Today is Thursday, April 20, 2023. I was not here in this space yesterday, as Elliot and I had attended a matinee performance of Life of Pi based on the 2012 film and book written by Yann Martel with our friend “Deborah.” We did have dinner at the West Bank Cafe on 42nd Street and then came home.

When we got home a little after 8, we began watching a gay thriller – if there is such a category of film – called Complete Strangers from 2020 on Amazon Prime. The story concerned a recovering alcoholic who returns to his hometown and falls in love with a man who who appears too good to be true. The setting is Budapest, Hungary, and it was exciting to see some of the sites that we visited when we traveled to this city some years back. Then I got involved with watching a young Humphrey Bogart in a gripping 1937 film called Black Legion that is as topical today as it was way back then: 86 years ago. It’s the story of an average Joe by the name of Frank Taylor (Bogart) who works at an auto factory who believes he’s going to be made foreman. When the job goes to a Polish-born worker instead, Frank is enraged and decides to join a local organization that persecutes immigrants. Known as the Black Legion, the group is patterned after our very own Ku Klux Klan. This clandestine hate group uses scare tactics to get their way as it champions America first. I strongly recommend everyone seeing this film; it got a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I was able to tape it off the Turner Classic Movies channel.

So it was too late to begin writing my blog after I watched a bit of the second film.

So I’m here now. Now to the news: An analysis of the astonishing last-minute settlement of the lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems is written by Oliver Darcy for CNN entitled “With this historic settlement, Rupert Murdoch is paying the price for Trump’s election lies.” Darcy begins his analysis with this statement, “The Big Lie came at a big price.”

Darcy makes the point that the country suffered the consequences of Dumpf’s election lies on January 6. And just two days ago, “Rupert Murdoch suffered the consequences of those same lies on April 18.”

Darcy feels, though, that the hefty price tag won’t be enough to change Fox News at its core. I would tend to agree with his assessment here. This hasty settlement hammered out right before the case would have gone to trial spares the country of Fox News’ public humiliation and chastisement which I think was necessary for the network to have experienced. “The settlement it reached with Dominion will not require its dishonest personalities to acknowledge reality and issue retractions on the air.” The network will not be exposed for its massive dishonesty and lack of journalistic ethics as a result of not going to trial. As Darcy writes, “The channel’s highest-ranking executives and biggest stars [and dicks, in my opinion] such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, would have been forced to confront how lies they never believed were promoted on the network’s air to its millions of loyal viewers.”

The settlement also spared the company and its executives of being bound by the laws of reality during trial. Normally, Fox News handles controversy about its on-air practices by distorting the criticism it faces and attacking “the media.” “This time-tested playbook would not have worked in court, where the judge would have forced the network’s lawyers to present the jury a fact-based argument.” It would have been tantamount to watching the Orange-Hued liar known as Donald Trump to actually state the truth while taking the witness chair, which is beyond him, as everyone knows.

What is reassuring about this first decision against the company is that more aggrieved companies are waiting in the wings to take a bite out of the mendacious network. Another voting technology company, Smartmatic, is still suing Fox News, demanding $2.7 billion for the “disinformation campaign” it waged against its company. This statement by Smartmatic’s lead attorney in this still-to-be-resolved case augurs a final reckoning for the network very soon in the future, “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest.” Touche. There might very well be a trial in the second case, possibly. This we can look forward to – with the country seeing the total debasement of the dishonest network chaired by Rupert Murdoch. We can only wish that Fox is totally eviscerated by major lawsuits settled against them to the tune of many, many millions. The country would survive its demise. Of course, there are other stations just like it sowing disinformation and misinformation as well – networks like Newsmax and OAN, which are considered more extreme, even, than Fox News.

Another story that is fueling discussion in this gun-obsessed country is the shocking number of shootings resulting from being in the wrong place and wrong time occurring within the space of several days and the lack of communication between shooter and accidental target. An analysis of this deadly occurrence is provided by Zachary B. Wolf for CNN entitled “What’s going on with all the wrong-place wrong-time shootings?” that attempts to analyze what is actually going on here.

Wolf initially states that this is not a story about mass shootings, AR-15s, or even about gun laws. He admits it’s about a country that has more guns than people, “where whatever inspires the 30% of Americans, who are most likely to be men, who own firearms has converged in dangerous and deadly ways with whatever fear, frustration, or paranoia leads someone to shoot at a stranger or a car that’s driving away.”

Three shootings like this happened in less than a week around the country:

• In Kansas City, Missouri, on April 13, two shots were fired at Ralph Yarl, a Black teen trying to pick up his brothers just before 10 p.m. By some miracle, he survived after being shot in the head.
• On April 15, in upstate New York, two shots were fired from a porch at cars full of young people that had just turned around after looking for a party in the wrong driveway. In this situation, just before 10 p.m. once more, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was killed by the bullet that struck the car driven by her boyfriend. The shooter was a 65-year-old white man.
• On April 18, outside Austin, Texas, two cheerleaders were shot in a grocery store parking lot just after midnight. One of the girls, Heather Roth, accidentally tried to get into the wrong vehicle. She and her teammate, Payton Washington, were both struck. Roth was treated at the scene and Washington is recovering in the ICU.

What may tie all of these accidental shootings together is that the gunmen don’t appear to have been interested in looking for answers. In the first case, the 84-year-old homeowner almost immediately shot Yarl upon opening his front door. The young teen was forced to run to multiple houses asking for someone to call 911.

In upstate New York, 65-year-old Kevin Monahan, who incidentally has shown no remorse, according to the local sheriff, fired shots from his porch at two cars and a motorcycle that were driving away.

The boyfriend of the shot woman told NBC that “As soon as we figured out that we were at the wrong location, we started to leave, and that’s when everything happened.”

All I can say is why are so many of us so fucking afraid of each other? The frightened homeowner who shot first asking questions last thought the teen was 6 feet tall and was going to break into his house. The teen was actually 5’8″. The Kansas City mayor has said that this situation had everything to do with race. He noted, “I think that if the young man wasn’t Black, we wouldn’t be here today.”

This phenomenon is now being called “hair-trigger justice” and it’s fucking disturbing to no end. No other country has this, I keep on repeating. Gun ownership is so ubiquitous in this nation in that there are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to one estimate. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center Survey, about 3 in 10 adults say they own a gun and four in 10 say they live in a household with a gun.

Certain groups are more likely to own a gun. Nearly half of white men, compared to less than a quarter of white women and nonwhite men, said they owned a gun in the Pew survey. Also, there are the expected partisan divides, meaning Republicans [who else?] are much more likely than Democrats to own a gun. People in rural areas are much more likely than city dwellers to own a firearm.

Lastly, a more recent KFF survey offered some additionally important insights. That survey found about 4 in 10 Americans live in a house with a gun. Among these, more than half said the gun is stored in the same location as ammunition and more than a third said the gun is stored loaded. There you have it, not only is the household gun stored where the ammunition is located, it’s stored fucking loaded. This then ties the recent shootings together – loaded guns at the ready. And no questions asked.

It’s so bad that we all should smoke a joint. Just joking here, folks. But today, April 20, is actually a celebration of cannabis, with many activities scheduled throughout the city. So for those who indulge, happy Cannabis Day.

Stay safe and be well.

Here is the playbill from the show we saw yesterday. We thoroughly enjoyed the sublime artistry of the staging and the lifelike puppets that populated the stage, along with the central character of Pi, played by Hiran Abeysekera.