"I slept with the guy who created it!"

Jane Fonda on her “Block the Merger” pin, saying that she “slept with the guy” who created CNN and doesn’t want to see the network owned by Paramount.

Vanity Fair #Oscar Party pic.twitter.com/bNj93GuO8A

— Variety (@Variety) March 16, 2026

This is a rare opportunity to use my old tag "charming bad logic."

And I enjoyed the garbled articulation: "The murders are going to be bad for workers."

"If Dolly Parton were organizing a literary dinner party, which 3 writers — dead or alive — would she invite?"

This answer is amusing because she's so openly declining to answer the question in terms of setting up an excellent conversation:

First would be James Patterson because, since we are both in entertainment, we could write it off as a business expense. (Ha!) Second would be Fannie Flagg — she’s a friend and a very funny author, so I know she would be a guaranteed good time. Third would be Maya Angelou because she would definitely have wonderful stories and spoke and wrote so poetically. As a bonus, I’d ask Charles Dickens to join us — for the street cred. 

That's from a NYT piece with a headline — "Dolly Parton Likes to Read by the Fire in Her Pajamas" — that forces me to crack a Groucho Marx joke — How the fire got in her pajamas, I don't know.

 

Anyway, she names 4, not 3, and Patterson seems only to be there as part of a tax avoidance scheme. Does Dolly Parton ever let her political opinions show? She flaunts her resistance to taxation. That might be conservative. The other thing in that piece that strikes me as conservative is that she expresses — twice — her love of the book "The Little Engine That Could." It's the book she wants all kids to read. I can't imagine a left-leaning person saying that. 

I found this from the Independent: "Dolly Parton’s politics hide in plain sight, whether she admits it or not There’s not much room for ambiguity in our times, as some Hollywood stars have found out, yet Parton’s philanthropy, which includes her funding of a Covid-19 vaccine, means she gets a free pass. But it’s easy to read between the lines." 

I've already read between the lines. A devoted promoter of the "The Little Engine That Could" must be conservative or libertarian. But let's read this:

Was the fly on Mike Pence's hair divine intervention?

This is a question that occurred to me as I was recording my reading of the previous post — "Was there any discussion of 'systemic racism' during the debate?," — which has a bit to say about the fly that landed and lingered on Mike Pence's hair during the debate. It made it hard to listen to what Pence was saying, which I see, reading the transcript, was trenchant and substantive. Was the fly a meaningless, random occurrence or could it have been divine intervention? 

Surely, an omnipotent deity, if He cared about the outcome of American elections, could simply cause the person he wanted to win. Why would he merely put a thumb on the scales as We the People weigh the choices? And such a tiny thumb, a little fly, so lightweight that it made no impression on the mind of Pence as it stood staunchly on the man's silvery coif! He had no idea of that thing as he burbled about respect for our earthly justice system. Yet perhaps it tipped the election. Who can know?!

But I had divine intervention on my mind after what Trump said yesterday (transcript):

Hi, perhaps you recognize me? It’s your favorite president. And I’m standing in front of the Oval Office at the White House... A short 24 hours [after receiving the drug Regeneron], I was feeling great, I wanted to get out of the hospital and that’s what I want for everybody. I want everybody to be given the same treatment as your president because I feel great. I feel like perfect. So I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it. This was a blessing in disguise. I caught it. I heard about this drug. I said, “Let me take it.” It was my suggestion. I said, “Let me take it,” and it was incredible the way it worked.... You’re going to get better. You’re going to get better fast, just like I did. So again, a blessing in disguise....

I blogged that video yesterday, here, and then — because it was thematically relevant — I added video of the aged actress Jane Fonda saying "I just think COVID is God’s gift to the Left." So, people are talking about divine intervention. It's an idea that landed on my head and has been lingering — depositing eggs of ideas, one might say, to extend the metaphor. 

By the way, look what The New Yorker put in its crossword on Monday:

23 Down: "________ Jane, celebrity epithet of 1972." So many possible clues for "Hanoi." They had to want to go there. Is it, for them, just a funny old nugget of pop culture? 

Anyway, back to the question whether divine intervention could come in the form of a fly? I think of the play "The Flies" ("Les Mouches") by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is something that occurred to me as I was reading the previous post out loud, but I couldn't talk about the play off the top of my head — my almost certainly flyless head. I hadn't read it in 50 years. I had to end the recording and find some sort of recap. I'll use this, randomly:

Trump talks up drug treatments... calls his contracting of the disease a "blessing in disguise."

