ladies. If I were at all into Kasey Kahne I’d be really excited right now. Ooh, he’s showing off his knee surgery scar. Man, the track cannot dry fast enough.
2:16: OK, here’s a legit issue with a Waltrip. Mikey still owns a team, one with a driver (Clint Bowyer) in this race. Why is Mikey in the booth, again?
2:30: Still raining in Florida. I’m doing laundry. Here’s something I’m a little concerned about – I’m still fighting off a cold, and I need to take another dose of NyQuil. But the last time I took cold medicine and fell asleep on the couch, I woke up an hour into an MSNBC special on Jeffrey Dahmer… which was weird.
Regan Smith also got married in the off-season. So, stuff race car drivers do: Tweet, get married, go to Africa.
2:35: Martin Truex Jr. is here! He and Mikey shot some new NAPA commercials in the off-season (what fresh hell is this?) – ah, but did he get married or go to Africa?
2:37: FINALLY talking with Kevin Harvick, who shut down his Nationwide team last year so he and his wife could focus on having a baby. (Congrats!) He also got to meet Cesar Milan, and is now trying to pick a beanie weenie-related fight with Trevor Bayne. I can’t really explain it any better than that. That really was the interview.
2:47: Still raining, so Fox Sports decides to put us out of our misery and re-air the last 25 laps of the Bud Shootout, thank goodness.
…
4:31: Well, I’m awake again. I vaguely recall hearing something about light gray skies over toward Orlando, and the jet dryers are on the track. Fox Sports is now going with the Daytona 500’s top 10 greatest moments, which I think is a good idea. You know, I really don’t understand this. If you’re in the business of broadcasting a sporting event that’s routinely impacted by weather, how do you not have contingency plans in place? It’s WEATHER. You can see it coming days ahead of time. How hard is it to build into your broadcast plan what you’re going to do if you have to fill a four-hour rain delay? Whether it’s a recap of the season so far, a rebroadcast of another race or some other special, surely they can have something in the can.
5:09: Cancelled for the first time ever. This sucks. The 500 will run tomorrow at noon, when I’ll be at work, naturally.
Wow, before I could even finish typing that sentence, the Fox Sports crew was signed off and out of there. Isn’t that nice. You expect viewers to sit around for five hours watching your pained interviews with drivers who’d probably rather be taking a nap and listening to Darrell Waltrip tell the same stories over and over about his 500 win, but once NASCAR calls the race, man you guys disappear faster than fried pickles at Tony Stewart’s house.
Meanwhile, there’s straight up nothing on TV on Sunday afternoons in February. I’m pretty much tied to my couch at this point trying not to run a fever, and it’s either “Cops” or that show where David Tutera buys people extravagant weddings up until the Oscars start at 8:30. Yeah, I’m in a pretty crabby mood right now.
Friday, February 24, 2012
What's so scary about the Girl Scouts?
You know, I don't like the stereotype that a little of liberals have that conservatives are anti-woman. Like any stereotype, it's unfair and oversimplified. But people like Republican Congressman Bob Morris of Indiana don't make it easy on me.
The same week that my long-anticipated Thin Mints and Shortbread cookies finally arrived (yay!), Rep. Morris wrote a letter to his Congressional colleagues encouraging them to oppose a resolution honoring the Girl Scouts on their 100th anniversary. They call these "nonbinding" resolutions because they have pretty much zero effect on anything other than making whoever's being honored feel "Aw, Congress gave me a shout-out!" They usually pass unanimously, and are often good ways for Congresscritters to do non-political favors for one another, i.e., "Well, if I vote for your oil pipeline incentive bill my progressive constituents will fry me alive, but I can totally get behind your resolution to recognize the contribution of Western Pennsylvania llama farmers to ska music." So, in other words, opposing one of these is kind of tacky. Very bad Congressional etiquette.
Morris doesn't want to high-five the Girl Scouts because, per his letter (based on his highly thorough Internet research), they are the tactical arm of Planned Parenthood - whatever that means - and that the organization sexualizes young girls.
The Girl Scouts have no relationship of any kind with Planned Parenthood. Period. And yet lots of people besides Morris seem to think otherwise. Why? Why is it so easy to believe that a social/service group for young women is in league with a medical provider? And why would someone make that connection in the first place?
