Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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Prognosticating about the future: A so-so track record somewhere between the Groundhog, seer of seers, St. Malachy and Nostradamus

I studied graduate level American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario from 1993 to 1995. Before that, I studied history as an undergraduate at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, on-and-off, for pretty much forever, or at least between 1976 and 1993, which sometimes felt like forever. I also spent more than three decades working as a journalist and now I work in a university library. So how good am I at prognostication and prediction? Perhaps better than some groundhogs are every Feb. 2, but still not in the league of Nostradamus or Maelmhaedhoc O’Morgair, born in Armagh in 1094, later to be known as St. Malachy, to be sure (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/04/the-prophecy-of-malachy/). And come to think of it, almost seven years ago in March 2013, I didn’t see Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires in Argentina, becoming Pope Francis. Who did?

Sure, I sometimes (OK fairly frequently or at least with some regularity) write about such doomsday topics as pandemics and economic meltdowns, not because I’m always prescient, but rather because I understand they’re both cyclical phenomenon. “How quickly we could we make a trip back to a modern-day equivalent to the Dark Ages of the 5^th to 11^th centuries?” I cheerily asked in a Jan. 23 post here, headlined “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/).

When it comes to pandemics and economic meltdowns, they’re always coming and the next one may well be bigger than the last one. Something like earthquakes. In reality, of course, that all has more to do with mathematical probability than me being a seer-like scribe, although one can always wish for that.

While The Jetsons cartoon television show, which only aired for a single season in 1962-63, but became a popular culture benchmark for my generation in terms of measuring our distance from the future, works OK for gadgets (still waiting for flying cars, hyperloops, and jetpacks, but the Slovakian startup AeroMobil is hard at work on a car that can turn into an airplane and vice versa; while other startups like AquaFlyer, Martin JetPack and Jet Pack International are working towards jetpack reality) in particular (as do the many iterations of Star Trek, for that matter), we’re not as good on the non-gadget, non-cyclical side of predicting the future, myself included.

The list of what I didn’t see coming is so long, it would be easier to enumerate the few things I did see coming. But here’s a few things I missed along the way, just in the first two decades of the 21st century, which turned out to have some historical significance.

At the beginning of 2008, I did not foresee the United States was a little more than 10 months away from electing its first Black president and that president would be Barack Obama, and that he would be easily re-elected to a second term in 2012. Obama was an obscure senator from Illinois, at least to my mind, in early 2008, and early in the year I thought Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. The long winter and spring primary season campaign trail changed all that in terms of who I saw winning the party nomination, and Lehman Brothers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at 1:45 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2008, following a mass exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. Lehman’s bankruptcy filing remains the largest in U.S. history. The name Lehman Brothers  would soon become shorthand for one thing – and one thing only: the collapse of the investment bank triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in the Great Recession, the most financially cataclysmic event since the decade of the Great Depression from 1929 to 1939, and ended the late John McCain’s chances to become president in the general election that followed, as even with the novelty of Sarah Palin, as his VP running mate, the prospect of a third-term Republican presidency was beyond the pale to most  American voters a dozen years ago. As Peggy Noonan put it so well in a perfect football analogy in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 14, 2008, “the idea has settled in that America just threw long.”

And speaking of American presidents, and missing or coming late to certain realizations, while now President Donald Trump formally announced his candidacy on June 16, 2015, with a campaign rally and speech at Trump Tower in New York City, it wasn’t until the Republican winter and spring primary season campaign trail victories of 2016 that I started to really pay much attention to his candidacy.  Later in the fall, it was Allan Lichtman and Michael Moore who convinced me Trump was going to dispatch Hillary Clinton back home to Chappaqua in the general election and become president, polling be damned.

My political myopia, sadly, hasn’t been limited to the New World. Across the Atlantic, I didn’t see the United Kingdom general election result of 2010, leading to the first “hung parliament” since 1974, followed by the coalition government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

Nick who?

Can’t say I saw much in advance either Cameron promising in 2015 to hold a referendum on the United Kingdom’s continued European Union (EU) membership after the UK Independence Party (UKIP) strong showing the previous year. We all know how 47 years from Jan. 1, 1973 to Jan. 31, 2020 ended last week: Brexit+6=Post-Operation Yellowhammer/Operation Redfold.  Apparently the United Kingdom still has food, medicine, money, and moving freight.

