I Did Not See The Superbowl Show But I am Still Shooting Off My Mouth

 I have the halftime show on my Watch Later list on YouTube. What I have encountered, so far of the reaction appalls me. But should we expect anything less than inane blather from our President?

Reacting to the President:

"The only thing more powerful than hate is love" (Steven Schmidt)

I know that Donald Trump is depraved and venomous, irredeemably evil and disgustingly cruel. He is unworthy of his office, and a blight on decency, but I worry that millions of our children are being marinated in his sins.

It is grotesque and shameful.

Yet, even the racism was outbid by the sick reality that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s close friend, who is mentioned more than 38,000 times in the child rape files dared to suggest that children were endangered by a musical performance in Spanish.

Think about that.

Good Bunny. Bad Super Bowl. Defund ICE. (The Bulwark)

 Anyway, last weekend’s sports may not have been super thrilling, but the culture war aspects were entertaining. Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language halftime show led Donald Trump to denounce him. And when some of the American Olympians said a few words distinguishing their love of their country from support for the Trump administration, MAGA-types attacked them (more on this below). Samuel Johnson, call your office: Patriotism has become the first refuge of scoundrels.

 Bad Trump, Good Bunny (Zeteo)

The president of the United States is That Guy – except instead of getting beaten up by a bunch of small kids who he tried to fight, Donald Trump is getting his ass handed to him by the very culture wars he so confidently started. And last night’s big game underscored precisely why.

Trump didn’t show up at Super Bowl LX in California, in part because his White House had determined that if he did, he would get booed so very lustily on live TV, in front of tens of millions of viewers. But his flailing, increasingly unpopular presidency still managed to loom large over Sunday’s events. The two main musical acts – Bad Bunny and Green Day – are both avowedly against Trump and his ethnic-cleansing campaigns. Green Day performed “American Idiot,” which they routinely play to protest Trump’s “MAGA agenda.” Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny’s halftime show was a cinematic, Spanish-language celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity in America. During the show, he prominently displayed the message, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” which is almost verbatim what he said at his recent Grammys “ICE out” speech.

If anyone wants to argue Bad Bunny avoided partisan politics during the Super Bowl, he sort of did – on paper, with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability. His message couldn’t have been clearer, and it joyfully spat in the face of what Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the gang running the federal government stand for. But if the NFL wants to pretend its halftime show didn’t have an inherently anti-Trump message to it, the Trump administration is already showing it’s not willing to give them a pass.

 The first I read was MAGA preferring a lip-syncing Kid Rock to Bad Bunny is what white supremacy looks like!(Dean's Report), which I sent onto some of my friends. Of which, only KH has replied so far. He wrote this:

The only thing Kid Rock ever did was steal samples of Sweet Home Alabama and Werewolves of London and throw some lyrics on top. I saw the video, he’s not even trying to hide the lip sync. 

Bad Bunny is arguably the biggest pop star in the world right now. His music didn’t bother me- then again I’ve been immersed in Portuguese and Latino culture for three decades now.

Also, portrays his stage character as gender fluid, and they really hate that. Of course, most magats don’t get that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. 

BTW- a number of country artists backed out of that debacle. 

And this was my reply:

Gender fluidity? Haven't we lived through that?

 

 

 

So what if you don't know the words - can you dance to it?

 

For Donald J. Trump, and the rest of MAGA, a concise explanation of American music:

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Muncie Arts Have A Future

 And we can take part in it!

Help Shape the Future of the Muncie Arts and Culture Council 

In-Person Focus Groups 

All in-person sessions will be held in downtown Muncie and last approximately 60 minutes. 

Tuesday, February 10

12:00–1:00 p.m.

5:30–6:30 p.m. 

7:30–8:30 p.m. 

Wednesday, February 11

12:00–1:00 p.m. 

5:30–6:30 p.m. 

7:30–8:30 p.m.

Online Focus Groups 

Wednesday, February 18 

6:00–7:00 p.m.

