If Beale Street Could Talk: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A Beautiful mess of a movie that is gorgeous to look at but story wise is derivative and dull, making it difficult to sit through.

If Beale Street Could Talk, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, is an adaptation of the James Baldwin story of the same name that follows the travails of two African-Americans, Tish and Fonny, as they navigate the perils of young love in a racist New York City of the 1970’s. The film stars Kiki Layne as Tish and Stephon James as Fonny with supporting turns from Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry .

If Beale Street Could Talk, director Barry Jenkin’s much anticipated follow up to his 2016 Best Picture winning Moonlight, is another in a long line of disappointments on the very bumpy ride of cinema in 2018.

Based on the James Baldwin story of the same name (which I have not read), If Beale Street Could Talk is a beautiful mess of a movie. It is at once visually stunning yet also narratively pedestrian and culturally juvenile.

Let’s start with the good news. Cinematographer James Laxton delivers an impeccably lush and cinematically vibrant aesthetic to the film. Laxton’s camera engages in an exquisite dance with his subjects while painting the world of the film with a delicate and ethereal palate that is not only gorgeous to behold but narratively profound. Laxton’s work on Moonlight was equally sublime and dramatically insightful, and with If Beale Street Could Talk, Laxton has shown himself to be not only a master craftsman but a powerful artist.

Sadly, Barry Jenkins script never lives up to Laxton’s stirring cinematography. Jenkins inability to write efficient and effective dialogue and build a coherent and compelling narrative make If Beale Street Could Talk a frustratingly uneven and ultimately unsatisfying film to watch.

When Jenkins (and Laxton) flashes back and focuses on the blossoming first love of Tish and Fonny, the film crackles with life. The chemistry between actors Kiki Layne (Tish) and Stephon James (Fonny) in these flashback scenes is palpable, and Laxton superbly bathes them in gorgeous light, shadow and color as he lets the viewer see the characters as they see each other, through the prism of unabashed love.

It is when the film shifts to the present moment and its drama of “legal peril”, which is decidedly stale and stultifying with cringe worthy dialogue to match, when the wheels come of the cinematic wagon. An example of which is that there is a scene between Tish and Fonny’s families that is so poorly written, poorly directed and poorly acted that it was like watching kids put on a play…a very bad play…in their basement.

The “legal peril” storyline is so trite, hackneyed and derivative it seems like it was lifted from an episode of Law and Order or some equally awful television show. Anytime the focus of the film shifts to the legal story and its adjacent narratives, it serves as little more than an irritating distraction.

The film is equally abysmal when it tries to convey a political or socially conscious message. When Jenkins tries to use the movie as a statement on race in America, it reveals itself to be, at best, painfully adolescent in its cosmology.

Ironically, in its social themes, If Beale Street Could Talk is as much an unnuanced distorted Black view of America as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry is a unnuanced distorted view of America through the White perspective. Both film’s are little more than wish fulfillment and fantasies driven by archetypes deeply embedded in the American psyche. In the case of Dirty Harry, it is the archetypal Righteous Gun Slinging Vigilante, who is part of the system but operates outside of it to protect Whites from those lawless “others”, most notably Blacks (think of the “you feel lucky” scene, where Dirty Harry points his .44 Magnum in the face of a “Black criminal”).

In If Beale Street Could Talk, the thematic archetype is one of the Righteous Victim (think of Fonny as the young Black criminal with Dirty Harry’s .44 in his face), who is oppressed by the system and must operate outside of it in order to survive it. In this way, If Beale Street Could Talk is social justice/victimhood porn and propaganda, which on its surface claims to be about speaking the truth of the Black perspective in America, but in reality is about reinforcing and strengthening the victim archetype and narrative.

What is striking to me about this aspect of the film, is that it also reinforces the racist tropes that fueled the Dirty Harry era to begin with and which eventually led to Clinton’s infamous crime bill in the 90’s which further criminalized Black men. For instance, the lead character Fonny which, along with Tish, is whom the viewer is supposed to identify with, and yet when we first learn about Fonny, he commits a crime, theft. Fonny’s lawlessness is not even given a second thought, but in the narrative structure of the film it subconsciously undermines the audiences connection to him to a devastating degree. This is not some personal revelation from me, this is just Cinema 101: Basic Storytelling and Character Development.

The same is true of the other Black men in the movie, all of whom are equally lawless and all of whom commit crimes. Fonny’s father steals from the docks, and his pseudo father in law not only steals but beats the hell out of his wife…and yet these men are supposed to represent “regular Black men”.

Add to that Fonny’s friend Daniel who is fresh out of prison, and just like Fonny claims he is entirely innocent of the charges against him. Apparently Fonny and Daniel are the two guys who really didn’t do it…even though we’ve already seen Fonny commit a crime and Daniel’s sketchy reputation precedes him.

While all of the Black men in the film are criminals, none of them take responsibility for their criminality. The crimes they commit are all the fault of the system that is screwing them, thus demeaning these men even further as they are deprived of any and all agency. This is the Victim archetype in full bloom, where no matter what the character does it is never their fault. This is an extremely unsatisfying quality in a cinematic Hero, as it simply castrates the Hero and asks the audience to pity them rather than relate or project on to them. It also does not allow for any catharsis on the part of the character, and that in turn doesn’t allow for any catharsis on the part of the viewer, which results in a psychologically frustrating movie-going experience.

Consider other Hero stories where the Hero is brought down by a corrupt system…movies like Braveheart, where William Wallace ultimately loses, but he goes down swinging, screaming “Freedom” at the top of his lungs as he is torn to shreds. Or think of a parallel for the Fonny character to maybe the best known Hero story of them all…Jesus Christ. Jesus is persecuted, just like Fonny, but the key to the Jesus story is that he has agency and chooses to be crucified….thus becoming Christ. Jesus is the empowered form of the Victim archetype…which is the martyr, who is victim by choice. The choice here is the important thing as it means the Hero may suffer a terrible defeat but he still maintains his agency. In contrast, the perpetually disempowered Fonny is just laundry being tossed and turned in a washing machine, who never chooses but always loses.

