Reflections on films, politics, and everything else.

For a good chunk of this presidential race I really wanted Hillary to just go away. As the Democratic establishment began worrying that their choice – Biden – wasn’t going to win, I started receiving countless emails asking me if I thought Hillary should get into the race. Sadly they didn’t give me a box to fully articulate just how much I did not want her to run again. Clicking on ‘No’ just didn’t suffice, and yet I’d voted for her in 2016. It’s that complicated history that still follows her around. Currently there’s both a fictional novel imaging Hillary not marrying Bill Clinton and a four-part documentary that gained quite a bit of air-time earlier this year because of one comment she made about no one in the Senate liking Bernie Sanders. Initially I wasn’t interested in either piece. What more does anyone need to find out about Hillary by now? I’m still not interested in reading the novel, feeling that I’ve wasted too much of my own brain energy over ...

When I was young I hit a rock in our yard, trying to reenact the bible story of getting water from the rock. My mother thought it was so cute, yet for me at that age it proved what they were telling me in church was just stories. I didn’t have faith or what I see now as blind devotion. I tried to pretend to believe to make it easier to survive in my family, but by the time I’d reached teenage status, I was done. By then I’d seen my share of hypocrisy and double standards, as well as corruption by national so-called Christian leaders. I think this inability I have to just blindly go along not only affects my choices on spirituality, but all areas of my life, including politics. When I first registered to vote as a senior in high school in Florida, it was as an Independent. I remained that when I moved to Kentucky. When I voted, I either protested by write-in (Bill the Cat and Opus in 1988) or voted Democrat. I proudly stood in line to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, but b...

If Bill Clinton won’t say it, I will. I’m sorry, Monica Lewinsky. Bill shouldn’t have found it surprising to be asked about the affair in his recent interview with NBC in this era of MeToo . He claimed the event had been litigated 20 years ago and that two-thirds of Americans supported him. That’s the problem – it was 20 years ago. Yes, he is right that he was supported then, and that much of this movement has to do with a predator in the White House whose supporters don’t care how many crimes he has committed or will commit, but Bill should realize that times are different now. I’m different now. I had stood proudly in a northern Kentucky polling station while in college to vote for Bill in 1992, but after way too many real and imagined scandals it all just got to be too much. By 1996, I had moved to Cincinnati and hadn’t realized the timing of getting registered, so I wasn’t able to vote, and wasn’t terribly upset by it at the time. Bill was re-elected, but I was d...