Week of 04/25/2022

 

DeFascist Versus DeMouse
– by David Matthews 2

Walt Disney was a storyteller.

That is who he was and that is what made him so successful.  He made his mark turning classic stories into animated legends.  And then he created not one but two amusement parks on each coast of the country for families to show up.  In turn, the company he created evolved into one of the biggest conglomerates in the world, recognized around the world, and encompassing a huge portion of the media.  Disney the company owns Star Wars and Marvel and ESPN and the ABC Network and DreamWorks and 20^th Century Fox and National Geographic, and countless other forms of media and entertainment.

And the two amusement parks that punctuate the world of Disney are not some small ventures with a handful of roller coasters and a water park.  These are massive facilities with their own police, fire, and rescue services.  The Walt Disney World resort has several hotels, a monorail service, a wildlife preserve, campgrounds, spas, golf areas, even a yacht resort.  All of that in one facility.

Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, is a lawyer who became a sleazy politician and currently serves as the governor of the fascist state of Florida.  And it is because of DeSantis that Florida is the fascist state that it is.

Ron DeSantis is not a builder or a businessman or a storyteller.  Aside from his family, the only thing he has ever created in his life was opportunity for himself.  Opportunity as a lawyer, as a congressman, and now as a governor.  And he thinks he can use all that to become President of the United States.

DeSantis, aka DeFascist, is a slimy stereotypical politician.  He looks and acts like a classic Disney villain.  He bullies his way though to get what he wants, and he attacks those that question or oppose him.

His handling of the COVID-19 global pandemic in and of itself should be considered a crime against humanity worthy of trial at the Hague.  He fought against data collection of virus outbreaks, even going so far to have the person who created the original program arrested.  His outright hatred of masks and vaccine mandates went so far as to him openly bullying schoolchildren in front of cameras for wearing masks. 

DeFascist is such a villain that should have an animated vulture behind him mirroring his every move.  The disgust that this commentator has for him as a human being for these acts alone is brobdingnagian.

But now he’s escalated his villainy to try to go after Disney... because they dared to question him.

DeFascist has been imposing his will through his state, including ramming through legislation that outlaw schools from making any reference to LGBTQ+ people.  He calls it “parental rights”, but it is best known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

The current executives at Disney were slow to say anything about it, something the previous CEO had no problem doing in the past to support the various LGBTQ employees there.  And when new CEO Bob Chapek finally spoke up, it was far too little and way too late to stop passage in the legislature.

Now normal politicians would take the obvious win.  It was going to pass.  They knew it was going to pass, and the half-assed late-to-the-party condemnation from the Almighty Mouse really meant nothing.

But… no, not DeSantis.  The petty little Italian snowflake took the criticism of his “Don’t Say Gay” bill personally.  So he retaliated.  He had his spinless lackies in the state legislature attack Disney by ending the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which gave Disney World a form of self-governance.  This allowed Disney to provide for its own fire and police and infrastructure.  All the roads and electricity and services for that area are paid for entirely by Disney and without any kind of oversight from the local counties.

DeFascist DeSantis thinks this will hurt Disney.

DeFascist DeSantis, dictatorial ruler of Fascist Florida, is definitely in de-wrong.

What this does is it gives Disney a multi-million-dollar tax break.  They don’t have to foot the bill for the infrastructure anymore.  The two counties that it affects will now have to pay for the police and fire and ambulance and hospitals and roads and electricity and sewers and the traffic lights and the mass-transportation.  They will also have to cover the bonds placed on all of those projects.

The local taxpayers will have to be on the hook for about $2 billion.  That’s “billion” with a capital “B”.

And you think your taxes are too high!

And all because the widdle Italian thug got his widdle feelings hurt.

Now this could be overturned in the courts.  This political retaliation for a statement made by the CEO of Disney is a direct violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  This is a government sanction because of speech.

Then again, the widdle Italian thug really doesn’t seem to give a crap about the rights of others anyway.

I haven’t even brought up the other thing that Disney could do in response to this.  Because you know the local counties will not be able to handle the tax burden.  Their neighborhood gangs of Karens and Kens will throw their temper tantrums at paying anything and they will demand that their local corrupt leaders say “no” to anything Disney asks in order to even maintain that massive infrastructure that they no longer have to pay for themselves.

