Ep. 115’s host skewers Latino protesters framing riots as "dreamer" resistance, with Hillary Clinton endorsing chaos while dismissing $15 wages for illegals—one claims Trump paid them to riot. Indiana primaries expose poll conflicts (WSJ/Marist vs. Mike Downs Center) and media bias, mocking Trump’s 31,000-strong rallies derailed by "professional agitators." The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is dissected for Larry Wilmore’s N-word gaffe and Obama’s hypocritical praise of a complicit press, while George Stephanopoulos and Brian Williams symbolize partisan journalism. Trump’s bluntness contrasts decades of media lies, from Bush’s Iraq to Benghazi, framing the election as a clash between populist defiance and elite consensus. The episode ends with a critique of American Beauty’s dishonest gay subtext, praising Tennessee Williams over "distorted" Hollywood. [Automatically generated summary]
Angry at being called violent criminals by Donald Trump, Mexicans have been protesting his California rallies by rioting, beating people up, and setting police cars on fire.
This will teach Trump to call us gangsters, said one protester, shooting pepper spray into a child's face.
If he calls us gangster again, me and my G is going to bang him good and throw his sneakers on the phone wire.
The Latino protesters were furious that Trump has been promising to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S. to prevent further illegal immigration.
They gathered to show they should be welcome additions to their new country by waving Mexican flags and carrying signs that said, make America Mexico again.
How dare he refer to us as illegal, said one protester, just because we snuck into the country in ways that were against the law.
Like all immigrants, we had to suffer through many hardships to get here, like hiding drugs in our lower intestines and engaging in running gun battles with border patrol agents.
Protesters said they would continue to show that Trump's policies inspire violence by being inspired to violence by his policies.
As one protester put it, we have just as much right to ruin this country as anyone.
Why should only natural-born American college students be allowed to cause chaos and scream ignorant, destructive slogans at the top of their lungs?
Hillary Clinton voiced support for the rioting Mexicans and anyone else who might help give her power and or money.
Secretary Clinton said, quote, these people are dreamers who dream of coming to this country and sabotaging our political process with riots.
And what could be more American than that?
Mrs. Clinton added, I support a $15 an hour minimum wage, so obviously we need illegal immigrants who can be paid less.
Because if you think I'm shelling out 15 bucks an hour to have the lawns mowed at my mansions, you are out of your mind.
To be fair, while some of the rioting Latinos seem to be just the sort of lawless marauders Donald Trump has been railing against, others were gainfully employed.
I have a very good job, one protester said.
My employer is that fat-faced man over there with the funny orange hair.
He paid me mucho de Nero to riot because he said it would help him get elected president.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, so that's what's happening here in California, where the election is going to be decided by my vote in a couple of weeks.
We're here again, or are we?
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And also, you get to participate in the show, because you can leave us letters, messages, comments, and we will read them on the show and answer your questions, and all things will finally become clear.
So we're going to Indiana this week, right?
This is the Indiana primaries.
Hooray!
The last stand for Ted Cruz.
We've got one poll, the Wall Street Journal Marist College poll, which is the one everybody's touting that has Trump 15% ahead.
But there was another poll over the weekend.
The Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, which was a very well-respected poll, had it exactly the other way around.
Cruz is up 15%.
The pollsters were probably going, Cruz, Trump.
I always get those too confused.
One of them's up.
One of them's up 15%.
That's what we know.
So, and here in California, they, I mean, this is really amazing.
They kind of spin this.
Our lovable left-wing media spins this as if it's somehow Trump's fault that people are rioting at his rallies.
But only the Wall Street Journal got this right.
These guys could be paid by Trump.
I mean, this is just, these are votes in the pocket for Donald Trump.
He's sitting around screaming about Mexicans are criminals, and they're out there setting police cars on fire.
I mean, it's like an advertisement.
It's like they're like a super PAC for Donald Trump.
