Hit her, baby, one more time
In response to yesterday’s post, Anonymous writes —
“Why would Britney”… is already the wrong approach and question. Why do you see an individual reasoning? This is no play. “Britney”, as one can see from Moore’s film, is an idiot, in the real sense of the word. Really, nothing personal, she is. How many interviews and subsequent white-trashtastic failures does it take to show over the YEARS, the chances to prove after her mother-managed first years that she understood anything, are gone. We talk about a “poor” girl who is rumoured to make 700thou a MONTH without doing anything. Such is the sublime banality of the U.S. media culture.
This comment interests me. Anonymous’s anger here is palpable, and reflects some of the strong feelings I’ve been hearing about Ms. Spears’s attempted comeback (including another long piece in the New York Times today). Any artist who makes people this angry must be worthy of some kind of attention.
So let’s examine this comment a little more closely.
Spears’s individuality, in Anonymous’s opinion, hinges on the fact of her supposed idiocy. If I’m reading this correctly, what Anonymous seems to be saying is that Britney is too stupid to have a successful career on her own, that she has been managed and packaged and handled and promoted and, if left to her own devices, would be unable to string two words together or feed herself properly.
Well, let me just say that I have no problem with that. I don’t demand that artists be scholars, or even particularly bright. I don’t care if they are drooling morons, as long as they have something to contribute to our culture. Elvis Presley had trouble with food, drugs and sex, Frank Sinatra was an alcoholic, woman-beating psychopath, Chuck Berry was a pathetic degenerate and Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin. None of these guys would ever make it at the Algonquin round table, but each one of them is a sublime, significant American artist.
So what is eating Anonymous? Spears’s “idiocy” is related, in the poster’s mind, to her “white-trashtastic failures.” So it’s a class thing then perhaps, Anonymous is upset not because a pop-star is a failure, but because she is betraying her “class.” I personally don’t know Spears’s background so I don’t know if she’s reverting to her white-trash roots or not. But let’s bring up Elvis again, since Spears decided to the other night it seems fair game. Elvis Presley was renowned for what Anonymous would call “white-trashtastic failures.” In Elvis’s mind, he was always and forever a white-trash truck-driver who got lucky, and his subsequent actions reflect that. He had terrible taste in clothes, food and manners, and behaved in the most garish, uncouth and barbaric ways, so much so that, by the end of his life, his personal tastes had completely overshadowed his substantial musical legacy. So I, for one, am still unconvinced by Anonymous’s argument — I don’t need my artists to be refined sophisticates any more than I need them to be scholars.
Next, Anonymous is outraged by Spears’s alleged income. This I can reject out of hand — you sing a super-hit song, you get millions of dollars. That’s the way it goes. I may like the song, I may not (and in the case of Spears, I couldn’t even hum it for you), but if people bought her music, she deserves the money. Lots of popular artists make art I don’t cotton to that other people do — I see nothing wrong here.
But now, Anonymous’s argument gets interesting. “The sublime banality of the US media culture.” Ah, so, it’s a national problem — Spears is a symptom of some sort of larger national disgrace.
Anonymous has, I think, hit on something here. We here in the US have been living through six years of utter bullshit, not unlike the England of Orwell’s 1984. We have been told, day after day, for six years, things that everyone can plainly see are untrue. This has produced a kind of national nausea, we’re like a nation of abused children being ruled by bullies who want to punch anybody who wears glasses, and a media culture who will snigger along with the bullies as they beat up the nerds and laugh at all their pranks. We know the Bush administration was wrong in their response to 9/11, we know they lied to us about Iraq, we know they abused the darkest moment of our recent national history in the most cynical and heartless way possible to gut our constitution and ransack our national treasury. We took five years of that and then elected a Democratic congress, who has, so far, done precisely nothing that we asked them to do. We, as a people, feel powerless and bitterly, bitterly frustrated after six years of being ruled by cruel, brutal monsters who are aware of every moment of our agony and laugh to each other about it, slap each other on the back and say “Heckuva job.”
We feel like we can’t do anything about Bush or the media who writes down every stupid lie he utters as though it is truth and common sense. We can, however, do something about Britney Spears, who, as Anonymous says, is, like Bush, an idiot, a puppet controlled by a machine, raking in cash, promoted by our national media, made famous for her embarrassing “white-trash” pratfalls while the rest of us suffer. We can’t get Bush out of office, but we can destroy the career of Britney Spears.