Disney could, at that point, just shut everything down and leave Orlando.  

The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, the Star Wars exhibitions, the resorts, the Animal Kingdom, the spas, all of it.  Gone.  Shut down and relocated.  The governor of Colorado just offered Disney a place to call home.  The Disney cruise ship can go dock in Savanah, Georgia.  They still have Walt Disney Land in California.  Georgia can pick up the film studios.  Think of the thousands of people who work there.  They’ll be out of work or moving elsewhere.   Think of all the local businesses that made their money because of Disney World.  Gone.  Bankrupt.  Shut down.  The massive Orlando airport hub, which brings people in and out from around the world, would most likely be a ghost town because nobody will want to be there without Disney.

Oh yeah, there’s also the Universal Theme Park.  But do you really think that owner Comcast will want to pick up the bill when Disney is absolved of it?  Or do you think they’ll also cut their losses and bail?

Let’s get brutally honest here… snowflake Governor Ron DeFasicst DeSantis really screwed up when he decided to pick a fight with the Almighty Mouse over his bruised ego.  His payback will end up costing his own citizens billions in taxes and lost business.

Does he really think he can somehow topple Disney?  Make them bend their knee?  Better groups have tried  and failed miserably.  Normally I complain about any entity being “too big”, but in this case that bigness is an asset to Disney.  It protects them from the abuses of a dictatorial thug with a fragile ego and an army of sycophants in Tallahassee.

I probably should also point out that this payback is supposed to take effect in 2023, just one year away from the 2024 elections.  If the widdle snowflake has any plans on running for the White House then, that’s when all of the consequences of this action will be highlighted, and it will all have his little sensitive name on it.  Yeah, he may want to hold off on those White House aspirations.

The thing about villains is that Disney has pretty much wrote the book on bad guys.  From Fantasia’s rising demon horde to Cruella De Ville, Maleficent, Scar, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Thanos, Baron Zemo, Hades, Ultron, the Red Skull, and even Secretary Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross.  Compared to all of them, fragile widdle Ron DeFascist DeSantis doesn’t even compare to Gaston from “Beauty and the Beast” or Prince Hans from “Frozen”.  His villainy is just pathetic, and it doesn’t take a suit of armor or a super-soldier or a Jedi knight to stop him.  It just takes prosecutors willing to prosecute and judges willing to smack him down.

Week of 04/18/2022

 

An Open Letter To Warner Brothers Discovery
– by David Matthews 2

This is an open letter to the executives of the new Warner Brothers Discovery company from a longtime fan of one of your products.

First, congratulations on your new merger.  I won’t say it is an “acquisition” because I know the majority of the new company is still owned by the one-time cellphone service that gobbled up everything it can like Pac-Man over the decades until it became just another one of a handful of huge mega-conglomerates.  In fact, I question even the rationale of buying the mess that is Time-Warner only to turn around and spin it off like they did DirecTV.

But, nonetheless, the deal is done and you’re the new bosses of this huge venture, and so I have a few things to say that you really should hear.

First, if you do somehow come across this open letter and you do some looking into this online column that’s been around since the early years of the World Wide Web, you’ll notice that I do talk a lot about politics, but I’m also a longtime fan of one of your products, namely DC Comics.  You probably know it as DC Entertainment.

I grew up with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman and all the other legends of the DC Universe.  I used to watch the animated stories of Superman and Batman.  I was thrilled with the campy Batman live-action TV series.  I enjoyed seeing Wonder Woman on TV.  I was blown away when Superman, and later Batman, went to the big screen.  I read as the vast multiverse was destroyed in “Crisis on Infinite Earths” only for it to come back again and again in various incarnations.  I watched as my legends died only to come back different and even sometimes better.  I’ve seen villains become heroes and back to being villains again.  I saw heroes get married and become parents and pass their titles to the next generation.

Not only that, but it is because of my love of heroes and superheroes that I became not only a writer, but a self-published comic book creator, with original characters inspired by those very legends that I grew up with.

