WHEN DO YOU GIVE UP ON A CELEBRITY?

 Micheal Jackson.  Woody Allen.  Bill Cosby.  Kevin Spacey.  These are some of the celebrities that the world has turned on recently when they were reasonably accused  of criminal sexual  behavior (only Cosby was actually convicted, and even that was overturned).  I myself will admit that I once was an admirer of all them,  but I still have moved away from supporting them to different degrees (I still have Thriller on my itunes, and sometimes watch Woody Allen movies).  It's always hard to separate art and artist, especially since so many great artists over the years have done terrible things (Miles Davis, Lou Reed, James Brown and John Lennon all used to make great music, and they all physically abused their wives and girlfriends).  The decision to admire the work of any artist always raises many questions, like  is there a waiting period after their death that makes it alright to admire them?  I noticed that the recent Sight and Sound magazine list of the 100 best films ever made included no films by Allen or Roman Polanski, but did have two by Charlie Chaplin, who once impregnated a 15 year old girl when he was 32.  Obviously, these things are complicated with no easy answer.

Which brings us to a recent concert I attended with Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock.  Like many other people, I've been a fan of Chappelle ever since his sketch show blew up about 20 years ago, and I've always enjoyed his stand up specials in which his incisive bits about race combined with his likable persona and gift for imitations were great.  That is, I did admire him until his recent Netflix special in which he declared himself a "Trans-exclusionary radical feminist" or "Terf" and railed against the rights (and really, the existence) of trans people.  It was a mean spirited bit  that played into the recent conservative demonization of trans people that has lead to hatred and even violence against them all around the country.  Chappelle has described himself as a Democrat, but here he was playing right into the Republican playbook of division and hatred against a small group of Americans who just want to lead their best lives.

So when a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go see Chappelle performing with  Chris Rock here in San Francisco, I reluctantly agreed I'm also a fan of Rock and I knew that he would be going first and I could always leave early if Chappelle started bashing trans people.  Thankfully, except for one brief reference, Chappelle didn't touch the issue, mostly sticking to crude sex jokes that didn't much for me (an entire bit built around the infamous Chuck Berry sex tape was not one I needed to hear).  Still, his set wasn't bad, even though I think Rock was better.

As the show wrapped up, it looked like controversy had been avoided.  But then Chappelle impulsively invited Elon Musk to come up and share the stage without considering how Musk's recent chaotic takeover of Twitter had made him unpopular in San Francisco.  It was an awkward moment in that Musk clearly didn't know what to do on stage, made even more awkward when many people in the audience started to boo him loudly.  At first Chapelle made a pretty good joke about how some of the people in the audience were the ones that Musk had fired from Twitter.  But then he later added that all the booing seemed to be coming from the cheap seats in the back row, which didn't exactly help the situation.  (When Chapelle,  who's paid tens of millions of dollars for his comedy specials, introduces one of the richest men in the world to the stage and then ridicules the poorer members of the audience for booing him, he inadvertently laid bare the unfair class issues in this country).  At that point, Musk tried to say something, but then a serious fight broke out in the crowd (between a Musk supporter and a Musk hater?  Who knows).  Chapelle then tried to calm things by saying how much he wished well for the whole audience, and then quite lamely got Musk to shout out one of Chapelle's old catch phrases from his show ("I'm rich, bitch!") before drawing this odd spectacle to a close.

At first, I mostly shrugged off this show's crazy conclusion as just a strange way for things to end.  But then I wondered about why Chapelle thought that bringing Musk out on the stage was a good idea.  Did he really think that the crowd would cheer for Musk just because he's rich?  Has he no idea how terrible Musk's takeover of Twitter has been, with a resurgence of hate speech on the social media site?  When I combine his comments about trans people with his open ridiculing of the poor at this show, I've decided that I can't support his career anymore.  I hope that other fans of his will join me.

THE CONSERVATIVE WAR ON PUBLIC EDUCATION

 

During the pandemic, harsh tensions arose between school teachers and parents concerning school lockdowns.  Parents were stressed about their school age children being home all day, and having to use a remote learning system that clearly wasn't the same as a classroom.  Teachers were stressed about a reopening of schools exposing them and their families to covid.  It was a difficult situation in which there were no easy answers, and it lead to school board meetings that turned into shouting matches.

Not surprisingly, even with the pandemic mostly over, teachers still feel undervalued, underpaid and overworked, and many of them have responded by leaving the profession, making those who choose to remain work even harder to cover for those missing positions.  Currently, polls show that over half of teachers are considering quitting.  You would think that this situation would result in a reevaluation of how our country treats the teaching profession, with higher salaries provided for their essential work.  Instead what we have mostly seen is right wing politicians sensing a weakness in public education and pouncing.

Since 2020, Republican politicians have seized on the issue of so called "Critical Race Theory", implying that "woke" public school teachers are teaching white students how to hate themselves when they teach American history.  Ignoring the fact that there was no such specific curriculum in out public schools, the right wing media whipped up  fear of white children being "brainwashed".  Then, quickly moving onto another school issue, conservatives dusted off the old chestnut of children being exposed to "pornographic" books, and started pushing for concerned parents to start searching and purging school libraries.  As with the whole CRT controversy, this was all absurdly overblown, with one conservative politician running an ad in which her young son appeared and  said he once got nightmares from a book he read in school, without mentioning that he read that book when he was 17 and in an AP literature class, and that the book in question was Toni Morrison's Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Things got even worse earlier this year when Florida Governor RonDe Santis passed  the so called "Don't say Gay" bill that limited what teachers and students could talk about in classrooms concerning sexual orientation.  After passing the bill, he claimed that anyone opposing it supported  sexually grooming children, which now has become another conservative talking point.  As the New York Times pointed out, in the last two years a dozen states have passed laws limiting what teachers can teach, and even say, in their classrooms.

Personally, I do't think that any of those attacks on public schools would have happened if the pandemic hadn't primed already angry parents to vent at school board meetings.  With teachers already pushed to the breaking point, the time was ripe for conservatives to strike.  Conservatives  have been angry at public schools for decades; part of it is from the Christian fundamentalist wing of the party, that miss the days when creationism was taught as fact.  Another part is the fact that public school teachers are one of the few remaining union jobs in the country, and unions have favored Democrats ever since President Ronald Reagan fired members of the Air Traffic Control union way back in 1981.  

And there's an even deeper movement at play here: the conservative school voucher movement, which has been used  already in some states, and which would allow parents to take the government funds that were to be used on their children's schooling and use them to pay for tuition to private schools.  Conservatives know that the more public schools are thrown in disarray, the more popular the school voucher movement becomes.  And the real danger of the voucher movement is that it provides an end around over that pesky separation between church and state.  Putting it bluntly, if conservatives have their way, government tax dollars could be used to pay for children to attend schools that teach them dinosaurs were too big to fit on the ark!  For conservatives, this is a no brainer, as it's a simultaneous attack on unions and a way to try and turn our nation's children into good little right wing voters.

Sadly, the days of school vouchers could become a reality soon (I can't imagine that the current Supreme Court would oppose them).  The only recourse we have for now is Americans to start appreciating the difficult job that our public school teachers have and support them as much as we can.