Why Doesn’t Reality Actually Win?

July 17--Low late day sun illuminates seeds on plants near Lily Lake. The real world can be a pretty place.

Recently in my life, there were strong reminders that our large human brains are both a species-defining asset and possibly our downfall, too. We think of ourselves, individually, as being much smarter than we actually are, and we’re convinced our take on life, our reality, is “the” reality.

When, in reality, the universe doesn’t care what any of us individually thinks of it, it just is. And our brains, flawed organic computers that they are, are wired to reach quick conclusions via limited data and to lock those conclusions in.

That’s good if you’re an early human living on a savanna evading a pride of lions, when hearing and reacting to a sound might save you and allow you to pass on your genes.

In our constructed modern culture, unfortunately, our innate human ability to reach conclusions quickly on limited information and to form narratives can lead both to self-delusion and group delusion.

Dragonflies near Lily Lake. Maybe not too brainy, but just about the most efficient predators in the animal kingdom. And they don't waste any time online.

To me, the reminders of this complex reality, in the chronological order in which I encountered them, were “Toy Story 5,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “A Bunch of Crazy Nonsense from President Trump” (I came up with the title of Trump’s election speech myself). Technically, the speech was given the night before Theatre Cedar Rapids presented “Dear Evan Hansen,” but I didn’t watch the speech live, so for me, it was experienced after the play.

First, the new Pixar movie. In “Toy Story 5,” we see Jessie struggle with the reality that her girl, Bonnie, is becoming distant due to an online life using Lilypad, an internet-enabled learning device. Bonnie attempts to form friendships via the device, only to have girls online turn on her and bully her for playing with toys.

For context, the Bonnie character is age 8. I found it sad that the fictional reality portrayed by the movie is all too plausible, that such a young child would fall into an online delusional attack—but I’m sure that’s close to truth. In the end, Bonnie manages to form a healthy friendship with a slightly older girl named Blaze—who lives in the house that Jessie’s original owner grew up in.

It was not the strongest movie of the Toy Story franchise. Woody shows up for Buzz and Jessie’s wedding, but he’s there basically because it’s a Toy Story movie, and Woody has to be around. The story was creative, but somehow didn’t hit my emotions as strongly as other movies in the franchise have. I did find it poignant when Jessie discovers that her original owner, who gave her away, still found her favorite toy so important that she used the name for her actual daughter—but that was the one heavy emotional hit in a movie with too many swings and misses.

It wasn’t a bad movie. It covers an important topic and did present many ideas on the big idea of what online childhood means—but, to me, it lacked a central message. It didn’t know what to say about the problem it correctly displayed. For example, the fact that online devices and sites are deliberately designed by corporations to be addictive and that the young are particularly vulnerable to that resulting allure was implied but not tackled head on.

Images from Pixar site for movie--Bonnie, Blaze and Jessie. Source: https://www.pixar.com/toy-story-5

Still, “Toy Story 5” was a decent movie, and a movie of its time. It didn’t give us a clear formula on how to make real life more compelling than the electronic lives we all get sucked into—yet perhaps that’s because there is no simple answer. At least the Toy Story franchise, decades after its first appearance, still has something to say.

In “Toy Story 5,” the issue is having a healthy childhood in a screen-heavy world. In “Dear Evan Hansen,” Evan has to deal with how the online world can magnify a lie—told for humane reasons—until things get wildly out of hand.

The musical was performed in 2015, but Theatre Cedar Rapids chose to place their production in today’s universe. Honestly, even if 11 years seems like eons ago, the underlying dangers and struggles of a social media world are still relevant and the play worked as a story of today.

In the play, a troubled boy named Connor signs a troubled boy named Evan’s arm cast at school, and then later takes his own life. Connor has also taken a note that Evan wrote to himself as part of his therapy, and which Evan had printed in the school library—a note that mentions Evan’s feelings for Zoey, Connor’s sister.

Image posted on Facebook by Theatre Cedar Rapids of "Dear Evan Hansen."

