If 2020 couldn’t get any worse; James Bond is dead.  The one and only Bond that meant anything to me and the rest of my generation, has finally succumbed to mortality.  In my opinion there was only one Bond; and that was Sir Sean Connery.  Bold, brash, often uncouth, and extremely sexy. Can we still say sexy without a lawyer present?  Bond was my young generation.  The best generation; the 60’s.

Sean Connery brought an edge to Ian Fleming’s James Bond.  He was the thug in a tux. The proverbial misogynist every woman loved.  He was cool, square jawed, and tough.  Sean Connery’s James Bond could drink a martini, light a cigarette, save the girl, and kill the villain without a hair out of place.  He didn’t swagger, he walked into a room with the same powerful intention of his Aston Martin.  Sean Connery didn’t just play Bond; he was Bond.

I stopped watching James Bond movies when Roger Moore decided to hang his Bond shingle. Both equally handsome and irresistible, they took the Bond character and reinvented it as their own without compromising who and what Bond was or supposed to be.  A spy, a lover, a cad, and a free spirit. However, Sean Connery imbedded himself in Bond’s psyche.  We could never tell where and when Sean started and Bond ended.  A lateral motion of intertwined characteristics found in both; albeit one real and the other fictional, they assumed each other’s DNA like a second skin. 

The era of spy films and TV series was at its peak in the 60’s.  The Berlin Wall had gone up, Khrushchev was being a dick, and JFK had just told us that he had met the Soviet’s bluff in Cuba.  We watched, we listened, and we turned to James Bond for a shred of hope in saving us from the likes of real life Goldfinger where nuclear annihilation had become a reality. We needed James Bond. He always got the bad guy and saved the world as we knew it without building a sweat.

Miniskirts, fast cars, beautiful women, booze, cigarettes, and villains. A wonderful combination that kept us wanting more. More of Bond and more of Connery.  Connery’s career became relevant as Bond.  His deep throaty voice with only a hint of Scot in it, kept us women glued to our seats and wishing we were being rescued by this burly man with a hairy chest. We all wanted to be Bond girls. Alas only a few were chosen.

Sean Connery’s movie career spanned in other directions besides Bond. Indiana Jones, Hunt for Red October, The Untouchables, and the list goes on pre and post Bond.  But Sean’s fingerprints remain firmly etched in the character of James Bond.  No matter how many “Bonds” followed him,  Bond belonged to Sean Connery  He owned it.

The early Bond movies sans gizmos and technology were the epitome of wit, charm, sexual innuendo, good versus evil, and testosterone. Bond in current times would be labeled as a misogynist. We really good give a shit. Manhood oozed out of every pour of his tanned muscular body.

Sean Connery was famous but private. He was every girl’s dream of a knight in shining armor.  We never thought of him as anything other than James Bond. Men tried to emulate him and women drooled over him.  In various interviews he admitted to taking on characters after his own personal life. 

Born to poverty in Edinburgh, Scotland, he developed a thick skin which served him well when playing dark characters.  He molded Bond into his own image. A moody often dark side to a man without roots and seemingly happy to be alone.  Finding women but never attached. Each movie produced its own “Bond Girl”, the most famous being Ursula Andress. She was “the girl” in Dr. No. The movie launched her. Others like Honor Blackman and Diana Riggs (pre Avengers) were the first few Bond girls who went on to star in other TV spy series.

If I had to close my eyes and think of Bond, there is no one that comes to mind but Sean Connery.  I remember a great line from one of my favorite movies “The First Wives’ Club”. A drunk  Goldie Hawn tells the bartender that Sean Connery “…might be 300 years old but he is still a stud”. How true. Sean aged but never grew old. I never noticed his loss of hair, wrinkles, or age spots. I only saw James Bond. Impeccably dressed and holding a martini and a cigarette. That’s the Sean Connery I will always remember.  Because that was Bond; my James Bond.

Moving toward the craziest of times I need some satire in my life.  But even that seems to have been hijacked by the social media “conscience”, aka the FaceBook “community”. FaceBook recently took aim at Babylon Bee.  Babylon Bee is the answer to the elevation of “stupid” to “serious” by the current generation of humorless goofs. Recently, Babylon Bee was sanctioned by FaceBook for alleged violation of its “standards”.  Whatever those are. FaceBook is now the social media morality police. They want to save us from ourselves.  Big Brother is watching.

What is Babylon Bee? Babylon Bee is the equivalent of Mad Magazine without paper. Scathingly irreverent and uniquely witty, it takes to task anyone from the Pope to the President with the same cutting edge of a surgeon. Provocative headlines give those of us eager to escape from madness disguised as politics, an opportunity to look at the world in the same light as an episode of Saturday Night Live without an audience.  A harmless parody in difficult times. A relief from the constant bombardment of bad news. A smile with a cup of Joe reminiscent of lazy Sunday mornings when newspapers and weekend cartoons were significant.