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Be it resolved for 2018: Let’s all chill a bit on The Donald

One can’t impose, I suppose, New Year’s resolutions on others, only yourself, which has struck me at times as a pity. Because if I could I would have folks dial back their Donald J. Trump vitriol and chill a bit as he begins the second year of his presidency. Yes, I know, he’s repeatedly called out most of the mainstream media as “Fake News,” which can’t be easy to stomach, especially coming from a serial tweeter whose own “facts” as often as not don’t comport fully, or sometimes even marginally, with the truth.

Tough. Raise the bar and take a higher road.

Two very different but interesting pieces – one a news story, the other an op-ed column – appeared over the last couple of days, reminding how much a reset is needed.

In the case of Darlene Superville’s news story for The Associated Press on Trump being the first president not to host a state dinner his first year in office since “Silent Cal” Calvin Coolidge, who became president on Aug. 3, 1923, but didn’t hold his first state dinner until Oct. 21, 1926 for Queen Marie of Romania, the problem perhaps is one of overemphasis on that interesting but, at least in my view, hardly earth shattering reality, combined with a snarky two-graf lede”: “President Donald Trump couldn’t stop talking about the red carpets, military parades and fancy dinners that were lavished upon him during state visits on his recent tour of Asia,” Superville writes. “‘Magnificent,’ he declared at one point on the trip. But Trump has yet to reciprocate, making him the first president in almost a century to close his first year in office without welcoming a visiting counterpart to the U.S. with similar trappings.”

But then Superville goes on in the very next paragraph and the one after to write: “Trump spoke dismissively of state dinners as a candidate, when he panned President Barack Obama’s decision to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping with a 2015 state visit. Such visits are an important diplomatic tool that includes a showy arrival ceremony and an elaborate dinner at the White House. ‘I would not be throwing (Xi) a dinner,’ Trump said at the time. ‘I would get him a McDonald’s hamburger and say we’ve got to get down to work.’”

So Trump has been on the record for a time now as not being a fan of state dinners. So we should be surprised, shocked or worried that he didn’t hold one in 2017?

Superville, who has covered the White House since 2009, came to Washington after covering the New Jersey Statehouse and the 1993 Whitman-Florio gubernatorial race, and got her start with the AP back in June 1988 in New Jersey.

Her point here is that state dinners are an important diplomatic tool, a point reinforced through sources Anita McBride, “a veteran of three Republican administrations who last served as chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush” and Peter Selfridge, “who served as a liaison between the White House and visiting foreign dignitaries as U.S. chief of protocol from 2014 to January 2017.”

Fair enough, although I might have thought state dinners were often useful as diplomatic tools, rather than necessarily essential or important, to draw a bit of a distinction. And as I recall, back on the campaign trail in June 2016, Trump had also said that under the right circumstances he would meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and again forego the state dinner in favour of hamburgers.

So, OK, state dinners may be important diplomatic tools, but it seems an oddly pressed point at the moment when the most dangerous diplomatic crisis in the world is the one that exists between North Korea and the United States, with Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump both cut from a bit of a different cloth from the recent historical norm when it comes to their ideas about what constitutes diplomacy.

State dinner? How about a dish of Realpolitik? Someone send out for some Mickey D’s.

New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Bruni wrote a well-argued column on overreach and hyperbole by Democrats and other liberals, headlined “The End of Trump and the End of Days, “which ran yesterday.  Bruni starts out: “To travel the liberal byways of social media over recent weeks was to learn that Donald Trump was on the precipice of axing Robert Mueller and was likely to use the days just before Christmas, when we were distracted by eggnog and mistletoe, to lower the blade.

“Christmas has come. Christmas has gone. Mueller has not.

“To listen to Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, the tax overhaul that Trump just signed into law is no mere plutocratic folly. It’s “Armageddon” (Pelosi’s actual word). Their opposition is righteous, but how will millions of voters who notice smaller withholdings from their paychecks and more money in their pockets square that seemingly good fortune with such prophecies of doom on a biblical scale?

“Some of these Americans may decide that the prophets aren’t to be trusted – and that the president isn’t quite the pestilence they make him out to be.”