He goes on, Chris Wallace has him on, and he asks him, isn't this a problem for you?
Play the first Trump cut.
Are you concerned that if you're the Republican nominee, these demonstrations could disrupt your campaign?
No, we were at that particular moment.
We had 31,000 people in the stands.
It was packed.
They've never had a crowd like that.
It's the biggest crowd they've ever had.
We had 31,000 people.
We didn't have a riot.
We didn't have anybody even raise their hand.
It was like a love fest for an hour and a half.
It was incredible.
I didn't even see the riot.
I guess it was, you know, these are wise guys that stomp on policemen's cars.
And it's a terrible thing that people are allowed to get away with this.
These were professional agitators.
They were wearing masks.
The cops told me anytime you see a guy with a mask, you know he's a professional.
And they were wearing masks.
And these people have to be dealt with very strongly because you can't allow that to happen to a police car, you know, essentially.
But this was an amazing, this was an amazing evening where we had 31,000 people, and almost never, other than a couple of helicopter shots, did anybody see the crowd, the massiveness of the crowd, a record-setting crowd, and nobody even saw it.
They only showed some guys making noise outside.
So these were the gangsters.
These weren't the gangsters he associated with in Las Vegas.
I'm sorry, Atlantic City.
These were the other gangsters who were ruining his gathering.
You know, I have to admit, I have to admit, I really, I detest Trump.
Professional Agitators Masked00:15:54
I really do.
But this is what's so refreshing about his campaign.
I mean, this is what makes Trump so interesting to watch, is that the press, you know, it used to be, it used to be we had the press was part of our life, but it wasn't like so pervasive as it is now.
We didn't have media just surrounding, like we walk around now in this cloud of media.
So our moral guides were people like priests and rabbis who they may have been wrong, they may have been bad guys themselves, but at least they spent their lives, the best of them certainly spent their lives studying the ancient moral texts, studying our values, and coming out and trying to guide us in how to have what we've had for the past 20 to 40 years has been politicians and journalists telling us about, I mean, the idea of politicians telling us about morality is laughable on its face.
And journalists, too, you know, I mean, these guys, every time I hear Barack Obama make a speech where he says, that's not who we are, I find myself thinking, well, it's who I am.
I mean, it's who everybody I know is.
Maybe it's just not who people in Washington are.
Maybe you're just being lofty because you don't have to deal with the problems that the rest of us are facing.
So over the weekend, there was this thing that they have every year, the White House Correspondence Dinner.
And every year, I hate the way this thing gets covered because this is supposed to be a place where the reporters and the politicians get together and make any joke they want about anybody.
And so it's always supposed to be kind of freewheeling and people will say anything about anybody.
And every year, the press tries to make us shocked by it.
Usually if it's a left-wing president, the right-wing press tries to make us shocked.
And if it's a right-wing president, the left-wing, oh my gosh, he said this, he said that.
So this year, there's always a comedian who runs the thing.
This year is this guy, Larry Wilmore, who is, he now runs the Daily Show, right?
This guy, the only thing that shocked me about this guy is how unfunny he is.
This guy is not funny.
He is like zero.
It's what we used to call a cheek sucker because instead of making you laugh, he makes you go like that, which you could see if you would only subscribe.
What a thrill that would be.
So we can just play, everybody got shocked at his little conclusion.
This is Larry Wilmore's ending speech.
I've always joked that I voted for the president because he's black.
And people say, would you agree with this policies?
And I'm always saying, I agree with the policy that he's black.
I say, as long as he keeps being black, I'm good.
People say, what about Iraq?
Is he still black?
But behind that joke is a humble appreciation for the historical implications for what your presidency means.
When I was a kid, I lived in a country where people couldn't accept a black quarterback.
Now think about that.
A black man was thought by his mere color not good enough to lead a football team.
And now, to live in your time, Mr. President, when a black man can lead the entire free world, words alone do me no justice.