So you might say that I’ve got a stake in that product that you’ve just acquired, as one of countless consumers over the decades.  We’ve bought and read those comics.  We eagerly awaited the next live-action TV episode and animated shows.  We bought those direct-to-video DC animated movies.  We waited in line for the box-office premieres.  We played the characters online and subscribed to the streaming services.  We have paid the way for your product to be where it is today.

That said, I was glad to hear your new CEO, David Zaslav, say that DC Entertainment is in need of an overhaul.  That, while there are gems in certain movies and TV shows, many of their mainstay characters – specifically Superman, the first iconic figure for DC – are being underused and are languishing in obscurity.  This is absolutely true and has been going on for decades.

DC Entertainment productions have stumbled and fumbled while Disney-owned Marvel has been soaring with their movies and streaming specials.  They’ve been making billions while DC and WB have struggled to break even.

So if you, the folks at WBD, happened to come across this article, I hope you will take these suggestions from a longtime fan and valued customer into consideration.

First, forget trying to be like Marvel.  Marvel and DC are opposites in how they approach heroes.  Marvel takes gods and make them mortal.  Captain America is just a grown-up kid from Brooklyn.  Iron Man is a narcissistic drunk with money.  Thor, the “God of Thunder”, is really just an alien from another planet.  Spider-Man is a teen slumming in Queens.  DC takes ordinary people and turns them into legends.  A farmboy from Kansas becomes Superman, Earth’s mightiest defender.  An orphan becomes Batman, the world’s greatest detective and master strategist and fighter.  A burned-out fighter pilot becomes Green Lantern, interplanetary cop.  Don’t think that you can simply copy Marvel’s formula and make billions at the box office.  You saw what happened with “Justice League”.

Speaking of “Justice League”, I strongly suggest that the first thing you do with DC Entertainment is that you fire all of the clock-watchers and penny-pinchers in your executive talent pool.  Or, at the very least, you send them back to whatever Six Flags operation they came from.  One of the main villains of the abomination that was the 2017 movie was the WB executive who demanded the movie be no longer than two hours, which made it the hack-job it was.  WB wanted it to be like Marvel’s “Avengers”, right down to bringing in that film’s original director and bringing in a ton of needless camp.  When the original director, Zach Snyder, was given the money and time to properly finish his original work and released it in 2021, it was just over four hours long, but it told the story and did all the characters right.  It got Oscar recognition, while the 2017 film got the “Golden Schmoes” award for biggest disappointment.

Executive entertainment hacks think that you should sacrifice story for maximum theatre exposure.  This applies not only to the movies, but also to the straight-to-video animated releases.  “Superman: Doomsday” was an abomination because they wanted to keep the time limited.  But when the story was retold as two movies – “The Death of Superman” and “Reign of the Supermen” – everything was fleshed out perfectly.  Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame” and New Line Cinema’s “The Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King” were both over three hours long, but they not only told their stories well, they also scored huge box office money, despite having that “limited theater exposure”.

The message is this: if it takes three or four hours to tell a story right, then take the time and do it right.

One of the reasons why characters like Superman have been underutilized is because of some asinine belief by entertainment execs that you can’t have the same character in both live-action movies and TV shows at the same time.  As long as Superman was appearing in “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman” and “Justice League”, you can’t have him on the CW.  But once Henry Cavil was benched as Superman, that was supposedly okay for Tyler Hoechin to be Superman in “Superman & Lois” on the CW.  And yet during the five-part CW crossover event “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, you had Tyler representing CW’s Superman working along with Brandon Routh, who played Superman in “Superman Returns” and represented the cinematic version of Superman.  A live-action appearance of Bruce Wayne played by the actor who voiced him in the animated series.  The appearances of the 1966 Robin and the stars of “Smallville” and brief appearances of “Titans” and “Doom Patrol” and “Swamp Thing” on HBO Max.  There was even a meeting between CW’s Flash and the “Justice League” Flash and a comic-book tie-in.  The media multiverse endured and viewers did not lose their minds over the mingling of genres.

People will not be confused between what’s on TV and what’s in the theatres, any more than they would be confused between what’s in the comics and what’s airing on HBO Max or the CW.

