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The usual suspects

The usual suspects

Last updated on: August 3, 2026 at 3:44 pm by Fred Clark

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The usual suspects 2026-08-03T15:44:26-04:00 Fred Clark

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• Young man, there’s no need to feel down. I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground, I said, young man, ’cause you’re in a new town there’s no need to be unhappy: “Men-only gyms seek to protect Christian men from lust.”

They have everything for young men to enjoy. You can hang out with all the boys.

• My original hometown back in Jersey rarely makes the news, but this photo of a Dunellen police officer patrolling traffic on its busiest street — in a ghillie suit — went viral late last week. It was part of the town’s attempt to raise awareness about the state’s distracted driving laws (and to raise revenue by handing out a ton of tickets for distracted driving).

Biggest news out of Dunellen since Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won Olympic gold.

I grew up on that street, just a few blocks south of where that photo was taken. Dunellen was a pretty good place to grow up. Go Destroyers!

• In other local news (local to where I live now), Valley Forge University — the short-lived new name of Valley Forge Christian College — is closing its doors. The Assembly of God school started as a Bible institute 87 years ago and became an accredited Bible college after moving to Chester County in 1977.

Will the last small Bible college to leave please turn out the lights.

• Speaking of universities that closed their doors … Phil Williams is reading Timothy Egan’s history of the Klan in the 1920s and this bit — “They also attempted to create a Klan university that would offer a ‘one hundred percent American’ curriculum” — sent me off to read more about the short, sinful history of Lanier University.

Much of its former Atlanta campus is now a synagogue. “My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. …’

• “Despite his own warnings, Ken Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator.”

This violation is a bigger deal than it otherwise might be because Paxton has vowed to punish anyone else who uses their ex-wife’s address to vote after they moved in with their mistress(es).

• The citizens live in North Carolina, the landlords do not.

“I’m not paying my rent come August,” Hughes said. “I don’t have it. They can evict me, and I’ll go to court, and I will appeal it to a jury trial. And that takes about two years. Kevin’s doing the same thing. We’re going to get everyone in the park together to not pay.”

For now, Idlewild Acres has become a test case for how far corporate park owners can push rural tenants, and how far those tenants are willing to go to fight back.

I don’t pretend to have any special insight into “outreach to rural voters.” But a lot of those rural voters live under the boots of these exploitative, predatory corporate landlords, and I suspect they’ll choose to side with those who choose to take their side.

• I’ve been re-watching all the Prime Suspects on PlutoTV (that’s Netflix for poor people) as my current laundry-folding show. In addition to the amazing Helen Mirren, the third series (we call them “seasons” over here) features an amazing cast in supporting roles, including David Thewlis, Ciaran Hinds, Peter Capaldi, Jonny Lee Miller, and James Frain.

Prime Suspect 3 aired in 1993, and it’s odd seeing those familiar faces looking 30 years younger. I didn’t think Hinds and Capaldi ever were that young.

The show, beloved and acclaimed when first broadcast, is an interesting time capsule for other reasons too. It was a contemporary drama when it first aired, but now it feels, at times, like a period piece.

For example, there’s an awkwardly ’90s scene when one of the “lads” in the police station tells his fellow police officers that he’s gay. The character is saddled with a well-intentioned, but somewhat clumsily didactic monologue about what that does and doesn’t mean. The presence of a competent, professional gay man back in 1993 was treated as something so exotic and potentially controversial that the writers felt needed to be explained and defended, and for a moment it feels like we’re watching an after-school special or a Very Special Episode.

But the storyline of Prime Suspect 3 also includes the trans woman played by Capaldi, a character portrayed without quite so much defensive exposition, if also without quite so much care to avoid reductive stereotyping.

This part of the story is not intentionally inclusive in a way that conservatives would sneer at as “woke” (or, back in ’93, as “politically correct”) but it also came out years before the relentless, well-funded campaign of right-wing demagoguery intended to portray trans people as a menace to society and an all-purpose scapegoat for every imaginable grievance. Capaldi’s character is presented as weird, but not as a menace. Unlike a gay policeman, the existence and dignity of trans people was something that the general audience for a popular BBC show was presumed to be familiar with in 1993.

Helen Mirren is so astonishingly good at showing us what Tennison is thinking and choosing. There’s a scene in which she chooses to deadname Capaldi’s character, then regrets that choice as something that both she and the audience understand was an act of cruelty. It was wrong of her to do and everyone watching understood that because they hadn’t yet been bombarded with years of propaganda advocating for such cruelty.

Again, this classic show is now a time capsule and a period piece and I wouldn’t recommend Prime Suspect 3 as an exemplary model of trans representation. But it’s a fascinating reminder of how radical the top-down crusade against trans people has been, and how it has granted widespread permission to what used to be universally understood — even back in 1993 — as simple cruelty and injustice.

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