By Beau Elliot
Well, once again, Bonnie & Clyde died in a fusillade of whatever that was Sunday evening in the river of the Hollywood of Our Imagination.
It was in ultra slow motion, of course, because that’s the way it was meant to be. You can’t argue with what was meant to be, many tell us, nodding and stroking their chins wisely.
You ever get tired of people stroking (or storking) their chins wisely, as if they might grow a beard someday? Perhaps become professors of “the dismal science”?
We have to remember that phrase “the dismal science” was invented by Thomas Carlyle, the distinguished British historian who once proposed that the West Indies would economically benefit by reintroducing slavery. Presumably, no economists outside of the Trumpster administration favor that.
(Should that be Dumpster administration? Who can know anything these days? Maybe that should be, Who would want to?)
Meanwhile, on Sunday night, the Oscars had the flub of ages, which if you have been counting at home, you should not aspire to (Bill Buckner, nobody remembers 1986 anymore). As you all know, unless you have the IQ of creamed corn and live inside an abandoned tortoise shell, Bonnie & Clyde named the wrong movie as Best Picture.
Not their fault, exactly. They were given the wrong envelope. But the way Warren Beatty looked at Faye Dunaway, they were reliving (or redying) in the final scene of Bonnie & Clyde. Good work, Oscar Academy. You guys should be in government.
I mean, you’d have thought the Iowa Legislature was running things. “Pure drivel tends to drive out ordinary drivel,” as the great columnist Donald Kaul once described the Legislature.
Republicans in the Legislature lately have accused the current state’s budget shortfall on Democratic overspending in the past. And thus, students are going to be hit with scholarship cuts and other financial wizardry. (You wouldn’t believe the wizardry; you think Harry Potter was something? Hah. Harreld Potter makes little Harry look like a Little Leaguer.)
On the other hand (now that we wish we had one), Republicans have controlled the governorship and the Iowa House for several years now, so it’s curious exactly how Democrats could have overspent, given the GOP control. Unless Republicans went along with the overspending. But that couldn’t be, right? Let’s see: Governer’s Office, Iowa House; that’s two out of three.
And then there’s Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa, who wants the state’s public universities to hire faculty on the basis of political affiliation.
No, really. Chelgren believes, according to the Washington Post, the Des Moines Register, and CBC, that there should be a political balance among the faculty in the regents’ universities. So if a prospective faculty hiring would tip the political balance by more than 10 percent, no hiring.
This, of course, would be illegal under federal standards for federal hirings, so far as I can tell. And it should be illegal under state standards. Potential employees cannot be asked about their political beliefs; that’s creeping McCarthyism.
But pure drivel wins again. It always does, it seems.
When evil was unleashed upon the world, hardly anyone noticed. Evil was like baseball — slow. There was all the Instagram and some Twitter to keep track off, not to mention streaming like rivers of TV. Evil, people said, is there an app for that?
(Speaking of Iowa, why is China ambassadorial-nominee Terry Branstad still in Iowa, trying to act like a governor? Shouldn’t he be in China, Beijing around or whatever it is that ambassadors to China do? Just wondering.)