A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT! pic.twitter.com/uhLIcknAjT

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020

ADDED: On the subject of divine intervention:

The smug chuckle after she says “I just think COVID is God’s gift to the Left.” pic.twitter.com/0NvAAJjKnL

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 7, 2020

Ivanka laughed at Jane Fonda's plan to use sex as a weapon.

I'm reading "The Star Power of Jane Fonda’s Climate-Change Arrests" (The New Yorker):

After the 2016 election, Fonda was initially optimistic that Trump could be flattered into taking on the cause of battling climate change. She wanted to invite several “voluptuous” female activists (including the environmentally minded actress Pamela Anderson) to brief Trump on the dangers of relying on fossil fuels. Fonda spoke by phone to Jared Kushner, who told her to speak to Ivanka Trump, who laughed at the idea and said she’d follow up. Fonda never got to meet with Trump.

So it's okay to treat women as sex objects if it's a means to an end? This belongs in the same category as "I'd be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal" ("I" = Time correspondent Nina Burleigh, "him" = Bill Clinton).

"It was a market that had never been played to... Nobody had sung their song to them."

Said Peter Fonda in 2018, talking about "Easy Rider." He is quoted in his NYT obituary, "Peter Fonda, ‘Easy Rider’ Actor and Screenwriter, Is Dead at 79."

That movie was so important to us young Boomers, half a century ago.

In 1967, Roger Corman, then the king of the low-budget movies, directed “The Trip” from a script by an up-and-coming actor, Jack Nicholson. Alongside Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg, Mr. Fonda starred as a mild-mannered television commercial director who uses LSD for the first time and makes the most of it. “Easy Rider,” which he also produced, came two years later.

There was also LSD in "Easy Rider."

What did Peter Fonda say about LSD in his later years?

“For me, it solved a great deal,” he said. “However, I didn’t take it and go out running through the city looking at lights. I was very circumspect and lay down on a couch.” Luckily, he added, “I don’t have an addictive character, and nothing except pot stayed with me.”

There's also The Beatles connection:

His mother committed suicide in 1950, when he was 10 and Jane was 13. Less than a year later, Mr. Fonda shot himself in the stomach with a pistol. Interviewed by The New York Times decades later, he insisted that it was an accident, not a suicide attempt or even a warning. “You shoot yourself in the hand or foot if you want attention,” he said, “not the way I did.”

Years later, he talked about the experience with John Lennon, who was reportedly inspired to write the line “I know what it’s like to be dead” in the Beatles’ song “She Said She Said.”

Here's how Wikipedia tells it:

"I'm not dating anymore, but I did up until a couple of years ago. I'm 80. I've closed up shop down there!"

Said Jane Fonda.

"closed up shop"... Was she running a business?

"down there"... Is sex something you do only with the lower part of your body?

In Urban Dictionary, "down there" gets this:

"Get Congress back. Everything is at stake… we can do it. Time is up!"

Said Jane Fonda, quoted in "Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred, Tessa Thompson Slam Trump at Sundance Women’s Rally" (Variety).

It seems like every day I see headlines about various people slamming Trump. Has anyone ever been so slammed? And to so little effect? And yet, Fonda and her ilk assert we can do it. Did you see the "We Can Do It" sign in the photo at the link?



Not terribly well drawn. She almost looks like she's hugging him, when clearly what is intended is a murderous chokehold. Through Google image search, I found this better-drawn version of the idea:



ADDED: The artist on the well-drawn version of the idea appears to be Kevin Karstens.

AND: Look at this other poster that came up on my "we can do it trump" search: A "We Can Do It"-type woman carving up Trump's head on a plate.

Megyn Kelly's 3rd effort at a morning show: She pisses off Jane Fonda.

Not just rude, but anti-feminist.

Speaking of hair and of Camille Paglia...

... there's also this from that New York Magazine article (linked in the previous post):

Lately, she wears her hair in a light-brown shag, which she got after bringing a photo of Jane Fonda’s Klute cut to her stylist.

Yeah, I too got hair-inspired by Jane Fonda in Klute...



... back in 1971 when the movie came out.

Tom Hayden died yesterday.

He was 76. Here's the NYT obituary:

In 1961, Mr. Hayden joined the Freedom Riders on interstate buses in the South, challenging authorities who refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings banning segregation on public buses. His jailhouse draft of what became the 25,000-word S.D.S. manifesto was debated, revised and formally adopted at the organization’s first convention, in Port Huron, Mich., in 1962.

