Biden says...Build the Wall?!, America's Regional Accents Dying Out? Activist Murdered in Brooklyn Victim of "Luxury Beliefs?! (The Five for 10/06/23)
Plus U2 drop a new single! WWII Epic "Fury" Director returns with new action film. "Cobra Kai" creators make a show about a drunk bomb squad.
Hey, welcome to The Five.
One quick note before we dive in. This week, I got to be a part of shooting a music video, using the set of the 2003 Tim Burton Film Big Fish (trailer) in Northern Alabama for Mesus, the rapper I manage. We were able to use crew and equipment from Stranger Things and American Horror Story.
I’ll (hopefully) share the video next week, but for now…here’s a quick preview of the cinematic quality:
With that being said…let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
A left-wing activist was murdered yesterday, which opened a whole can of worms for the “chronically online.”
At 4 a.m. on Monday, Ryan Carson, a 32-year-old social justice and climate change activist, was walking with his girlfriend in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, when he was stabbed to death by a stranger. Only a few hours earlier in Philadelphia, activist and journalist Josh Kruger was shot and killed in his home.
And two Democratic lawmakers who voted to “redirect funding to community-based policing reforms” have been recent victims of violent crime.
On Monday night, blocks away from the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed men. (The lawmaker survived the incident unscathed.) In February, Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator at her apartment building in Capitol Hill. A homeless man demanded she allow him into her home to use the restroom, then he punched her and grabbed her around the neck. She escaped after throwing hot coffee on him.
Of course, these people did not deserve harm because of their support for soft-on-crime policies. But I’ve long argued that many people who hold “luxury beliefs”—ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes—are oblivious to the consequences of their views. Support for defunding the police is a classic example.
Luxury beliefs can stem from malice, good intentions, or outright naivete.
But the individuals who hold those beliefs, the people who wield the most influence in policy and culture, are often sheltered when their preferences are implemented.
Journalist Andy Ngo (who was nearly murdered by Antifa for covering the 2020 riots) uncovered some of Carson’s old social media posts advocating for violence…which does not mean Carson deserved to die, or that his passing is ironic, or worthy of celebration.
Many commentators on the left and right ran to equally stupid positions on this tragedy.
Uhh, no…it is not possible to “be a victim” for stabbing someone in the chest at random, and casually strolling away as the mortally wounded gasps for his final breaths.
Equally disturbing on the right, commentator Mike Cernovich immediately joked about Carson’s final moments.
The final disturbing plot twist here is that Ryan’s friends started a GoFundMe…for themselves. The $60K plus that has been raised…is not for funeral costs or to support his family, but so that his (alleged) friends don’t have to go to work.
So…no one cares about the victim. Ryan Carson is a political football for the left and right, and a bank account for his dumb little leftist buddies. Did Carson’s own bad beliefs about public safety contribute to his death? Possibly…but the loss of every life is tragic. Or, perhaps I’m in the minority for believing that now.
Although I’m a devout Christian, I don’t typically quote the Bible in this publication…but perhaps it’s worth noting that the world has seen this before:
“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).
[two]
The latest group to try to halt rapidly expanding illegal immigration?
The largely Hispanic Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen.
At a heated meeting on the city’s West Side, about 300 people packed a gym at Galewood’s Amundsen Park on Tuesday evening to hear about the city’s pitch to turn the park into a migrant shelter.
Michael Woods, 63, said he came concerned about whether arriving migrants would displace current residents of the area.
“I want everybody to be helped, but there’s got to be a better way of doing it,” Woods said.
Prior to the meeting, Ald. Chris Taliaferro, 29th, had expressed discontent as the city plans to open the shelter.
“It takes away valuable neighborhood resources from a community that, in part, has been disinvested in for decades,” he said in a letter to the community.
In a statement to the Tribune, Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, said he agreed with his colleague.
“The ‘experiment’ of housing 1,500 migrants at the Inn of Chicago has been an abject failure. The conditions there are deplorable and the property is not safe for the migrant families living there who are co-mingled with hundreds of single, young adult males,” he said in an email to the Tribune. “Not only do I worry for the health and welfare of these young migrant families — I also worry for the safety of my constituents and thousands of tourists and visitors who come to the area every day.”
UPDATE: Before I was even able to write a response to this cultural shift, the news broke that President Biden is…building the border wall. The messaging coming from the White House on this one is…conflicted.
[three]
One of my favorite music outlets, Saving Country Music, pointed out that country music is stepping up to speak on the opiod crisis…while the federal government is largely silent on the issue:
Where it often seems like certain elements of the government are uncaring about the pill epidemic if not outright facilitating it through close ties with Big Pharma, country music is stepping up to address the crisis, and head on. It’s a concern that affects everyone, no matter your taste in music. But it happens to be that a lot of these songs also are done in good taste. It makes for compelling art and entertainment, while also conveying an important message.