I must admit, I was baffled by the Times headline today — “Spears’s Awards Fiasco Stirs Speculation About Her Future.” I thought, really? Speculation about her future? From who? Why? Who cares? Why is this in the New York Times?
And I realized, this isn’t about Spears at all, this is about Bush, or rather, it is about our national health. Spears, we have decided, no longer deserves the fame and wealth we heaped upon her — she has betrayed us. Given the perfect context and opportunity for a “comeback,” she flubbed it — took the TV time and the money, stumbled as badly through her routine as Bush stumbles through a simple declarative English sentence, and said “now give me my career back.” We’ve had six years of this bullshit and we’re not going to take it any more.
(The timing could not have been worse, putting on this non-show so close to the anniversary of 9/11, and with the Petraeus testimony looming the next day. We as a nation were at our highest level of shame, disgust and anger toward our elected officials that night. What if Spears had triumphed? She could have truly “come back” in the Elvis sense, been a truly popular artist who does what a truly popular (that is, “of the people”) artist does — she could have taken the anxieties, hopes and dreams of a nation and crystallized them into a pure pop moment of power, hope and, sure, why not, sex — man, what a show that would have been! Why, that would have been like Elvis Presley getting his act together and proving himself for his Christmas special in — what year was that again? oh yeah, 1968, the high-water year of Vietnam and the year the entire world rioted. See, that’s what was riding on Elvis in 68, that’s why he closed the show with “If I Can Dream” — his message was “Hey, World, I pulled it together, I lost the weight, I regained my focus, and I deeply care — why can’t you?”)
What was the name of Spears’s song on Sunday? Oh yes — “Gimme More” — the chant of the Bush administration. Why wasn’t the song called “Four More Years?” Britney demanded more, just as Bush has demanded more — more of the middle-class’s money, more of the poor’s children, more of our national dignity, all without giving us anything in return. We cannot rebel against a grinning moron who controls the courts, the Congress and the media, but by gum we can certainly rebel against a stumbling buffoon who demands that we watch a lame, three-minute dance routine. Not to sound too much like the hysterical young man now, doubtless, famous on Youtube for his impassioned defense, but I suspect that Britney is now dying for the sins of Bush.
When Anon. refers to Moore’s film, s/he is probably referring to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, in which Britney gives her unconditional support to our current president.
Thank you — it’s been a while since I’ve seen that movie.
I confess to being baffled by the “This is no play” sentence
This confused me too. But looking at it again, I think it might be a dig on your status as a playwright.
Or I could be completely wrong.
I’m kind of baffled by all the fat comments. She may not be skinny anymore, but jeez.
And the hysterical young man appears to a satirist of some sort. But one of the sort where there’s very little indication that what he does is actually satire. Then again, maybe that video is sincere and the others aren’t. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t care that much.
That would be my almost-entirely-nonexistent status as a playwright. But then, why tie that together with Spears’s idiocy and non-individual status? Perhaps Anonymous is suggesting that Spears is not the protagonist of her own life, and therefore it is wrong to examine her actions in a cause-and-effect way.
I knew the hysterical young man was too good to be true. Best of luck to him.
You might be onto something but it might also be a case of building up l’affaire Spears into something more than it really is. Furthermore, while she claimed to support the war, many people far more intelligent than Britney, for whatever reason, did the same. I’ll be charitable and assume that her endorsement was due to a natural tendency to offer words of support for our troops during moments of national crisis. Of course, she may have arrived at her decision only after having pondered all of the available information and after carefully weighing the socio-economic pros and cons that regime change and democratization could bring to that historically troubled region. But I doubt it.
We the people might be fed up with the current administration (I know I certainly am) but I think the backlash against Britney is more likely attributed to old-fashioned pettiness and simple human nature. We love a good trainwreck, whether it’s a minivan full of strangers or the life of people more famous, more wealthy, more attractive, more powerful and yes, sometimes, even more talented than we are. We love to build people up and then tear them back down. And for those of us who never got on the band wagon in the first place we can smugly point at the media freakshow and say, “See? I told you she was no damned good.” That nasty aspect of human nature far pre-dates this heinous administration. Feel free to blame them for just about everything else though.