I think the answer lies in Morris's "sexualization" comment (also not true), and in another statement from the letter, that the Girl Scouts have "been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values."
I was a Girl Scout starting in fifth grade, up through maybe eighth grade. My mother led our troop, which also included my older sister Maria; a few years later Mom would help lead my youngest sister Elizabeth's Brownie troop. Mom was from Georgia, and her ultimate goal was fort he troop to raise enough money to take a trip to founder Juliette Gordon Low's birthplace in Savannah, like her own Girl Scout troop had done.
I don't know how other Girl Scouts did things, but our troop was in everything together. We earned patches together, did service projects together and went camping together. Looking back, I can better appreciate how many different types of girls were in our troop. We didn't all have mothers who had the free time to volunteer with the troop's activities, and most of our families didn't have a lot of money. If we couldn't figure out a way for everyone to take part in something, than we didn't do it.
Wait, that probably sounds socialist to Rep. Morris. What it actually taught me was to understand that not everybody had the same privileges that I did. It taught me not to say, "Well, I can afford to do this, so forget you."
Here's what else I learned:
- how to change a tire, something I recently discovered most of the people in my office can't do (and which came in handy not long after we earned our automotive car patch when we got a flat tire on a group trip to Carowinds)
- that women are perfectly capable of hacking rattlesnakes to death with a rake
- how to entertain ourselves in a cabin with no TV
- confidence, or whatever it takes for an 11-year-old girl to ask perfect strangers to buy your - it has to be said - overpriced cookies.
I also learned more intangible things, like how important it is to pitch in so that no one person gets stuck striking the tent, carrying the heavy stuff, etc., or how to take responsibility for your actions. Unlike our local Boy Scout troop, we didn't get funding from a lot of groups in our town; that was a sad, but ultimately a valuable lesson to learn as well.
Speaking of the Boy Scouts, my understanding from my male friends, and from seeing my nephew get involved once he was old enough, is that scouting was just as empowering an experience for them as Girl Scouts was for me. But I never hear anyone say that the Boy Scouts are "sexualizing" young men.
If anything, the Girl Scouts do the exact opposite. We live in a culture that still teaches young women that our only value is as sex objects or baby-makers. The Girl Scouts was the first place that a lot of us learned that we could be so much more. (Maybe that's what Morris objects to?)
He's backed down from his earlier position, but not by much. Thankfully, everyone else in Congress had the sense to ignore him and vote for the resolution anyway. Cookies for them, but not for this very nasty man from Indiana.
The same week that my long-anticipated Thin Mints and Shortbread cookies finally arrived (yay!), Rep. Morris wrote a letter to his Congressional colleagues encouraging them to oppose a resolution honoring the Girl Scouts on their 100th anniversary. They call these "nonbinding" resolutions because they have pretty much zero effect on anything other than making whoever's being honored feel "Aw, Congress gave me a shout-out!" They usually pass unanimously, and are often good ways for Congresscritters to do non-political favors for one another, i.e., "Well, if I vote for your oil pipeline incentive bill my progressive constituents will fry me alive, but I can totally get behind your resolution to recognize the contribution of Western Pennsylvania llama farmers to ska music." So, in other words, opposing one of these is kind of tacky. Very bad Congressional etiquette.
Morris doesn't want to high-five the Girl Scouts because, per his letter (based on his highly thorough Internet research), they are the tactical arm of Planned Parenthood - whatever that means - and that the organization sexualizes young girls.
The Girl Scouts have no relationship of any kind with Planned Parenthood. Period. And yet lots of people besides Morris seem to think otherwise. Why? Why is it so easy to believe that a social/service group for young women is in league with a medical provider? And why would someone make that connection in the first place?
I think the answer lies in Morris's "sexualization" comment (also not true), and in another statement from the letter, that the Girl Scouts have "been subverted in the name of liberal progressive politics and the destruction of traditional American family values."