Connor’s parents find the note after Connor’s demise and mistakenly think it’s a note Connor wrote to Evan. It leads them to conclude that Evan was Connor’s friend and confidant—and Evan plays along, inventing a false narrative of a relationship that never was.

Nobody liked the abrasive and troubled Connor when he was alive, but our human brains often rewrite history at a time of loss, and the departed often acquire halos that they didn’t always earn in life. So a group to remember Connor is created at school and starts posting materials online. Evan gets to be “co-president.”

Inevitably, Evan’s ruse is uncovered, and it all falls apart.

I realize that it can be unfair to compare an animated movie to a live stage musical. It’s like comparing a book to a movie. The different narrative forms don’t serve completely the same function and thus the comparison can be flawed.

Part of the reason TCR’s “Dear Evan Hansen” worked so well for me, better than “Toy Story 5,” is a prejudice I have in favor of live theater. When it works, it works so well because you know you’re experiencing a shared reality that you co-create with a living set of other humans who are performing their magic right in front of you.

It's not such a fixed, mediated experience, even when it’s an experience about social media.

“Toy Story 5” was about young children. “Dear Even Hansen” concerns humans on the brink of adulthood—and how the adults also react. Maybe that’s another reason why the play worked more for me.

July 5--The day after America's 250th birthday, a Monarch butterfly named "Dodger" emerged in our dining room. We had brought the caterpillar inside from Milkweed in front of our house. It's a girl, and it's real and not an Internet hoax.

And then we have the third key lesson, a demonstration of delusion. To me, both the play and the movie I watched were partly about the struggle to distinguish what is real to us and what exists in a weird, constructed online reality. And President Donald Trump’s July 17, 2026, speech seems like a cautionary tale on how even the oldest amongst us are not necessarily the wisest when it comes to separating fakery from reality.

Donald Trump is a unique, and uniquely terrible, character in many ways. He’s a norm-busting president, and partly how you feel about him depends on whether you think the busted norms are useful or constraining.

But our president has a long history of self-delusion parlayed into flawed government policy. Think of his insistence that he won reelection in 2020, although he did not. And he often gets his false narratives via internet sites and amplifies them via social media. Our oldest president is enamored of our newest communication technology.

Image from Whitehouse.gov of President Trump giving an interview to Fox News a couple of days before his election speech.

The 2020 election took place at a strange time in global history, a year that will always be defined by a novel respiratory virus infecting us and many other mammal species, and our struggle to deal with it. Trump’s false claims that the election that year was stolen are a part of that weird time. 

And last week’s national address on election security seem to fit into that long-standing Trump pattern of trumpeting self-delusion. I not only watched the speech—I also read a transcript of it that is available on CNN.com. Let me ruminate for a minute on how much reality and our president’s thoughts on it diverge from each other.

Take the start of the speech, in which Trump claims the world was ending before he was reelected, and only he saved us: “We had transgender for everybody, men in women's sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”

“Transgender for everybody?” Say what you will, even transgender people recognize that the transgender community is hardly “everybody.”

And today in Iowa, it’s very hot indeed, and the air is barely breathable because of wildfire smoke. Our country is indeed “hot,” but maybe not in the way President Trump means.

Two years ago the whole world was “laughing at us” and they aren’t now? Yikes. Maybe they are crying now more than laughing, but our standing in the world has been severely degraded by our current dysfunctional dear leader.

In the speech, the main villain, besides Barak Obama, was China. China, it seems, didn’t want Donald re-elected in 2020 and Trump darkly hinted, although he never stated, that explains the cheating that led to the fake outcome (we’re in Don’s LaLa land, I don’t mean that there was widespread cheating that led to a fake outcome, that’s just the Big Lie that Trump trumpets). What did China do to the 2020 election? Go on, tell us, Don.

They downloaded “sensitive” information, he said. “That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data.”