In terms of the criminality of the characters in the film, there are other contrasting examples, think of The Godfather or Goodfellas. The mobsters in those movies do awful things to people and yet audiences relate to them and embrace them as “Heroes” of the story, why is that? The reason for that is because those characters, from Michael Corleone to Henry Hill, embrace their criminality. They maintain their agency and don’t claim to be victims of the system, instead they are gaming the system.

These details in the DNA of If Beale Street Could Talk may seem minute to the less sophisticated viewer, but it is these specific elements that can make or break a film and its narrative in the unconscious of the audience. In the case of If Beale Street Could Talk, these subtle archetypal issues deter viewers from fully accepting and embracing the characters, story and film.

It isn’t just the Black men who fair poorly in If Beale Street Could Talk, as White men are portrayed as truly devils in this movie. White men are sexual predators (again, the inverse of the Dirty Harry movie where Black men are predators) and are inherently evil, from a lecherous perfume shopper to a cop who is so consumed with racial hatred he comes across as more than a little insane. For the White characters in this movie, just like Black characters in Dirty Harry, they are entirely devoid of nuance and are absurd caricatures. Even White characters we never see are predators, as there is one who impregnates a poor Latina women and then leaves her with nothing, and then maybe even returns to rape her.

It is for these reasons that If Beale Street Could Talk is just as insidious and insipid as the blatantly racist Dirty Harry movies.

As for the acting, Stephon James and Kiki Layne are glorious in their falling in love sequences. Laxton’s camera holds on their loving gazes for extended periods and their love for one another is tangible in these shots. But when they are asked to do more than just look longingly and lovingly at one another, the two stars lose much of their power.

James is a charismatic screen presence, but he seems rather limited when it comes to the more static shots. James is unable to compress his magnetism and dynamism when he is contained in such a confining space and he loses his power because of it.

Kiki Layne is quite engaging during the dreamy love sequences as well, but she too falls well short when things get much more complicated. Layne’s strong suit is her ability to seem to be overcome by her wonder for the world, but when the world stops being wondrous, she stops being interesting and starts being wooden.

Regina King does solid work as Tish’s mom, but she is hamstrung by being stuck in the intolerably mundane legal drama portion of the story, and while she is a compelling actress, none of her scenes are particularly noteworthy.

If Beale Street Could Talk, which may be the second most mis-leading title in the history of cinema right behind The Never Ending Story because Beale Street is never seen in the movie and all the action takes place in New York (I am kidding, the title is explained in the opening, but still…I found it funny), is another in a long line of films that underwhelmed in 2018. Barry Jenkins (and his cinematographer James Laxton) has a distinct and luscious visual flair to his work, but his storytelling and character development need serious work. Therefore I can only recommend this film to the most committed of cinephiles who would want to see the cinematography on the big screen. For everyone else, there is no reason to see this in the theatre, but if you stumble upon it on cable one night or on Netflix, feel free to check it out if you like, and tell me if I am wrong or not.

In conclusion, if Beale Street could talk, I’d tell it to shut up because while it talks a lot and does so in a beautifully melodious and mellifluous visual voice, it actually doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot, and what little it does have to say is so vapid and vacuous that it has no value whatsoever.

©2018

Mary, Queen of Scots: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. You would be better served getting your head chopped off than ever seeing this movie.

Mary, Queen of Scots, written by Beau Willimon and directed by Josie Rourke, is the story of Mary, the young Catholic Queen of Scotland in the 1500’s, and her struggle for power in her native land amidst her rivalry with England’s Queen Elizabeth. The film stars Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth.

Recently, in the midst of a magnificent hurricane of my own cleverness, I came up with a stunning new maxim that feels decidely old when, after weeks of fasting and meditation in a cold and windowless room, I declared to myself that “Wokeness Kills Art”. For proof of the veracity of my maxim, one need look no further than Mary, Queen of Scots.

As a first generation Scotsman (and an outspoken supporter of a Independent Scotland), a Catholic, and a classically trained actor, a period piece/historical drama about Mary, Queen of Scots starring Saiorse Ronan, who is one of my favorite actresses, and Margot Robbie, another top-notch actress, should be right up my alley. I was pretty excited to see Mary, Queen of Scots, so much so that I actually went and saw it the day the film opened in theatres. Once I actually saw the movie, my excitement was left dead-eyed, with its decapitated head rolling down the aisle of the theatre.

It is difficult to succinctly state how absurdly awful this movie is…but my best attempt would be to say that Mary, Queen of Scots is a narratively incoherent, cinematically obtuse and historically vapid piece of painfully progressive propaganda.

Director Josie Rourke, who comes from the London theatre world, is so cinematically illiterate I wouldn’t feel comfortable letting her watch a movie, nevermind make one. Ms. Rourke’s inability to even comprehend the most rudimentary aspects of storytelling in film is remarkable to behold.

Rourke’s take on Mary is that she is a symbol for social justice warriors everywhere due to her anti-patriarchy, pro-feminist, pro-gay, pro-trans and pro-diversity views. Ms. Rourke should have renamed the movie, Mary, Queen of Woke. This film has all the cinematic craftsmanship and political subtlety of a Dinesh D’Souza movie combined with the historical veracity of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.

Adding to the tsunami of historically inane things thrown into this film to fit a modern liberal agenda, Ms. Rourke uses some bizarre and frankly, distractingly ridiculous color blind casting. So viewers are supposed to be woke enough not to notice that Adrien Lester, who is Black, is playing Lord Thomas Randolph, who was so pasty white in real life he bordered on transparent. Ms. Rourke doesn’t stop there, as she casts Asian actress Gemma Chan as Bess of Hardwick, again, a very, very, very White woman who was decidedly NOT Asian.

