Week of 03/16/2015

Hey Airport People! We Will Call You What We Want!
– by David Matthews 2

Apparently the people in charge of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport have a real problem on their hands.

And we’re the problem.

The Atlanta City Council are upset that people – you know, us - are not calling Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as “Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport” in our conversations.  We’re simply calling it “The airport” or “Hartsfield”.  We’re not calling it “Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport” every single time.

Oh the horrors!  How dare we do that!

So the City Council have directed the airport’s general manager to come up with some remedy by June.

Yes, you read that right.  The Atlanta City Council is going to spend taxpayer money to have a government official come up with ways to force everyone in Atlanta to refer to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in all of our conversations, communications, and references.  Not “The airport” or “Hartsfield” or “The Atlanta Airport” or even “Hartsfield-Jackson”.  No, they want us to say “Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport” each and every time.

Now the reason they give is this: when you don’t refer to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport by its full name, you are somehow “disrespecting” the memories of either William Hartsfield or Maynard Jackson, the two former mayors whose names got tacked onto the front of the Atlanta International Airport by the Atlanta City Council.

Did you get that?  If you do not refer to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, then you are supposedly “disrespecting” two dead people.

And here I thought only young homicidal gang-banger wannabes were so vain and egomaniacal.

Tell me something, airport people... have you ever heard of the First Amendment?  Do you even know how asinine you appear when you approved of your little speech-control measure without even one of you opposing it on constitutional grounds?

How about this... how many of you in the Atlanta City Council refer to the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit Authority bus or rail line as the “Metropolitan Atlanta Transit Authority”?  Or do you simply call it by its acronym?  I’m guessing all of you simply call it “MARTA”.  According to your logic, you’re “disrespecting” the whole Metropolitan Atlanta area by not using the full name.

How about Turner Field?  How many of you simply call it “The Ted”?  Isn’t that “disrespecting” Ted Turner, for whom the field is named after?

Let’s get brutally honest here, Atlanta City Counselors... we will refer to Atlanta’s airport as we wish, and there is absolutely nothing that you can do to stop it!  We will call it “Hartsfield” or “The Airport” or “Hartsfield Airport” as we wish because it’s shorter than to call it by its full name.

A name, I should point out, that you – the Atlanta City Council – chose all on your own to make longer and longer.

You chose to add the late Maynard Jackson’s name to the already-long William B. Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport.  You did that.  Not the voters.  Not the people that use the airport and keep it going through their dollars.  You imposed this change and expected us all to simply accept it.   But what you can’t do is tell the rest of the world what to think or how to call it.  You have neither the power nor the authority to do that.

What adds insult to injury is that you chose to pick this fight at a time when your precious airport has some serious problems.  Not too long ago it was revealed the airport was the hub for illegal gun-smuggling.  More recently, it was revealed that some 1400 security badges were missing.

And here you are demanding the airport manager focus his attention on why the masses don’t call your precious airport by its full name instead of trying to plug all the security breaches.

Let’s not forget that the most dominant airline in your precious airport is on a money-grubbing fee-happy spree, hitting passengers up for every kind of additional fee that they can imagine.  And your second-dominant airline has a notorious history of being clothing Nazis.  No joke; they make the “Fashion Police” look petty in comparison. 

I don’t know about you, but I think those issues are far more important than whether or not the masses refer to your precious airport by its full name.

In fact, I think that’s what I’ll be referring to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport from now on. 

“Your precious airport.”

Go ahead and try to stop me. 

The real problem, of course, is not whether the masses call your precious airport by its full name.  It’s not even about gun-smuggling or missing or stolen security badges or excessive fees or a draconian dress code.

The real problem is not the world, Atlanta City Council.

The real problem is you.

If you think that it is more important that you should worry about whether the masses refer to your precious airport by its full name instead of real security issues, then it is clear that you don’t deserve to be running the airport.  Maybe it would be better for the city and for your precious airport if control was given to an independent private entity.  Then at least the emphasis would be on making the “World’s Busiest Airport” one of the safest in the world.

