On Trump

Seeing a lot of “the sky is falling” sentiment last night and this morning from people who are genuinely shocked that a blatantly racist and misogynistic buffoon like Donald Trump could become the de facto Republican nominee, and who have equated that with Trump’s ability to win in the general election. I’ve also seen more than one person cite this blog post by Scott Adams as argument for Trump’s strength in the general and his ability to pivot towards the center. (The fact that the argument for Scott Adams’ intelligence is his capability to recycle the same dozen gags over and over again to get people to buy Dilbert merchandise seems to have been momentarily lost.) The other big argument is that pundits got Trump’s chances wrong across the board and thought he could never win the nomination.

To this, speaking as someone who started predicting a likely Trump nomination victory in November of last year and advised people not to write off his chances as early as August – in short, as someone who has been more or less continually right about Trump’s chances all along – I’m going to say now: although it is not impossible for Donald Trump to win the general election against Hillary Clinton (it is never impossible; that is the nature of a two-party system), there is probably not a worse candidate with the possible exception of Ted Cruz that they could have nominated to go against Hillary, and every piece of actual data we have, rather than pundit sentiment, says that Trump is going to get absolutely murdered in the general.

Firstly, consider the low baseline. There are 18 states (plus the District of Columbia) that have gone Democratic in every election since 1992: Washington, Oregon, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland and Hawaii. Every single one of those states right now currently polls a hypothetical Hillary/Trump matchup with Hillary winning. In most cases she’s winning by ten points or more. If she wins all of these traditionally strongly Democratic states, and then wins Florida – where she presently beats Trump in the hypothetical matchup by thirteen points – that’s the ballgame because she has enough electoral votes to win. If she loses Florida but wins Ohio and Nevada (where she also leads Trump in general election matchups), she wins too. If she loses Florida, Ohio and Nevada but takes New Hampshire, Colorado and Virginia, she still wins. In order for Trump to have a shot of winning he has to crush Hillary and win essentially everywhere that he stands even a modest chance of winning. He has to be perfect.

He won’t be. There is a difference between winning a hyperpolarized Republican primary, where you can essentially say anything and it doesn’t matter, and winning the general. The modern GOP doesn’t really give a shit about policy; they’re a party founded on resentment (of liberals, of minorities, of foreigners, etc.) and if you express that resentment for them they’ll follow you over a cliff, which is how Trump won. But, across the board, he won a plurality of GOP voters – not even a majority, although by the end he’ll probably have a slight majority of overall votes and delegates. Trump is massively unpopular. His net unfavorability rating is averaging around negative twenty-five percent. Hillary, who is widely disliked, only averages around negative twelve percent – and historically that gets better whenever she’s obviously the target of sexist attacks. Donald Trump will be incredibly misogynistic towards Hillary because that’s who he is:

And if Trump has a weakness – he has many, actually. Trump’s personal and business history is loaded with egregiously awful things that will make glorious attack ad fodder, more juicy than the ad above. But his defining weakness is that he is a bully and when he gets challenged he loses his temper. His few moments of discomfiture during the Republican debates came when he was attacked, and during the GOP campaign his opponents could not call him out on many of his weaknesses because to the GOP primary audience they were strengths, but they will not be strengths with the general electorate.

On Bernie

Since we are talking about hypothetical general election matchups, let us talk about Bernie Sanders for a bit, because at this point in the campaign hypothetical election matchups are really all that is left. He and Hillary agree on too many policies for it to be otherwise; Bernie himself has pivoted to talking primarily about how he is best suited to beat Trump (or any other GOP candidate, but really, it was Trump everybody was talking about). The argument for Bernie is as follows: Hillary is unpopular; Bernie is not. Hillary does all right in hypothetical Trump matchups; Bernie does better. Therefore, Bernie is better equipped to beat Trump.

