Category Archives: Culture

A Plutonic Understanding of Some Transphobia

March of 1930 saw the announcement that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the ninth planet of our solar system, Pluto. Despite controversy at the time of discovery concerning the object’s apparently quite small size, for the next three generations, school children learned the names of the nine planets. In the 1990s, discovery of larger bodies in the Kuiper Belt added to doubts concerning the proper classification of Pluto, followed by the discovery of Eris, an even larger body in the outer reaches of our planetary system. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) released three criteria for a body to be considered a planet: 1) It orbits the sun, 2) It possesses enough gravitational pull to be roughly spherical in shape, and 3) it must have cleared out its orbit of other large bodies. Following these new parameters, Pluto was moved from the classification of planet to dwarf planet, igniting public outrage that burns to this day.

While there is debate among the astronomers and other scientists over detailed points such as what exactly qualifies as having ‘cleared out’ its orbital volume, the most intense defenders of Pluto as a planet are laypeople without scientific expertise or training. I find this a curious phenomenon. Pluto’s status has zero impact on their lives, their day-to-day activities, or even outside of the fierce controversy, their conversations. With the body’s status so irrelevant to their lives, why do people demand its status so vigorously?

Because it’s what they learned as children. The ‘facts’ we learn when we are young are the most difficult to discard when new data or ideas come along to displace them. It doesn’t matter that classifying Pluto as a planet would mean adding a lot more planets to the roster. They do not want to do that; they want the nine planets that they learned in grade school. That’s it, that’s the entire argument and goal, to have what they were taught decades ago to be the same today as it was then.

For some, certainly not all, the debate surrounding transgender people operates on the exact same mechanism as the insistence that Pluto is a planet. They were taught that the world and people worked a certain way, a very simple model of humanity, and they find it impossible to discard the model impressed upon them in childhood. It doesn’t matter that the truth of the spectrum of human sexuality and identification is self-evident; they want the simple, but false, binary definition they understood when they were six. (For those who wish to deny the spectrum and insist on a binary understanding, that would mean you could not define the character of John Rambo as more masculine than the character of Peewee Herman. That judgment only exists if there is a spectrum of masculinity—in a binary system they would be equally masculine.)

This explains only some people’s transphobia and insistence on strictly binary understandings of gender. There are those who harbor more hateful and bigoted views. Their issue is simply being unable to unlearn what they have learned. Their views are more aligned with evil than ignorance.

I wish there were a simple and direct way to enlighten people to acceptance of others in all their dazzling diversity that life presents. We live only once. For a very brief time, we walk this Earth seeking love and happiness. To inflict pain and suffering upon others because they don’t live as you think they should is a terrible crime, robbing them of precious time that can never be recovered.

Luigi Mangione & Vance Boelter: Brothers in Arms

On December 4th, 2024, the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, while walking out of a hotel in Manhattan was shot and killed. The alleged assassin Luigi Mangione has lain in wait for the corporate executive to depart the hotel and killed him on the sidewalk leaving behind shell casings with the words ‘delay, deny, and depose’ inscribed upon them. Five days later Mangione was arrested and faces charges for the apparently politically motivated murder.

Following the assassination Mangione and his alleged actions became the focus of online activity with ironic supportive memes going viral and people debating the ‘justification’ of the murder due to the nature of the victim’s business. For some, Mangione became a sort of modern folk hero for murdering the ‘right’ sort of people.

I shall not get into a healthcare debate here, UHC is a company I have detested for more than a decade, and I am well-aware of the failings and evils of for-profit healthcare.

In the early morning hours of June 14th, 2025, Democratic state politician John Hoffman and his spouse were shot in their home, the spouse suffering gunshot wounds while shielding their daughter from the assailant. A short time later, the leader of the state’s Democratic Caucus Melissa Hortman and her spouse were assassinated in their home by an assassin posing as a police officer. The next day, Vance Boelter was arrested and charged with the murder. Once again memes began being shared online, dark, ironic and dismissive of the victims, with some coming from Republican Senators.