Color blind casting in a historical drama is more complicated because “people of color” back then had their own history and back stories. Seeing a Black man as Lord Randolph begs the question…how did a man of African or Caribbean descent, who back then was more likely to be a slave or a servant, rise to the upper echelons of the aristrocracy? The same is true of an Asian women playing Bess of Hardwick. Asian women existed in the 1500’s, obviously, but not in the Royal Court or in the halls of power or among the blue blood families of England. So when audiences see an Asian women or a Black man in such a prominent role in English society in the 1500’s, they have questions, and when the film never addresses or answers those questions, audiences feel deceived and betrayed.

In addition, Bess of Hardwick and Lord Thomas Randolph are real people from history and they were very White…why is it ok for them to be played by non-White actors? Would it be alright for a White actor to play Jesse Jackson in a film about MLK or Louis Farrakhan in a film about Malcolm X? Of course that Whitewashing wouldn’t be acceptable, so why should it be ok for the opposite to occur here? It seems with the Woke Brigade, diversity and inclusivity top authenticity and the evil of cultural appropriation is something of which only “other” people are guilty.

The rest of the cast is also littered with token “people of color”, “token” being the operative word, no doubt to fulfill some wondrous “inclusivity rider”, but that doesn’t make it any less distracting or any more palatable or even remotely believable.

I understand that color blind casting is more acceptable in theatre where the threshold of believability is considerably lower, and while I find it and the reasons behind it distasteful there as well, I accept it as an unfortunate reality. But film is not theatre and the dynamics between film audiences and screen, and theatre audiences and stage, are very dramatically different. Film audiences are much less inclined than theatre audiences to suspend their disbelief over such things as colorblind casting, no matter how well intentioned it is, especially in a historical drama.

In film, audiences want to feel like they are watching the actual events as they take place, and they make a bargain with the movie maker, ‘you make it seem real and we’ll go along for the ride’. But when the Royal Courts of Scotland and England in 1500’s, which were obviously lily white, are populated with a cornucopia of minorities, then audiences just roll their eyes and tune out thinking the whole thing is little more than politically correct nonsense…which it is…because it doesn’t reflect the reality of the time.

Added to the absurdity of the film’s rainbow coalition in Royal Court, was the notion that Mary was a proud champion of gay and trans people. There is a scene where Mary forgives her gay/trans best friend for an act of stunning betrayal simply because she is so accepting of his homosexuality and thus excuses his awful act. This is so historically illiterate as to be absurd. The fact that Mary was a Catholic Queen in a Protestant land, and yet would not divorce or convert in order to save her skin or take the throne, is maybe a strong indicator that her religion IS PRETTY FUCKING IMPORTANT TO HER…and her religion at the time was quite clear in how they felt about “Sodomites”. But for Ms. Rourke, religion means nothing to Mary, it is her modern progressive values that really matter.

In keeping with the vacuous wokeness of the film, the overarching theme of the entire enterprise is that Mary and Elizabeth were feminist sisters, but it was those damn men who ruined everything. Of course, Ms. Rourke and her ilk are too ignorant to understand that taking the agency away from these two historically powerful women and reducing them to victims of the evil patriarchy doesn’t make them iconic, it makes them unconscionably weak…not exactly the girl power message the filmmaker intended.

Ms. Rourke, and her equally abysmal screenwriting accomplice, Beau Willimon of the execrable House of Cards fame, go so far as to have Elizabeth claim that she is “now a man and not a woman”, therefore making sure that when Elizabeth does something bad…and anyone who knows history knows she does something bad to Mary…masculinity is to blame! See…even when women do something terrible to another women it isn’t their fault! Damn you patriarchy because women have no agency!

I went to the film with a decidedly bleeding heart social progressive, the Honourable Rev. Dr. Lady Pumpernickle - Dusseldorf Esquire, and even she thought the cavalcade of suffocating political correctness in the form of colorblind casting, pro-LGBTQ and anti-maleness on-screen was way too much, and to an eye-rollingly ridiculous degree.

As for the actual making of the movie, Ms. Rourke is terribly ill-equipped as a visual artist. With the luscious green Scotland as a backdrop, Ms. Rourke somehow manages to make a visually dull, flat and stale film. Ms. Rourke’s inability to even do the most basic of blocking for the camera, as opposed to the stage, makes for some very stodgy sequences, not the least of which is a poorly executed battle scene that is staggering in its incompetence.

The aforementioned Beau Willimon’s script is equally inept. Willimon starts out trying to balance the Mary narrative with the Elizabeth narrative, but then just scraps that idea altogether and throws in a myriad of betrayals and counter-betrayals that end up only muddying the already murky historical waters. Willimon’s script is a key component in making the film such a garbled, incoherent mess, but it is Ms. Rourke’s weak direction that ultimately sinks the ship.

As for the acting, the majority of the cast is so poorly directed that they end up with lots of theatrical histrionics but very little genuine humanity. There is a lot of light but absolutely no heat from the cast that pushes too hard, too often to make something out of nothing.

Ms. Ronan is a compelling figure on-screen but her talents are entirely wasted on this disaster. It certainly would be a treat to see her play the role under the eye of a different, more competent, director though, as Ronan is very well equipped to play such a demanding and complicated character.

Margot Robbie is both out of place and under utilized as Queen Elizabeth. Robbie’s Elizabeth is such a listless and lifeless figure that she is no match for the dynamic Mary, which is maybe why they just, of the blue, stopped comparing and contrasting the two of them mid-way through the film.

The climactic scene of the film, which is at best historically dubious, has Mary and Elizabeth facing off. This sequence is so poorly shot, blocked and executed it was stunning to behold. Rourke uses fabric hanging from the ceiling to build a maze that the two actress…and the camera, must navigate until they finally come face to face. I get what Rourke was trying to do there, using the fabric to symbolically show the layers of barriers between the two women that they must wade through in order to actually see one another, but this is just another example of a theatre director trying to make a movie. This sequence is so visually ineffective and cinematically impotent that it boggles the mind. While Ms. Rourke intended this sequence to be a metaphor speaking volumes about the world Mary and Elizabeth inhabit, what it really does is perfectly highlight Ms. Rourke’s filmmaking ineptitude.

On the brightside, some of the costumes look nice.