The entire Bruni column is worth a read and can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/opinion/trump-liberals-armageddon.html

I wrote a post for soundingsjohnbarker in July 2016, headlined “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/) in which I argued that “right-wing populism is not centralized authoritarian Fascism.

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to terms who served two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.”

A year after Trump’s election, I still think this is largely true. Even his appointment of Neil Gorsuch, as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Antonin Scalia, has not made me, at least as yet, wish the court had been dissolved.

As for other issues in international diplomacy, such as Trump reiterating the moving of the United States embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which became law on Nov. 8, 1995, called for the relocation of the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, no later than May 31, 1999.  For that matter, I seem to recall former Progressive Conservative prime minister Joe Clark committing to moving the Canadian embassy in Israel 20 years before 1999 from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – way back on June 6, 1979, although the Tories were backpedalling on the promise four months later in October 1979.

While the United Nations General Assembly resolution earlier this month to condemn Trump’s decision to move the Embassy of the United States in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, by a vote of 128 countries in favour, nine against, 35 abstentions, including Canada, and 21 countries not participating in the vote, shows the move is far from popular internationally, it is also far from the end of the world as we know it, as the modulated outrage in the Arab world suggests.

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The metrics of Netflix binge-watching: Autoplay and synthesizing the zeitgeist

The big entertainment news last weekend was that Netflix, the California company founded in 1997 and famous for riding the tide from its original core business model of mailing out DVDs to customers for rental to becoming a huge provider of video-on-demand via the Internet when the DVD business died one day in 2011, has announced it has 15 new original series debuting in 2016.

As CBS News noted Jan. 1, “With shows like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, Netflix has led the pack when it comes to original streaming series. The streaming service picked up several Golden Globe nominations recently for Narcos, Orange Is the New Black, Grace & Frankie and House of Cards.”

And if that’ not enough, Forbes magazine ran a story Jan. 3  headlined, “Why ‘Making a Murderer’ Is Netflix’s Most Significant Show Ever” and “not just because the genre has switched from scripted drama and comedy to a true crime documentary,” says Paul Tassi, a Forbes contributor who writes usually about video games for the magazine, but rather “because this is the first Netflix show that seems to have completely consumed its viewerbase from top to bottom. Though many of the shows mentioned above are popular, they have pretty specific audiences. But Making a Murderer? The story of Steve Avery has seemed to hook pretty much everyone who has laid eyes on it.”

Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, co-executive producers, writers and directors at Synthesis Films LLC, a Los Angeles-based film production company, spent a decade whittling down over 700 hours of footage to craft the 10-part Making a Murderer documentary series released on Netflix Dec. 18.

With serious long-form true-crime documentary being the hottest genre of the moment, the Making a Murderer documentary series is perfect for its legendary binge-watching autoplay audience that Netflix has made a science of creating and studying with series episodes that run one right after the other before you have time to even get up from the couch and refill the bowl with Cheetos®. The phenomenon is so profound at the moment that UK-based Collins English Dictionary picked “binge-watch” in November as its 2015 Word of the Year. Usage of the verb – defined as “to watch a large number of television programs (especially all the shows from one series) in succession” – has tripled since the previous year, according to the publisher.

“Although not a new coinage, the word was a runaway winner due to a sharp rise in its usage, which reflected a change in behavior,” Elaine Higgleton, international publisher at Collins Learning, told CNN.

“It’s actually been around since the 1990s, and binge is an old Lincolnshire dialect word that made its way into common English in the 19th century,” she said. Helen Newstead, head of language content at Collins, told BBC News: “The rise in usage of ‘binge-watch’ is clearly linked to the biggest sea change in our viewing habits since the advent of the video recorder nearly 40 years ago.”

Netflix really has all this down to a science. Variety reported last September the company has “crunched cold, hard viewing data for more than two dozen TV shows and says it has determined which specific episode grabbed most subscribers to the point where 70 per cent of viewers went onto watch the entire first season.

“However, none of the shows Netflix looked at, which included originals and licensed series, hooked viewers with the pilot,” Variety observed. “In the traditional TV biz, conventional wisdom holds that a show’s pilot is the most critical linchpin to igniting viewer interest, given the nature of how new television programs debut.” Netflix  “sees the metrics as validation of its binge-release strategy of delivering all episodes of a season at once.”