The problem is that Bernie is simply wrong about this. The argument assumes that Hillary and Bernie are equal quantities; they are not. Whatever one thinks of Hillary, she is a known quantity to the general American public; she can’t not be. Everybody in America has their opinions about Hillary more or less set already. Bernie is not a known quantity, and there is ample fodder for attack ads that the Hillary campaign has never touched. For example: in 1980, Bernie was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party. In 1980, the Socialist Workers Party called for solidarity with the revolutionary regime in Iran during the Iranian hostage crisis. The attack ad writes itself. As does the one where Sanders applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. And the one where he called for the abolishment of the Armed Forces in the 70s. And the one where he was arguing that military budgets should be halved in the 90s. All of these will hurt Bernie, some more than others, but he will have trouble arguing back against them because they all happen to be true.

And this is before we get to the big problem, which is that Bernie is a self-identified socialist. (Over the last couple years he’s started saying “democratic socialist” but it doesn’t really matter.) It’s literally the least popular trait a presidential candidate can have. According to polling, fifty percent of Americans would not vote for a socialist Presidential candidate. That’s worse than “atheist” (forty percent), “Muslim” (38 percent) and “gay” (24 percent). Even if we assume that’s soft and Bernie can get one out of five of them to consider it once he explains his policy enough, that still means only sixty percent of the electorate would be even willing to consider voting for Bernie.

This doesn’t mean that Bernie can’t beat Trump. He may well be able to do so. But it does mean arguments that he can beat Trump more easily than Hillary can because of current polling are facile arguments with no real weight to them.

And we’re back! We begin the episode with Phil’s reminder that Rachel had a hard time lugging around buckets of water, while Brodie had a hard time putting a kite together. Brodie and Kurt escaped elimination by the skin of their teeth, but it’s a sobering reminder of just how much Kurt has carried the team…and how he can’t do that anymore.

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As I have previously mentioned, the one bright spot about the existence of the otherwise extremely uninspiring and uninteresting ‘Batman v Superman’ movie (really, I remember having huge misgivings as soon as the project was announced–Zack Snyder, talking about DKR as his inspiration, feels like it could be the dictionary definition of “toxic masculinity”) was that it held the potential for some truly wacky studio hijinks. After all, the movie looked like it was going to tank, at least by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters…

A word about that, for everyone saying, “Hey, it made $850 million, why is it being called a failure?” It’s being called a failure because different standards apply to Hollywood blockbusters. These things are designed, through merchandising, product placement, synergistic endorsement deals and aggressive promotion, to make back their money even if the film is basically just two solid hours of Arnie flipping the bird to the screen and shouting, “SUCKER!” in an Austrian accent every few minutes. (Spoilers for ‘Terminator: Genesys’!) It is very hard for them to actually lose money, because so much of the money is made before the film hits theaters–‘Phantom Menace’ would have been profitable without selling a single ticket–and so much more of the money is made before the reviews come out. These films are not judged on the absolute money they make, but on the money they make relative to each other, because their job is not to make money. Their job is to make the kind of obscene, world-shattering money that lets studio execs throw $50 million at some crazy vanity project sight unseen because they’re making ten times that per extremely reliable Avengers movie and have money to burn. On that scale, BvS has failed. ‘Ant-Man’ did better in its fourth week than ‘BvS’ in its fourth week. You do not want to be the guy who makes a Batman/Superman movie that makes less than ‘Ant-Man’.

OK. So the point is, all I was really hoping for is that WB execs would lose their shit and we would get some entertaining panic. Would they dump Snyder overboard like a hot potato? Would he give great snippy bitchy interviews where he blamed audiences for not getting his vision? (I’m still holding out hope for that. If there’s one thing I can say about Snyder besides the fact that he’s a shitty director, it’s that he’s incredibly thin-skinned and holds grudges with reviewers that he works out every time he does a press junket. He’s still holding court on ‘Sucker Punch’, ferfucksake.)

