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White House Correspondents’ Dinner and Bedtime for Bonzo

  • Posted on April 28, 2012 at 11:00 pm

What do Greta Van Susteren, Lindsay Lohan, Arianna Huffington, Kim Khardashian, and President Barack Obama all have in common?  Well, tonight they are all at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.  It is the place to be if you are the rich, the famous, or the connected!  Don’t worry you and I, the “normal” American people, weren’t invited!  We can only watch through a CSPAN camera lens.

This event always irks me because I see the coziness between the White House and the press that is supposed to be covering it for the American people.  It doesn’t matter if the president is a Democrat or a Republican.  These dinners go on and they are all the same.  The president is expected to be funny and self deprecating.  A good laugh is supposed to be had by all and everyone can let their guard down a bit from the stress of everyday life in Washington D.C.  That, to me, is a fantasy because truthfully these people don’t know what stress really is.  They live in a world unlike what most Americans live in.  They are the one percent.  They are the movers and shakers in the country, if not the world.

The rest of us are truly the glue that holds this country together.  We are the ones that take care of their children, educate the masses, watch over their homes, and give dignity to those that are dying in a hospital or on the battle field.  We are the ones that give our bodies to build this country, our heart to fight for it, and our soul to continue to believe in what matters in this world is our humanity!  We are not the one percent.  We are not Hollywood, and we are not politicians.  We are the American people that can see through a fake dinner and are probably the servers at the dinner.  We are the 99%.  We are your sisters, brothers, cousins, and friends.  We hold no title but we serve our country in a manner that the one percent could never understand.  While they are busy patting themselves on the back for doing their jobs and telling the rest of us what they had to give up in the private sector to be a politician, super star, or whatever, we are out doing our jobs every day like we always do.  We don’t complain.  We just want a fair break.  We aren’t stars although we tend to watch the stars.  We are normal folk that just want our country to do the right thing.  This dinner is meaningless to me but it always shines a light on what is happening in our country.  While we are living our simple lives the politicians, Hollywood, and the press are busy figuring out how to manipulate us into the next big thing, whatever it may be.  If we’re supposed to get ready for another big war, don’t worry folks, Hollywood will put out just the right kind of movies to get us in the proper “mood”, you know those movies that make us feel patriotic and want our young ones to do something for their country.  We have all watched them and they do tug at our heart strings in ways we can’t quite understand.

The press already has done their job for this election.  This past year it was obvious that the press wanted Mitt Romney to be the nominee.  Why do you suppose this is? From my point of view, it seems as though there won’t be much difference between the two parties for voting.  We have a choice between Barack Obama who continued the Bush policies, even those tax cuts for the wealthy or we have Mitt Romney, who will continue the Bush policies like extending, once again, the tax cuts for the wealthy.

The reason I’m upset about this dinner is because we, the American people, will get the shaft.  We do all the heavy lifting and while we are doing it these people are really setting the agenda for the coming year.  Does it make any sense that former Senator Chris Dodd went from being a senator to being the president of the Motion Picture Association of America?   He is working right now on legislation that could have a major impact on us “little” people.  This dinner makes a lot of sense to me and it makes it easy to understand how Dodd ended up with the job he did.  These shakers and movers are not really concerned about the American people.  They are concerned about their own situation and their next jobs.  Everything is a set up.  Do you remember last year’s dinner?  The next day was the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.  Following that was “breaking news” about Osama Bin Laden.  Even the death of Osama Bin Laden was so strange to me.  They dumped the body at sea.  I really don’t know what that was about but it sure did feel like we should have learned a lot more than we did!  I just feel the timing for all of this was pretty staged.  It was presented as “all in a day’s work” of the office of the presidency but to me there was much more to it.  It just makes me wonder if there will be any surprises this week.

The one thing I’ve noticed in the past several years is how easily politicians move into the press.  The relationship must be too cozy if these politicians can get their next jobs as pundits on some show.  How else could people like George Stephanopoulos and Joe Scarborough so easily switch into the roles of correspondents or press?  Sarah Palin and Governor Huckabee are both on Fox.  Go figure.  Don’t get me started on Hollywood or I’ll have to be wondering how a guy that was an actor in a movie, “Bedtime for Bonzo”, could ever get the job as president of the United States of America!