Meanwhile, don’t worry about what people call your precious airport.  You should be more concerned that they are still using it, because all the names tacked on to it won’t mean a thing if people decide that it just isn’t worth the effort to fly anywhere.

Week of 03/09/2015

Brian Versus Bill-O
– by David Matthews 2

When it comes to the idea of honesty and integrity in the media, I can’t help but come back to a little exchange between Jon Stewart and the political commentators on CNN’s now-defunct series “Crossfire” back in 2004.  Stewart was being grilled by the hosts about his Comedy Central series “The Daily Show” about his supposed “journalistic integrity” when Stewart turned the tables on them.

“You're on CNN” he said. “The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?”

That pretty much spelled the end of that incarnation of “Crossfire” ten years ago.  Meanwhile, Stewart only recently announced his retirement from “The Daily Show”.

The “Crossfire” hosts made the mistake that a lot of other people do about Stewart’s show on Comedy Central.  “The Daily Show” is not a news program.  It’s a satire of a news program.  Stewart is not a reporter.  He doesn’t pretend to be a journalist.  He is a comedian.  He doesn’t do what he does to inform.  He does what he does to entertain.

And yet we’ll watch his show instead of the local news, and we’ll trust what he says more than we will the network anchors.

And that, I think, is the real joke.  But the joke isn’t on us.  It’s on the people that think that Stewart is a journalist or that his Comedy Central show is a real news program.

That brings us to a guy named Brian and another guy named Bill-O.

Brian Williams was long considered a reporter before he became the host of NBC Nightly News.  People trusted him.  If he said something happened, then viewers believed that it did, because they believed in him to be honest.

That kind of honesty and trust is not easy to build.  And yet it can be ruined so easily.

In February of 2015, Brian announced that he may have told a fib about being shot down in a helicopter in Iraq.  And, for that, he was taking some time off from his job as Managing Editor and host of the Nightly News.  Not long afterward, NBC decided his time away would be six months without pay, and there is some speculation that it may eventually end his employment altogether.

There is some precedence.  Dan Rather lost his job as the “grand poohbah” of CBS News – a position he inherited from the great Walter Cronkite – after it was discovered that one of his stories had a questionable source.  And no matter how many times Rather said the documents were true, the facts continued to mount until his bosses decided to pull the plug and terminate his job.  The scandal destroyed the integrity of that network’s news division, and NBC execs could very well move to make sure that the same doesn’t happen to their own division.

That brings us to Bill-O, aka Bill O’Reilly. 

Bill-O, it seems, has been making claims for quite some time that are now turning out to be false.  Was he a “war correspondent” during the Falklands War?  Apparently not, since he was in Buenos Ares at the time looking at photographs.  Was he there at the hotel when the friend of Lee Harvey Oswald killed himself?  Well the sheriff’s report and the Associated Press reports at the time say otherwise.  So do his co-workers at WFAA in Dallas, who say they were with him in Texas when George de Mohrenschildt committed suicide in Florida.

As far as anyone knows, Bill-O does not possess the power of teleportation, nor does he own a teleporter straight out of “Star Trek”, so it’s a little difficult to claim that you can go from Texas to Florida in an instant.

Oh, and apparently he wasn’t caught up in the Los Angeles riots of 1992 either.

Bill-O, Bill-O, Bill-O…you just can’t seem to keep your history straight.

So why is Bill-O still on the air?  You would think that after he went on a tear about Brian Williams and the integrity of the news division that Fox News would set the example, especially after Bill-O started bashing the so-called “liberal media” following Brian’s suspension.  “Think about other news agencies that are distorting the facts,” he said.

Bill-O?  They are. 

But instead of admitting to his instances of Munchausenism, Bill-O and his employers at Fox News have been busy attacking the accusers.  They don’t refute the claims with hard proof or evidence.  They simply dismiss the accusations of Bill-O’s lies and exaggerations by screaming “Liberal agenda” in the same way that a little boy refutes his bad behavior by saying that the other person’s a “doodie-head”.