Instead, we get Seth Grahame-Green quitting the ‘Flash’ movie. Now, I can’t say this would have been a great movie–I loved the hell out of the book of ‘Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter’, but he hasn’t been able to translate his skills into movie-making quite yet and it’s distinctly possible that this would have been a big whiff. (Especially since this would have been his directorial debut, and giving someone a huge summer blockbuster as their first movie even though these things have damn near broken guys like Sam Raimi and Joss Whedon seems like its own category of fascinating train wreck.) But in terms of whose vision I’d rather see in the DC Murderverse, it’s an untested Seth Grahame-Green over Snyder any day.

And now James Wan is talking about ditching ‘Aquaman’. And while…look, I cannot stand ‘Saw’, okay? I absolutely think the final twist is the kind of irredeemable bullshit that makes me want to throw things at the screen, an infuriating and unearned “gotcha” that makes no sense and requires six billion coincidences that the killer can’t possibly arrange all to fall in a very particular way for the movie not to literally end on Page Two of the screenplay. (“Hey, I found these keys stuck in the drain! Let’s just go!”) I cannot stand this movie and I will gleefully spoil it for strangers on the grounds that it is better for you to not watch the movie than feel like you wasted two hours on it. (The killer is the guy on the floor. He’s not really dead. Yes, it’s bullshit.)

But that’s all the script. The direction in ‘Saw’ actually makes a movie about two guys stuck in a room all night compelling. It’s impressive work. James Wan has a solid and impressive body of directing behind him. If WB is backing Snyder, whose biggest hit is now over ten years behind him and wasn’t written by him in the first place, over Wan, this is going to be less “fun trainwreck” and more “oh. oh, that poor man. oh god, his wife is crying, and she’s covered in blood, and…is that her blood? is that her husband’s blood? oh god, they had a cargo flat full of adorable baby lambs, and they’re squealing, they won’t stop squealing, there’s just so much pain….”

I’m hoping that doesn’t happen. I’m really hoping that the backstabbing and panic leads to good movies in the end, rather than good movies being shitcanned in order to double down on the Snyder vision of a Bat-boot stamping on a human face forever. Because this, this thing of interesting and creative people fleeing the DC movies like rats leaving the sinking ship? Not actually what I was hoping for.

And we’re back! Phil starts the episode by reminding us that Kurt and Brodie managed to beat a camel in a bike race and still needed to use the Express Pass, thanks to Brodie’s poor performance at Roadblocks, while Sheri and Cole got so badly lost that they were briefly concerned that they had departed Dubai altogether. Luckily, they were saved by a non-elimination leg, but we have to be pretty much out of those by this point. Which bodes ill for somebody…

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I feel like I should say something, as the site’s resident “Doctor Who” fan, about the casting of Pearl Mackie. The problem is that I will then have to expand out, “Um…good, I guess?” into a full blog post. But with that said, here goes.

I have no feelings on Pearl Mackie as an actress. Looking over her brief IMDB entry, she has done nothing that I’m personally familiar with on film or television. It sounds like she’s done some stage work, which I’m unlikely to have seen from Minnesota, and some radio work as well, but the name definitely does not ring a bell. This isn’t anything unusual, though, as I hadn’t heard of Matt Smith either prior to his casting and Jenna Coleman was just a name too, as was Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill and really most of the names on the show except for Eccleston. That’s because I’m not a casting director and I don’t get to root through stacks of glossies and CVs and then do auditions and find awesome people that nobody’s ever heard of. So I’m going to assume a good job was done from the brief clip shown, and make up my mind further when I see her first episode.

That said, I have a theory based on the clip that I’m really hopeful about–I don’t think she’s from the present-day. Her outfit is very 80s, right down to the Nagel print t-shirt, and the Doctor says that they need to go back to the future because 2017 needs them. Assuming this is filmed for a 2017 debut, the Doctor may well be using her frame of reference in describing 2017 as the future.

That excites me. I’ve felt for a while now that the one thing the new series needs to do so very badly is to get out of its comfort zone when it comes to companions; with the exception of Donna, who was very well-received for that reason, the predominant model for companion has been “young, gorgeous woman from an era contemporary to broadcast”, with their family members and significant others appearing as a sort of tertiary supporting cast. It’s been sort of a case of “roll off the old girl, roll on the new girl,” and I think that was something you could rarely accuse the classic series of. I’m hoping that we’re going to see someone from a different time period.