In conclusion, Mary, Queen of Scots is a bitter disappointment because it tries to turn this historical drama into a piece of woke propaganda. As a historical drama it fails miserably both as history and as drama. As propaganda it also fails miserably because of the heavy handed incompetence of director Josie Rourke. If I could go back in time and had a choice between having my head chopped off or having to sit through this movie, I would gladly go under the executioners axe than suffer through this cinematic abomination.

If you want to see an exquisitely crafted and highly entertaining period piece and historical drama, do yourself a favor and go see the deliciously sublime The Favourite and skip the putrid cinematic detritus of Mary, Queen of Woke.

©2018

The Favourite: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.35 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A very dark, arthouse comedy set in the early 1700’s that speaks to the absurdity of the world in which we live today.

The Favourite, written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is the story of palace intrigue in early 1700’s England as two cousins, Sarah Churchill and Abigail Hill, conspire to out do one another in an attempt to be the favorite of Queen Anne. The film stars Emma Stone as Abigail, Rachel Weisz and Sarah and Olivia Colman as Queen Anne, with a supporting turn from Nicholas Hoult as Robert Harley.

As I have said repeatedly over the last few weeks, 2018 has been a rather tepid year for cinema, but finally, after the recent ill-exectued visual art house bombast of the highly anticipated At Eternity’s Gate and the messy mainstream misfire of the even more highly anticipated Widows, I have come upon a film worthy of my cinematic attentions and affections. That movie is The Favourite.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos has directed two previous films that I have seen, The Lobster (2015) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), both of which were exceedingly dark, at times laceratingly funny, uncomfortably insightful and strikingly original. Lanthimos’ ability to make the off-beat and absurd, not just palatable but penetratingly profound, elevated those two movies onto my list of best films of the year.

Thankfully, Lanthimos is up to his old tricks with The Favourite, as he coaxes deliciously powerful performances from his three leading ladies, Stone, Weisz and Colman, all while putting on a master class in verbal sparring, physical comedy and visual storytelling.

The crazy thing about The Favourite is that it made me laugh out loud on occasion due to the absurdity of it all, but it wasn’t until after seeing the movie and reading about the story, that I discovered it is based on a true story…which makes it all the more absurd…and also makes it extraordinarily prescient in regards to our current political moment.

Watching Stone’s Abigail and Weisz’s Sarah jockey for position and using ever more outlandish tactics to get their way in order to have the Queen’s ear, made me think of the pervasive palace intrigue of Trump’s soap opera White House. Sarah and Abigail could be Ivanka and Kellyanne or Jared and John Kelly or Sarah Sanders and The Mooch or any of the myriad of other miscreants who, in an attempt to warm their hands at the hearth of presidential power, have latched themselves onto the mad king currently sitting on the throne.

Speaking of which, Olivia Colman gives a deliriously Trumpian performance as the rabidly insecure, emotionally incontinent, childless and widowed Queen Anne. Queen Anne is blissfully uninformed, ill-informed and disengaged when it comes to politics and governance…sound familiar? Colman’s Queen Anne is, for all intents and purposes, an entitled basket case (again, sound familiar?), so for Sarah and Abigail, manipulating the erratic sovereign takes a deft hand and a decidedly strong stomach.

The Favourite is also relevant not just for political reasons but for cultural ones as well, as Queen Anne’s court and kingdom have a glaring lack, and a desperate need, for traditional masculinity…there are no warriors here, only connivers. The women, such as Sarah and Abigail, are the ones with power, close to power and jockeying for power, while the men, all impotent and effeminate dandies, are little more than pieces on a chess board for the women who rule the roost to manipulate. These “men” are not only emasculated but embrace their emasculation, and are thus reduced to being second rate women as opposed to first rate men, this is evidenced by Nicholas Hoult’s small but truly stellar performance as Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer.

The sex in The Favourite, whether it be in the court of Queen Anne or in a filthy brothel, is, in keeping with the grander theme, entirely transactional. Even when men are involved there is no actual penetration when it comes to consummation, for the fairer sex prefers to keep these perfumed and powdered geldings literally at an arm’s length during carnal interactions. In the female dominated world of The Favourite, the only body part used for penetration is the tongue…and it is very effective.

Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan do a masterful job using light and darkness to illuminate the rich sub-text in The Favourite. Ryan’s use of candles is particularly sublime, as he creates a crisp vision of light dancing in a sea of darkness, symbolic of the perils of swimming in the black oceans of power where danger lurks just out of sight and where your humanity, your name and your future can be snuffed out at a moments notice.

Ryan’s framing and Lanthimos’ embrace of animals as sub-text and storytelling devices work hand in hand and are both extremely well done. For instance, Lanthimos’ and Ryan wisely use the symbolically vital seventeen rabbits in Queen Anne’s room as notable backdrops for certain important scenes and although it is very subtle, it is extremely effective.

The performances in The Favourite are stellar across the board. Stone, Weisz and Colman all deserve Oscar nominations for their complex and thoughtful portrayals of what could have been caricatures in lesser hands.

As previously mentioned, Colman is particularly mesmerizing as the petulant Queen who fluctuates between being a tantruming toddler and a vengeful tyrant. Colman gives Queen Anne a remarkable depth, and makes her clownish antics both pained and somehow poignant.

Rachel Weisz is a force to be reckoned with as Sarah, and make no mistake about it, she literally and figuratively wears the pants in Queen Anne’s court. Weisz’s Sarah is the cunning and compelling brains behind the throne. Weisz’s impeccable use of her physicality to convey Sarah’s strength and determination brings a forceful element to the power dynamic of the Anne-Abigail-Sarah narrative.

Where Sarah is vulnerable though, is where Emma Stone’s Abigail strikes. Stone’s Abigail is more feminine than Sarah, but equally vicious when it comes to getting what she wants. Stone’s performance is beguiling as she taps into a darker and more overtly sexual side as Abigail than we have ever seen from her before, and it suits her nicely. Stone’s natural charm makes her Abigail all the more adept at manipulating the Queen and in turn, the audience.