Names, addresses, phone number and party affiliations associated with our elections are part of public documents. The Chinese didn’t hack that data—they bought it, and not on the dark web. It’s available to anybody to purchase legally. True, maybe a foreign actor would put that public data to nefarious use, but Trump never alleged that—merely that the Chinese had that data and it was “sensitive.” So what? It’s a way to make what’s mundane seem dark and dangerous—creating an alternative reality, the kind of weird conspiracy that our brains can embrace and that can spread in the cyber world.

And I’m not sure Donald’s speech didn’t at least partly work. There is no guarantee what the Senate will do, but it’s in Republican hands, and a weird, dangerous federal takeover of elections promoted by Trump passed the House after the speech. Plus, the speech seems like pretext for later rejecting the mid-term election results should Trump, as seems likely, not care for those results.

Our democratically elected president is setting the stage to discredit and deny our democracy. That’s rather chilling. It’s July of 2026. The mid-term elections are still some months away. But our President is casting aspersions on our election system and preparing us for emergency federal action to topple the table if the game doesn’t go his way.

Dragonflies and setting sun at Lily Lake. I hope it's not twilight for our democracy, but our capacity for delusion has me worried.

And all because he can’t come to grips with reality. He lost the election in 2020. Frankly, he lost the popular vote in 2016 but was still elected due to the quirks of the Electoral College. Re-writing history is one of Trump’s specialties, and one of the features of our human mental weaknesses.

Our memories are always interpretations of what has gone before, our brains are not video recorders but rather filters that distort our past and present. We excel at creating narratives—which is useful if we’re writing thoughtful movies or plays about the cyber world but less useful if we construct fake narratives that misguide our collective political actions.

Hopefully, there are enough smart people that the president’s election lies won’t work. Yet it remains to be seen. The nature of our smarts is sometimes our flaw. Just ask Evan Hansen how easy it is to slip by accident into a web of lies. Or, in Trump’s case, to spin and promote such a web.

Last week, my wife and I took a mini vacation to the Amana Colonies, which are located nearby. During a two-day stay, we took a warm late-day stroll around Lily Lake, a swampy body of water between Amana and Middle Amana. Despite the heat, it was a pleasant outing, featuring many birds and dragonflies around the lily-filled pond.

The two-day break was nice. I didn’t get online as much as I usually do, which is probably good for me. It’s healthy to connect to world that’s actually outside my door and not spend too much time in the constructed, constrained reality that is created online.

Another dragonfly. They were just too pretty, I had to make and share images of them online. At least they're not AI.

I wish President Trump would go for a refreshing walk around a lake rather than a golf course now and then. Most of all, I wish MAGA America would get away from its screens and see the world for what it is. It’s troubled and troubling, but not because Chinese hackers have already hijacked our elections. They might try, but have not yet.

I have met the enemy, and they are us—our attraction to and ability to create the fake, comforting narratives that we spread online. I pray that in the end, reality can win.

Sundown at Lily Lake.

The World Unites: Clearly It’s Fiction

Recently, my wife and I went to the local cinema to watch “Project Hail Mary.” It stars both Ken (Ryan Gosling) and a pile of rocks (James Ortiz), and both play their parts well.

And, subsequently, I’ve read the novel that the movie was based on. I enjoyed them both, just as I enjoyed “The Martian,” book and movie. Both books were written by Andy Weir. And, as if you didn’t already know that, there may be spoilers in this post. You are warned.

From https://www.mgm.com/movies/project-hail-mary

I found “Project Hail Mary” to be well done in both movie and book form—which is something, given that there are differences between the two stories in the two media. The movie simplifies the story and leaves out much of the science details, some of which I wish that they had hinted more strongly in the film. For instance, in the book Eva Stratt had planned for Dr. Grace to be a backup science officer all along and had quietly ensured he had all the necessary science insight. Or that Ryland Grace had to be the one to go partly because of a rare genetic trait that made him unusually likely to survive a long coma.