And not just a different time period–I have a strong hope that Bill’s name and the choice to cast a biracial actress (and not to de-emphasize her race–she’s not being asked to straighten her hair or anything dreadful like that) will signal that she’s going to break that mold a bit, even if the opening shot is of her running hand-in-hand with the Doctor in a slightly cringe-inducing way. I’m not saying that she’s going to be gay or bi just because she’s not dressing frilly and she’s got a masculine nickname, but if she was, that would be by no means a bad thing for the show.

Basically, I think I’m saying, “Could we please get Season Ten so I can get to know the new companion, please? Because I’m cautiously optimistic about this one, and I’d like to find out how awesome she is now.” Which is a bit more enthusiastic than “Good, I guess?”, so maybe writing out my thoughts in a whole blog post was a good idea here.

And we’re back! Phil starts us off with a reminder that last week in Georgia, everyone stabbed themselves, then danced until one team (Scott and Blair) finally keeled over dead. Or at least eliminated. On with the Race!

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The problem with any retelling of the Doctor Strange origin story – and although I am more or less tired of origin stories as “first movies” in superhero cinema, I make an exception here, because Doctor Strange’s origin story is probably the last truly compelling one in comics that hasn’t been filmed yet – is that the original Doctor Strange origin is almost irreversibly Orientalist – apocryphally, Stan Lee is said to have described Doc as “what if Mandrake the Magician learned all of Fu Manchu’s secrets” at one point, and that is more or less the origin story right there and that’s kind of a problem. Doc, moreso than any other Big Two comics character, is the best example of the “white man learns ancient non-white secrets, surpasses the original practitioners” trope. Thus, I can see the argument for getting away from that by casting a non-Asian actor as the Ancient One, and Tilda Swinton is as gloriously weird an actor as exists on this planet so giving her the role makes sense in that context (and making the Ancient One female adds additional cultural weight to the student/master relationship between Ancient One and Doc that I feel is welcome).

However. In a cinematic universe where Marvel is doubling down on white male protagonists – to the point of casting the whitest possible character to play Iron Fist, a character who A) is only white because when he was created it was impossible to imagine a non-white character in his role and B) actually works much better in the “child of two worlds” aspect if you make him biracial Euro-Asian or simply Asian but raised in an American context – and has at this point a track record of reducing the impact of non-straightwhitemale characters seemingly to increase the impact of SWM protagonists (Ant-Man being the best example of this so far as it spends half the film trying to explain why Evangeline Lilly isn’t just the Wasp despite the fact that she obviously should be), any change of ethnicity in characters has to be very, very carefully done. Casting Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo, for example, is diverse casting, but how great is it to make one of Strange’s definitive archenemies the diverse casting choice, exactly? And while Swinton is an inspired choice for the Ancient One, couldn’t Michelle Yeoh (for example) also have been as inspired?

So doing Doctor Strange’s origin story – which, I repeat, you should want to do, because it is about a bad and broken man healing and becoming a better one, unlike most superhero origin stories which are either lengthy revenge fantasies or “generally decent person gets superpowers” – is tricky, because you can either go with the traditional origin, in which case you risk criticism of being Orientalist, or you can revamp it and attempt to de-Orientalize it, in which case you risk criticism of whitewashing/yellowface. What Marvel have done here, apparently, is try to split the difference via the Swinton casting but still keeping the “trip to conspicuously un-named country that looks a lot like Tibet” aspect of the origin story, in an attempt to address both issues while still keeping the origin as traditional as possible. But the problem is that instead of avoiding both, they’ve opened themselves up to scrutiny on both counts, which is certainly sort of an own-goal in this context.