So, Mr. President, I'm going to keep it 100.
Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.
Did it.
So everybody got upset that he uses the N-word and this, you know, who cares?
You know, that's the whole point of the gathering.
That's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is the cheering press.
This press is so inside Obama's pocket.
They're so in.
And listen, I'm proud to live in a country.
We're the only country, the only country in the West, only major Western country that would, you know, that really doesn't care whether the guy's black or not.
My feeling is like, yeah, it's amazing we had a black guy lead the country, but did he have to lead it so badly?
Did he have to do such a crappy job?
I mean, the economy's, you know, just like trembling on the brink all the time.
The Middle East is going up in smoke.
You know, that was nowhere to be seen.
It was as if this were just a triumphal final.
This is obviously his final White House dinner.
Now, the other thing is, Obama is great at these things.
You know, we on the right find him so distasteful, just his personality so distasteful, that we don't like to give him credit for anything.
But he's genuinely got a good sense of humor.
He's got good writers, and he's got good delivery.
Now, here's what he said: play the first of Obama's cause.
Here's his part of his joke routine.
I won't lie.
Look, this is a tough transition.
It's hard.
Key staff are now starting to leave the White House.
Even reporters have left me.
Savannah Guthrie, she's left the White House Press Corps to host the Today Show.
Nor O'Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS this morning.
Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.
Funny line, but also the truth.
The truth.
There is a revolving door between Democrat administrations and the media.
That is who the media is, you know, and that's the problem.
That is the thing we're facing.
At the end of this, well, then he says it seriously at the end.
Play the last part.
Your power and your responsibility to dig and to question and to counter distortions and untruths is more important than ever.
Taking a stand on behalf of what is true does not require you shedding your objectivity.
In fact, it is the essence of good journalism.
It affirms the idea that the only way we can build consensus, the only way that we can move forward as a country, the only way we can help the world mend itself is by agreeing on a baseline of facts when it comes to the challenges that confront us all.
So this night is a testament to all of you who've devoted your lives to that idea, who push to shine a light on the truth every single day.
So I want to close my final White House correspondence dinner by just saying thank you.
I'm very proud of what you've done.
It has been an honor and a privilege to work side by side with you to strengthen our democracy.
So if they're shining a light on the truth, why are they working side by side with the most powerful person in the room?
I mean, isn't when you, aren't you supposed to be speaking truth to power, if you're shining a light on truth, shouldn't the light be brightest on the, I mean, this is the thing.
All the candidates who've been so far defeated by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who is struggling, you know, trying to stay in the race, they have all accused the press of giving Trump all this free publicity because Trump is good news.
I mean, he's like fun to watch and he's controversial and he's interesting.
So they keep bringing him on.
Fox, of course, has gone completely into the Trump tank and just has a mind.
So basically, which Fox anchor is interviewing Trump at this hour is basically the only thing you see on Fox.
But that is not, in my opinion, that is not how the media created Donald Trump because they could have shown a light on him and he could have gone right down the tank.
They created him by lying, by lying and lying and lying for 15 to 20 years.
See, the media, it's one thing the media, the political consensus in America has collapsed.
After the war, after World War II, we had a kind of consensus of what was right.
It was kind of center-right in some ways, but also kind of slowly liberalizing.
And that was the consensus.
And the press could kind of represent that consensus against both the far left and the far right and just kind of tread that middle path.
As we have become more extreme and more European, our press has become more European because in Europe, when you buy a newspaper, you buy the socialist newspaper, you buy the conservative paper, and it'll, you know, you'll open the paper and it'll say, you know, Tony Blair, that idiot, did something, you know, that means it's just kind of right out there.
And that's the way our press has become.
But it's all on one side.
I mean, we have, if you look at the remnants of the legacy press, the network news, the chief anchor of ABC News is a Clinton operative.
He's George Stephanopoulos, right?
The best investigator, investigative reporter at CBS had to quit because they wouldn't put stories about Obama's scandals on the air.