I was a Girl Scout starting in fifth grade, up through maybe eighth grade. My mother led our troop, which also included my older sister Maria; a few years later Mom would help lead my youngest sister Elizabeth's Brownie troop. Mom was from Georgia, and her ultimate goal was fort he troop to raise enough money to take a trip to founder Juliette Gordon Low's birthplace in Savannah, like her own Girl Scout troop had done.
I don't know how other Girl Scouts did things, but our troop was in everything together. We earned patches together, did service projects together and went camping together. Looking back, I can better appreciate how many different types of girls were in our troop. We didn't all have mothers who had the free time to volunteer with the troop's activities, and most of our families didn't have a lot of money. If we couldn't figure out a way for everyone to take part in something, than we didn't do it.
Wait, that probably sounds socialist to Rep. Morris. What it actually taught me was to understand that not everybody had the same privileges that I did. It taught me not to say, "Well, I can afford to do this, so forget you."
Here's what else I learned:
- how to change a tire, something I recently discovered most of the people in my office can't do (and which came in handy not long after we earned our automotive car patch when we got a flat tire on a group trip to Carowinds)
- that women are perfectly capable of hacking rattlesnakes to death with a rake
- how to entertain ourselves in a cabin with no TV
- confidence, or whatever it takes for an 11-year-old girl to ask perfect strangers to buy your - it has to be said - overpriced cookies.
I also learned more intangible things, like how important it is to pitch in so that no one person gets stuck striking the tent, carrying the heavy stuff, etc., or how to take responsibility for your actions. Unlike our local Boy Scout troop, we didn't get funding from a lot of groups in our town; that was a sad, but ultimately a valuable lesson to learn as well.
Speaking of the Boy Scouts, my understanding from my male friends, and from seeing my nephew get involved once he was old enough, is that scouting was just as empowering an experience for them as Girl Scouts was for me. But I never hear anyone say that the Boy Scouts are "sexualizing" young men.
If anything, the Girl Scouts do the exact opposite. We live in a culture that still teaches young women that our only value is as sex objects or baby-makers. The Girl Scouts was the first place that a lot of us learned that we could be so much more. (Maybe that's what Morris objects to?)
He's backed down from his earlier position, but not by much. Thankfully, everyone else in Congress had the sense to ignore him and vote for the resolution anyway. Cookies for them, but not for this very nasty man from Indiana.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Fellas, I love you... but it's time for you to shut up
So, this...
...is funny because it flips reality. It's also sad because of the reality that it flips. Namely, that in 2012, we have individuals, Congresspeople and actual candidates for the presidency publicly debating women's sexual health, when no one outside of America's comedians would broach doing the same for men's sexual health.
Don't shake your head at me, man-reader. You know what? I love my male friends, the feminist ally ones especially. But after a month that saw the Komen/Planned Parenthood thing, the health insurance provider/contraceptive thing and its sequel, the Congressional panel on contraceptives with no women on it thing, I'm pretty tapped out on male opinions regarding things that affect me and that don't affect them.
No offense, it's a free country, and blah blah blah, but I've discovered that even the most enlightened man has a point where he hits his "admitting my own privilege" limit and starts patting on my head and telling me how much worse the women in Afghanistan have it.
*profanity alert*
FUCK THAT. I am a human fucking being, and my citizenship and my vote count for just as much as yours do. When Congress and people who want to be in charge of negotiating the next Cuban Missile Crisis find time out of their days to waste taxpayer time on your testicles, then you can talk. Right now you can buy condoms in every goddamn gas station bathroom in this country and nobody gives a shit, so don't fucking pretend you know what it's like to be me.
You don't know what it's like to take it for granted that everything about your body is open for public debate, from how you have your children to how you avoid having children. (Unless you're gay, which is a whole 'nother category of MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS.) When you ask your doctor for that little blue pill, you don't have to worry about swearing that you're only going to use it to fuck your wife. It probably never crosses your mind that your insurance company might not cover your boner pills. You don't think for a second that some fundie state representative will pass a law keeping your doctor from treating you the way his/her education and experience dictate. Because your body isn't up for public debate.
Mine is. And I'm fucking over it. If I decide, and my doctor concurs, that a medicine or medical procedure is best for me, there are individuals who would keep me from acting on that. More seriously, there are state and national legislators who would do the same. This is EVERY DAY in my life, and in that of all women in this ostensibly free country.