None of this, incidentally, should be taken as the implication that I won’t be going to see this on Day One because of course I’m going to go see this. Me noting that aspects of the film are potentially problematic (and I hold out hope that the script will address some of my concerns) is not the same as me refusing to go see a Doctor Strange film. It looks visually ambitious, which I both hoped for and expected, and Cumberbatch looks to be a decent Doc, which I also expected – just because he was the safe choice for the role didn’t make him a bad choice. (I do find it amusing that he’s basically doing Hugh-Laurie-as-House for the accent, if only because my personal Doctor Strange in one sentence is “if Dr. House became Dr. Who.”) I’m not sure how Mads Mikkelsen is gonna be Dormammu but, whatever, he’s a good actor, I’m happy to let them run with it and see what happens.

And we’re back! Last time, as Phil reminds us, everyone went through Armenia looking for the Express Pass, which went to Kurt and Brodie while Sheri and Cole avoided elimination only due to a conveniently timed double leg. We rejoin the action with them sprinting to catch up…which isn’t that hard, because everyone’s leaving on the same train for Georgia (the former Soviet Republic, not the home of Dragon*Con). I’m not entirely thrilled with a double leg that includes a huge bunch, but on the other hand we’re treated to Blair pretty much going straight to Kurt and Brodie’s compartment and hanging out there, possibly for the whole train ride. Could this romance, which started out like Romeo and Juliet, end in tragedy? Let’s find out!

continue reading "Amazing Race 28, Episode 7: “Welcome to Bloody Fingers 101”"

While it does, unfortunately, appear that Warner Brothers has not responded to the mediocre performance of ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ with any kind of interesting panic (although Marvel is amusingly enough flaunting their confidence in ‘Civil War’ with a preview screening in twenty-five cities a full month in advance to build positive word-of-mouth), there’s certainly been a reaction among DC fans. It’s fair to say that this is probably the most divisive movie since ‘Phantom Menace’, and pretty much for the same reasons.

Basically, there seem to be four groups of fans. The first are fans that didn’t like the movie, and are arguing that it was an artistic failure so profound that they’re actually hoping it fails, so that WB will be forced to go back to the drawing board and re-envision their plans for the slate of DC movies. The second group are fans who didn’t like the movie, but see potential in the DC Expanded Universe and are hoping it succeeds even though it was bad because they want an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Cyborg movie, et cetera. The third group are people who really liked the movie and want more. The fourth group just didn’t like the movie, and don’t really care about the box office one way or the other.

As with any fan schism, there’s a lot of category confusion going on. The second and third group claim that the first and fourth group don’t actually exist–anyone who says they didn’t like the movie is probably a Marvel fan who’s just shit-stirring DC fans because they’re afraid that DC will suck away money and goodwill from the viewing public, supplanting the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ending Marvel’s dominance at the box office. The first and fourth group assume that anyone in the third group is actually in the second group–to them, it’s unimaginable that anyone could like the movie, but they are willing to believe that people would lie about liking it because they’re terrified that if BvS fails, they’re looking at another eight years of the occasional, desultory Batman or Superman reboot before anyone even looks at the second or third tier characters in the DCU.

In actuality, all four groups have their points. It seems pretty clear by now that Zack Snyder is who he seems to be; if you haven’t liked ‘300’, ‘Watchmen’, ‘Sucker Punch’, ‘Man of Steel’ or ‘Batman v Superman’, you’re probably not going to be surprised by his next film. A DC movie universe guided by his vision is only going to appeal to his fans, and people who don’t like that can point to the slightly more heterogeneous style of Marvel and say that there’s another way to do this. And DC won’t do it as long as they’re making money. That doesn’t mean they’re “Marvel fanboys”, it means they’re DC fanboys who aren’t getting their needs met.

The second group is right in suggesting that a lot hinges on the success of BvS. Warner Brothers are not going to throw a ton of money at ‘Cyborg’, especially not a version of the character who isn’t recognizable to the existing fanbase of “Teen Titans Go!” fans, without some sort of assurance that the overall DC brand is going to be enough to draw audiences to the theater like the Marvel brand did for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Ant-Man’. A failure of the big tentpole movie threatens to collapse the tent, and WB already has a pretty damn shaky record of giving a fuck about fans to begin with. (*cough* Jonah Hex *cough*)

The third group is right in saying that they like the things they like and shouldn’t have to be ashamed of it. If you enjoyed ‘Batman v Superman’, you get to be happy about that. Nobody should ever have to apologize for liking a movie. Full stop.