For Orange Is the New Black, which Netflix has said is its most-watched original series, the magic number was Episode 3. Same for House of Cards, the American political thriller developed and produced by Beau Willimon and now in its fourth season. It is an adaptation of the four-episode serial 1990 BBC mini-series of the same name, set after the end of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and which aired from Nov. 18 to Dec. 9, 1990. Both the British and American series are based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, former chief of staff of the Conservative Party. The entire first American season on Netflix, comprising 13 episodes, premiered on Feb. 1, 2013.

Set in present-day Washington, House of Cards is the story of the fictional Frank Underwood, played brilliantly by Kevin Spacey, as a Democrat from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district, who is the House majority whip, and who after being passed over for appointment as Secretary of State, initiates an elaborate plan to get even and more.

In researching more than 20 shows across 16 markets, Netflix found that no one was ever hooked on the pilot, although they did find slight geographic differences in the “hook” study, which analyzed data from the accounts of subscribers who started watching season one of the selected series between January and July 2015 in Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, and between April and July 2015 for Australia and New Zealand. The company noted that the hooked episode had no correlation to overall viewership numbers or viewer attrition for a particular series.

While all the Netflix hyperbole is fine – or at least is what it is – regular readers will know by now I’m something of a counterintuitive contrarian curmudgeon, so my enthusiasm for all-things Netflix, including Making a Murderer, autoplay and binge-watching  is, well, limited, truth be told. While the story of Manitowoc County, Wisconsin’s Steve Avery, the real-life character at the centre of Making a Murderer, is indeed strangely compelling, it’s compelling in the way one can’t take their eyes off a slow-motion train wreck or accident-in-progress. Perhaps I just spent too many years sitting in courtrooms every day as court beat reporter for the Peterborough Examiner to ever need to hear again yet another defence lawyer methodically ask prosecution witnesses under cross-examination those questions which must admittedly be asked methodically. Questions such as, “Officer, are these your notes and were they made contemporaneously (sometimes rephrased as at the time or shortly after) you attended at the scene?” Or perhaps, “Do you have any independent recollection, aside from your notes, officer, of the events in question?” Or maybe, “Have there been any additions or deletions, officer, to your notes, since they were made?”

Me? I’m looking forward to setting my personal video recorder (PVR), while I’m working at the University College of the North library here, for 8 p.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 7 on Vision TV, which is airing reruns of McMillan & Wife, the now unintentionally ironic but still delicious (well, if you like beige and the faux-wood paneling such as maybe you knew growing up) 1970’s American police procedural, set in San Francisco, of course, which aired originally on NBC from Sept. 17, 1971, to April 24, 1977, as a popular original partner in the NBC Mystery Movie trio, which also included initially Columbo and McCloud.

As Vision TV notes on its website: “It was Rock Hudson’s first foray into our living rooms on the small screen and he was paired with the luminescent and ultra-charming Susan Saint James to create the most popular crime fighting couple of the ’70s. Throwback Thursdays are about to get even more mysterious and exciting than ever before!”

And after I have had a good hit of 1970’s pop culture nostalgia? Well, maybe a trip over to Fox TV (did I really write that?) to check out Lucifer, as the devil, Prince of this World, is about to get his due debuting Monday, Jan. 25 at 8 p.m. CST.

The new DC Comics-based Fox TV high-concept genre series where Lucifer Morningstar “bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, resigns his throne and abandons his kingdom for the gorgeous, shimmering insanity of Los Angeles, where he opens an exclusive piano bar called Lux” admittedly may give new meaning to the dangers of glamorizing evil, something we Catholics get a refresher course in every Easter through the renewal of our baptismal promises where the priest asks us, “Do you renounce Satan and all his works, and all his empty show; do you renounce the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin; do you renounce Satan, the author and prince of sin?”

While the production of Lucifer is incredibly slick and well done, watching a three-minute trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4bF_quwNtw), I couldn’t help laughing near the end of the trailer when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, baffled, asks the female L.A.P.D. homicide detective, Chloe Dancer (played by Lauren German) who unlike almost all the other women who are charmed by him, while she isn’t, “Did my father send you?”

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