Most of all, I wish that the way that the breeding of nitrogen-resistant Astrophage worked in the book was in the movie. I liked the slow progress through generations of microbes; it’s a reminder of how evolution and deliberate breeding actually work.

But I understand that it’s almost always necessary to leave details out of movies—they are a different, simpler narrative medium than books.

At least one change from the movie to the book improved the story, for me. In the movie, Eva was businesslike and determined, just as she was in the book. But film Eva has a bit more humanity—the karaoke scene, for instance, softens her. In the movie, she forces Dr. Ryland Grace to go on the mission by inducing his coma early, as she does in the book—but Sandra Hüller’s excellent acting shows the conflict Eva feels despite her compulsion to have the project succeed at all costs.

The book.

Well. I like my science fiction with rivets, and “Project Hail Mary” is science fiction with plenty of plausible, interesting science conjecture—it has got its rivets on. Yet any story is better if it has both factual depth and human heart—and like Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, the deepening friendship between Ryland Grade and Rocky provides a lot of heart. Meanwhile, the themes of what bravery is and isn’t, and whether it’s ever OK to remove another person’s agency to save others—those, added to the science, gives great depth to the story. I also like that Dr. Grace is literally the “chosen one” who isn’t chosen for some magic or innate superpower—he’s chosen for his science background, built over years of study. Score one for graduate school.

He is definitely the reluctant hero. “Some people are failures,” as he says. “Some people don’t rise to the challenge.” And yet, in the end, Dr. Grace does.

Partly due to Rocky. While the designated astronauts are training, Dr. Grace comments to Yao Li-Jie, played by Kenneth Leung, that Grace doesn’t think he has a bravery gene that the crew has. Leung’s character replies that it’s not a gene—you just have to find someone to be brave for. Ironically, Dr. Grace finds an alien to be brave for—I like that the film shows even a coward can sometimes do incredibly brave things.

If anything, the most fantastic, unbelievable part of the book and movie isn’t that mysterious bugs are eating Sol and most nearby stars—it’s that the humans of our world would so quickly unite behind such a complex project. Our current leaders would probably deny that Astrophage is real and refuse to be part of Project Hail Mary because it sounds too Catholic (or is a Chinese hoax). Would that we respected science a bit more in this reality.

There are many stories that work as both books and movies and many that don’t. In my life, my earliest experience with such a working pair was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee—great book, great film. Also, both the book and movie “The Princess Bride” are wildly entertaining.

Sometimes, one part of the movie-book dyad is superior. I admire Stephen King as a writer, but enjoy many of the movies adapted from his works more than the original books or stories. “Stand by Me” is way more satisfying to me than “The Body,” for example.

Anyway, I’m glad both book and movie work so well for “Project Hail Mary.” It’s an uplifting tale, with troubling elements, which adds to its charm—it can spark endless discussion, as deep stories do. Yes, I am also among those who appreciate that the alien was so “alien,” but in important ways, so much the same as us, too. Even some surprising similarities are explained—Rocky “sees” with sonar and has much better hearing than Ryland Grace, and in the book Dr. Grace wonders why their hearing should overlap so much. Rocky raps on the floor and asks if Dr. Grace could hear that—their hearing overlaps because important physical sounds in both of their worlds overlap in sonic frequency. Well, cool.

So, in summary. I rate the movie “Project Hail Mary” 10 of 10. Or, in other, more musical, words: "Amaze, amaze, amaze."

In the Charlotte Tradition: Lily Sheep & Flock

For many, myself included, one of the seminal reads of our youth was the traumatizing, tantalizing and entertaining story of a writer, surrogate mom and spider, Charlotte. EB White’s “Charlotte’s Web” is indeed a masterpiece, and recently I watched two movies that are in its tradition.

Like “Charlotte’s Web,” both “The Sheep Detective” and “Project Hail Mary” feature nonhuman characters who reveal a lot about humanity. It’s a common modern narrative device, used in novels and movies and TV shows, to have the non-human commentator observe humans and remind us of how weird we sometimes are. Think many Pixar or Disney sidekicks, Leonard Nimoy as Spock on the Enterprise or Alan Tudyk as the resident alien in Resident Alien.