And the fourth group is right in saying that they have just as much of a right to dislike the movie–they should not have motives imputed to them, they are still DC fans even if they don’t like it, and it should be possible to discuss the film with fans without being the subject of angry, defensive rants about how they’re ruining the franchise. (This was also common with ‘Phantom Menace’–the people who liked it would get a bit intense in their discussions sometimes, simply because they wanted more ‘Star Wars’ and didn’t like hearing negativity around it. It also happened with the ’96 Doctor Who TV movie.)

But one thing all four groups need to keep in mind is this: WB doesn’t care what they think. I don’t mean this in a mean way, but the fact of the matter is that the dedicated fanbase of Batman and Superman just isn’t enough to sway the studio’s opinions no matter how many tickets they buy. The Batman comic sells about 100,000 copies a month. Superman sells about 38,000. Even if you assume no overlap, all those fans buying one hundred tickets apiece to the movie are only going to move the needle to the tune of about $138 million. Given that we’re talking a billion dollars as the metric for success, it’s unlikely that fan opinion matters nearly as much as the opinion of the general public in terms of box office success and future films.

So please remember, before getting violently angry over ‘Batman v Superman’: Your opinions are irrelevant. No, wait, that came out wrong. Remember that it’s not a life or death matter when you try to convince someone to see or not see the movie, and try to keep this particular schism, at least, to a polite discussion.

And we’re back! Phil helpfully reminds us about the events of a couple of weeks ago, where Erin and Joslyn failed to sprint through knee-deep snow fast enough to literally take flight. Oh, and Tyler and Korey took first again as part of their “First Place Exchange Program” with Brodie and Kurt. On to the Race!

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Those of you hoping for a review of ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ on this website will probably need to look elsewhere; I’ve never been particularly interested in seeing Zack Snyder’s take on the Batman/Superman rivalry, to say nothing of the fact that I’ve always felt that giving the two a “rivalry” was a misguided take on both characters to begin with. And Chris is tweeting that he has no particular interest in seeing it either. Unless you want to start a Kickstarter to pay for my tickets, I will let other people have All the Opinions on this one.

Oh, and hey, they do! The movie is currently hovering around the 30% mark on Rotten Tomatoes, which is…let’s just say Not Good. Further, the reviews themselves have been filled with phrases such as “like putting your head into a beehive for 2 1/2 hours”, “rectum-puckering garbage fire of a movie”, “blunt, humorless and baffling”, “overstuffed and preposterous”, and my personal favorite, “a ponderous, smothering, over-pixelated zeppelin crash of a movie scored by a choir that sounds like it’s being drowned in lava.” (That last from NPR. I didn’t think they got that mad about anything, up to and including Trump.)

So basically, the movie is not reviewing well. And Warner Brothers is right up against it–‘Justice League Part One’ begins filming literally within days, and this movie is going to be seen as the direct precursor to that one. Meaning that if audiences agree with critics, well…they are going to have to drastically retool ‘Justice League’ pretty much on the fly, starting with the decision of whether to keep Snyder.

On the other hand, if the movie does well (Thursday box office was great, but those numbers were always going to represent people who went to see the movie on faith) then it could be another ‘Transformers’, a critic-proof franchise that draws in major box office despite getting bad reviews. Warner Brothers can probably live with that.

So this weekend is going to be very important. Because BvS has to have a showing that will put it on track for the kind of 1.5-2.0 billion dollar box office that WB has every right to expect from a movie that finally puts two of their most iconic characters onscreen together. We’re probably talking about something in the $400-500 million dollar range, at a minimum. Anything less than that and you will see panic. And I mean panic; WB has left themselves almost no time cushion to absorb any lessons that might come from the success or failure of BvS, so if they find themselves in a crisis of faith, they will have to pull the trigger quick on any changes they want to make.

