News of the Day Got You Down? I’ve Got a Plan for You!

Long-time friend and LWC contributor Guy Heston writes on what to do about the news of the day.

The other day the news of the day was getting on my nerves of the day.

Mr. Trump was ablaze on Twitter. The so-called cable news networks were enthralled but I was not. Name calling tweets are not necessarily news, even if they come from you-know-who.

But then I noticed someone I had never heard of, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, was on the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. The former White House staffer had tapes she thought the public and Special Counsel Mr. Mueller might find interesting and damaging to Mr. Trump. Although she seemed mostly trying to sell her book, this was a disturbing development, another national controversy apparently in the making. As President Reagan might have said, here we go again.

Then there was the latest economic news from Turkey, where the lira was heading south faster than a jet from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Expert economists were beginning to sound rattled about the larger implications, so I got rattled.

Luckily, there seemed to be no breaking political news about Canada/US relations—all quiet on the Canadian front. I was beginning to wonder if our neighbors to the north were even speaking to us. If I were them, I’m not sure I would. Maybe they are ghosting us, I thought.

And then there were my beloved Los Angeles Angels, heading south in the baseball standings so fast they made the Turkish lira look positively stable. I can take the lira free fall, but an Angels collapse is beyond rattling, although we fans should be used to it by now.

All the negative news was just too much. So I turned off CNN and MSNBC (ok, I admit it, I’m a lefty so I don’t watch Fox much unless I want to see what they are up to), logged off my lefty self from The Times and The Post, got into to my California emissions regulated car and drove to one of our local cineplexes where I bought myself a ticket to “Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again” and settled in.

Some of my friends think the movie is sappy. Not me. I found one hour and fifty-four minutes of innocent bliss, a story about a young woman’s wedding, remembering her mother and connecting with her extended family and, yes, foreigners who welcomed her to their land. Somehow she got through immigration.

There I was in the dark, lounging in one of those new recliners so many theaters are installing, munching on my $7.50 bag of popcorn laden with imitation butter, trying to sing along silently to ABBA so I did not disturb my seat mates, and not thinking a whit about Mr. Trump, Ms. Omarosa, Turkey, Canada or baseball standings. Plus the movie featured a cameo by Meryl Streep, Cher arriving on a Greek island via helicopter, and so many ABBA songs I lost count. What was not to like?

Maybe you don’t like ABBA songs. Maybe you don’t like Meryl Streep movies. And maybe you don’t like Cher, in which case I am ghosting you. But I can say this much. When you are truly weary of Trump tweets and all that cable news drama, pick a movie, go to the cineplex, sit in the dark with strangers, munch on popcorn, and spend a couple of hours forgetting about the news of the day.