But, you know what?  There is a way out for Bill-O.

Because let’s get brutally honest here… what Brian Williams does (or did) and what Bill-O does are two different things.

Brian is/was a reporter and a news anchor.  His job depends on people trusting what he says is honest and factual.  His accounts need to be fact-checked and verified.

But Bill-O really isn’t a news anchor, is he?  No, he isn’t.  He is the host of a commentary program that dissects the news of the day with his own slanted spin.  Maybe he was a reporter once upon a time, but not today.  Not while he sits in the chair of the “O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News.  Not while he churns out books talking about “Killing” this person and “Killing” that person like they were Harlequin novels.

Bill-O is a commentator.  Commentators have different sets of rules than a news anchor.  They don’t have to be completely factual.  They can exaggerate things and make stuff up to get their point across.  I should know, because I’ve been a commentator longer than Bill-O had a Fox News program, and I’ve been pointing out the line between journalism and commentary for years now.  (And, by the way, that’s not an exaggeration.  My commentary site started months before Fox News went on the air.)

As a commentator, Bill-O can live in and report from his fantasy world with impunity.  He can talk about how he witnessed famous events without actually being there.  He can accuse the United States Army of committing war crimes in Malmedy during World War II.  He can claim that a falafel is just another word for an exfoliating bath sponge.  He can claim he defied the Ottoman Empire and flew on a cannonball.  Oh, wait, that last one wasn’t Bill-O; that was Barron Munchausen.  Well it’s easy to see how anyone could confuse the two of them.  (Just kidding, of course.)

Fox News could even take it to the next step and just admit what their critics have long accused them of being… not a news network, but rather a political propaganda machine for the conservatives and neo-conservatives.  Then they won’t ever have to worry about “journalistic integrity” or whether or not their media personalities are telling the truth.  But I really don’t see that happening anytime soon.  They love the pretense of being a “superior” media outlet too much to give it up.

What Brian Williams did was sad and needless.  But at least he had the integrity and the courage to own up to his mistake when exposed and accept the punishment from his employer.  What would truly be sad is not that Bill-O won’t do the same, but if his own viewers refuse to hold him to the same standards that he pompously decrees others should live up to.

Week of 03/02/2015

In Defense of Superhero Movies
– by David Matthews 2

So apparently there are those in the bowels of Hollywood that have a problem with superhero movies.  The stench of which wafted up like a foul fart during this year’s Academy Awards ceremony.

Jack Black, best known for playing rather large and obnoxious characters, decided to let this little gem rip like a bad burrito during the opening song: "Opening with lots of zeroes, all we get are superheroes: Superman, Spider-man, Batman, Jediman, Sequelman, Prequelman -- formulaic scripts!"  Shallow, “Hal”, really shallow.

Of course, I could possibly excuse his ribbing as simply him being an actor playing a role of a douchebag performer.  I used to be a stage actor myself in college, so I know that sometimes you just have to sing the song as it was written.  Then again, Mister Black is also one half of the comedic folk group Tenacious D, so there is a chance that he wrote the lyric himself, which would make him an actor playing the role of a douchebag performer singing a song written by a douchebag lyrist.

This comes a day after director Dan Gilroy dissed superhero movies during the Independent Spirt Awards. “Independent film, the foundation and everybody here today, I think are holdouts against a tsunami of superhero movies that have swept over this industry,” he said.

Gilroy, it should be noted, is married to Rene Russo, who co-starred in two superhero movies, “Thor” and “Thor: The Dark World”.

It should also be noted that just hours after Black slammed superhero movies, the Academy Award for Best Picture went to “Birdman”, a movie about an actor that was best known for playing a superhero.  And the award for Best Animated Feature went to “Big Hero 6”, a computer-animated superhero movie.