And they may make changes anyway. Some of the pre-release articles have hinted that not everyone up top buys into Snyder’s vision; if there are executives with itchy trigger fingers already, they may decide that it’s not worth the risk that audiences will stay away from another Snyder joint and bring in someone else to direct. Sometimes it’s all about how the person signing the checks feels about the movie. (Just ask ‘Superman Returns’, which was ultimately a modest success for the studio, but which alienated the top brass at Warner Brothers.)

Why am I so interested in this? Because with ‘Batman v Superman’ not sounding like anything I want to see, I take my entertainment where I can find it.

He’s a longtime reader of this blog!

The Three Lies of Politics

Seriously, it is scary how hard he is sticking to something I wrote in 2010. His primary “campaign plank”, if you actually want to call it that, is “We’re going to build a big wall to keep all the Mexicans out and we’ll make Mexico pay for it.” That is literally Numbers One, Two and Three in a single sentence.

Last night, he explained to everyone that he could solve the problem of jobs going overseas (implied Lie #1, because “jobs going overseas” is always code for “to non-white people”) in ten minutes just by sitting down and talking to people (Lie #2, spectacularly bold-faced because only a complete rube would buy that one) and getting corporate taxes down so the companies invest in America again (implied Lie #3, suggesting that somehow cutting corporate taxes will magically pay for itself because the only thing stopping money from flowing into American coffers is the greedy grasping IRS).

It’s not that Trump is a huckster that bothers me. I’m cynical enough to understand that every politician presents their vision of what they want to do in their campaign, not what they can do. No, what bothers me is that the man is such a transparent, shameless, empty huckster. I get that politicians make promises they can’t keep, but Trump hasn’t made a single promise that he can keep.

And we’re back! Phil starts off by reminding us that Blair and Brodie are a sort of maybe kind of thing, and that co-operation sounds really awesome unless you’re the one team nobody is helping. Brittany and Jessica are gone, we’re down to eight teams, and it’s starting to feel a bit like a competition around here. On with the Race!

continue reading "Amazing Race 28, Episode 5: “We’re Only Doing Freaky Stuff Today”"

Tonight, a short streetcar ride from my home in downtown Toronto, my boyfriend and I are going to see a live WWE event. I’ve been to a total of two in the past – the first time was in Peterborough, Ontario, sometime in 1989 or 1990, and the second an NXT event in Brooklyn last summer.

The tour stop in Peterborough wasn’t exactly a star-studded event – the headliner that evening was the Honky Tonk Man, and I’m sure I cared more about the possibility of getting a chocolate bar at the concession stand than any actual wrestling. It was very dark and loud inside, and from where we were seated we couldn’t see much. I remember my brother Alex’s disappointment that there weren’t more stars on the card. However it didn’t affect his love of wrestling in the slightest. In the decade and a half that followed, it became the one thing we could talk about. I’m grateful for that.

I don’t quite recall when my brother’s love of professional wrestling began, but by age 6 or so, it was already there, as strong as his love of hockey. He had the figurines, and a replica championship belt. We watched Hulk Hogan’s Rock N’ Wrestling on Saturday afternoons. He used the couch cushions to practice body slams and pile drivers; I allowed him to practice half-nelsons and figure-four leg-locks on me. And, sometimes, on very special occasions, we would go to bed early on Saturday night to be woken up to come downstairs and watch Saturday Night’s Main Event.

We were farm kids, two hours from Toronto; it was a forty-minute drive to the nearest mall. There wasn’t any internet yet, so that meant television, books and magazines were our connection to popular culture and the world at large. In the early 2000s my mom got satellite TV, which meant that pay-per-views could be ordered by phone. This was a huge deal for us and for Alex’ connection to wrestling – before this we had never even had cable. But now Alex could watch RAW, Nitro, Smackdown, and even ECW shows.