I would argue that The Favourite may be Best Actress Oscar winner Emma Stone’s greatest performance to date. I also think Olivia Colman deserves to be nominated and maybe even win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, for her remarkable work as Queen Anne. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or both of Stone and Weisz get nominations as well as they are certainly worthy.

Politically The Favourite teaches us that being a slave to your ambitions ultimately leaves you a slave. I think Jared Kushner, Don Jr., Michael Cohen and the rest of the Trump bootlicking groupies will understand this film more than most as it highlights the degradation, humiliation, inherit myopia and associated dangers involved in doing anything and everything to gain favor with power. As the film and the actual real life events that inspired it show, the long game, if you have the strategic mind, testicular fortitude and vigilant patience for it, is a much more complicated, complex and ultimately rewarding venture than just being a sycophantic ass-kissing lackey.

In conclusion, The Favourite is a dark and delightful treat of an art house film. I believe the film is worthy of your time and energy to see in the theatre in order to enjoy not only Colman, Stone and Weisz’s performances but Robbie Ryan’s exquisite cinematography. I also think it is worth seeing for no other reason than to get a glimpse of what is no doubt the absurdist black comedy playing out behind the scenes right now in the epicenter of buffoonery known as the Trump White House.

©2018

Bush, Bertolucci and a Requiem for Truth

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 66 seconds

There is a common belief among the hoi polloi that famous deaths happen in threes. While I can’t prove that to be true, it certainly seems to be true. For instance, just this last week, former President George HW Bush died along with famed Oscar winning director Bernardo Bertolucci. Who was the third death you may ask? My answer to that is, the third death this week was Truth.

Bernardo Bertolucci died on November 26th, 2018, but the truth regarding Bertolucci died two years ago when the media ran with a story about the man and his work that was so ludicrous and odious as to be absurd. The gist of that story was that while filming one of his great works, Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bertolucci directed his star, Marlon Brando, to use butter as lubricant and rape his lead actress Maria Schnieder, on camera.

The story, on its face, is absolutely ludicrous and only an imbecile would believe it, and yet, the media ran headlines misinterpreting a Bertolucci quote and Hollywood celebrities went into overdrive virtue signalling to condemn Bertolucci and Brando. Some, like the genius Chris Evans of Captain America fame, actually called for the two men to be in prison. No one had the heart to break to the dim-witted Mr. Evans that digging up the long dead Brando to stuff his body into a jail cell was not really worth the time and effort.

I wrote a piece about this Last Tango/butter rape story back when it happened, and that piece got quite a lot of attention. Even though I was prescient enough to write in that 2016 story about actual, real sexual abuse taking place in Hollywood a full year before the Weinstein scandal broke, many people attacked me for my article claiming that I was somehow condoning rape. Of course, my counter argument was pretty simple…no rape had occurred so I couldn’t be condoning rape. In fact, not only did no rape occur, but no sexual contact of any kind occurred, but that didn’t appease the future #MeToo-ers from getting hysterically hysterical.

With Bertolucci’s death last week came a whole new wave of stories highlighting the fallacious butter/rape nonsense, with a great number of columnists, in as serious a tone as possible, condemning the man and saying that the butter/rape story overshadowed his artistic genius and must be in the first paragraph of his obituary. I nearly gave myself seizures from rolling my eyes so much and sighing so heavily at the moronic group think and political correctness consistently on display by these intellectually impotent, flaccidly unoriginal, know-nothing writers, but somehow I survived.

The one bright spot was that nearly every piece I read, especially the hard news pieces as opposed to the editorials and columnists, made clear this time around what they failed to make clear two years ago, namely that all of the sex in Last Tango in general, and in the “butter scene” in particular, was simulated. It is a sign of the idiotic times that the bar is set so low in regards to Truth that I took that bit of raging obviousness to be a small concession and a partial victory. My thinking was that, at least my article from two years had some impact…and that has to count for something (much like my Chris Kyle piece made a minor ripple in the culture four years ago). While I am certainly not a hero in the war for Truth, I can at least claim to have fired a shot….whether it hit or not is another thing entirely.

Which brings us to former President George HW Bush, who died over the weekend. Bush was preceded in his death not only by his wife of 73 years, Barbara, but also by the Truth. For proof of that one need look no further than the glowing media coverage of the elder Bush that spontaneously erupted even before rigor mortis had even set in after he shuffled off his mortal coil.

In America we have no official state religion, and that is because our de facto state religion is the religion of state. The deaths of former presidents and first ladies trigger an instantaneous high holy days in America where critical thinking is replaced with maudlin displays of faux patriotism that is more akin to a cult than a country. This flag-waving nostalgia spreads like a pandemic in post-presidential death America, and it infects both establishment political parties equally.

The establishment and its duplicitous corporate media wing kick into high gear when a venal American aristocrat like HW Bush dies. Michael Beschloss, Jon Meacham and Doris Kearns Goodwin are, like wax figures at Madame Tussaud’s, dug up out of the basement, dolled up and rolled out for the mindless to gawk at as they, ironically, wax eloquently about what a kind man Bush was and how he put country before self. It is all so soft and nice and is nothing but a pandering, manipulative fairy tale. Added to the mix now is how Bush the Elder was so different from the usurper currently sitting on the throne…the scandalous Donald Trumpenstien. Of course, the reality is that the media is only interested in style over substance and form over function, and thus their distaste for Trump and lavish adoration of HW Bush.

Bush’s death has notched the establishment’s hatred of Trump well past 11 and into the stratosphere…even more so than when St. John McCain died earlier this year, leaving behind his grieving common-law wife Lindsay Graham, who no doubt still suffers from the vapors. Mainstream media talking heads poetically pontificating about Bush’s and McCain’s “civility” and their “unquestionable patriotism” is like a never ending and gratuitous funeral dirge meant to signal the end of one noble life (and reprehensible lie) and the continuation of the greater tradition (and bigger lie) of the great American city brightly shining on the hill in all its moral superiority. This is all just smoke and mirrors to tap into emotion over reason and distract from the Truth.