“We are people of this generation,” it began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” It did not recommend specific programs but attacked the arms race, racial discrimination, bureaucracy and apathy in the face of poverty, and it called for “participatory democracy” and a society based on “fraternity,” “honesty” and “brotherhood.”...

Much more at the link, including this, about the part of his life he shared with Jane Fonda:

Although Ms. Fonda was a wealthy movie star and financially supported Mr. Hayden’s early political career, she and Mr. Hayden lived for years in a modest home in Santa Monica, near but not on the ocean. They did their own shopping and laundry, cooked meals in a tiny kitchen with an old stove and shared child-care duties for Troy and Vanessa....

ADDED: I think I've only written about Tom Hayden once before on this blog, in this May 20, 2007 post "Roberts Rules of Order and 60s radicals." Yeah, Roberts Rules of Order....

Mocking the sexual desire of a 100-year-old tortoise.

I clicked on the clickbait: "100-year-old tortoise walks 6.5 miles for romance with plastic dome" ("A 100-year-old tortoise that escaped her owner's California yard was found 6 1/2 miles away attempting to romantically court a small dome.")

But I disapprove of laughing at the creature's sexuality. We cannot comprehend the longing of 100 years. We cannot know how it feels to be so separated from your fellow species that something in the rough shape of what feels like your counterpart fixates you.

And the euphemism "attempting to romantically court" is quite disgusting. I encounter that after reading the NYT story about Cher's anti-Trump speech to a crowd in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which includes such dirty-word avoidance as "'I just think he’s' an idiot, Cher said of Donald J. Trump, adding a decidedly unprintable modifier."

It's not "unprintable." It's quite printable: fucking. See? The NYT merely chooses not to print it. "Unprintable" is a cornball expression. "Fucking" is a crudeness that bothers some people, but where is the concern for people like me who are bothered by the prissy way you posture to avoid it?

"Unprintable" is a word that was created to express the idea that something is "Not fit to be printed" because it is "too shocking to appear in print; obscene, rude." I'm quoting the (unlinkable) OED, which finds the earliest appearance in print in 1830, in something called "Age": "A sham improvisatore held up to the ridicule of society by the excellent but unprintable jeu d'esprit of James Smith."

What is an "improvisatore"? The OED says: "A poet who composes or performs verse extemporaneously." James Smith seems to have been one of the freestyle rappers of his day, mocking some unnamed other one as a sham. It was excellent but unprintable... so we can't read whatever it was.

Improvisatore... improviser. When we don't have a script — when we don't want a script — if we want anything to happen at all, we must improvise, like a tortoise with his sham tortoise, the plastic dome.



IN THE COMMENTS: CJ points us to an episode of "Futurama" that treats the sexual needs of a 100-year-old with excellent humor and quality profundity:



"I haven't seen a female of my kind in well over 100 years!"

"... Coming Home was produced by Jane Fonda, who at that time had made films with Ho Chi Minh and was virulently anti-American. At the Academy Awards, she wouldn't look at me..."

"... because I had already been labeled a right-wing fascist," says the movie director Michael Cimino in a new interview. His "Deer Hunter" was up against "Coming Home" for the awards in 1971.

We were in the same elevator together. I wanted to say congratulations, but she turned away. From what I know about the original script, ["Coming Home"] was honest, but I think because of her political stance at the time, she managed to turn it into American guilt. She's the only one who had the power — she was the producer. The end of the movie is the American officer, Bruce Dern, who out of unspeakable guilt walks into the Pacific Ocean to drown himself. That's not what the original script was. That character is so filled with rage that he strides the hillsides of Laurel Canyon onto the 101, as I recall, and he's got a machine gun with him. He walks to the center of the freeway with oncoming traffic in both directions, and he's just howling, just firing in a circle. Cars are blowing up all over the place. That was the real ending. You don't have moviemaking to prove a point about your political conviction in American Sniper.

About "American Sniper," he says: "Though it was characterized [as such], Sniper's not a political movie. It's not about the rightness or wrongness of the war. It deals with the impact of trauma on people who go to war and people who stay behind."

NYT columnist Frank Bruni, 49, is teaching a college class and the students don't get his allusions.

They didn't know the Jane Fonda movies "They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?" and "Barbarella." They hadn't heard of Vanessa Redgrave or Greta Garbo.

Or at least they looked like they didn't. Should we trust Bruni's interpretation of the blank expression on their face? Did it mean "I don't know what you are referring to?" or "Boring!"