The guy who used to be, what's his name, Brian Williams, who he got fired for lying, but he didn't get fired when he bowed to the president.
He actually bowed to the president like a courtier, you know, to his king.
You know, yes, Mr. Beau, yes, Mr. Brazil.
That's who these guys are.
That's who they are.
And so they've lied.
And all through the Bush administration, all through the Bush administration, we've got these non-scandal scandals, right?
Remember, Joe Wilson wrote that op-ed in the New York Times about how Bush had lied about yellow cake being sold in Africa to Saddam Hussein.
Turned out Bush was absolutely right.
So to cover up the fact, to cover up the fact that Bush was absolutely right and Joe Wilson was absolutely wrong, they made this big fuss about the fact that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA agent, Valerie Playman, and somebody mentioned, oh, there had to be an investigation.
There was a prosecutor appointed.
It was a nothing.
It was a non-scandal scandal meant to distract us from the fact that Bush was right.
100 years of Democrat corruption, funneling funds that were supposed to go to the levees into the pockets of Democrat politicians.
Hurricane Katrina hits.
The levees break because these scum, this Democrat scum has been filtering the money out of the city.
Whose fault is it that New Orleans goes underwater?
It's George W. Bush's fault.
You know, everything, every single thing.
You know, Abu Ghraib, you know, shameful.
What was it?
Five guys, ten guys, who misbehaved at Abu Ghraib?
You know, and go on, go on Amazon and look up Abu Grab.
There's a shelf of books about, oh, the road to torture, how torture became American policy.
You know, it was all nonsense.
Then compare that.
Compare that to the Obama administration, right?
The IRS scandal.
Any other president would be under fire for eight years if he misused the IRS as Obama misused the IRS.
Here, it's like nothing to see.
You know, we'll report on it a couple of days.
Other than that, just forget about it.
You know, I mean, the sale of guns, the, what did they call it, the fast and furious sale of guns, Mexican killers, a lawman was killed by those guns because of that stupid policy, that stupid policy.
Again, there would have been hearings.
It would have been nothing, you know, nothing.
It's just a Fox News obsession.
It's on Fox News, so it's not real news.
It's not, you know, they did this consistently, and now they're doing it with Hillary Clinton.
I mean, Hillary Clinton, the emails, let alone you, you or I would be in prison for doing what she provably did on the emails.
But the fact, the fact that she lied to the parents of the Benghazi dead standing in front of their coffin, I mean, that's a horrible thing to do.
And the fact that she has clearly sold government favors for donations to her foundation, again, you know, there's no smoking gun.
That's what they always say.
There's no smoking gun.
You know, I mean, there's no, I mean, if it had been Bush, the smoking gun would have been in the hands of the New York Times reporters because they'd have been firing at Bush.
You know, it's like, bam, I'm going to smoking because I'm coming after George W. Bush.
Nothing, nothing.
So it's compared to that fog of lies.
It's in that fog of lies that Trump's blithering, loudmouth, bullying, name-calling sounds like telling it like it is.
I mean, that's how, you know, it's refreshing.
It's refresh.
You know, David Brooks, David Brooks, who is, I don't even know what to call him.
He was supposed to be the conservative columnist for the New York Times, but he's just, you know, I have, there's a writer named Gertrude Stein.
She was famous for kind of nurturing Hemingway and that whole lost generation.
She was an experimental writer.
I just hate her work.
I hate it.
And one day my wife was looking at our shelves and she saw the collected writing of Gertrude Stein.
She said, you hate this.
Why do you keep this on your shelf?
And I said, because there are many bad books, but there's only one worst book.
It's like, I just want Gertrude Stein on my shelf, so I have the worst book.
David Brooks may now be the worst commentator in America.
He wrote a piece that has to be one of the stupidest columns.
He's talking about the fact that he didn't see Trump coming.
He says, you know, there obviously was something wrong.