Anyway, I’m sure Charlotte isn’t the first example of this trope, but she’s one of the ones who has the power to awaken new ways of looking at the world. Selfless love, mortality, empathy—it’s all there in that arachnid. And, for that matter, in that lovable bundle of stones in “Project Hail Mary.”

By the way, I appreciate the humor of Andy Weir, who wrote the book and named Dr. Leland Grace, even if someone else had to point out to me one of the obvious puns: Dr. Grace is the only human to survive on the spaceship Hail Mary. Hail Mary is full of Grace. I’ll write more later about that particular movie after I finish the book it’s based on. Don’t hold your breath—I’m a reader, but I read like I ride a bicycle or tricycle. Very slowly.

For now, back to the town of Denbrook and the intrepid ewe Lily and her flock, who work with a bumbling local police officer to solve the murder of the flock’s beloved shepherd. Obligatory and probably unnecessary aside: Yes, as I reflect on this tale, there will be spoilers—such is the nature of commentary. You have been mildly warned.

To anthropomorphize animals (or humanize aliens) is a  common narrative tool that doesn’t always work. That’s the way with character tropes in any story, I suppose. If the animals are two-dimensional stereotypes, the story may be entertaining but ultimately fails. It’s the “Penguins of Madagascar” trap—you can have action sequences, witty quips and still come up with a stale tale that’s flat and forgettable.

“The Sheep Detective” is anything but flat. Through the eyes and ears of ewes and rams, the film ruminates well on prejudice, bullying, murder, mortality and the role of memory.

I appreciate the ensemble nature of the flock. The murdered shepherd, George Hardy, has spent each evening reading murder mysteries to his sheep, and Lily has taken in the nature and “rules” of such stories. She’s not alone—there is the hapless Winter Lamb, the excluded and abused Wilbur of our story. There’s the sometimes-sad Mopple, “cursed” with the ability to remember when other sheep can easily forget. There’s Sebastian, the Aragorn of our tale: the rugged, masculine outsider with his own tragic back story.

And like Fern in “Charlotte’s Web,” another aspect of this pleasing story is that the humans also have complex layers. For a while, I suspected the harsh lawyer—Lydia Harbottle, who is excellently played by the wonderful Emma Thompson—but it turns out she’s just a really tempting red herring. There’s Tim Derry, played by Nicholas Braun, the bumbling small-town cop who, despite his limits and awkwardness, in the end is smart enough to figure it out (led by the sheep, of course).

The comedy is partly what keeps this movie moving through it’s darker thematic elements. Like many entertaining mysteries, it both keeps you on your toes and tickles your funny bone. Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, undergoes genuine growth. She learns to remember even the painful past as the way to be fully alive, and ends up embracing the outcast Winter Lamb.

Several main characters die, and their deaths have impact. The killer is satisfyingly caught. The lost daughter returns to read to the sheep and keep the now enlarged flock going.

It’s a satisfying, well-done animal story that made this viewer feel more fully human, and that’s the mark of storytelling that’s not baaaaaad.

Hoping a Meeting Sparks More Journalism

Jada Veasey, adjunct advisor to the MMU Times.

The cookies were exceptional and the energy was good. I hope it picks up and something comes of it—the energy, that is.

On March 12, I was invited to speak with a small number of Mount Mercy University students in the newsroom of the Mount Mercy Times. For various reasons, the Times, which had been a student newspaper in years past and now is a student online news source, has been inactive this year, and some at MMU are hoping to change that.

I retired in May 2025 as a communication professor at MMU, and was the faculty advisor to the Times for two decades. This year, a relatively recent MMU graduate, Jada Veasey, was named as the adjunct advisor to the Times. I was speaking with the students at her invitation.

The main reason to bring me in, I think, was to give the students a sense of what journalistic writing is—how a news story is structured. But I started by asking the students what they were doing in the room—what they saw as the role of journalism at MMU.

The questioned stumped them, a bit, but that’s OK. I wasn’t seeking a quick answer nor a “correct” answer, I was more interested in prompting them to think about the “why” of the MMU Times. If you know why you’re doing journalism, the “how” has something to drive it.

Lainey Henley, sophomore English and political science major.

Anyway, we had a bit of a broad-ranging philosophical discussion, and then I went over a bit of newswriting 101. I reviewed, briefly, what a lede is, what a bridge is and how to proceed form there.

It was way too quick to turn aspiring writers into journalists but I guess the whole point of the meeting wasn’t to cover a semester’s worth of intro to journalism. It was more to try to feed the spark, prime the pump, get the students to get out there and get started.

Kade McPherrin, sophomore social work major with a minor in sociology.

Meanwhile, Jada, the advisor, also has her own cooking blog and had brought in a set of chocolate chip cookies to test our reactions.

I don’t know how the open-ended ramblings of the old man would be rated. I did leave the meeting feeling good about the potential for student journalism at MMU and hoping that the students, who were only a day away from Spring Break, would feel now is the time to dive in and get something done. As for the cookies, my rating was simple. They were 10 of 10.

Keira Carper, senior English major and creative writing minor.

Jada, a registered nurse in her day job, was an excellent student journalist at MMU. As a nursing student, she had a difficult, time-consuming major, yet managed to make time to be a guiding light at the Times. She seems to viscerally understands that a community, even a student community, is richer and more informed with journalists active in it.

I think the students there sensed that, too. I hope that they live it.

Missing The Disappearing American Newspaper

A few sobering notes from a report called “The State of Local News 2025” by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University: Since 2025, the number of daily newspapers in the United States has declined by 40 percent. News deserts, defined as a county in which there is no local news outlet, increased from 150 in 2005 to 210 in 2025.

Well, I don’t live in a news desert, but it is getting dry out there.

Map of news deserts--there are still a lot of local news sources in U.S., but many local outlets like The Gazette are far less robust than they recently were. Map from: 

https://localnewsinitiative.northwestern.edu/projects/state-of-local-news/2025/report/

In November, The Gazette, my local newspaper, announced that it was being sold—going from an employee-owned local company to the property of something called Adams Multimedia.

And the change comes with cuts to the shrinking Gazette news staff. For example, long-time sports journalists Mike Hlas and JR Ogden wrote farewell columns. I’ll miss then both, but JR in particular, since he was very kind to many students of mine over the years.

As an old news man, of course that makes me a bit sad. Four decades ago, I was working hard as a local journalist in a small town in Missouri. Those were difficult, busy days, but rewarding ones, too. I later became a business journalist covering banking and then a professor at a small university teaching media writing and editing skills. Because of my background, I can’t claim to be neutral about news nor the decline in the newspaper industry.

But I also firmly believe we, the larger “we,” are suffering due to the loss of local news. It does feel like we’re living in a time and culture that celebrates ignorance and doesn’t discern well between fact and nonsense. Our “marketplace of ideas” is too often a cacophony of competing “realities” where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening nor watching the watcher.

Dec. 8 front page of The Gazette.

As the Gazette continues, it feels like it’s a shadow of its old self, an army on a long death march that sadly seems to have the end in sight.

The world turns and changes. Back when I was a reporter for The Boonville Daily News, there wasn’t an internet. Communication scholars were aware of a growing online world and anticipated something that they called the “information appliance,” without necessarily understanding it would be our phones that would come untethered from our desks and walls and start accompanying us everywhere and seducing us with their siren call of social media—and, these days, AI deep fakes.

When our attention shifted to the online world and ad revenue followed our ears and eyeballs, the demise of the local newspaper became an almost inevitable byproduct. But the shift of my local newspaper from local ownership to a Minnesota based regional media chain still hurts. In the 1980s, the newspaper I worked for went from being owned by a small chain to a larger regional company, and the shift was catastrophic—the paper became un-tethered from serving its audience and entered a deep decline.