The school is Princeton, Bruni reveals in paragraph 4, which means, of course, the students aren't dumb. They're just fractured, lacking shared experience, which Bruno concedes might be good:

No single, potentially alienating cultural dogma holds sway. 

Oh? Young people may not know the grand old actresses that swan about forever in the mind of Frank Bruni....



... but I think the young people are actually quite aware of the sway of a single, potentially alienating cultural dogma.

Cue inevitable discussion of Brendan Eich and Bill Maher's talk of the "Gay Mafia."

Drudge lines up the blondes and seems to say: The old is yielding to the young.

That's at the top of the 3 columns of Drudge right now. Jan Brewer is there because that "Arizona bill letting businesses deny service for religious reasons sparks heated debate." Jane Fonda on the other side is bleating about how little life she's got left, since she's 76. In the middle, we see Hillary Clinton sidling up to Ronan Farrow, but the story that's linked is just about Farrow's new MSNBC show.

To use a picture of him that includes Hillary is to create visual resonance with the 2 old blonde dames on either side, that is, to create a sense that the young man is ascendant and the old ladies are fighting for their lives. Each of the old blondes show her way of fighting — perhaps the iconic 3 styles of female power. Jan Brewer glares, snarls, and crushes you with her fingertipss. Hillary plays up to the man with the old let-me-remove-the-bit-of-lint-from-your-lapel move. And old Jane is defiant — I am on my own, I will survive, I will claim control over the definition of what beauty is until the very end.



Oh, but the new child of Hollywood royalty is on the scene to dazzle the people with blondness and youth.

Those who are pushing outrage over ousting Maria Conchita Alonso from "The Vagina Monologues"...

… remember "Veterans Boycotting 'The Butler' Over Jane Fonda's Portrayal Of Nancy Reagan."

Don't be hypocritical!

"You know life has changed when you’re hanging out with Jane Fonda backstage."

"There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being 'all in' in every way — than Jane Fonda. And it’s a huge honor just to even briefly have shared the stage with her."

Said U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power.

"I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically."

I just said, to Meade, after he misread the title of the last post as something I'd written, when it was a quote from a Wall Street Journal editorial. (Not that the Wall Street Journal was calling anybody a genius. It was characterizing what other people were saying about John Roberts, and, in my view overstating it.)

I decided to check my impulsive assertion. Have I ever called anybody a "genius" (without sarcasm)?

On February 15, 2008, I called Jane Fonda "some kind of media genius... a media genius — a media whore." And I called Eve Ensler "genius" for thinking up a play — "The Vagina Monogues" — that's so completely easy to produce and perform — "3 women sit on stools and get to read their lines off index cards."

On June 28, 2001, Howard Kurtz had called Mitt Romney a "boring genius," and I restated that as "a genius at being boring."

On March 14, 2012, I called Rush Limbaugh a "media genius," but not "enough of a genius" to have deliberately set off the Sandra Fluke flap for publicity purposes.

On December 30, 2011, I said "The guy's a genius!" about James Franco, but that was complete sarcasm.

October 14, 2011, I say this about Steve Jobs: "Here we are, mourning our loss of a genius, and the genius (apparently) fell for the monumental stupidity of 'alternative' medicine." I'm only referring to his reputation as a genius, and I'm calling him stupid.

June 14, 2011: I say "The idiot is a genius!" about Sarah Palin.

January 24, 2008: I refer to Dolly Parton as a "pop culture genius."

I see I need to amend my original quote: I don't think I've ever called anybody a genius, except sarcastically or in the specific category of genius: media genius.

ADDED: Contemplate the possibility that John Roberts is a genius — a media genius.

Jane Fonda: "My biggest regret is..."

Guess!

"Should a two-time Oscar-winner like Jane Fonda really be making a spectacle out of the fact that she wanted to appear on a home-shopping channel?"

Asks Big Hollywood, noting Jane's plaint:

I was to have been on QVC today to introduce my book, “Prime Time,” about aging and the life cycle....

The network said they got a lot of calls yesterday criticizing me for my opposition to the Vietnam War and threatening to boycott the show if I was allowed to appear.

Bottom line, this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us.

Big Hollywood has a few quibbles with some of those assertions.

Poor Jane! Getting old... and just wants to sell her book about getting old. We're all getting old, and Jane has always been about capturing — and purveying — the spirit of whatever time she happened to be in. With that mindset, it's hard to understand the depth of feeling some people have about the past.

Remember 80s Jane?