There was something wrong, and Trump is the wrong answer.
But what's the right answer?
So listen to this for a minute.
Just listen to the pomposity and the sequestered consciousness.
And he's complaining about the fact that he doesn't know what's going on in America.
He says, I was surprised by Trump's success because I've slipped into a bad pattern, says David Brooks.
I've been spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata, in professional circles, with people with similar status and demographics to my own.
It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable, but this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years.
We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.
So now he's going to find out what we need instead of Donald Trump.
David Brooks is going to explain to us what all these people who are turning to Donald Trump, what they really need, because they're in pain.
He says, we'll probably need a new national story.
Up until now, America's story has been some version of the rags to riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work.
But that story isn't working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.
I don't know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive.
Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison, and loss.
A story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability, and dislocation so common today.
We'll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too.
That's what I've been waiting for.
I've been waiting for the New York Times to deliver, you know, to put down their poodles and take their dresses off, you know, and stop using the women's bathroom and come out and redefine masculinity for me.
This is David Brooks.
We'll probably need a new definition of masculinity too.
There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role.
Men are the largest of those groups.
The traditional masculine ideal, it isn't working anymore.
It leads to high dropout rates and high incarceration rates, low labor force participants.
This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness.
Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old, reticent, stoical ideal.
So in other words, this guy leaves, says, I'm going to break out of my bourgeois, left-wing, you know, elitist community to find out what America really needs.
And what he finds out he needs is we need the values of the bourgeois, left-wing, elite community.
These are all the things they've been saying.
This is the problem.
This isn't the solution.
This moron?
You know, I mean, I'm sorry, but it's ridiculous.
And so that's, you know, and this thing about masculinity and femininity, which is obviously a big thing on everybody's mind, is coming out in the worst possible way between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
I mean, this is the thing that is, that is, it's just amazing to me watching this.
So Donald Trump comes forward and he says that all Hillary's got going for her is the woman card.
If she weren't a woman, she wouldn't get 5% of the vote.
Once again, Chris Wallace comes after him and says, this is the problem with your campaign.
How are you going to fix this problem?
And here again is Trump being obnoxious, but refreshing.
Woman Card Controversy00:06:47
Now, I got to tell you, strategists and both, if you consciously went about it, if you specifically planned, you couldn't have said anything that would drive your numbers among women even lower.
Really?
Okay, well, I'm my own strategist, and I like what I said, and it's true.
I only tell the truth, and that's why people are voting for me.
Wait a minute.
Don't forget, in the Republican primaries, which I just beat Cruz by numbers that went up like 50%, I was up by so much.
I had 62 in New York, and I was 63 and 64.
With total due respect, whether or not you like, let me just ask the question.
But Chris, all of the polls coming out, I won with the women by landslides.
I beat Cruz, and I beat him.
I understand, but Hillary.
That's a different idea.
And regardless of whether you like her or not, or think that she should be president or not, to say, I mean, she was a senator, she was the Secretary of State for four years, to say if she were a man, she'd get 5%.
Isn't that kind of dismissive?
Well, Bernie Sanders said a lot worse than that.
He said that she almost shouldn't be allowed to run, that she's not qualified to run, and she's not capable.
I mean, Bernie Sanders, what he said was a lot worse than what I said, and I'm going to use that.
We'll have that teed up.
But Bernie Sanders said she shouldn't be allowed to run, that she's not capable.
And, you know, what he said is incredible.
It's a soundbite.
It's an automatic.
In fact, as soon as she said it, they broke in and they said, I can just imagine Donald Trump watching these statements Bernie Sanders has made, making about Clinton.
So, look, she's a strong person.
She's going to have to be able to take it.
The fact is, the only card she has is the woman's card.
She's done a lousy job in so many ways, and even women don't like her.