That brings me to the CW network.

Some idiot, or a bunch of idiots, think that it would be best of the CW was sold off.  Since the WBD is now a co-owner of this network, and many of their best DC Entertainment talent is on the CW, this jeopardizes the company.

The idea that a network is “profitable” is about as muddied as those “Terms of Service” letters you get in the mail from your credit card lender.  I get that Viacom and WBD have their own streaming platforms now, but it’s asinine to expect to sell the network to some other company and yet still keep the content that made it the draw it is.  This is also one of the reasons why the CW’s hero-themed shows are either getting cancelled or are on the verge of being cancelled.  They don’t know if they even have a network to call home now.

This, in my not-so-humble opinion, is a mistake.  A huge, phenomenal mistake.  Viacom has its own major broadcast network called CBS.  Disney has ABC.  Comcast has NBC.  WBD only has a handful of cable channels which are becoming cookie-cutter copies of each other.  You’re the ones that will be left without a broadcast presence if you let this sale go through.

If, however, you decide to do the stupid and make the phenomenal mistake of selling off the network, I strongly suggest you move all the hero shows to HBO Max or possibly come up with a free ad-paid streaming service, like what Amazon did with IMDB TV (soon to be “Freevee”).  Many of your network fans… aka your consumers… can’t afford the monthly subscription of HBO Max, or perhaps they just don’t want to make the leap to a subscription service.  Their biggest fear as expressed in the various social media posts I come across is they don’t want to see the shows they love suddenly go behind a subscription wall.  Airing them on an ad-paid streaming service would keep them connected to those programs.  You’re doing this already with the CW app.  At least fight to keep that part of the CW network for yourself.

That brings us to the CW hero shows themselves.  I know the COVID global pandemic has put a serious hindrance on crossovers, but the CW spent all that time in 2019 and 2020 to bring the various shows together and unite them either on one planet or part of a renewed connected multiverse.  Even if they can’t be physically in the other shows, there should be at the very least an acknowledgement that these other characters still exist, even if made in passing.  “Supergirl” had John Diggle from “Arrow” show up and quote something from “Black Lightning”.  “The Flash” brought in several characters from other shows together for a five-part special.  But “Superman & Lois” are in their second season and still act like there is nothing else in the universe aside from a one-time Diggle appearance.  Again, you don’t have to have the actors show up physically, but you can at least mention them.  Acknowledge they exist.

Here's the last piece of advice… you do not need to keep re-inventing the hero in order to “revitalize” him or her.  Build from the talent you already have.  You have a great cinematic Superman in Henry Cavil.  He has the look and feel of the late Christopher Reeve.  You don’t need to recast Superman or re-tell Superman’s origins.  Michael Keaton is coming back as Batman, but you do not need to keep rehashing Batman’s origin story.  Keep Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Jason Momoa as Aquaman.  Build from their past movies, don’t hit the reboot button.

Let’s get brutally honest here… Warner Brothers Discovery has to make some serious investing if they want to see DC Entertainment get back to the top of the entertainment world.  They need to invest money, of course, but they also need to invest attention.  Don’t let CW shows languish in their own little programming worlds.  Give them the connectivity they need.  Spend the money on bringing those big-screen hero movies to life and forget about counting the minutes it takes to tell the story.  If the movie shows the characters in the proper light and tells the story that needs to be told, it will bring the audience back over and over again and the movie theatres will have to keep running that movie over and over.  That is how you generate maximum box office revenue.  It does not come through cutting story to conform to some artificial deadline.

Warner Brothers has been around long enough to remember back when going to the movies were a huge ordeal, with runtimes so long that there were forced intermissions.  Today we may look at those classics as overblown and maybe even overdramatic, but, back in the day, they brought in the masses and they made the money that made WB exist as it does today.  It would be folly to think that any media executive could magically make the business of entertaining and telling stories happen by making mergers and cutting corners and runtimes.

But, really, who am I to say this?  Other than a storyteller myself as well as one of your many consumers and fans.  The very kind of people that you need to make it all happen.