I had forgotten that she had once publicly supported the war. But knowing that does not alter my view — Elvis Presley supported Nixon and wanted to help him rid the US of drug-taking weirdos, and went so far as to go to the White House, unannounced, high on drugs and carrying a gun, to talk to Nixon personally. His blinding hypocrisy and political naivety does not diminish his status as an artist.
I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that Bush is responsible for the career of Britney Spears (if anything, she’s clearly a Clinton-era star), but I still maintain that the public outcry against her has little to do with her off-night at the VMAs. The New York Times wonders, for god’s sake, if her career can recover from the show, as though no artist has ever recovered from a bad performance before. It’s not like she got caught molesting children, she just put on a bad show. (Why can’t people just leave her alone?!) This has nothing to do with whether or not her career can “recover” (and let’s not forget, “Gimme More” is still a big, big hit, even after the VMAs) and everything to do with our desire to destroy her.
“our desire to destroy her”
See my child-sacrifice note below, which I was writing at the same time you were writing this…
–Ed.
I think you raise a lot of interesting points and I think there may be some people reacting to exactly the things you pointed out, however, (and it gives me no joy to say it) I think the majority of people genuinely give a shit about this crap, or think they do until the next celebutard does something to grab their interest. (Is Britney still news? It must have been a slow news week on the Lindsay Lohan/Brangelina front).
Some people will tell you that the reason more people vote on American Idol than they do in political elections is because on Idol they feel that they can participate in a democratic race in which their votes genuinely count. That’s an interesting theory but I think it bestows more gravitas on the subject than it deserves. More people vote for a stupid TV show because it’s easier. They don’t have to do any thinking more complex than “well, she’s cute and she sings real good.” You don’t have to weigh a candidates’ experience, voting record, or ethical lapses. You don’t have to worry about, you know, real issues or do any reading involving big words. Democracy is hard (just ask an Iraqi) but lascivious freak shows starring gaudy celebrities is distracting, self-medicating brain candy that sells itself.
Even a respected publication like the NYTimes knows that soft news sells papers. If the venerable “Gray Lady” deigns to run a story on Ms. Spears’ over-inflated public meltdown it’s less likely to be a reflection of the country’s political frustrations and more likely to prove that even that esteemed journal occasionally feels the need to traffic in gossip and tittilation.
Man, I typed more than I thought. I promise not to make a habit of it.
They don’t have to do any thinking more complex than “well, she’s cute and she sings real good.” You don’t have to weigh a candidates’ experience, voting record, or ethical lapses. You don’t have to worry about, you know, real issues or do any reading involving big words.
More importantly, you don’t have to leave the house. You don’t even have to leave the couch.
If people merely laughed at Spears’s meltdown or, god forbid, felt sympathy for her in a publicly humiliating situation, I’d agree with you. But people today feel angry about her, as though, by stumbling through a dance routine, she’d personally betrayed their trust. Which sounds suspiciously to me like the way we feel about Bush.
I don’t know, I wouldn’t underestimate the “people”, but sure, “anger” is the most viable expression for the short attention span of media and so what gets sent out.
Also: she didn’t “stumble through a dance routine”, she let it be known publically the nights before, through the backstage and onto the stage, that she enacted a series of steps way before she went onstage, and we are seeing the culmination of that, from the attire, the physique, the stoned, comatose eyes, the disregard for any of her so-caled audience. So that what you call “anger” may also just be directed at the industry who is using her, and of which she has always stood happily in for as signifier. Why do you imagine it is only her, and not what she stands for, that is being addressed? I don’t think the “people” have a problem with stating the layers, given the chance.
I certainly agree that Spears is, to a large extent, a cog in a machine, but I have not seen anger expressed toward the machine as you suggest, whether people are feeling it or not. If anything, as I elaborate elsewhere in this comments section, people seem upset that she failed to live up to her commitment as a cog.
“The New York Times wonders, for god’s sake, if her career can recover from the show, as though no artist has ever recovered from a bad performance before.”
Exactly – NYtimes creates an issue to avoid the obvious one that has been discussed, that her career has been dormant, the “recover” factor was a question before the performance, not due to the performance, the performance was just interesting because of how many were hyping her and one sees then how many interests need her around. The NY times article and others, made it seem as if THIS one performance was the issue, deflecting from the point it has been YEARS since there is anything worthwhile music-wise to Britney.
