February 13, 2017

How About If We Start Treating Beyoncé Like a Human Being?

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I’m not a music person, so I have no particular personal opinion about Beyoncé’s musical powers. However, I do have an opinion about the increasingly tedious insistence that every time she shows her face publicly she has absolutely crushed, slayed, and otherwise annihilated every other musician currently alive or who has ever lived. I figured the same thing would happen tonight at the Grammys. Sure enough, the Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon posted a thousand-word review of her performance that is, in tribute to Beyoncé’s reality-warping power, time-stamped an hour before she actually performed. Here’s a sample:

It’s a remarkable feat to resuscitate a nation while simultaneously taking their breath away, but such is the otherworldly power of Beyoncé…spiritual, sweeping…ethereal glow…jaw-dropping…leaps and bounds ahead of all her peers…trippy, spellbinding…a tribute to healing and resilience…Glorious is certainly one word to describe Sunday night’s galvanizing affair…ambitious, artistically audacious…she rises, and she lifts us up with her bold performance…gorgeous, provocative…It was glorious.

I assume the second use of “glorious” is because Fallon ran out of entries in his thesaurus.

Come on, folks. Beyoncé may be the best performer working today—I wouldn’t know—but can we start treating her like an actual human being? This stuff is just embarrassing.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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