Week of 04/11/2022

 

Injustice Unlimited
– by David Matthews 2

On March 27^th of this year, Will Smith physically struck a presenter at the Academy Awards in front of a live televised audience and with the whole world watching.  Over a joke made in bad taste concerning his wife.

The police were not called.  No criminal charges filed against him for the assault committed on live television.

His punishment? A “ten-year ban” from all Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences events.  A ban made meaningless by his “resignation” from said Academy.

In all honesty, he should have been charged with assault.  Not that, but he should be kicked out of the Screen Actors Guild, the union that everyone must join in order to make mainstream movies or TV shows.  Let him keep the Oscar as a reminder of what he used to have but his film career should have ended that night.

This was not some disagreement made behind-the-scenes.  This was a physical assault that took place in front of cameras during the most-watched event of the whole motion picture industry.  I don’t care how “big” you are.  If it was Marlon Brando, or Al Pacino, or Heath Ledger, or Carrot Top, I’d still be demanding that person go to jail on the spot.

But that didn’t happen to Will Smith.  Because Will Smith is a major movie and music star who, not long after his criminal act, ended up winning the Best Actor award.  Indeed, his colleagues coddled him instead of chiding him.  He would later go out to celebrate, laughing with his family over the night’s events.

Simply put, Will Smith is “too big for jail”, just like bank executives, corporate executives, certain professional athletes, and politicians.

His criminal activity took place just hours before my article about the rising belligerence would go online, putting a punctuation to what I had said two weeks ago about how we have become increasingly hostile to one another.  The fact that he is allowed to get away with what he did, while the victim of his assault is still paying the price for it, shows the rampant injustice going on in the world.

Yes, Vladimir Putin is waging war on Ukraine and his propaganda machines both in Russia and the United States are spreading this lie that he’s somehow the “victim” of the gross crimes and violent atrocities being committed there.  Yes, there are calls for him to be tried in the World Court for crimes against humanity, but unless he finds himself removed from power by his own people and magically spirited to the Hague, those calls will be meaningless. 

And, no, the United States cannot give Ukraine the help they really need, because to do so would be a provocation for global thermonuclear annihilation.  We can’t go in like we did with Iraq and Afghanistan because those countries did not have nuclear weapons that could destroy the world countless times over, and Russia still does.  And the only people who are calling for that are Putin and the evangelicals here in the United States.

Meanwhile there are three people that have been referred to the Department of Justice by the January 6^th Commission for failing to heed a congressional subpoena.  But the lily-livered yellow-bellied Attorney General refuses to act on those referrals and arrest those three people like he did with mad monk Steve Bannon.  Oh, AG Merrick Garland has no problems going after the little guys who stormed the Capitol, but he’s the Coward of the Country when it comes to the higher-ups.  Speaking of which, those little guys all seem to get off with light sentences for their acts of sedition and assault.

It is said that a certain narcissist who used to be the President of the United States has “likely” committed crimes when he tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.  This matches what certain members of the January 6^th Commission have said on the subject and that they could bring up actual criminal charges.  Then again, that would also fall on the lap of AG Garland, the Coward of the Country, to follow through with actual indictments and the arrest of said narcissist.  The same person who has failed to act on the charges outlined in the Mueller Report from 2019 that could be filed now that said narcissist is no longer in office.

Let’s get brutally honest here... there is rampant injustice going on, not just in the United States but pretty much around the world.  We claim that America is a “nation of laws, not men”, and yet we have certain people and a certain political party wrapped around a certain narcissist, that firmly believe that “only they” can run the country.  We say that “no one is above the law”, but we have demonstrated quite well that certain people and certain groups are, in fact, beyond reproach and above the law.  They are not charged with their crimes.  They are not held to account for their actions.  They do what they do repeatedly, and they get away with it repeatedly, because they are considered “too big”.  As if the whole universe will come crashing down in flames if they dare be held to account for their actions like the common riffraff.  Well, with Vlad Putin, yeah, that could actually happen.