These two alleged assassins, though from very different ends of the political spectrum, are, in effect, the same. In both cases these people felt that the ‘injustice’ they perceived justified their murderous actions. That they held a moral authority to deal in death and judgment against whom those that they ascertained to be their enemies. If you celebrated one and condemned the other, even in mocking ironic memes, you are part of the problem. You are part of the culture that nurtures, encourages, and provides the justifications for such horrid actions.

Political violence is a terrible beast, never dead and always seeking to escape the chains of civilization do not saw at those links for your side’s benefit; it never pays off well in the end.

Overtures: Vanishing Cultural Knowledge

One of my brain-resting pastimes is watching ‘reactors’ on YouTube. These are generally millennials viewing classic films, which depressingly are often from the 80s & 70s, for the first time. As a boomer born in the early 60s these are movies I have seen many that are close to my heart and among my favorites. It is surprising just how successful some of these channels have become. One Canadian lady now in the US, who until she started this project described herself as a rom-com and comedy gal, had her channel, Popcorn in Bed, become so large that Tom Cruise’s production company invited her to the premiere of a Mission Impossible film.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching these channels is seeing how some things that were once common knowledge slip away into obscurity. It makes me feel like Galadriel’s narration at the start of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “…some things were lost because none now live who remember it.”

I have written before about how these younger people have no context for the little white nitroglycerin tablets Father Merrin takes for his heart disease in The Exorcist but another larger thing on my mind this morning: overtures.

Taken from ballet and opera, an overture in film is a piece of music played before the start of a movie used to set a mood. They were never common, but overtures were once employed much more often, usually of grand elaborate productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or Ben-Hur (1959). I can’t recall when I learned about overtures in feature films, but it was long ago, so much so that it is just part of what I know about movies. I think the first overture I experienced before a film was for the original release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So many of these millennials, coming to adulthood in a world so unlike mine own, have never encountered an overture nor have they learned what they were from some text or book. When these people, who are not dumb or stupid, encounter an overture it is a period of confusion as they sit through several minutes of sometimes a black screen, neither Star Trek: The Motion Picture nor 2001: A Space Odyssey employed a title card with their overtures, with only a score playing. Aside from people who manage to see live Broadway-style productions, and the rare film that still employs them, the overture seems to be slipping out of all knowledge.

Grotesque and Un-American

This Saturday, June 14, 2025, Washington, D.C. the capital of the United States, will witness an insulting parade of military machinery not unlike the displays seen from the Union of Soviet

Pathe

Socialist Republics to flatter and fluff the ego of a malignant narcissist. Oh, officially, this is a celebration of the United States Army, established on this date in 1775. (Well, actually that was the Continental Army, which was disbanded, and the U.S. Army was established June 2, 1784.) This unseemly projection of power which actually signals a deep and crippling weakness is all about the most unfit man to ever serve in any post of the United States, Trump, as that date is also his birthday.

How do I know this, beyond the simple fact that this man’s desperate neediness makes it manifestly clear to any objective observer?

We had no parade on March 27th in celebration of the founding of the U.S. Navy, nor is one planned or even discussed for October 13th the anniversary of the founding of the Continental navy. The same is true for July 11th or November 10th, the founding dates for the Marine Corps. No party for those services which do not share a date with the weak man’s birthday.

The office of president is currently occupied by a greed, vain, immoral man who has surrounded himself with grifter, kooks, and bootlickers, and our nation and the entire world will suffer for years to come because of it.

Life Has No Factory Reset

It’s not uncommon when a relationship has become terribly strained and stressed for one of the parties involved to suggest that they ‘start over’ but such a step, short of a fantastical memory wipe, is impossible. We carry our histories inside us and the weight of all the past words and actions press us inevitably forward. This is also true outside of the romantic realm.

There are some current and former members of the Republican Party who long for a return to the party that they remember, often this is from a very distinct and fenced off recollection of the party, usually centered on the ‘Reagan Revolution’ discarding the party before that time. Such dreams are pure fantasy. The population, both inside and outside the party, carries the history of all the words and actions and hurt that has been visited upon this nation and this world by the GOP of the last quarter century. You cannot unwind history. This is not a malfunctioning iPhone that can be restored to factory settings and reloaded with fresh applications.

