"All the groovy gay ladies I know won't be watching your Christmas schlock."--actress-comedian Sandra Bernhard, who played one of the first bisexual characters on network television in Roseanne, openly addressing the Hallmark company.
Perhaps you'll remember the fall and early winter of my discontent, from Election Day 2016 through the holiday season.
The nation had elected preposterously as president a mean-spirited megalomaniacal madman who had bitterly attacked, among others, my profession.
I wandered about as if in a daze, finding odd solace--or vapid escape--in formulaic Christmas movies on a television network called Hallmark.
The snow always was pristine white, but no pedestrian ever slipped. No automobile ever skidded. All the fireplaces offered rolling fires, but no burning log every collapsed or needed stoking. I could smell the potpourri and scented candles as I watched.
Inevitably, the sad widower with the precociously wise pre-teen daughter would end up living happily ever after with the initially abrupt woman from back east who had been sent to his charming hamlet to execute the corporate takeover of his family business making Christmas ornaments.
Instead, she would experience a cultural conversion and devise a way for the family business to avoid the takeover and thrive under the joint leadership of the newly married couple--he with the local good will and she with the business know-how, and they with love and a precocious child and other little ones on the way.
All of that would come to its non-dramatic conclusion on Christmas Eve during community caroling beneath large powdery snowflakes on the town square, where the widower and the woman from up east had met 45 minutes previously at the annual tree-lighting ceremony.
The local man and the businesswoman had seemed not to like each other at first, but the sparks were evident, foreshadowing an infinitely more predictable and settling result than the presidential election.
Either I watched that movie over and over or I watched several movies that told the same story with the same kinds of characters.
I noticed there was not much diversity from white, straight-sexed characters in these movies. I made a note to worry about that later, when I got to feeling a little better.
I could feel my brain decaying, but I couldn't stop myself.
Sometime after the first of the year I regained my emotional footing and returned to my routine. Now I have Internet-streaming television in my home, and I don't even buy the Hallmark app.
Those movies had been a crutch, a narcotic. One fateful click and I might become addicted anew to overly simplistic wholesomeness run amok.
So you might have read what happened the other day.
In a commercial break during a Christmas movie, or between two Christmas movies, Hallmark aired a commercial from a wedding-planning company that featured five happily marrying couples, including one composed of two women.
A right-wing professed-Christian conservative outfit calling itself One Million Moms but consisting only of thousands fired off a complaint to the home office of Hallmark--the Crown Media Family Networks, it's called.
The group said it depended on Hallmark for Christian fare, especially during the Christmas season, and was deeply offended that such a trusted entertainment-providing friend would betray them and force them to have to try to explain such an alien and vile scene to their children.
Hallmark executives put their heads together and decided to run no more commercials with same-sex couples, saying it wanted to be vigilant about entertaining but not offending.
The wedding-planning company, in turn, pulled all of its commercials. Gay and lesbian groups called for a boycott of programming I bet a great many of them weren't watching anyway.
On Sunday, Hallmark executives put their heads back together and, confronted with the prospect of backward-seeming public relations as well as lost corporate advertising and a marginalized space in the emerging public marketplace, announced that they were sorry they had been sorry.
They said they would run all the commercials as bought and that they'd even be looking in the future to serving more broadly the wholesome entertainment interests of all persons and all families.
One of these days, and it might be a few years, Hallmark will air a film with a gay-romance element. Then, a few years after that, it will air a film with a same-sex central story leading to a show of affection and wedlock.
Then, a few years after that, people who don't want to look at that sort of thing, or for their children to look at it, will learn to use differently the energy they once would have expended to write a letter seeking to impose their own values.
They'd execute instead a simple changing of the channel, now widely known as clicking a different icon.
Whether I'll be watching probably hinges on whether the preposterous and megalomaniacal madman gets a second term.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/18/2019