I didn't make reproductive rights a political issue. The people - sorry to stereotype, but pretty much universally Republicans - who swept into office promising jobs and fiscal restraint have instead wasted no time passing laws restricting access to abortion and contraception and, in Virginia last week, pretty much mandating state-sponsored rape-via-camera dildo*. They're the ones who made this political.
*watch if you think that statement was hyperbolicious
And they've done so largely without input from women. No wonder. In this country, when a woman points out that men are not, in fact, all knowing, we get that little head-pat. An eye roll if we keep it up. Maybe even the b-word. Most of us don't relish CONSTANTLY having to inform the men in our lives of the most basic facts.
Fuck that. I love you guys, but you don't know what you're talking about. If you'd like me to enlighten you about specifics, drop me a line and I'll be glad to do so. I mean, if women were 90 percent of the people making public policy decisions, and there were an issue that pretty much exclusively affected men, I'd consider it my duty to ask them what they thought.
So, men - I love you, but you need to shut up now. You need to listen to the women in your lives and that it's your job to represent. We don't all think the same way, sure. But we all know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than you do.
...is funny because it flips reality. It's also sad because of the reality that it flips. Namely, that in 2012, we have individuals, Congresspeople and actual candidates for the presidency publicly debating women's sexual health, when no one outside of America's comedians would broach doing the same for men's sexual health.
Don't shake your head at me, man-reader. You know what? I love my male friends, the feminist ally ones especially. But after a month that saw the Komen/Planned Parenthood thing, the health insurance provider/contraceptive thing and its sequel, the Congressional panel on contraceptives with no women on it thing, I'm pretty tapped out on male opinions regarding things that affect me and that don't affect them.
No offense, it's a free country, and blah blah blah, but I've discovered that even the most enlightened man has a point where he hits his "admitting my own privilege" limit and starts patting on my head and telling me how much worse the women in Afghanistan have it.
*profanity alert*
FUCK THAT. I am a human fucking being, and my citizenship and my vote count for just as much as yours do. When Congress and people who want to be in charge of negotiating the next Cuban Missile Crisis find time out of their days to waste taxpayer time on your testicles, then you can talk. Right now you can buy condoms in every goddamn gas station bathroom in this country and nobody gives a shit, so don't fucking pretend you know what it's like to be me.
You don't know what it's like to take it for granted that everything about your body is open for public debate, from how you have your children to how you avoid having children. (Unless you're gay, which is a whole 'nother category of MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS.) When you ask your doctor for that little blue pill, you don't have to worry about swearing that you're only going to use it to fuck your wife. It probably never crosses your mind that your insurance company might not cover your boner pills. You don't think for a second that some fundie state representative will pass a law keeping your doctor from treating you the way his/her education and experience dictate. Because your body isn't up for public debate.
Mine is. And I'm fucking over it. If I decide, and my doctor concurs, that a medicine or medical procedure is best for me, there are individuals who would keep me from acting on that. More seriously, there are state and national legislators who would do the same. This is EVERY DAY in my life, and in that of all women in this ostensibly free country.
I didn't make reproductive rights a political issue. The people - sorry to stereotype, but pretty much universally Republicans - who swept into office promising jobs and fiscal restraint have instead wasted no time passing laws restricting access to abortion and contraception and, in Virginia last week, pretty much mandating state-sponsored rape-via-camera dildo*. They're the ones who made this political.
*watch if you think that statement was hyperbolicious
And they've done so largely without input from women. No wonder. In this country, when a woman points out that men are not, in fact, all knowing, we get that little head-pat. An eye roll if we keep it up. Maybe even the b-word. Most of us don't relish CONSTANTLY having to inform the men in our lives of the most basic facts.
Fuck that. I love you guys, but you don't know what you're talking about. If you'd like me to enlighten you about specifics, drop me a line and I'll be glad to do so. I mean, if women were 90 percent of the people making public policy decisions, and there were an issue that pretty much exclusively affected men, I'd consider it my duty to ask them what they thought.