The people killed and injured by handing the nation’s health systems over to a conspiratorial nutjob cannot be made whole again. The international relations cannot be mended with mere words. The brilliant minds denied entry or chased away will remember their treatment for decades and will remain wary.

A startling fact I learned this morning is the number of physicians looking to leave this country. Over the same period in 2024, 71 doctors applied to become licensed in Canada, for 2025 that number rose to 615! Now we are the subject of a global ‘brain drain’.

If a massive health event were to take the principal instigator of our nation’s pains from this mortal coil the damage will have already been done. The dark period of rebuilding and constructing of a new Republican Party would be shortened but not eliminated. There are terrible times ahead and the next century may not be America’s.

The Pointless Hypocrisy Canard

There is a tendency in the Anti-Trump resistance for some people to deploy the rather obvious charge of ‘hypocrisy’ when Trump, his administration, and his allies perform crude and obvious actions that they have deeply and loudly criticized among their political opponents.

The list is nearly endless and stretches back decades to the Clintons, through Obama and Biden. Money donated to the Clinton Foundation, was in reality monies going directly to them, proof of their ‘corruption,’ however billions washed through Trump’s various crypto schemes are unworthy of any thought. Still images of Obama nose in the air peering down at someone solid proof of the man’s narcissism, egotism, and arrogance. Trump’s display of nearly clinical malignant narcissism, merely proof of his opponents ‘derangement.’

The reason the charges of hypocrisy are pointless is that they miss a fundamental truth, every single attack is not launched in anything approximating ‘good faith.’ These people care not one iota for the truth of the matter but only for the effectiveness of their attacks. The point isn’t about what really happened but only to win the ‘news cycle’ and drive down their opponents’ support. The moment a particular tool or weapon ceases to be effective it is discarded.

It is a waste of time and resources to answer any of it with ‘hypocrisy.’ That merely invigorates the charges, often patently false, providing Trump and his allies with even more opportunities for attack.

Weakly bound voters I think are more likely to be swayed with attacks that simply go directly at the man and his administration’s criminal and authoritarian actions without reference to any hypocrisy. His solidly committed voters, motivated by racism, or self-interest and simply the delusion that a Democratic politician is always the wrong choice cannot be dislodged with this charge.

Democracy’s Unresolvable Fault

Throughout its long history humanity has tried many systems of government. Evolution molded us for hunterpgatherer bands that function on interpersonal relationship and knowledge. Agriculture and creative intelligence exploded our populations well beyond that scope and ever since we’ve grappled with creating systems that work efficiently but also with a freedom that at very least sates individuality to the point that people are satisfied enough to not burn it all to the ground.

History is replete with Kings, Emperors, God-Kings, Oligarchs, and religious domination. For the last several centuries the newest and boldest experiment has been democracy.

Amid the various forms and systems, the essence of democratic governance is the concept that in some method the populace, rarely the entire populace, is polled and their preference in party or person is elevated to government. The assumption being that a widely distributed method of selection will tend to marginalize extremism in favor of moderation in rule. There have been spectacular failures, NAZI Germany for example, where the populace selected quite poorly and that points to the flaw of democracy that looks to be uncorrectable.

Self-selection.

The men and women who put themselves forward to be chosen have self-selected. Only those who want to be in power are options for the populace to elect from. While the nobility of service is real and there have always been and always will be people for whom service is their goal they never have and never will be the only ones in that pool.

Power attracts those who want to abuse it for their own selfish needs or twisted ideologies. The pool from which the populace can select will always be tainted by the greedy, the corrupt, and the evil. As such the possibility that the greedy, corrupt, and the evil secure power for themselves is unavoidable.

I am not advocating abandoning democracy, it’s a flawed system that has far fewer flaws than the rest but it is not perfect and your franchise is a terrible power you must always use wisely.

Yet Another Reason to Hate A. I.

Generative A.I. is not without decent and good uses but there has been a lot of terrible things as well, the scraping of artists’ work to feed it, my own novel has been fed into at least one A.I. to ‘train it, the enormous amounts of energy used to power it for so far little practical benefits, the dangerously destabilizing effect it could have if not carefully introduced in the economy. All that said last night I discovered yet another reason to hate the wide-spread and easy access to artificial ‘intelligence.’