She did not just put on a “bad show”, you make it sound like it was a concert and she showed up with a hoarse voice. This was a long string of symbols that have been aligned together to prod up Britney-value, and each one has been failing to instigate the usual market response. All she keeps having success with is being tabloid-fodder, and that, as any market analyst will tell you, is a junk-bond status in terms of the corporate culture.
Britney/Bush
As much as I enjoy the idea of the Britney backlash substituting for more legitimate rage at the evil of our national “leaders,” I have to agree with mr_noy. There’s an awful lot of schadenfreude going on here.
Or perhaps we’ve come back to Todd’s myth of child sacrifice: Britney, once a cute, reasonably talented kid discovered by the wholesome folks at Disney [somebody fact-check that, please], was sacrificed by her own mother on the altar of fame. We all watched in stunned fascination as her nascent sexuality was exploited in the most public way possible. And now her own children look like they’re strapped down and ready for the knife, while the gossip-guzzling public screams for more.
She’s also gotten tangled in that other mythic paradigm, the virgin/whore/mommy complex. She went straight from virgin to whore — freaking out one consituency — then from whore to mommy (seen as a state of regained virginity in our culture). People can’t forgive her for being both a whore and a mother simultaneously (that’s at the root of Anonymous’ anger, too).
And on the political connection, here’s a link to Jezebel.com [http://jezebel.com/gossip/evening-purge/has-the-whole-world-lost-its-corset-299349.php] (owned by Gawker Media), whose blogger implies that the whole Britney flap is a way for everyone to ignore all the truly awful, actual news of the week. Read the comments!
–Ed.
Re: Britney/Bush
Both Britney and Christina began their careers as Mouseketeers.
Re: Britney/Bush
“People can’t forgive her for being both a whore and a mother simultaneously (that’s at the root of Anonymous’ anger, too).”
No, no, no – the “root” of whatever so-called anger should be there, is: Please finally THROW OUT THE BABY and KEEP THE DIRTY BATHWATER. She isn’t enough of any of those symbols you raise to quantify her into categories, she just isn’t. Not if you’ve seen real characters in the past decades, who also performed. She ain’t tragic enough, nor superstar enough and so on. So we end up only with this new kind of mediocre 24-hour a day blog-media construction of “shock” at Britney as bad mother, bad wife, bad media star, etc.
The idea that a public wants Britney, is naive. Just take the media away and watch what happens. Just look at the faces of alot of black culture there at MTV, who would have liked the opening slot of the awards show, watching this character being trotted out instead of one of them, and ask just whose popularity is being maintained…
So it isn’t the easy psychology reading of mother-whore only, there are classes and media industry audiences being constructed here.
Re: Britney/Bush
Well now, it’s interesting that, on top of everything else, you also bring race into the equation. I noticed that the MTV cameras were trained on black faces, but I didn’t see envy or hatred on them. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that they were associates of Spears’s who were feeling awkward embarrassment at her televised pratfall. But now you’re making, for me, the connection from Britney to Bush even stronger. For a lot of the nation, the dance routine was Bush’s treatment of the war in Iraq, but for blacks it was more like Bush’s reaction to New Orleans, that is, “what is the minimum I have to do so that people will leave me alone?” Blacks saw Bush in New Orleans and were justifiably outraged at his total lack of empathy, just as, you say, they were outraged by Britney’s assumption of power by usurping the opening slot of the VMAs, which should have, you say, gone to a more deserving, more credible act.
I highlight this sentence mostly for the “bad media star” phrase, because I think it’s another symptom of what upsets us about Britney. We feel like, as America, we should be able to manufacture media stars to beat every other nation’s media stars hands down. Yet here we have a perfect media star, placed in a context where she should have had the perfect opportunity to impress us with her manufactured perfection, and she let us down. And that makes us feel bad as a nation, because the machine didn’t work. If we can’t control a product as artificial as Britney Spears, how can the world expect us to successfully control a product as artificial as the war in Iraq?
Re: Britney/Bush
“I noticed that the MTV cameras were trained on black faces, but I didn’t see envy or hatred on them. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that they were associates of Spears’s who were feeling awkward embarrassment at her televised pratfall.”