Americana superstar Tyler Childers recently raised $400,000 for addiction at the annual Healing Appalachia benefit concert. And Elvie Shane (check out his song “Pill”) and Brad Paisley recently released songs about the Opioid epidemic, with Paisley returning to his home in West Virginia to shoot a video for “The Medicine Will,” containing the haunting lyrics:
Well these are good God-fearing people
Just doing the best they can
And if the devil's in the details
Then hell's in milligrams
For every family visitation
Sons and daughters gone too soon
The drugstore and the undertaker
The only businesses that boom
There's coal under the mountains
And gold in them there pills
If living here don't kill you
The medicine will
This largely rural medical genocide was kicked off in many mining downs by local doctors handing out powerful painkillers like candy, creating decades of addiction with a stroke of the pen onto a prescription pad.
There are some who believe the CIA allowed Central American countries to ship drugs into the U.S. in the 70’s and 80’s to bolster funds for anti-Communist forces, and to reduce the minority populations in urban centers.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, but by the lack of attention from the Federal Government…we have to assume that at least some bureaucrats are perfectly happy to let the folks of rural America put their loved ones in the ground.
[four]
America is losing it’s regional accents…and I find that heartbreaking.
First, let’s look at a state with one of the most famous American accents: Texas. The Texas accent — or, really, accents, because it’s such a large state it contains multitudes — is famed for its twang, its use of y’all and its connection to a romanticized vision of the Old West. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin looked at the accent and found an unfortunate trend: the Texas accent seems to be shifting toward the norm. In the 1980s, about 80 percent of the Texan native students at the school had “traditional” Texas accents, but that’s shrunk down to around 33 percent in the past few years. It seems that many of the features that set Texas apart from the rest of the country are slowly fading, such as the pin-pen merger (where both words are pronounced like “pin”) and phrases like “might could.”
Other accents that really stand out in the United States are those found in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and New York. And each of these, too, seem to be going away to some degree. At the very least, they’ve faded from their former prominence in the 20th century, and the people born in these cities are more and more likely to speak with a standard American accent.
I spent the first half of my childhood in Pike County, IL, where the speech patterns tie closely to the Appalachian roots of many residents, who came from Virginia, Kentucky and Central Pennsylvania. I was also exposed to a deeper Ozark drawl out of Missouri (“Missourua”) hearing words like “warshed” (“washed”). Later, we relocated near Moline, IL, where the dialect picked up the inflections of the Scandinavian ancestry, before I moved to Chicago and was surrounded by the clipped, aggressive pronunciations of words.
It’s unclear if regional accents are completely dying, or just shrinking. One strong possibility is that Appalachian, Ozark and Southern accents are fading due to employment discrimination. Even when I “talked like a Chicagoan,” one of the most powerful TV news producers told me she was “surprised” I was “well spoken” when she learned I grew up on a farm. I could do nothing but take the insult…but it helps me understand why some people learn to talk differently for work…and then, all the time.
[five]
I’m a pretty huge David Ayer fan, as the director has helmed two of my very favorite films, Fury and End of Watch.
The director is known for mixing gritty violence with deeper themes than your standard action flick, so hopefully there’s something more going on in The Beekeeper than just Jason Statham (of the Fast & Furious movies, The Italian Job) killing a stack of bad guys.
This one is getting dumped into the movie dead zone—January—but I still have moderate hopes. Critics tend to have a negative bias towards Ayer, who’s Suicide Squad was one of the most panned movies of the last decade…but the failure was due to the fault of WB’s tinkering, not Ayer’s vision.
What if we remade Speed, but everyone was drunk/high and then hungover? The team that brought Cobra Kai (the Karate Kid sequel that showed up 30+ years after the original) to Netflix returns with a straight-to-streaming action flick in which a bomb squad or something must find a nuclear bomb before Vegas blows up.
The only problem? The team is inebriated when they get the call (except for the token sober guy). Obliterated is…a very on-the-nose title.
Stream this dumb fun…or just dumb idea…11/30.
The new something-something-disaster-movie stars Julia Roberts (Ocean’s 11, Pretty Woman), Ethan Hawke (Training Day, Glass Onion) and Mahershala Ali (Green Book, Marvel’s Luke Cage).
This time, it’s a cyberattack that’s going to kill everybody.
Either you like the disaster sub-genre (The Day After Tomorrow, Armageddan, 2012 etc.) or you don’t. If you do, this one looks decent (even if it relies pretty typical tropes we’ve seen before), but does boast a solid cast. Catch it 10/25.
The Buccaneers is Bridgeton, but on Apple TV+. That’s…all I have to say. Popular, so it’s worth covering…but not my thing. I didn’t recognize a single cast member except for Christina Hendricks (Mad Men, Good Girls) so maybe they’re all British actors?
NEW(ISH) MUSIC
Throwing in a recent-ish (2022) album from Lee Bains + The Glory Fires, which blends the southern rock and folk of Drive-By Truckers meets the aggressive guitar parts of 90’s punk acts like Pennywise and The Offspring.
Bains tells the stories of the working class, making Old-Time Folks a good soundtrack to a fall where auto labor is a major news story.
Finally, U2 are back with a new single, released in conjunction with their residency in Vegas. The Irish quartet have promised a new album “soon,” but are notorious for being slow on album releases, so don’t hold your breath.
Until the next one,
-sth