8:00–9:00 p.m. 

Community members can express interest in participating by completing the focus group interest form at https://form.jotform.com/260225399669066. More details about session locations and registration will be shared with participants upon sign-up. 

 

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An Antifa Publisher

 I do like either/or situations—they strike me as showing a lack of imagination—but to me, you are either antifa or you are not. I am on the antifa side.

Therefore, I knew when I found Not A Pipe Publishing, I knew I had to feature them here. They are a book publisher, not a magazine publisher. 

Not a Pipe Publishing is a small, independent publishing company founded in 2013 in (fittingly) Independence, Oregon.  Working with groups like the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Willamette Writers, the Oregon Poetry Association, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, Literary Arts, the Alliance of Independent Authors, and Project GirlSpire, Not a Pipe Publishing is committed to supporting fine literature in our region, across the country, and around the world. Focusing on high quality poetry and genre fiction for young adult and adult audiences, Not a Pipe Publishing seeks to both entertain and enlighten readers by bringing diverse voices to the market, engaging in the struggle for human rights, and giving voice to deeper truths best expressed through fiction and poetry. 

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Forgiveness

 The Lord's Prayer says we are to forgive the trespasses/debts of others.  What has troubled me for the past few years is not forgiveness, but if forgiveness means I must let a person harmful to me back into my life after forgiving them.

Richard Balkin 's What we get wrong about forgiveness – a counseling professor unpacks the difference between letting go and making up (The Conversation) offers me an answer.

I often remind people that forgiveness does not have to mean a reconciliation. At its core, forgiveness is internal: a way of laying down ill will and our emotional burden, so we can heal. It should be seen as a separate process from reconciliation, and deciding whether to renegotiate a relationship.

***

Forgiveness is also confusing, thanks to the way it is typically conflated with reconciliation.

Forgiveness researchers tie reconciliation to “interpersonal forgiveness,” in which the relationship is renegotiated or even healed. However, at times, reconciliation should not occur – perhaps due to a toxic or unsafe relationship. Other times, it simply cannot occur, such as when the offender has died, or is a stranger.

But not all forgiveness depends on whether a broken relationship has been repaired. Even when reconciliation is impossible, we can still relinquish feelings of ill-will toward an offender, engaging in “intrapersonal forgiveness.”

***

With this in mind, I offer four steps to evaluate where you are on your forgiveness journey. A simple tool I developed, the Forgiveness Reconciliation Inventory, looks at each of these steps in more depth.

1. Talk to someone. You can talk to a friend, mentor, counselor, grandma – someone you trust. Talking makes the unmentionable mentionable. It can reduce pain and help you gain perspective on the person or event that left you hurt.

2. Examine if reconciliation is beneficial. Sometimes there are benefits to reconciliation. Broken relationships can be healed, and even strengthened. This is especially more likely when the offender expresses remorse and changes behavior – something the victim has no control over.

3. In some cases, however, there are no benefits, or the benefits are outweighed by the offender’s lack of remorse and change. In this case, you might have to come to terms with processing an emotional – or even tangible – debt that will not be repaid.

4. Consider your feelings toward the offender, the benefits and consequences of reconciliation, and whether they’ve shown any remorse and change. If you want to forgive them, determine whether it will be interpersonal – talking to them and trying to renegotiate the relationship – or intrapersonal, in which you reconcile your feelings and expectations within yourself.

Either way, forgiveness comes when we relinquish feelings of ill will toward another.

Okay, I see it is okay to refuse any ill will on my part towards another without inviting them over for dinner.

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Cheerleading Creativity

 I keep repeating that my cure for despondency was coming back to the idea of creativity.

Therefore, I find Angela Yuriko Smith's Creativity Is How We Survive a great explication of my own ideas.

When systems strain and stories harden, we’re told, quietly and repeatedly, that there are fewer options now. Fewer paths. Less room to experiment. Less permission to change our minds. Creativity is reframed as indulgent, impractical, or dangerous at exactly the moment it becomes most necessary.

