"If you have class, you have it. It doesn't matter who you're with."
~ Julia Sugarbaker
I've heard of people "binge-watching" a television show, but can you "binge-watch" an episode? I've been watching "Designing Women," Season 1, Episode 19, on You Tube several times over....
It's the one where the Sugarbaker interior designers are hired to renovate some rooms for a super-wealthy partying married couple, the Tates. One by one, and each in their own style, Julia, Suzanne, Mary Jo, Charlene, and their delivery driver Anthony Bouvier all get "sucked in" to the Tates' lifestyle which is sort of based on a lack of impulse control.
During a party on the Tates' boat, Mary Jo fixes a toilet, and Sissy Tate's so grateful, she takes the diamond bracelet off her own wrist and puts it on Mary Jo.
Mr. Tate fancies a stone-crab dinner, so he flies from Atlanta to New Orleans and brings Julia with him.
Later in the episode, there's gunplay.
I don't know why, but ever since I discovered "Designing Women" on You Tube, the recollection of that episode kept walking stealthily around my brain, a memory from clear back in the Reagan years -- and I wanted to see it again.
I scanned episode titles from Seasons 5, 4, 3, and 2, thinking it was in one of the later seasons, but then -- no, found it in Season 1.
What makes this DW episode resonate?
(Perhaps it's the uneasy truth that a sanguine desire to connect with others exists side-by-side with the awareness, whether naturally assumed based on one's temperament, or learned from experience, that "others" can be trouble.)
(Makes me think of Bill Cosby -- he would wear a shirt with the caption on it reading, "Hello, Friend." The man wants to be everyone's friend. Now, that's beautiful. A natural, and very sweet, human sentiment. [Until somebody gets slipped a mickey...] In an interview, Cosby's music collaborator Stu Gardner said, with layered meaning, "He -- invites people into his life"....)
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{"Donald Trump Is Saving Our Democracy"
an article written by Frank Rich
published in New York Magazine,
September 20, 2015}
---------------------------- [excerpt, to end of article] -------------
If the best his intraparty adversaries can come up with as dragon slayers are his fellow outsiders -- the joyless scold Fiorina, who presided over the firing of 30,000 Hewlett-Packard workers (a bounteous gift to Democratic attack ads), or the low-low-energy Carson, who has never run anything except an operating room -- that means they have no plan.
And thanks to another unintended consequence of the GOP's Citizens United "victory," the PACs it enables will keep hopeless presidential candidates financially afloat no matter how poorly they are faring in polls and primaries, thereby crippling the party's ability to unite early behind a single anti-Trump alternative. In a worst-case scenario, the GOP could reach the spring stretch with the party's one somebody still ahead of a splintered field of nobodies.
By then, Trump's Establishment nemeses, those who march to the beat of the Journal editorial page and Krauthammer and Will, will be manning the backroom battle stations and writing big checks to bring him down.
The specter of a brokered Republican convention loomed briefly in 2012, when Romney was slow to lock up the nomination.
Should such a scenario rear up again in 2016, the Koch brothers, no fans of Trump, could be at the center of the action.
Whatever happens, there will be blood.
The one thing Trump never does is go quietly, and neither will his followers. As Ross Douthat, a reform conservative, wrote in August, Trump has tapped into the populist resentments of middle-class voters who view the GOP and the elites who run it as tools of "moneyed interests."
If the Republicans "find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message," he added, the pressure of that resentment will keep building within the party, and "when it bursts, the GOP as we know it may go with it."
Even if this drama does not play out to the convention, the Trump campaign has already made a difference. Far from being a threat to democracy or a freak show unworthy of serious coverage, it matters because it's taking a much-needed wrecking ball to some of what has made our sterile politics and dysfunctional government as bankrupt as Trump's Atlantic City casinos.
If that's entertainment, so be it. If Hillary Clinton's campaign or the Republican Party is reduced to rubble along the way, we can live with it. Trump will not make America great again, but there's at least a chance that the chaos he sows will clear the way for those who can.
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