So as Chris Wallace explained, once again, and this is not an attack on Wallace, I mean, he's a good reporter, but all these guys have been saying, and women have been saying to Trump, you know, shouldn't you stop doing what's causing you to be a success?
Shouldn't you stop doing what's causing you to get votes?
You know, the polls say this, we say this, our values are this.
That's not who we are.
And he keeps winning.
He keeps winning.
So no wonder, like, after all these years of lies, after all these years of low lifes, like journalists and politicians telling us who we are, to watch them get kicked to the curb is refreshing even to me, who basically thinks, yes, this guy is a mistake.
This guy is just an imitation man.
But he sounds like a man because he's dealing with these people.
He's knocking down these pins.
So now on the other side, you have Hillary Clinton.
She's come up with her strategy of how she's going to do it.
She's going to mock him.
She's handing out to her people, she's handing out women's cards, the woman's card, and all this stuff.
And she comes on, I guess she's talking to Jake Tapper, and he asks her, you know, how are you going to deal with these savage anti-female attacks from Donald Trump?
And here's her response.
I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation and the way they behave and how they speak.
I'm not going to deal with their temper tantrums or their bullying or their efforts to try to provoke me.
He can say whatever he wants to say about me.
I could really care less.
I'm going to stand up for what I think the American people need and want in the next president.
That's why I've laid out very specific plans.
There's nothing secret about what I want to do with the economy, with education, with healthcare, with foreign policy.
I've laid it all out there.
And he can't or he won't.
I can't tell which.
So we're going to talk about what we want to do for the country, and he can continue on his insult fest, but that's the choice he's making.
So she's going to be a castrating pitch.
I mean, that's basically, I'm sorry.
I listened to that and I thought, oh, you know, these men, they misbehave.
They're just like children.
I just thought, I thought, that's your strategy.
And Trump, and Trump, I'm sorry, I hate to say nice things about the guy, but he put out a tweet and said, you know, she said she's had a lot of experience dealing with these men.
She's done very badly at it.
He pointed out, as he pointed out, so you know what?
It's like the worst example of maleness.
I mean, Trump is like a parody of what a man is.
And she is like the worst.
She's like evil mommy at this point.
I feel like the entire country is about to be plunged into the play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?
Have you ever seen the play Who's Afraid?
You can see it.
You know, the movie is great if you ever want to watch it, but it's about this warring old couple, you know, this old professor's just a battleaxe wife and this drunken husband.
They invite this nice, sweet young couple over and they just get into a massive two-hour fight.
And that's what this is like.
You know, it's like, yeah, I'm kind of not for you, men.
Well, you know, you think you're going to be president.
There is no president.
It's something you fantasize.
We're living in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
And it's just, so anyway, the thing is, what we're going to find out, if this continues, if Cruz doesn't stop it in Indiana, and even if he loses in Indiana, he may fight on and try and take away the convention.
But if we wind up, if we wind up with Trump and Hillary, it's going to be a test.
It really is going to be a test of who is closest, whose bizarre fantasy of what America is like is closest to the truth.
Because I feel like we have been listening to the David Brooks and only the David Brooks for 20 years, 30 years, maybe 40 years.
That's all we hear of these guys who sit around and talk about the crease in their pants and how wonderful it is that Obama's skin is brown.
And yes, you know, that's what a wonderful triumph that is.
And the economy, I don't know what you people are complaining about in the economy's 5% unemployment rate, 5%, you know, nobody's working, but still, the way we figure the unemployment, you know, it's like we're going to find out which of these people are right, whether it is whether Donald Trump is closer to the American heart or whether Clinton is.
And right this minute, I don't think we can tell because I think we are just so enshrouded by lies, the lies of this left-wing press, that it's impossible to know.
I think everybody, everybody has been blindsided.
And when they ask themselves what the problem is, a lot of them ought to look in the mirror.
All right.
I just want to say before I get to stuff I like, all week long I've been listening, because I don't like Donald Trump, I've been listening to these pathetic alt-right anti-Semites who come on my Twitter feed and shout all this horrible stuff.
