This past month I recorded a lot of thoughts rolling around
in my head on topics I probably should have kept to myself. The Bachelor? Oprah?
Who really cares about how I feel about pop culture and celebrities besides me
and often times I wonder about my own level of interest in what goes on in
between my ears. It’s called ‘editing’
Jean. I know how to do that when I’m face to face with others but I could
use a refresher course in editing my thoughts when I write. If you rooted out
an apology in this paragraph, au contraire. I'm just saying that a self-imposed commitment to write a
1,000 words twice a week might be good disciple and a useful teaching tool for would-be
writers but there's a fine line between forcing a topic and
finding one. Sometimes I forget that.
The January thaw has brought my social life back into the
realm of possibilities which is always good for journaling fodder. This week’s
choice: Should I go to the rescheduled-for-the-3rd-time Red Hat
Society Christmas party or go on an outing with my Movie and Lunch Club? I
chose the latter because I was totally out of the mood to stretch the holidays out
past the middle of January. From the photos they shared online, I was the only
one who didn’t make it and I didn’t feel even a tinge of regret looking at
all those smiling ladies all decked out in their gaudy best. Ever since they
changed “management” over a year ago, I’ve lost interest in the group. One
power-drugged person---even a nice, church lady power-drugged person---can
change the whole dynamics of a group. Dictatorships, whether in a group of
twenty or in a country, creates the dissident class. That’s me, Ms Dissident.
I skipped the ‘lunch’ part of my Movie and Lunch Club because I still felt a little weak from being sick not long ago and I didn’t want to over-tax myself with a stretched-out social afternoon. The movie we saw was The Post with Tom Hawks and Meryl Streep taking the lead parts and directed by Steven Spielberg. You can’t go wrong with that combination of talent at the helm. Rotten Tomatoes.com sums up the story like this: It’s “…a thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post's Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers - and their very freedom - to help bring long-buried truths to light.”
I skipped the ‘lunch’ part of my Movie and Lunch Club because I still felt a little weak from being sick not long ago and I didn’t want to over-tax myself with a stretched-out social afternoon. The movie we saw was The Post with Tom Hawks and Meryl Streep taking the lead parts and directed by Steven Spielberg. You can’t go wrong with that combination of talent at the helm. Rotten Tomatoes.com sums up the story like this: It’s “…a thrilling drama about the unlikely partnership between The Washington Post's Katharine Graham (Streep), the first female publisher of a major American newspaper, and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), as they race to catch up with The New York Times to expose a massive cover-up of government secrets that spanned three decades and four U.S. Presidents. The two must overcome their differences as they risk their careers - and their very freedom - to help bring long-buried truths to light.”
For anyone who lived through that era when the Pentagon
Papers were exposed and The Times and The Post ended up in an emergency Supreme
Court hearing charged with treason via a suit filed by the Nixon
administration, for any history buff or political junkie, for anyone concerned
about our present administration’s attack on the press this is a MUST-SEE film!
All the glowing reviews this movie has gotten are well deserved. But I wish
more younger people were interested in see it. My niece saw it on a Friday night
and she noted the same thing I did about my afternoon audience. We were all
older, well dressed people who looked college educated or at least smart enough
to follow the complicated and fast-moving true story and the importance of the
Fourth Estate in our democracy.
Near the end of the movie they quoted Justice Hugo Black’s argument
for ruling in favor of the two newspaper’s right to publish the then-classified
Pentagon Papers and against Nixon’s attempt to control the press and I was able
to google his words. They’re important words, words that matter today every bit
as much as they did in 1971 when the court ruled 6 to 3. He wrote, “In the First
Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have
to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the
governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press
was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the
Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of
government and inform the people.”
And that’s why Trump’s attempt to erode the credibility of
the press is so dangerous. It’s why we need to remain vigilant against his corrosive,
dictatorship-inspired tactic of calling any news he doesn’t like “fake” news. It’s
why we all need to put on our dissidents hats and stand up for this basic
building block of our democracy. ©
This is probably the most comprehensive movie
trailer I’ve seen in ages. The 2:32 minutes sums up the two hour movie and the historical
event it covers with near perfection.
A fun
and fascinating interview of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep on CBS This Morning about
the movie.
“Katharine Graham stepped into a moment in history where she
made history.” Meryl Streep
“The news is the
first rough draft of history.”
A line attributed
to Katharine Graham in the movie, who was quoting her father.