What really comes across to me in watching the vacuous and vapid coverage of HW Bush’s demise, is that it is really just one more echo of a scream from the vicious and brutal killing of Truth in American life.

For example, whenever MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace rhapsodizes on Bush’s compassion but fails to mention his belligerent refusal to apologize to the Iranian people when in 1988 the U.S. military shot down Iranian Air Flight 655, a passenger jet that was flying in Iranian airspace, killing 274 innocent civilians, including 66 children, Truth dies. Truth dies further when the fact that Bush awarded the commander of the ship (U.S.S. Vincennes) that shot down that civilian aircraft a medal for his actions, is ignored.

Whenever Rachel Maddow declares that Bush is so dramatically different from Trump, but fails to mention that both men were born with silver spoons in their mouth that were so big they still shit bullion, Truth dies.

Whenever CNN’s Anderson Cooper talks of Bush’s beautiful 73 year marriage to Barbara and holds it up as a symbol of true love and devotion but fails to mention Bush’s long-term affair with his aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, Truth dies.

Whenever some pundit calls Bush a “self-made man” but fails to mention that he was born into one of the most powerful families in the country and his father was one of the most powerful bankers in the country who later became a U.S. Senator, Truth dies.

When the fact that HW Bush came from one of the most powerful blue blooded families in the country and then married into another wealthy and politically connected family, the Pierces, is not mentioned in regards to his life, Truth dies.

Whenever some historian speaks of Bush being unlike Trump because he put “country before self” and fails to mention his deplorable treason of the October Surprise, where Bush conspired to keep Americans hostage in Iran until after the 1980 election, Truth dies.

Whenever Bush is held up as a paragon of civic virtue as opposed to Trump, but his pardoning of his compatriots in the Iran-Contra scandal, many of whom could have ratted him out for his own criminal involvement in the scandal is omitted, Truth dies.

Whenever media members decry Trump’s treatment of illegal immigrants but fail to mention Bush’s Operation Condor, which was a covert operation in effect while Bush was head of the CIA, where the U.S. funded, trained and directed assassination and death squads in Central and South America who hunted, tortured and killed thousands of political dissenters and dissidents in order to keep right-wing dictatorships in power, Truth dies.

Whenever Bush is revered as a dignified statesman, but his illegal invasion of Panama, where he arrested Manuel Noriega, who was one of Bush’s partners in the Central American portion of Iran-Contra, and who under CIA supervision and protection, facilitated drug and gun smuggling throughout Central America and major U.S. cities such as Los Angeles and Miami that ravaged minority communities here in America and entire countries in Central America, which now fuels our immigration crisis, Truth dies.

Whenever talking heads speak of Bush’s impeccability in contrast to the corruption of the Trump administration but fail to mention the Bush family’s connection to the S&L scandal, in particular HW’s son Neil Bush, who was neck deep in that mess, Truth dies. Or when HW Bush’s father and his connections to the Nazi’s is conveniently lost down the memory hole, or the Bush family connections to the Bin Laden’s, or the House of Saud, or even…wait for it…the Hinckley family, whose son John Jr. shot President Reagan just months after he became president, and if Reagan had died, then Vice President George HW Bush would have been eligible to be president for the next 11 years…when all of those connections are ignored…Truth dies. (And Truth dies before I even mention the memory-holed information like HW Bush’s compelling connections to the Kennedy assassination, including his being a CIA operative at the time, the use of off-shore companies he is connected with as a money laundering vehicle for the Kennedy operation, and his allegedly being in Dealey Plaza on that day. )

Whenever historians, with misty eyes, eulogize Bush and bemoan Trump, but fail to directly connect the failures of Bush and his ilk to the collapse of trust in institutions which led to Trump, Truth dies. For instance, Bush’s CIA led Operation Condor and Iran-Contra, both de-stablized Central America and have directly led to the immigration crisis of today, which led to Trump. The same is true of Bush’s handling of the S&L scandal, which directly led to the Wall Street crisis of 2008, the anger over which led to Trump. The same is true of Bush’s (and Reagan’s) meddling in the Middle East, from putting Marines in Lebanon, which empowered Hezbollah, to dealing with Iran in both the October Surprise and the Iran-Contra scandal, as well as the head fake to get us into Iraq War I, and the devastating effect that had on regular Iraqis who were killed in the war and starved in the sanctions in the war’s aftermath, not to mention the debacle that was Iraq War II, all of which led to Trump.

Bush was not only a failure as a president, but as a father and a human being. He is responsible for the deaths of millions of people and for the misery of millions more. He has the blood of thousands killed in Central America on his hands and is morally responsible for the countless others he condemned to life in misery here in America with the easy flow of drugs and guns into inner cities under the Iran-Contra flag.

Bush’s son, the execrable George W. Bush, the 43 president, was an even worse president and presided over the killing of millions across the globe, most specifically in Iraq. Besides lying us into a war, Dubya also shredded the constitution with his expansive surveillance programs and his rendition and torture programs, and that doesn’t even scratch the surface of his awfulness since I haven’t mentioned his failure (or complicity) on 9-11, and his use of that tragedy for personal political gain. Dubya’s moral and political corruption and failure led to Trump.

Bush’s other sons are no walk in the park either, as his previously mentioned son Neil was deeply involved in the S&L scandal, and who also had a dinner scheduled with John Hinckley Jr.’s older brother the night after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan…how uncomfortable that phone call to cancel must have been. And I’m not even going to get into “Low Energy” Jeb Bush because, ironically, I just don’t have the energy, but trust me when i tell you that Neil Bush and Jeb Bush make Don Jr. and Eric Trump look like pikers at the entitlement and corruption table.

The bottom line is this, the establishment rants and raves about Trump and his destruction of American institutions and his attacks on Truth, but the reality is that the establishment destroyed their own institutions through flagrant corruption and fragrant mismanagement (“Heckuva job Brownie!”), and George HW Bush is the epitome of the depravity, nepotism, fraud, malfeasance, unscrupulousness and above all the entitlement that has turned many Americans against the establishment and which led directly to Trump.