And just for anybody who is actually interested in my particular religious perspective, I have written a book called The Great Good Thing, and it comes out in September, but you can pre-order it now, and I wish you would.
It's called The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, and it's the story of my religious journey, and I'm really proud of it.
Why American Beauty Fails00:04:26
I think it's one of the best books I ever wrote, and you can get it on all of the sites, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble.
You can pre-order it now, and as I say, I wish you would.
Now, stuff I like.
This week, we're going to welcome Ben Shapiro back from his Passover break by pulling a bit of Ben Shapiro on our own show.
Ben does this hilarious thing, stuff I hate.
I actually don't like attacking works of art because works of art are hard to make.
I make them, they're hard.
And sometimes I'd rather just sort of ignore the ones I don't like and sort of praise the ones I do.
But this week, I would just like to take a look at a couple of works that have been super praised that I think stink.
Okay, so this is stuff I like that I hate, you know, or stuff you like that I hate.
I mean, these are things that are listed maybe among the best movies, the 100 best movies.
And the first one is one of my least favorite films, and I don't dislike it because I dislike it.
I dislike it because it's bad.
It's a bad movie.
And the movie is American Beauty.
This one, the best film Oscar for 1999, excellent performance by Kevin Spacey, written by the guy whose name just went right out of my head.
What's his name?
Anyway, I'll come back to it, but he's done a lot of stuff since on HBO, a very highly praised writer.
And American Beauty is about a suburban husband who has an affair with a young girl.
Except the problem with it is, is that it's really about being gay, and it's a dishonest movie.
That's what really bothers me about it.
If you read the movie as a story about a married man who has an affair with a young boy, the whole movie makes sense.
Now, basically, that doesn't bother me.
We just talked about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, also written by a gay guy, also could be seen as gay.
One of the greatest American plays, Streetcar Named Desire, also written by a gay guy, clearly with a lot of gay imagery in it, but still, it applies to everybody.
It's universal.
Both Virginia Woolf and Streetcar Named Desire are universal plays because they found these playwrights were brilliant and they found the universal truths in all of this.
Everything in American Beauty is false.
Its depiction of the suburbs is from another time.
It's from the 50s.
It's totally dishonest.
It reads as if a guy had never been in the suburbs.
Its love affair between Kevin Spacey and the girl is also dishonest, very much really a gay love affair being kind of, you know, with a woman playing the young boy's part.
And most dishonest of all is this picture of Chris Cooper playing a Marine Colonel, which is a who hates gay people because he really is secretly gay.
And this is just a gay fantasy that is complete nonsense.
I mean, plenty of people just hate them because they hate them.
And I'm not condoning it.
I'm just saying it doesn't come out of anything himself.
One of the silliest scenes in this movie is this one where Chris Cooper as the Marine Colonel is attracted to Kevin Spacey and starts to think that maybe Kevin Spacey is making a pass at him.
Yep, we missed it.
Your wife is with another man and you don't care.
Nope.
Our marriage is just for show.
A commercial for how normal we are when we're anything but this man, you are shaking.
We really ought to get you out of these clothes.
You know, I mean, it's just an absurd gay fantasy.
Alan Ball is the name of the writer.
Everything he writes is, you know, he writes stories about vampires.
The vampires are really gay.
He writes stories about, you know, everything he does.
And again, that's not what I'm objecting to.
I'm objecting to the dishonesty.
And every character is dishonest.
The milieu of the suburbs is dishonest.
It plays into left-wing fantasies of what life is like, and it's totally untrue.
And it got awarded for being untrue, for being untrue, for selling a point of view that is just not the real world.
Really dislike this movie, American Beauty.
And we'll have more things that I dislike as the week continues, probably including the Indiana primaries.
But we'll talk about it all, and we will not lose our senses of humor by God as we go down the train together.