My Art Student, Occupy Wall Street, and those Pesky Politicians

  • Posted on December 10, 2011 at 1:11 pm

I had a student recently create a work of art that really made me think about how easy it is to understand the 99% versus the 1%.  So many of the pundits that I have watched on television have said that the Occupy Wall Street group doesn’t have a clear message, or a spokesperson and this is why they won’t be successful in whatever they are trying to do.  That’s the media, the machine that is trying to douse the flames of this current movement.  I want to share the painting that my student created.  First of all, she is a seventh grader of Mexican heritage.  She recently moved away and I’m sad to see her move as I would love to have worked with her more to see what inspires her.  The painting was the result of an assignment I had given.  She was working with a group of students and they were learning about Pieter Bruegel.  I challenged them to create a small painting inspired by the artist they were studying but to put their own “twist” on it.  Yareli did not let me down.  Below you will see the piece that inspired my student and you will see what she painted.

Pieter Bruegel, The Misanthrope

She had to write a reflection statement about her artwork.  This is what she said, “My artwork is pretty good.  This project helped me know what colors can make a different color.  My artwork could have been better but I wanted it simple.  It’s a better version of the artist I copied from because now days it’s the poor who are being robbed and that brings more attention to the one looking at it.”

Her artwork can be seen so you can make a comparison between the two pieces.

Yareli's Artwork

I think it is interesting that so many pundits and politicians profess to just not understand the Occupy Wall Street group when a little seventh grade girl can see what’s happening in the world today!  Newt Gingrich even suggested some ridiculous idea about taking a bath and getting a job.  I think the politicians and the pundits have a pretty good idea why people are so fed up with the way things are run in Washington.  They are just trying to get us off topic by changing the subject to bathing and trying to make people think the Occupy group is just a bunch of hippies.  You know those pot smoking, sex driven, street people, that are dirty.  Most of us are tired of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer because of those Washington policies that favor wealth and corporations over living wages, education, and jobs.  There is always enough money for Wall Street bankers and private corporations tied to our military industrial complex but there is never enough for the little guy.

I, for one, am thankful for the Occupy Wall Street Movement.  It takes a lot of guts to go out and really protest.  I can write on my little blog and say some of what I’m thinking but these people really put themselves out there, day after day, taking the abuse for the rest of us.  I couldn’t believe the way those young college students at UC Davis were pepper sprayed.  The video that everyone has seen shows how abused they were by the campus police.  It was surreal to watch as the students innocently stayed calm in the face of real adversity.  It must have seemed like a torturous nightmare to them that the police would spray them over and over when they were being so compliant.

UC Davis Students from LA Now from the LA Times Blog

What prepared those young students for the ability to sit still like that?  These are kids that have grown up with computers and comforts that their parents might not have had but they are still able to reach down into the well of what is right and wrong and take a stand!  I commend them and anyone else that is out there trying to make a difference in this screwed up world where up is down and down is up!  It’s almost like we have reached the Land of Oz where nothing seems to make sense.  We are facing a nightmare with the richest one or two percent controlling the lives of the rest of us.  I would like to see a change in our government but I don’t see it happening.  Too many that have the power to make the change are living in the world of the 1%.  They don’t care enough about the rest of the people.  If they did, they would stop playing these political games and get something done to get this country moving again!

I was watching C-Span today and there was a woman on talking about tax breaks for making energy improvements to your home.  A guy called in about transportation and how we should be creating a high speed railway system across our country.  I couldn’t help but think about all of the jobs that could be made from such a move.  The other day I was telling my new trimester of sixth grade students that we don’t know what the jobs will be when they grow up.  A tech guy had been in the room fixing a computer.  I told them that twenty years ago his job didn’t exist.  I went on to say that if jobs continue to be so difficult to find that the people getting the jobs will have to be innovative, inventive, and creative.  Unfortunately, politicians are the same old, uncreative, uninventive lot that they have been for years.  While they are sitting in their ivory towers of inequity telling the rest of us how to live, the creative innovators are being silenced.  They are silenced by this class of lazy, stale politicians that only live for one thing, their own greed!  My last post I pondered why the choices for president are so damn bad.  Unfortunately, the 1% and 99% don’t have a lot in common, one is looking for a hand up onto the boat and the other is pulling the ladder up and saying the boat is full!  I think the politicians are already in the boat ready to set sail.