A couple of weeks ago, Babylon Bee headlined that NBA players decided to wear white lacy collars in honor of RBG’s death.  A doctored picture showed two famous players in lace and a mean smile. Limpid liberal loons took to the airwaves in unprecedented umbrage and offence. The loony left sans sense of humor and wit. Poster children to boorish victimization activism without tolerance. Meaningless minds. A  generation of humorless boring millennials who continue to forge forward in futile attempts at reducing our sense of humor and elevating stupid into relevance.  There is no joy left in comedy or satire.  A new  society fraught with malcontent and self loathing ignorance.

But back to Babylon Bee.  A few weeks ago amidst the Amy Barrett circus of  indignation, anti-Catholic narrative, misguided feminism, and total disregard to decorum or minute intelligence; Babylon Bee published a pseudo Monty Python analogy entitled, “Senator Hirono Demands ACB Be Weighed Against a Duck to See if She is a Witch”.  A tongue-in-cheek reference to the continual hounding of Ms. Barrett’s Catholicism and faith by the insidious and belligerent Ms. Hirono. Senator Hirono came close to accusing Ms. Barrett of sexually assaulting people because of her Catholic beliefs. Babylon Bee extrapolated on the arrogant ignorance of Ms. Hirono and other Democrats’ attempt at insinuating that Ms. Barrett’s Catholicism was on par with witchcraft. Babylon Bee took on the parody with gusto and style.  

In a now all too familiar Babylon Bee satirical prose, the parody alleged that Senator Hirono compared Ms. Barrett to a witch.  Common knowledge attests to the fact that witches are made out of wood and can float like ducks. Therefore, it is correct to assume that if Ms. Barrett should be weighed against a duck and consequently floats, she should be burnt at the stake as a witch. To those of us with an ounce of humor find the analogy funny and an ice breaker in months of misery.  But no.  Our freedom of speech and creativity is on a short leash nowadays.  We are at the mercy of FaceBook and the like who find it necessary to mentor us on what is considered funny or offensive. We must abide by their “community” rules. A social media Gulag in the making.

When satire is censored, we are satirically doomed.  Remember Charlie Hebdo?  The continual deterioration of our creative freedom and the chipping away of fundamental free thought has reached epidemic proportions.  

Babylon Bee, albeit accused of conservative leaning, has made fun of everyone to include President Trump.  In a recent interview with the New York Times, Babylon Bee Editor in Chief, Kyle Mann, expressed the site’s unadulterated pleasure in tormenting Trump when he fails to realize that their site is satire. What is better than that? We need more of Babylon Bee and its counterpart The Onion in our daily lives. The latter is liberal leaning but just as satirical and funny.  And like Babylon Bee takes the “mickey” out of everyone on the same scale.  Both provocateurs that are essential to the well being of our psyche.

As  we brace ourselves for an election that is going to bring massive angst regardless of who wins; we need the unabashed often offensive humor of satire and satirical publications like Babylon Bee and The Onion. They provide the insane to keep us sane.  They peel away the stupid like a raw onion.  They push us into admitting that we are borderline morons.  Most of all they reveal the arrogance and self adulation political crap that we are subjected to on daily basis. They strip the veneer to reveal high cost salaried pinheads.  The burden of taxpayers.  The ducks that float.  They should be burnt alive.

Since the Hirono debacle, FaceBook went to the social media confessional and made penance.  They admitted to having been too hasty.  You think?  But don’t be fooled by their self serving penitent stance. They got caught for the idiots they are, pandering to political special interest groups who have managed to stifle our freedom of speech in lieu of partisan agendas.

We have managed to raise a generation of boring unappreciative goofs bent on being miserable.  They wallow in self absorbed righteousness. A gradual morphing of ingrate boring morons. The new entitled generation who expects the government to be their private sugar daddy.  But their misguided boorishness is not entirely their fault.  It has taken years of indoctrination at schools and universities to achieve such a caliber of brainwashed fools. The “woke” welfare society unable to provide for themselves. Hold on to your seats because we’re in for a bumpy ride.

The censorship of Babylon Bee should be a wake-up call to anyone with an ounce of awareness.  The path to stifling free speech is widening.  We are rapidly approaching a precipice of censorship without reason. The quick silencing of opposing opinion in politics should bring goosebumps to our skin. The demonization of faiths and traditional ideals is creating a cesspool of hate toward individualism and freedom of speech. Racism and bigotry is easily labeled to those opposing mainstream lemming thinking and indoctrination to silence discourse.  When parody is labeled dangerous to the State, we might as well ask Putin for advice on free speech.