So, men - I love you, but you need to shut up now. You need to listen to the women in your lives and that it's your job to represent. We don't all think the same way, sure. But we all know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than you do.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Bittersweet memories... What makes a good song
I've written a lot of things. Short stories, screenplays, feature news stories, bad poetry. I've recently tried my hand at songwriting, which is ridiculously intimidating because of the whole "needing to come up with an interesting melody" aspect.
But a good song is so much more than that. Have you ever heard a song and wondered how this person you've never met could nail your emotions so precisely? That's what a good song does. It's personal and universal at the same time. From a technical perspective, it can be performed any number of ways - acoustic guitar to full choir backing vocals.
"I Will Always Love You" is an amazing song. Dolly Parton wrote it in 1973 for her former mentor and later performed a sweet, understated version in the movie "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Elvis Presley wanted to record it, but only if Parton sold him the rights (which she didn't). Linda Ronstadt recorded it in 1975. Whitney Houston made it world famous with her cover of it on the soundtrack of "The Bodyguard." (By the way, angry Facebook people - Parton still owns the rights to the song she wrote. It wouldn't have been used in "The Bodyguard" had she not given her permission, and she made bank off the royalties, so can we please stop with the "Sniff. That's Dolly's song" stuff?)
Jennifer Hudson sang "I Will Always Love You" at the Grammy Awards in honor of Houston following her death. This week, Chris Cornell performed it as well.
All of these recordings I've mentioned are beautiful in their own way, as different as they are. And that's how you know it's a truly great, timeless song.
But a good song is so much more than that. Have you ever heard a song and wondered how this person you've never met could nail your emotions so precisely? That's what a good song does. It's personal and universal at the same time. From a technical perspective, it can be performed any number of ways - acoustic guitar to full choir backing vocals.
"I Will Always Love You" is an amazing song. Dolly Parton wrote it in 1973 for her former mentor and later performed a sweet, understated version in the movie "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Elvis Presley wanted to record it, but only if Parton sold him the rights (which she didn't). Linda Ronstadt recorded it in 1975. Whitney Houston made it world famous with her cover of it on the soundtrack of "The Bodyguard." (By the way, angry Facebook people - Parton still owns the rights to the song she wrote. It wouldn't have been used in "The Bodyguard" had she not given her permission, and she made bank off the royalties, so can we please stop with the "Sniff. That's Dolly's song" stuff?)
Jennifer Hudson sang "I Will Always Love You" at the Grammy Awards in honor of Houston following her death. This week, Chris Cornell performed it as well.
All of these recordings I've mentioned are beautiful in their own way, as different as they are. And that's how you know it's a truly great, timeless song.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Some of these drugs are not like the others
One more weekend to go in the show I'm working, so I'm exhausted, so I can't write a very lengthy post, so I'm just going to ask one question:
- This week, Congress, the president, various religious groups and seemingly all of Facebook have been arguing over whether employers should be required to include contraceptives in their health care plans. Women use any number of hormone-based medications (the pill, IUDs, patches, etc.) to regulate ovulation, with the purpose of controlling things like ovarian cysts, endometriosis and, yes, the timing and number of their pregnancies. This basic health care is actually up for public debate, complete with Congressional hearings.
Meanwhile...
- Another celebrity dies in connection with prescription drug abuse. (Yes, I know Whitney Houston's autopsy results haven't yet been made public, but allegedly she drowned after taking too much Xanax.) This may be yet another high-profile case because of Houston's fame, but raise your hand if you don't know someone who's abused prescription drugs. (If you didn't raise your hand, it's because you just didn't know about it.)
All over this country there are people getting high off of completely legal drugs that they either got from their own prescriptions, or lifted from someone else who had a legit prescription. All over this country, there are people mixing completely legal medicines in combinations that could kill them.
Prescription drug abuse is rampant, and it's largely invisible in ways that snorting cocaine or smoking pot aren't.
But you don't see Congress convening hearings on Xanax, or Vicodin, or Adderall. I wonder why that is? Maybe the birth control pill manufacturers need better lobbyists.
(True story: Back in 1980-whatever, my third grade class's DARE officer said to a girl who was freaking out because, as she said, "My Mom takes us to a drug store ALL THE TIME!" - "It's okay, those aren't real drugs." Ten years later, a college classmate had to keep his Ritalin locked in his car because people kept stealing it.)