After watching the programs of interest to us my sweetie-wife and I relaxed by scanning trailers on YouTube. Some were interesting, some were not but then at the end of the line produced by the search lay a trailer for The Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan began filming his adaptation of that classic story in February 2025 and it should hit theaters in the summer of 2026 so it is possible that some form of teaser trailer had just been released.

Nope.

Some forking dipshirt had prompted generative A.I. to make a trailer and it was among the most idiotic and terrible bit of video I have ever witnessed. It was evident within a few moments what sort of garbage this was, and we stopped watching, disgusted with the thing.

It is bad enough when fans make fake trailers; I still recall how hard it was to find a legitimate trailer for The Return, ironically enough also adapted from The Odyssey when the internet was overflowing with fan-made trailers using clips from various movies starring Ralph Fiennes. A.I. doesn’t even resort to clips, it just lies and throws crap into the world.

There are some very funny and creative fake trailers out there, such as Must Love Jaws which is created to make Jaws look like a buddy comedy when misfit friends Brody and Hooper have to stop the evil Quint from killing their shark friend. You would never mistake this for the real trailer, it’s a work of creativity and love, things A.I. does not possess.

The Stool Has Three New legs

When Reagan ascended to the Presidency in 1980, he often described the Republican party as a stool with three legs to describe the major divisions of the movement as: Family Values, Fiscal Conservatism, and Anti-Communism.

One can argue with aspects of any one or all three elements, but I do think that description pretty much told you who and what made up the GOP at that time. There are some deluded fools who think it still has bearing but the legs of that stool have long since been replaced with three new ones.

Cruelty to the Queer, Looting Public Funds, and Isolationism marbled with a rich vein of white supremacy are the new legs.

What little compassion for others in the old ‘Family Valuers’ crowd, and there hadn’t been much to begin with, has boiled away with its concentration in the homophobic transphobic, and woman-hating stew it has become.

Fiscal conservatism, however, it may may have erred with ‘supply side’, now makes no pretense at sane or rational monetary policies or decisions. The last Republican president, who is also the current one, ran the debt and deficit to insane amounts and now wants to add trillions more to it with additional tax cuts for the very wealthy.

The isolationism of the new GOP is unmistakable, democracies are derided and left to suffer invasions from militaristic and expansionist neighbors while the deep and binding commitments of the post war era are abandoned. The white nationalism is plain when books about racism are removed from the Naval academy, but Mein Kampf is left for the cadets to read.

From 1980 through about 2003 I was a registered Republican, but the mark of true wisdom is not being free of mistakes but recognizing when you have made them.v

Absence of Religion or the Supernature Does Not Equal Nihilism.

While as a child I was raised with moderate Southern Baptist beliefs and attended at least a smattering of Sunday School classes, the faith never really took hold. It is a truism to me that from the outside all religions look preposterous, but it is a very human thing to believe in them.

In my opinion, there is no soul, no spirit, nothing that existed that is ‘me’ prior to my birth, nor will there be anything lingering after the biochemical reactions that power my flesh cease. When I die, that is it; that is the end of all thought and all sensation. No lake of fire or endless clouds await me. This one brief passing moment in the nearly limitless expanse of time is all that will comprise my existence. For all of us, this is it; this brief, fleeting, flickering moment of consciousness is all we get.

Does that mean life is meaningless, without purpose or value? Fuck no! It means that the value life has, the purpose life has, is determined solely by each and every one of us for ourselves. We create meaning, and that is the center of a life that is our own.

It is because I hold these beliefs that I deeply despise the ‘social conservatives’ and their spiteful domineering of other people’s lives. You want to believe that sexual relations with people of the same gender is wrong? Fine, go ahead and refrain from it all you wish, but don’t tell others how to behave. Believe that life divides neatly into binary states of existence? Foolish, but that’s okay for you, but don’t tell others how to live.

We get this one tiny moment to live, and as long as it is not harming another, you should get to live your life in the manner that brings you joy in this painful, passing existence.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur