Like A Gallstone

10 December 2025

Decades ago, when I was witnessing illegal, unhealthy, sick and menacing-toward-violent behavior on the parts of certain In-Laws, I made it very clear to them that I wasn’t putting up with any of it.  I didn’t do so within my Family of Origin,  and this band of neurotics wasn’t going to get cut any slack, at least not by me.

I seemed to have been the only one voicing offense and outcry.  Besides, (or maybe because) I was pregnant with Dear Daughter at the time, I believe that, to this day, she experiences emotional co-incident adrenalin rushes with me!

“Can’t you let it pass?” My Zia asked in quiet desperation.

“Like a gallstone,” I replied.

My Dear Zia was earnestly trying to hold onto me, but, as They wisely say, “Love is letting go.”

It was thus in the spirit of wisely letting go that I watched an episode of Early Edition, late last night, during a time frame that, for me, is late, from 10-11.  The title, Up Chuck, pretty much says it all about the era of the 1990s.

I frequently, uh, constantly, ask Dear Husband, “How did we get here?” — when it comes to reading about (I choose not to observe or hear) our whack-job “Guv” in Chronic Campaign Mode for King Gavin.

I ask the same question when it comes to reading similar potty-mouthed promises, social-media-screeched, by big fat billionaires who slavishly must try to be the Big Bad Dude Who Does in Donald.  (I don’t even think The Consultant, that blue-haired freak with the nose ring in each nostril, is remotely impressed by these preschool-level histrionics.)

Last night, while watching Up Chuck, I got all the answers I needed about How Did We Get Here.

Chuck Fishman, the college-buddy of lead character Gary Hobson, he of male-hunkdom, returns to Chicago and McGinty’s Bar, after having bombed out in Hollywood.  Of course, Chuck lies, as he always does, about how he’s doing, what he’s doing, and pretty much everything else.  It’s the ways in which Gary finds out the truth(s) that create the story line of this episode.

The story, in itself, is simple.  The devil, however, is in the details, and there’s a lot of devil.

— The nerdy Nephew of Chuck, majoring in Film Studies in L.A., has the weirdo appearance that is currently being aped by such TV-non-personality-News-Stars as Jake Tapped-Out.

— Chuck bemoans the Focus Grouping and Group Thinking of the TV/Hollywood Entertainment World. Methinks he was speaking about the producers of Early Edition!

— Gary’s Newspaper fades to white because he is NOT supposed to become THE NEWS.  Hint, hint, Fake News?

Then we get to the Real Payoff:  The Jerry Springer Show!

I never watched that daily afternoon parade of human debris, or any of the trash tv-talk-shows during the 1990s.  (Heck, I didn’t even watch Early Edition in its original airing!)  I lived in Suburbia at the time, so it meant I was very alone, and free as a bird!  I did research for my novels!

Gary ends up on the stage of The Jerry Springer Show, which, that day, featured Southern White Trash:

Bride-to-Be who cheats on her Future Husband.

This type of televisual human garbage is the prototype of the online clickbait that comprises TheNewYorkPost or TheDailyMail!

The friends/employees of Gary are back at McGinty’s Bar, watching this show — LIVE!

Erica Paget, the single mom who risked getting CPS (Child Protective Services) called on her, weekly, is shocked:

“I thought these things were staged!”

Gary is merely on-stage, drawing such a crowd response that Jerry checks his notes to see if this brou-haha was written into the script!

But, no, Mr. Hobson, is there, on-camera, trying to get a hold of the videotape, secretly filmed by Nerdy Nephew, and shopped to Jerry to make a quick buck.  Mr. Springer is quite the role model for this creep:  he keeps a poster of the parasite plastered on the door to the apartment he shares with a roommate who wants rid of him.

The full display of mid-late 1990s trends and mindsets are encapsulated in “Up Chuck” — Episode 7 of Season 3 — of Early Edition.  The fact that this show was filmed in the Chicago of the 1990s is testament to the reality that the outdoor sets were sanitized, scrubbed, selected with extreme caution, and shown artistically.

There was a concurrent serial drama at that time called “Chicago Hope” (which I’ve never watched).  It was billed as a medical drama.

Considering the medical drama that would overtake the USA from 2008 onward, covertly fronted by an unknown from Illinois, I’d say there never was any hope in Chicago, or real change either, medical, surgical or otherwise.

As for the tough-punk Getty-Oil brat, trying to prove he’s Mr. White Trash for those Southern primary voters, he’s not a hope, or a prayer — even in his Book of the Deviant Occult.

This historic tv episode ends with a plot twist that has become a telling device in this series:  the choice that Hobson must make initially seems to sacrifice a greater good for a personal need, but, in the end, the miracle of serendipity prevails.

And, in the end, that miracle always prevails.  It’s not counted on by the statisticians, or plotted by the computer modelers, much less dimly conceived by the cynics, the experts, the frauds who claim to know everything, past, present and future.

Late last night, I got the bright idea to watch that long-ago time-capsule from an era I most definitely did not enjoy; I used to view the 1990s with abhorrence and the need for immediate flight.

Last night, though, I’d completed my review of the translation into French of these paragraphs from Chapter 58, The De Gaulle Chapter, of THE DAWN.  I felt so supremely confident about journeying back in time, to any time, even to a wretched time, such as the 1990s, that did, indeed, pass like a gallstone.  The body politic is, nonetheless, feeling just fine in December 2025.

The French would look back at their sorrowed past, not necessarily to learn from it, but to revise it and, at times, to delete portions of it.  The most egregious historical revisionism would, of course, come from the State, l’État.  By the 21st century, the legislative re-naming of administrative regions would take on an almost messianic zeal among the socialists intent on re-shaping France, much like Petain had wished to do with his National Revolution.  Ergo, places with tragic pasts like Alsace and Lorraine, and the Ardennes, these unique regions would be tossed together in the same cultural basket and renamed the Great East, le Grand Est.  Great indeed.

This propensity of the French government to re-arrange territorial deck chairs while the ship of state is going down is a form of reform mania that correlates in inverse proportion to reality.  Thus, while the French no longer flee the sight of their past, they continue to view it as a giant work in progress that comprises the peculiar domain of the politician who does nothing but who claims to re-invent entire nations based upon policy and computer models.

The people know better, but they are complications in this crass flight from the truth.  Truth, however, always prevails, and the politicians, even in France, sense they have a shelf life before the next crisis reveals another truth from the past, the sacred past, that will reveal them as liars.  The public image of any politician depends on the truth being hidden for as long as possible from the public.