- This week, Congress, the president, various religious groups and seemingly all of Facebook have been arguing over whether employers should be required to include contraceptives in their health care plans. Women use any number of hormone-based medications (the pill, IUDs, patches, etc.) to regulate ovulation, with the purpose of controlling things like ovarian cysts, endometriosis and, yes, the timing and number of their pregnancies. This basic health care is actually up for public debate, complete with Congressional hearings.
Meanwhile...
- Another celebrity dies in connection with prescription drug abuse. (Yes, I know Whitney Houston's autopsy results haven't yet been made public, but allegedly she drowned after taking too much Xanax.) This may be yet another high-profile case because of Houston's fame, but raise your hand if you don't know someone who's abused prescription drugs. (If you didn't raise your hand, it's because you just didn't know about it.)
All over this country there are people getting high off of completely legal drugs that they either got from their own prescriptions, or lifted from someone else who had a legit prescription. All over this country, there are people mixing completely legal medicines in combinations that could kill them.
Prescription drug abuse is rampant, and it's largely invisible in ways that snorting cocaine or smoking pot aren't.
But you don't see Congress convening hearings on Xanax, or Vicodin, or Adderall. I wonder why that is? Maybe the birth control pill manufacturers need better lobbyists.
(True story: Back in 1980-whatever, my third grade class's DARE officer said to a girl who was freaking out because, as she said, "My Mom takes us to a drug store ALL THE TIME!" - "It's okay, those aren't real drugs." Ten years later, a college classmate had to keep his Ritalin locked in his car because people kept stealing it.)
Friday, February 3, 2012
Someone flunked PR 101
The Komen v. Planned Parenthood debacle continues to fascinate me. As I wrote earlier this week, I disagree with Komen's decision to cut its funding for PP's cancer screening programs (which they reversed today). That hasn't changed... but it's Komen's exceptionally poor handling of the entire situation that's interesting to me, just because of what I do for a living.
I've been where Komen's administration was this week. And it's just about impossible to change the conversation when people take what you've done so personally and when information (and sometimes misinformation) can spread so rapidly. The time to fix something like this is before it blows up. Once the horse is out of the barn, all you can do is mitigate the damage, but you can never completely cure it. Even if you assume that every single thing Komen said this week is completely true, a lot of their former supporters will never completely trust them again.
But how do you handle a PR crisis before it starts? You just have to prepare as well as you can. You know your organization well enough to know who your constituents are and where their hot buttons are (and that those buttons may be different for different groups). You don't have the luxury of pretending that everyone loves you and will always trust you no matter what. Komen was one of the most respected nonprofits in this country, and a reputation built over 30 years took less than 24 hours to be turned on its head. Because someone in a position to do so didn't plan ahead.
OK, so, assuming that Komen's policy change late last year not to award funding to groups under any kind of investigation was indeed about better stewardship. At some point, when whoever it was noticed that, oops, that includes Planned Parenthood, that's when the Komen staff should've asked themselves one basic question - who is going to piss off?
PR crises happen when someone who's invested in your organization feels slighted, or caught off guard, or taken advantage of. It could be a customer, or an employee, or a legislator who's helped you out in the past, or in this case millions of women who support the goals both of Komen and Planned Parenthood. These are the people who do NOT need to read about your potential bomb on Facebook. They need to hear from you directly so that you set the narrative (as best you can).
Someone high up at Komen should've been on the phone with every politician who's ever done them a favor, every head of every affiliate, every top supporter (they have email, don't they?), and all of that BEFORE they released a statement to the press. Someone should've had the sense to grasp that cutting off Planned Parenthood, the lightning rod that it is, would be seen as a political move even if it wasn't. Someone should've looked through the books and found all of the other under-investigation groups that Komen still funds (ahem, Penn State). Someone should find a way to deal with the fact that "We're assessing the effectiveness of grantee programs so that we can better steward our resources" is a harder story to tell than "Komen hates poor people."