The media has failed right along with the rest of the establishment, and their glaring and self-serving hypocrisy and mendacity only furthers to erode any remaining credibility they hope to hold on to. HW Bush’s failures shouldn’t be papered over by the press in the wake of his death, they should be shouted from the mountain tops in an attempt to regain the credibility that they so frivolously squandered with their cheerleading for war in Iraq (both I and II), their boot-licking of Dubya Bush on torture and surveillance (like the New York Times not using the word torture and holding a story on illegal surveillance until after the 2004 election) and for being lackeys to power in both Washington and Wall Street (such as media asshats like Jim Cramer yelling “BUY, BUY, BUY!” for Bear Stearns as it collapsed).

The media continues to degrade itself and its credibility when it bends over backwards to condemn Trump but simultaneously rehabilitates George W. Bush and his ilk. The same neo-con crew that lied us into the Iraq catastrophe and slept walked through 9-11, are still held in the highest regard by the overlords of American mass media. The allegedly liberal MSNBC is a festering cesspool of Bush apologia that actively rehabilitates Bush along with his nefarious intelligence agency henchmen like General Michael Hayden, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and Robert Muller. An example of MSNBC’s Bush sycophancy is that the network lets Bush administration alum Nicole Wallace have her own daily show and regularly allows such worm-tongued troglodytes as Bill Kristol and Max Boot on their programs with never a mention of their Iraq War villainy or any of their other egregious sins.

The problem with the lack of Truth in regards to HW Bush or Bertolucci is that the lies we tell ourselves only end up fooling ourselves. The lies the media tells itself and attempts to spread far and wide now ring hollow across large swaths of the the culture, and thus we have President Trump.

Telling ourselves lies, or believing in lies in order to make ourselves feel morally superior, like Chris Evans and the rest of the anti-Bertolucci, butter rape believing crowd, only ends up creating more shadows dancing on our cave walls meant to distract us from the harsher reality we prefer to ignore. So Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Jessica Chastain et al, used the Bertolucci butter rape story to make themselves feel better, like they were strong and taking a stand, but it also conveniently distracted them from their silent complicity with Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein and other sexual predators hunting young women and men in Hollywood. The reason they raged against Bertolucci and not against Woody Allen or Weinstein, is because it was easy…it was a form of cheap grace. Calling out Woody Allen or Weinstein (at the time before the story broke) would have cost them something…but attacking Bertolucci was free…free from repercussions and also free from fact.

The same is true of the media in regards to their hagiography of George HW Bush and family. Instead of speaking Truth, they pass on polite platitudes about service and nobility rather than highlight the family’s and man’s utter moral depravity, because it is easier to lie than seek or speak the Truth. To be fair to the media though, they are just doing their job…which is to propagandize the population with lies and inoculate them against Truth.

In conclusion, George HW Bush is dead. He inflicted great harm and evil upon the world, that is not a partisan assessment (I think the same of Clinton and Obama), but one founded on a very clear rational, moral and ethical basis. By ignoring the truth about George HW Bush, or distorting the truth about Bernardo Bertolucci for that matter, the media, and we the people, are condemning ourselves to our own execution. For as some have only come to discover under Trump’s mendacious and malevolent presidency, if the Truth has no meaning, than life has no purpose, and we are left in a Nietzschean will to power death spiral where, like a narcissistic ourboros, we cannibalistically gorge ourselves on our own lies and bullshit, and therefore end up being annihilated by eating ourselves into oblivion.

©2018

2018 Mid-Terms: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 35 seconds

Well, the mid-term elections are in the rear-view mirror and fading fast in the public consciousness as the never ending and frantic news cycle moves on to other topics like Jeff Sessions’ firing and the horrific shooting in Thousand Oaks. Before the election results are permanently lost down the memory hole though, I thought it would be wise to revisit them and see where we are and where we are headed.

GOOD? BAD? UGLY?

I predicted there would be no “blue wave” and depending on with whom you talk I might have been right. That said, the Democrats in the House outperformed my prediction, I thought they would either lose or win the House by a nose, and they exceeded that.

Some in the media are calling this a “blue ripple” as opposed to a blue wave, that may be more accurate but it also strikes me that it might be a desperate attempt to find the bright side. This election was billed as a referendum on Trump, and the cold hard reality is that Trump was not repudiated. Yes, Trump lost the House, but historically speaking, he substantially outperformed his predecessors. For example, Obama lost 66 House seats in 2010 and Clinton lost 54 seats in 1994 in their first mid-terms compared to Trump losing 30 (or so, the final tally isn’t in yet) this year…and they both went on to win reelection. Add to that the fact that Trump expanded his majority in the Senate and it appears that while Trump is certainly more vulnerable with a Democratic House, Trumpism is, to quote The Simple Minds, “Alive and Kicking” here in the good old U.S. of A., which means that while my House prediction may have been too pessimistic, my prediction of very bad things to come in our future is going to be right on the nose.

BAD

The Democrats, with their chests puffed out after winning the House, have seemingly decided to take a gigantic shit all over themselves and keep Nancy Pelosi on as Speaker of the House. What a brilliant strategic move, making an elderly, rich, corporate whore, machine politician as the face of your party when populism pulsates throughout not just the critical rust belt states you so desperately need to flip in order to win back the White House, but the majority of the country as well. Power is there for the taking if only the Democrats would abandon Wall Street in favor of Main Street and tack far to the left economically. But we all know they won’t do that because, just like the Republicans, they are pigs at the trough, and regular folks are left with nothing but the foul stench of their excrement after the establishment hogs have gorged themselves.

GOOD AND BAD

I had a reader email me earlier in the year regarding Beto O’Rourke, this reader is a very smart and engaging guy and always has terrific insights to share. In one email he told me he was excited for Beto in Texas, and thought he could be a game changer. I replied to the reader and told him that I liked Beto a lot as well, but that Texas politics is like the movie Chinatown, and while Democrats keep insisting that it is going to flip blue, at the end of the day Democrats will only be left agog in the middle of the street as their partner tries to console them by saying, “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

I do admit though, that on election night as I saw the numbers come in I totally got sucked into the Beto magic and started thinking he might pull it off and be the next JFK and become president in 2020 and save the universe. But then the Beto love (played by Faye Dunaway) got shot and killed and the creepy Ted Cruz drove off with the election with incestuous lust in his eyes for his daughter/granddaughter and I was left muttering to myself, “forget it Mick, it’s Chinatown.”