I would wish that a similar fate doesn’t await The Gazette. The loss of many respected and experienced staff members doesn’t bode well. Then again, yet that doesn’t mean that The Gazette could have continued operating the way it had been. The meta forces at work in the media world are inevitably going to reshape who informs or misinforms us and how.

Nothing is as it was—that’s life. The world turns. We hope that the long arc of history is bending towards a better future, but that is clearly not always the case.

I can’t help the feeling that part of our current cultural, political mess is an extension of The Washington Post’s tagline: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Maybe there are glimmers of light in new online media yet to emerge but it’s feeling very twilight out there, and that makes me melancholy.

Cue Joni:

 

 

Netflix Movie Touches on What Music Means

The fictional members of imaginary KPop group Huntr/X, Zoey, Rumi and Mira, Netflix image.

“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”
Pierre de Beaumarchais, “The Barber of Seville”

As a retired media professor, I’ll disclose right up front that I am ignorant of music. I never took an intro to music class, never learned to play an instrument (beyond briefly ringing in a hand bell choir) and don’t have insight into music structure or history or much of anything else.

Yet, I have required students in the past to use music in a communication class—to pick a song of their choice that includes a video, and unpack what they see as the communication meanings or concepts portrayed in the work. I don’t doubt that Pierre had a point—“Baby Shark” is sung, after all. But even a musically ignorant person can understand that music, including pop songs, can be very expressive of ideas both verbally and non verbally.

And one of the points I was indirectly making to students is that communication is both data and feelings. So music, even pop music, can express our inner feelings. Music can have depth.

Which brings me to this year’s movie phenomenon, “KPop Demon Hunters.” As an old man, I freely admit I have zero experience with KPop. I’m aware of the term, but this Netflix movie served as my introduction to the genre.

And what an introduction. The movie follows three pop singers, Rumi, Zoey and Mira. The trio, a KPop group called Huntr/X, is also the chosen group, a mystical, generational set of super heroes who protect the world from demons through both their songs and their fighting prowess.

It’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” meets “Frozen.” Except it’s more than that. For one things, although I wish there was more character development, it’s got multiple characters who are complicated and surprising. Not just the trio, who each has their own distinct characteristics, but the demon boy band, the demon king, the band manager, the quack doctor—there are lots of interesting characters who are well written and well acted.

The story is fantastic, but works because it’s both animated, which gives it lots of license to be in its own imaginary reality, and internally cohesive. The characters believe in their universe and behave reasonably as a result.

And—those songs. This is an animated musical where each song works—they are catchy, well sung, lyrically interesting and advance the story. That it’s pop music doesn’t detract from its quality. Pretty much any of the videos of the songs would have worked in my class—there are characters and depth in each to dig into, communication ideas interestingly expressed.

True, I found the song about soda pop to be the musical equivalent of the food—there’s not a lot of depth there .But then again, in the context of the movie, these are demons attempting to snag fans, not anybody expressing truths about their life.

For me, the song that hit the most was the final one. I wish it had more set up—the quick resolution of the movie was, in my mind, one of its weaknesses—but I like both the sound and the lyrics of this song. “My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like?” Yeah, I have fallen in love with three cartoon girls by that point. There are lots of quotable lines in the song “What it Sounds Like,” but I really love one of its final verses:

“We broke into a million pieces, and we can't go back
But now we're seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.”

It’s a message of truth and self-acceptance. I’m not a poet, but it seems like decent poetry to me, wrapped in a catchy pop sound.

There is a lot that I like about the movie. The cast, both signing and speaking, seems excellent. The look of the movie is bright, colorful and eye catching. There is a serious tone and message, but also a lot of silliness and levity.