By this time I was living in Toronto, studying opera at university. At this point, Alex and I didn’t have very much in common and as a result we didn’t really get along. From the way he spoke to me then, he felt I was a soft and undisciplined dilettante, living it up the big city, spending my student loans on (pfffft) singing. I was in my high-minded early 20s and thought “at least I’m pursuing something specific!” Alex never really found that focus for anything other than wrestling. After high school, he did a year in an agricultural program near Ottawa, and then attended a wrestling school in Cambridge – but he wasn’t built for wrestling. All the guys at the school were big; Alex had less than 10% body fat. He was lean and strong – very strong – from a lifetime of physical farm labour, but it didn’t translate to success in the ring.

I wish it had. I wish he had found a way to make a living in the world he loved so much. I wish he knew that just because he wasn’t cut out to wrestle didn’t mean he wasn’t worthy. He was. But he was in so much pain.

By the mid 2000s, we would end up arguing just about every time I came home to the farm for a weekend or holiday. He was still living at home, working on the farm. The only time we didn’t fight (if we were in the same room) was when wrestling was on. Because I had become a professional performer, I still enjoyed it. (There are more similarities between the opera world and the wrestling world than you might think – although most opera crowds, as a rule, don’t chant at the singers.) I would ask him questions about the wrestlers, about the storylines. We could talk about it and be friendly again, like when we were kids. He’d been reading the wrestling magazines for years and years, but now was reading wrestlers’ autobiographies too, like Mick Foley’s, which I picked up and devoured in a weekend. I hoped we could connect on other levels. There was so much about him I didn’t know, that I hadn’t gotten the chance to learn.

We never got the chance. In April 2007 my brother Alex took his own life. He was twenty-five. We buried him with his championship belt. He was sick and in pain, and chose to end that pain in the only way he thought he could. He left his parents, eight siblings, five nieces and a nephew, and many more he didn’t get to meet. They would have loved him; he would have loved them. He was great with kids: he taught our five year old niece to sing the lyrics from Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” and specifically the part where Petty sings “let’s roll another joint,” which made all of us laugh – even Mom, although she pretended to be shocked.

For a few years after his death I felt guilty that we never had the chance to get along better. Did I have the right to grieve when we were always at odds? I felt like he hadn’t liked me since we were kids. He was my brother and I loved him, but I certainly didn’t always like him. We could really be assholes to each other, to be quite honest.

Then, two years ago, I met someone from Twitter for what was technically a blind date. We had a drink at the Imperial Pub near Dundas Square; when I found out that he was a wrestling fan, I ran with it. I name-dropped every 80s wrestler I could, telling him how I remembered Dino Bravo’s baby blue trunks, professing my appreciation for Randy Savage’s use of classical music. To put it mildly, we hit it off great. (He says me name-dropping wrestlers didn’t have that much to do with it, but I think it had to help at least a little.) Eventually I told him about my brother, about how much of a wrestling fan he was, too, and that I hadn’t really paid attention to it since his passing. So he did his best to catch me up. He pulled up a clip of someone named CM Punk cutting a promo that was now wrestling history. And then told me that this guy – his favorite wrestler – was probably not going to come back to the WWE. I missed CM Punk entirely!

In the two years we’ve been dating, I’ve watched more wrestling than in the past fifteen years previous. We went the the NXT event in Brooklyn, which was FANTASTIC. (We bought matching Bayley “I’m A Hugger” T-shirts.) We catch the live broadcasts of PPVs in the theatre or at home on the WWE Network. I still ask a LOT of questions, which Chris seems happy to answer.

This week, with the WWE event that’s happening in Toronto, I’ve been wistful. I’ve been thinking about my brother and how, though they are from vastly different worlds, their shared love of wrestling might have given them a bond. Each time I watch it feel like I’m honouring Alex’s memory in a small way. Tonight when I see Triple H – who was always the wrestler Alex and I could agree we really liked – I will be cheering through tears, wishing we’d had the chance to enjoy it together more – and I’ll be thankful for the man who’s brought it back into my life.

And we’re back! Phil once again reminds us of Erin’s claustrophobia, Rachel’s money-counting problems, and Darius and Cameron’s Race-ending mistake. On with the Race!

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