In all honesty, there is a part of me that wouldn’t tolerate what happened to Chris Rock – the comedian and Academy presenter who was assaulted by Will Smith on live TV – if I were in his shoes.  Like him, I was a victim of bullies.  Like him, I also have a problem sometimes with social awareness.  People would like to believe that Chris was the “better man” for just taking the assault and not pressing charges.  I see it as just another bully preying on someone who was already subject to bullies.  Another injustice that will go unanswered, and another criminal who got away with his crime.

Week of 04/04/2022

 

The “Great Regret” Is A Great Crock
– by David Matthews 2

Something wonderful happened during the past year.  After coming out of the pandemic and with the world opening up again, people started leaving their jobs for better ones.

They’ve been calling it “The Great Resignation”, as huge masses of people who were working mundane jobs – often in the service sector – have said “Enough” and started work elsewhere.  So people who were flipping burgers, serving complex coffee orders, and waiting tables, who previously were called “essential workers” during the pandemic but were treated like crap by customers and management, realized they could make more working at Amazon or some other warehouse or office position.  Even people who felt were paid and/or treated lowly at their modest positions found better work and/or pay with other companies desperate to fill those vacancies.

Now, to be fair, a lot of those people quitting during “The Great Resignation” weren’t looking for better work.  They were older people who simply had enough of the crap and were able to retire.  But their departures still gave great opportunities for others to take their place with more pay than before.

But now comes the pushback from Big Corporate and Big Business in general.  Being forced to pay people more to keep their jobs or to hire new people, they’re trying to stop the trend from going on.  Or, worse yet, watch as it becomes a global phenomenon.

Thus, they came up with... “The Great Regret”.

“The Great Regret” is this idea that all those people who quit their old jobs and found new ones will now “regret” their decision, thinking the grass on the “other side” really isn’t greener, and would be begging on their hands and knees for their old jobs, weeping for their former bad employers for forgiveness and to take them back.

Essentially this is a capitalist fantasy.  The child that vows to hold their breath until they turn blue and then “you’ll be sorry!  You’ll see!”

“The Great Regret” was the brainchild of business “experts” a few months ago, but it wasn’t long before it went out to the air-fluffed ego-driven media, most of them owned by big corporations.  According to one of their many polls to reinforce this, one in five people who quit their old jobs would supposedly “regret” the decision.  “One in five!”

Yeah, “one in five” is just twenty percent.  That means that eighty percent of the people who left their old jobs for new ones have no regrets.

“One in five” is not “great”.  “One in five” is pathetic.  “Four out of five” would be “great”.

Let’s get brutally honest here... “The Great Regret” is not “great”.  It’s a great crock of crap.

What you have here are corporate-owned media and capitalist interests spreading a false narrative, using polls and surveys that they can control and easily manipulate to try to head off this trend of employees leaving the workplace for better jobs and friendlier environments.  A trend that has not stopped and has continued as long as there are jobs to be needed.

For the longest time, businesses large and small have been able to underpay their employees and treat them like crap because the marketplace allowed them to.  Since the late 1970’s, the Economic Policy Institute says that real wages for most Americans have been stagnant, not even keeping up with rising costs and inflation.  That’s because jobs were always considered scarce, especially during economic hard times.  During the Great Recession, people who were laid off took whatever jobs were available because jobs were hard to come by.  Employers have always had the power.  And during the Great Recession, “too big to fail” corporations who were getting bailouts were paying bonuses to the execs that caused the problem because they were deemed “top talent”, while millions of hard-working Americans were finding themselves out of work and on the verge of being out of their homes.

But with the global pandemic, when a greater emphasis was placed on warehouse and deliveries, suddenly the demand for different and better-paying jobs became a thing.  Now the workers have options.  They don’t have to stay with a low-paying job that treats them like crap.

In many ways, “The Great Resignation” is also a “Great Revolt”, as workers suddenly have the power to get away from their conditions if they so choose for better jobs.  That doesn’t mean that things will be better for every worker who makes that decision.  Obviously if you don’t do your due diligence and look into that potential “better” job before accepting it, you may feel some regret, but that happens with any job you apply for.  There is nothing “great” about that.

The only real “Great Regret” going on are the employers who have shortchanged their employees and took them for granted.  Now they have to address that if they want to keep their true “top talent”.