I feel lucky that I didn’t see this movie on Netflix. They released a “sing along” movie theatre version, and a grandson wanted his grandparents to go with him and his mother to see it. Luckily, I saw it in Iowa, a Midwestern state where most movie audiences are too uptight to actually sing along, so no audience voices interfered with the songs.

It’s not a perfect movie. As noted earlier, to me the resolution was nice but too rushed and needed more setup. The demon king could have used a much more effective physical appearance, particularly for the climatic battle. I liked seeing girls portrayed as creatures who actually eat, but they were also razor thin, which cut against that message. The quick cuts and pace sometimes gave the movie a too frantic feel to me.

Still, it’s very good. It’s an animated film that can appeal to a grandson and his grandfather. It’s Golden.

TB Persists as Deadly Disease Because We Allow It

 

My copy of John Green's latest.

The author John Green has a nifty tradition—when he has a new book coming out, he gets a bunch of paper and signs his name to thousands of sheets, which then go into the first edition of the book.

Thus, my copy of “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” has “signed edition” on the cover and a Sharpie Scrawled “John” on a page before the title page.

I have a J name, too, but not such a great J as John.

I recently read the book. I recommend it. But be prepared for some frustration.

Not with John, whose prose is breezy and readable, but with what he recounts. I’m not surprised that our deadliest infectious disease attacks our lungs—as the recent COVID-19 pandemic and previous flu pandemics show, our bodily oxygen interface is a vulnerable system in our anatomy.

So, why did I feel frustration? As Green reports, in 2023, more than a million people died from tuberculosis, “more than died from malaria, typhoid and war combined.”

We only have ourselves to blame for wars—they are not an inevitable part of nature that is imposed on us.

Tuberculosis, on the other hand, is natural, and it is also curable and has been for many decades. We found out how to cure this stubborn bacterial infection in the 1950s, yet it still harvests more souls than any other other human disease. Why?

“The cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not,” Green writes. That reality, made worse this year as America pulls back from life-saving foreign aid efforts, is a result of poor human decisions.

Anyway, one interesting aspect of Green’s book is the history of tuberculosis—how it was framed and what it meant. TB was a bit romanticized before we understood what the disease actually was. It caused sufferers to waste away, and was conflated with some rather messed up feminine body ideals—if the cultural aspiration is that women should be pale and thin, as it has been in some Western cultures, a disease that slowly causes its poor sufferers to waste away (it was once called “consumption” because the disease consumes the body) has some chic, some cool factor, in a sick (literal and figurative) way.

It was even at times associated with intelligence and education—and for many White “experts” back in the day, there was suspicion that Black people could not get TB. It was an upper class disease, or so they thought when diseases overall were way more common and hard to diagnose.

Then, as the 19th century faded in to the 20th, it became known that TB was caused by a specific germ, a bacterium. It was not genetic; it was not from character or intelligence—it was aided by crowding and filthy living conditions. Very quickly, TB went from being “cool” to being associated with the lower orders.

Finally, hooray, in the post WWII world, antibiotics knocked tuberculosis down and made it rare—in places. In others, where drugs are less available and more expensive, where modern health care does not exist—TB never went away.

Thus, we meet a young African who represents the reality of the disease. The book returns often to the narrative of a man who was a boy when Green first met him in Sierra Leone—Henry. Henry had TB, and was treated, on and off (for various reasons, medical treatment in west Africa is often on and off) over years. His case was drug resistant, and his life was endangered for years in slow, painful ways.

Luckily, Henry’s story did not end in one of the millions of deaths that TB causes each year. He eventually got effective treatment. For once, the cure and the disease were in the same place.

Yet, too often they are not. I do not think it is a spoiler to quote the very end of Green’s book, since early in the book the reader already understands the idea Green is stating is central to this text:

“In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. We must also be the cure.”

We must be. We are not, yet. These days, our ability to think well of collective needs has ebbed badly. May the tide of human compassion and knowledge rise soon. If it does, Green’s book may be part of that tide. So, I encourage you to read this book. It will frustrate you, but it’s an important piece of writing.