It doesn’t take a Spike Lee film to remind us of what faces such entertainment stars need to have to BE on tv, especially live at that moment. Angry, scowling, etc. African-American men do not mega-record sales make.
And covering their smiles or amazement at Britney’s fate (partly as they were partying with her the night before) can be allowed in the equation – hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if even she is laughing later with them at the next bar.
Re: Britney/Bush
Remind me to check the covers of every rap record made in the last 20 years.
And Kanye didn’t get the award again this year. damnnnn.
This is satellite at best, but the play “Third” deals with the same sort of transference. A liberal arts professor metaphorically crucifies an apparently privileged conservative student as a means of fighting against the president just before the onset of the Iraq war. It’s a slightly different flavor than making scapegoats out of former pop queens, but it jumped to mind nonetheless.
J’accuse!
The anger and teeth-gnashing vitriol surprised me, too. I look at Britney and our illustrious leader, both national laughing-stocks, and I just want to say–hold on a minute. Britney Spears has always been a shrill, tune-deaf trollop. She never could dance. She is what she is, a tainted meat by-product of our twisted cultural sexual subconscious, weaned from birth on chlamydia, Marlboro Reds and Zima. Likewise, George W. Bush has been a stammering, bumbling, malicious buffoon since he paratrooped out of his mother’s minge–the only successful ground assault the man’s ever led. Yet Britney’s sold tens of millions of records and George W. Bush is (ostensibly, anyway) a twice-elected President of the United States. Neither of these individuals would be on the global stage unless countless millions of people embraced them wholeheartedly and threw millions of dollars at them. Now, when the damage is done and the consequences are coming home to roost, now America says “how horrible you are! What an awful, stupid, horrible person you are! You no longer amuse us! Bring us a new horrible, awful person!” Bush and Britney are part of an evil machine, sure–and all these self-righteous people who are now so indignant and horrified and shocked! shocked! are the machine! Every Bush voter, every Britney fan made this happen. Bush and Britney both pander to the darkest impulses of human nature. People chose to buy it, to usher in this dark and venal age, and they should have to live with the consequences. If they want to get mad at somebody about it, if they want to hold someone accountable, I would direct them to the nearest mirror.
Re: J’accuse!
Please..Forget the so-called “anger” factor, that seems to be over-interpreted around here. But I can’t believe alot of comments here that inevitably seem to boil down to a kind of “greater good for the greatest number” repackaged in marketing-speak.
Since when has it been – certainly in these past few decades – that the kind of huge, “mass” audiences vote/bought without a degree of manipulative forces behind that, making tastes, constructing identifications and so on? Especially tweens. It’s a balance, there ARE times such manipulations go out of whack, and yeah things snap.
Why is after all this recent story, she being considered to trot out for the Emmy awards ceremony, is it because she has so many sales? her acting peformances? Would the same occur for alot of other high-sales earning acts?
How can it be just say, oh it’s because of all of you who voted these people in, or bought their records? Someone must like it, etc….
Sorry, but it sounds like an easy devil’s advocate: Ok, everyone is blaming Britney, so now I will turn around and ask them to look at themselves. Yeah, sure, “J’accuse!” is always an applicable, sobering statement, but not at all fully explaining the reason to react against and comment upon a complex American media culture that both B and B are part of.
So it’s all about free will, the recognition that you can just “turn it off” or vote out the President. Really? Notice that VMAwards evening the representatives of “other” American cultures at the VMAwards, and their expressions as Britney got the coveted (in terms of business symbols) opening slot… and walks on, appearing comatose. If that were anyone else? A non-caucasion blonde girl? IF it were based on greatest sales, or greatest audience numbers that got that slot usually etc… then OTHER people would have been having that slot. Such is the “greatest good for the greatest number” or “most popular rules” etc… in reality.
What is being commented on with a kind of vehemence or insight, or both, is the machinations so obviously at work, of which she is but a signifier of. As an individual, she has nothing to contribute to this story, as we see whenever she opens her mouth. Britney was always a corporate enterprise, not an individual who understood her role in that, and THAT is what is being targeted now, the sloppy, screw-you-all mechanics at work – no, the obviousness to it, to the desperation to keep her afloat. Which yes, does stand for some other things going on, but also is strictly ABOUT itself too.
