"there is no snow in Hollywood / there is no rain in California" – Frank O'Hara
Melissa McCarthy’s parody of White House (“so-called”) press secretary Sean “Spicey” Spicer is funny (edited to add: but not that funny–really, more amusing). But her Spicer is smarter than the real Spicer. I don’t believe that Sean Spicer knows when or why women ovulate or that he has ever even used that word.
My favorite part is the gum.
“sign taxonomy” from Saturday’s march by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. THE RADICAL POSSIBILITY OF THE WOMEN’S MARCH.”
So I wandered the mall, taking a running sign taxonomy. There were the signs that announced the carrier’s identity: “Fornicating Homosexual Abortionist,” “Now You’ve Gone and Pissed Off Grandma,” “Proud Louisiana Liberal—Send Help!” (Plenty of people carried torches for others: white and Asian women holding Black Lives Matter signs, men with signs about reproductive rights.) Others roasted Donald Trump lightheartedly: “The Devil Wears Bronzer,” “Urine For a Long Four Years.” Some were as frank as possible: “I’m Too Worried to Be Funny,” “I Can’t Believe I Left the Soviet Union for This Shit.” There were pleas for police accountability and grace toward immigrants; innumerable signs protested Trump’s Cabinet, his unreleased tax returns, his “Access Hollywood” gloating descriptions of sexual assault. Coat-hanger cutouts were everywhere.
But Tolentino’s main point was about white women’s politics (emphasis mine):
Beneath the thrill of the broad-minded demonstration, there was a nagging thought that I couldn’t shake, and that some protesters made a point of noting:
if a majority of white women had not voted for Trump in November, he would not currently be President
—and millions of people would not be protesting. There’s a corollary to this that also tugged at me:
if Trump weren’t President—if we had, on Friday, inaugurated President Hillary Clinton—how many of the white women who protested on Saturday would feel as if there weren’t much about America that needed protesting at all?
Republicans are scary. And there are so many of them.
“Some people say they’re gonna turn off the satellites that are monitoring the climate,” [California governor Jerry Brown] said, adding that back in the 1970s he had been one of the first politicians to propose low-Earth satellites. “They called me Governor Moonbeam because of that,” he said. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite.”
The California Sunday Magazine has started a series called “California vs. Trump.” Part 1 was posted on 1/17. By Andy Kroll and with pics by Erin Brethauer.