Now before we go any further, I should point out that I am not only a huge fan of superhero movies, I’m also a creator and self-publisher of fan-made superhero comics.  So not only am I biased in my support of superhero movies, I create content that could be turned into the next big blockbuster movie for the Hollywood elite to pooh-pooh all the way to the bank.

Having said that, I have to ask Misters Black and Gilroy and all of the other Hollywood elitists that don’t care for this genre of money-making movies… what the hell is your malfunction?  What’s with all the hate, haters?

A “tsunami of superhero movies”?  There are maybe one or two superhero movies coming out in any given year from Warner Brothers, Sony, Fox, and Marvel Studios, not counting the direct-to-video animated releases.  Compare that to the orgy of so-called “horror” movies that come out every other month that could all be summed up by simply saying the word “jump-scare” a hundred times.  There are more movies made in any given year about teen angst than there are superhero movies, Mister Gilroy, so I have to seriously question your reasoning in singling out superhero movies.

“Opening with lots of zeros”?  I’m sorry, Mister Black, but which movie did you perform in that brought in over one billion dollars at the box office?  Yes, “billion” with a “B”.  That’s how much money “Marvel’s The Avengers” brought in.  One-point-five billion US dollars worldwide as of February 13th of this year.  That’s a lot of “zeros”.  And it’s still bringing in money for Marvel Studios!  How much money did you bring in, Mister “Nacho Libre”?

Of course this ongoing bias against superhero movies is nothing new.  Back in 2009, Hugh Jackman – best known for playing Wolverine in several “X-Men” movies – wondered why superhero movies get snubbed in the Academy Awards.  After all, Heath Ledger had to die to get his Best Supporting Actor award for “The Dark Knight”.  And “Superman – The Movie” had to get a special award for best visual effects because the Academy felt bad about snubbing it in 1979.

But let’s get brutally honest here… I strongly suspect the reason behind this elitist snubbing and bashing of superhero movies has less to do with some intellectual disdain of the subgenre and more to do with what these kinds of movies bring to the studios, namely money.

Superhero movies have a build-in loyal fan base.  Thousands, even millions of loyal fans that spend money every month on their regular comic book publications, that look forward to spending that money seeing their favorite heroes and villains fight it out on the big screen.  That’s money that the studios use to then cushion the losses from the more “hoity” movies made by people like Mister Gilroy and performed by actors like Mister Black.  So, really, the Hollywood elite are pooh-poohing the very hands that feed them.

And that brings me to the dirty not-so-little secret about these awards show, specifically the Academy Awards.  While the Hollywood elite pretend that these kinds of awards are meant to celebrate the best of the best, in truth they have always been designed to recognize the movies that they themselves think “should” have gotten the box office money.  In other words, movies like “Thor” and “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight” already got all of the rewards and recognition they deserved.  They got the fans and the box office money.

James Gunn, director of the highly-successful “Guardians of the Galaxy”, penned his own response to the elitist bashing and snubbing of superhero movies, which I agree with for the most part.  Except for this: “If you think people who make superhero movies are dumb, come out and say we're dumb.”  You’re not “dumb”, Mister Gunn.  Nor is the audience.  People that make superhero movies have a pretty high bar they have to meet from their audience.  Jack Black can give a mediocre performance in a grade-Z movie and nobody will really notice.  But Chris Pratt playing Star-Lord or Christian Bale playing Batman have to live up to their comic book characters, and if they fail, the fan base is merciless.  Just look at the ongoing online arguments about “Man of Steel” if you don’t believe me.

Superhero movies are really no different than the legendary tales of old.  Our ancestors used to be enthralled by tales of Hercules, Perseus, Thor, Samson, Ali Baba, the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood, the Scarlett Pimpernel, and Sherlock Holmes.  Yesterday’s stories told in the round are today’s big and small screens, and the people that mock them or minimize their importance in inspiring generations past, present, and future, are really the “dumb” ones.