Just rewind and look at the VMA audiences, all those American, non-Caucasian million sellers watching this bloated-with-a-song-stuck- at- #85 (on some charts ONLY) being promoted on there for her tabloid factor, not for “the music” and sales. You could cut from the audience of survivors to the stage, and imagine Bush saying “Brit’s doing a great job”, or?
“Britney” isn’t an individual is the point, she’s a signifier, being addressed for countless reasons surely, but in other words isn’t simply a person whose “songs” were bought and thus those who buy (especially tween markets) have the power to just deny it, to turn it off, and simply end it. If only the synergies of entertainment industry worked like that today…
Todd — may I call you Todd?, now that I have produced comments that have supplied the impetus for a whole new posting by you? There must be a lesson here, I have commented over years here, and the one that gets it’s own dedicated alcott.html is…a set of comments in ez-chair, lite-mode, due to the fact they were of all things, Britney. Man..this isn’t even hubris I am feeling here, just perplexed at fate. At any rate, I am changing my name from Anonymous, after this one.
Obviously not all tones translate in text well, but it wasn’t anger at all, but more snark, a mode I felt fit to the topic (Britney et al). That obviously requires new kinds of punctuation marks.
Todd, here is perhaps the point of where I was coming from, rather than anger per say: There was a time I recall, when Sonic Youth at its first wave of early do-no-wrong glory, stated their ultimate-Madonna-fan position, and covering “into the groove” and so on, and totally freaked out an indie community. At first. But it showed what kind of characters were being forged in that moment, of both the “entertainment-material girl” model, that spawns a whole culture, as well as the “avant indie-band”. They had possibilities to reflect, to think, to act, and so on. That act reflected the era of savvy convergences, and had some foresight as to the way things would play out in the music and arts. It was also easy to see the intertwinement of media and politics in those conservative Reagan years and how Madonna as well as Sonic Youth could be understood as a product of that. And so on. Not that media DEVELOPS them, but they all changed in formidable ways, and it was intertwined. And yes, Madonna’s formation was greatly belonging to the Reagan years in certain ways as Britney belongs to the Christian Bush Legacy, one could say that.
Yes, it was after that era that the Disney-legacy performers were brought in, kids brought in by whom? to go after the tweens market and occupy the MTV slots etc… marketing for male fantasies. And that was so unempowered, a white-kids movement, who accepted the awards on MTV by giving big thanks to Christ, like Britney, who would gesture up above and remind everyone.
Madonna signified dealing with a reality through her transforming construction. Britney is solely a one-dimensional, static construction from others. Madonna chose a specific religion to take on, her psyche if you like, all the way to the Pope. Britney, stands for lack of psyche, a committee-made, demographic marketing of “faith-based” and all that kind of Bush-way of speaking on religion as if the same as faith. So I meant, the inverse Madonna, and that is nowhere clearer than in the position to government and religion and of course, media. (Before Madonna’s religion became celebrity)
So it peeved me to see you considered her as an individual, a person who actually makes decisions on songs to choose, on career, on anything, certainly in a blog that KNOWS music and the arts and writes on that to a degree.
Now, the “Moore” was Michael Moore, F911,the scene with Britney was important at the time. But then so much back then in that film faded from memory.
As for “white-trashtastic” the point is that it is NOT class-based at all, but the belief in money replacing class relations, that virtual entertainment world that seems so marvelous. That is a trash much different than “white-trash”, and thus I intended the “-tastic”.
Elvis was hillbilly-country. What makes him intriguing in American culture, is how he did some trashtastic things as well, but he managed something unique and creative out of that background, certainly in terms of gospel, and race, and it grounded him – and we recognize something of ourselves or stories in that.
What do we want to recognize in Britney? who is very middle-class, not white-trash but calls up Disney-theme-park-Tennessee trash, acting out and using it as an excuse for whatever she aspires to lacking an education, a creativity, and a background culture other than money.
As for the rest of your posts this blog is one of the highlights of my reading day, because of its consistency, the film analysis I have marvelled at, and for managing to touch on the Venture Bros waaaay back.
Ok. From here out, this “anonymous” is no more!
I just want to add here that, as far as I’m concerned, Sonic Youth are still in their early do-no-wrong wave of glory.
On top of everything else, you are an optimist.
Guilty as charged.
Many of us feel exactly the same.
Great read again 🙂