This is why we can’t think of creativity as a luxury. It’s a necessity. It is a survival skill.

Creativity is how humans adapt when the old maps stop working. It’s how we test alternatives, imagine exits, and keep meaning intact when familiar structures fail. Without it, we don’t just lose art. We lose flexibility. We lose ourselves.

Reclaiming our reality begins by rewriting over some of the most corrosive rhetoric we’re fed as creators… especially the idea that this work isn’t “real,” that it can’t sustain us, that it should be done only on the margins of a life that matters.

The truth is simpler and more dangerous: when we are creating, we are living. The return on that investment isn’t abstract. It’s survival.

We are all creators, and creativity is fueled by curiosity

***

When we reclaim our own reality, we help keep reality itself flexible. We keep imagination alive as a shared resource, not a private indulgence. Creativity is not something we do after we survive. It is how we survive.

Once we see that clearly, it becomes impossible to pretend this is a solo endeavor. Survival never is. Creativity doesn’t just help us navigate what’s ahead. It creates pathways others can follow.

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Morality Clauses

 I am far, far beyond getting much of anything done here. The after effects of the sinus infection that knocked me out last week is to be tired. That is why it took me several days to finish reading E. Lily Yu's A History of Morality Clauses (Quillette). Fascinating. I am, however, old-fashioned in my attachment to free speech - for all that the First Amendment protects against only government interference - as an antidote to a stifling and infantilizing moralism, I agree with the writer's conclusion:

 The answer to Comstock, the answer to McCarthy, and the answer to their modern-day descendants is the same as it always is: courage, discernment, and laughter. The writer should speak and write fearlessly in spite of morality clauses; agents should strike those clauses out of contracts; the publisher should neither bow to the mob nor force the writer to bow to it; and each individual should bear the responsibility of being an individual and stand apart from the howling mob. Laugh as well, Doris Lessing advises in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, because laughter is a heretical act. Naked emperors waddling about are, after all, absurd, and so is our determination to repeat the 1910s. These tasks are as hard as they ever were, but we are not spared by our failure to carry them out. 

If a work offends your sense of morals, then you are free to refuse it into your life. That  does not mean you are free to impose on my sense of morals. Whatever immorality I indulge in will be judged by my conscience and my God.

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Rejections from the last of January

 No longer feeling like a mucus producing machine, but with goo still lurking in my lungs. I hope this will not mark the high point of my energy for the day.

 1/26

Thank you for your submission, but we don't think this is a good fit for the Against All Odds anthology. 

But feel free to submit for future Ink Alchemy anthologies.

Thank you again, take care.

Keegan Young

Editor at Ink Alchemy Books

inkalchemybooks.com

1/27

Dear Samuel Hasler,

Thank you for submitting "Agnes." We were glad to have the chance to read your work, but unfortunately we were not able to find a place for it in the New England Review.

It’s an important part of our mission to publish work by new and emerging writers as well as by those who have already earned recognition, so we read each piece with care. Because we are only able to publish a small percentage of the thousands of submissions we read each year, we often have to turn down very accomplished work.

If you haven't already, please consider staying in touch by signing up for occasional emails from NER.

Thanks again for sharing your writing with us.

Sincerely, 

The Editors

New England Review

 

 1/28:

We appreciate the opportunity to read your work, but unfortunately "A Heart’s Judgment Judged" was not a right fit for Hudson Review.

Thank you for trying us.

Sincerely,

The Editors of Hudson Review

***

Thank you very much for sending "Agnes" to Boulevard. Although it was not selected for publication, we're glad you thought of us. Good luck placing this with another magazine.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Boulevard
www.boulevardmagazine.org 

 

 1/30

Thank you for taking the time to send us your writing and for your patience. We are sorry to report that this story was not selected for publication in our Spring issue. 

We hope TGLR will remain on your radar when you seek publication opportunities in the future, and we wish you the best. 

Sincerely,

Shyla & The Good Life Review Short Fiction Team

 

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