And even if Komen didn't manage to get ahead of the story, they still could've handled things better. Sometimes things blow up out of nowhere. But it's still true that PR crises don't happen unless someone feels wronged. (It's not a media story unless there's more than one side.) And that's when you do everything you can to get everyone on the same side, which usually means you're the one who's going to have to move. You listen. You don't pretend that the people who are angry with you don't exist, or worse, say on national TV that they're uninformed.
It's kind of shocking that an organization that's been so sophisticated in its marketing could be so bad at negotiating what could've been a relatively straightforward PR issue. In my experience, the organizations that struggle to respond to situations like this are the ones who identify the institution's reputation too closely with their own. It must be incredibly hard for Nancy Brinker to look objectively at the nonprofit she founded in memory of her own sister, but that's what you have to do. When you believe that the organization is you and you are the organization, it's harder to consider how all of the other people who care about, say, Race for the Cure, are feeling. Especially if you're a nonprofit, utterly dependent on the goodwill of your donors and volunteers to survive. Everyone who's ever worn a pink ribbon has a stake in Komen, and Komen's leaders lost sight of that this week.
I've been where Komen's administration was this week. And it's just about impossible to change the conversation when people take what you've done so personally and when information (and sometimes misinformation) can spread so rapidly. The time to fix something like this is before it blows up. Once the horse is out of the barn, all you can do is mitigate the damage, but you can never completely cure it. Even if you assume that every single thing Komen said this week is completely true, a lot of their former supporters will never completely trust them again.
But how do you handle a PR crisis before it starts? You just have to prepare as well as you can. You know your organization well enough to know who your constituents are and where their hot buttons are (and that those buttons may be different for different groups). You don't have the luxury of pretending that everyone loves you and will always trust you no matter what. Komen was one of the most respected nonprofits in this country, and a reputation built over 30 years took less than 24 hours to be turned on its head. Because someone in a position to do so didn't plan ahead.
OK, so, assuming that Komen's policy change late last year not to award funding to groups under any kind of investigation was indeed about better stewardship. At some point, when whoever it was noticed that, oops, that includes Planned Parenthood, that's when the Komen staff should've asked themselves one basic question - who is going to piss off?
PR crises happen when someone who's invested in your organization feels slighted, or caught off guard, or taken advantage of. It could be a customer, or an employee, or a legislator who's helped you out in the past, or in this case millions of women who support the goals both of Komen and Planned Parenthood. These are the people who do NOT need to read about your potential bomb on Facebook. They need to hear from you directly so that you set the narrative (as best you can).
Someone high up at Komen should've been on the phone with every politician who's ever done them a favor, every head of every affiliate, every top supporter (they have email, don't they?), and all of that BEFORE they released a statement to the press. Someone should've had the sense to grasp that cutting off Planned Parenthood, the lightning rod that it is, would be seen as a political move even if it wasn't. Someone should've looked through the books and found all of the other under-investigation groups that Komen still funds (ahem, Penn State). Someone should find a way to deal with the fact that "We're assessing the effectiveness of grantee programs so that we can better steward our resources" is a harder story to tell than "Komen hates poor people."
And even if Komen didn't manage to get ahead of the story, they still could've handled things better. Sometimes things blow up out of nowhere. But it's still true that PR crises don't happen unless someone feels wronged. (It's not a media story unless there's more than one side.) And that's when you do everything you can to get everyone on the same side, which usually means you're the one who's going to have to move. You listen. You don't pretend that the people who are angry with you don't exist, or worse, say on national TV that they're uninformed.
It's kind of shocking that an organization that's been so sophisticated in its marketing could be so bad at negotiating what could've been a relatively straightforward PR issue. In my experience, the organizations that struggle to respond to situations like this are the ones who identify the institution's reputation too closely with their own. It must be incredibly hard for Nancy Brinker to look objectively at the nonprofit she founded in memory of her own sister, but that's what you have to do. When you believe that the organization is you and you are the organization, it's harder to consider how all of the other people who care about, say, Race for the Cure, are feeling. Especially if you're a nonprofit, utterly dependent on the goodwill of your donors and volunteers to survive. Everyone who's ever worn a pink ribbon has a stake in Komen, and Komen's leaders lost sight of that this week.
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