GOOD

With all that said, Beto O’Rourke and Andrew Gillum in Florida are both cases that prove that genuinely economically progressive politicians will outperform the usual centrist drivel put forward by the Democrats. I keep hearing how O’Rourke was fool’s gold, same with Gillum, and that the lesson to be learned from their loss is that the Dems need to move to the center. This is beyond moronic. Both Beto and Gillum were supposed to lose because both Texas and Florida are Republican states, but they did extremely well and exceeded expectations because, one - they are top-notch political talents and two - they were selling a genuine progressive economic agenda that has proven to be extremely popular among the masses regardless of party. Hell…in Idaho, Nebraska and Utah, voters passed initiatives to expand Medicaid and in Arkansas and Missouri they voted to increase the minimum wage.

I believe that the lesson to be learned from Beto and Gillum is the same lesson to be learned from Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise showing in the last British election, which was met with the equally inane analysis of “but he didn’t win!”. In our myopic culture, one must look to the big picture and the long game in order to have a strategic advantage, for Corbyn, his “loss” was a “win” because he gained momentum and was positioned to win at the next election and would not be held accountable for the shit show that is the current Brexit negotiations. For Beto and Gillum, they “lost” but won because they can now spend their time positioning themselves and gearing up for future races which might be more advantageous than this latest one. Beto and Gillum are serious talents, they just have to find a way to maintain the magic and not sell out before the next election.

GOOD

On the bright-side, one of my least favorite politicians of all-time, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, was defeated. Walker is a Koch brothers sycophant and an anti-Union hound, and I hope his next job is testing the strength of two by fours with his face.

BAD

Steve King of Iowa and Peter King of N.Y. are two more of my least favorite politicians. Being a native New Yorker, I find Peter to be the more deplorable of the two kings but it is close. Sadly, they both won re-election, and seem to be the type of politicians who will probably become Weekend at Bernie’s Congressman who continue in their jobs long after their death.

BAD

Speaking of awful people winning elections…in my home state of California, the repugnant Gavin Newsom won the Governorship and the repulsive and decrepit Dianne Feinstein won her fifth Senate race. Both Newsom and Feinstein are the poster children of Democratic fecklessness and corporate sluttery.

Newsom is one of the more phony and manufactured politicians you will ever come across, he makes Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney look like Robin Williams and Jonathon Winters. Newsom no doubt has his sights set on the White House, but the reality is that he doesn’t stand a chance. Trump would chew up and spit out a canned clown like Newsom and his corporate friendly economics with ease.

Dianne Feinstein, or DiFi as I like to call her, is a prostitute for the military and intelligence industrial complex. She loves the intelligence community and shamelessly kisses and licks their ass on her own volition and upon their request. Why liberal Californians love DiFi is a complete mystery since she is actually a closeted Republican, which makes sense since she is old enough to be Calvin Coolidge’s big sister.

THE WAY FORWARD

As for the next two years…as I stated in my prediction post, things are about to get really interesting. The Democrats seem to want to try and impeach Trump, which strikes me as a bad move strategically.

I am all for hearings and holding his feet to the fire, but I think it should be done in moderation and with surgical precision. Like Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York the Democrats must stick the knife in where it will be fatal. Random investigations of petty offenses may actually be fruitful in the short term, but long term would only strengthen Trump across the country. Remember, a lot of people hate Trump, but a lot of people also hate grandstanding Democrats (see Cory Booker and his “I am Spartacus” buffoonery) and the media (see Jim Accosta). So the wise move is to do fewer hearings but to have them cut deeper and in fatal areas. My advice for the Democrats…and I have been saying this from the get go…DROP THE RUSSIA BULLSHIT. The Russia investigation is going nowhere…even if Russia is guilty of what everyone says they are (which I still do not believe since I have yet to see one iota of proof), no one but liberal partisans gives a flying fuck.

Want to get under Trump’s skin, forget Russia, forget Stormy, forget emoluments…go after his business. Trump will go nuts, he will flail and freak out because going after his business means going after his family. And going after his family may turn some people off, but unlike the Russia story, Trump’s business is ultimately a political winner for Democrats. Trump can be shown to be just another silver-spooned, Daddy’s little rich girl, corrupt business man who is cheating the little guy and breaking the law. Exposing Trump’s business does two things, it will show him to be criminal and most importantly it will show him to be a failure and that will resonate with regular people who do not care one bit about the Russia nonsense.

The other thing Democrats should do, is use their newfound leverage to actually make deals with Trump. Trump will want the wins, and Dems may not like letting him have them, but big picture, getting Trump, a Republican president, to sign off on Medicare for all, would be a huge win for Democrats and would shatter any Republican coalition. It would also show that Democrats are more than just Anti-Trump, and that they actually have a governing philosophy and want to get things done and that will play in the heartland.

The Democrats would also be wise to move closer to Trump on immigration and make a deal with him on it. Immigration is an issue that the Democrats are going to lose on, and so they must find a reasonably moderate solution to it before 2020. Trust me, open borders and shutting down ICE are not going to work as a position on immigration. The Democrats (as I have been saying for years), should make the immigration debate about economics, which would again, split the Republicans. The Chamber of Commerce Republicans want illegal immigration because it gives them cheap, non-union labor but “Springsteen voters” (working class who voted for Obama twice but switched to Trump) don’t want illegal immigration because it lowers their wages and dilutes the culture. Dems would be wise to placate the Springsteen voters because they are the ones who can give them Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio…and thus the White House.

As I said in my prediction post, we are in a phase of destruction right now, which is a part of a natural historical cycle. Some readers have asked me what they should do with that information, many wondering if it won’t lead to apathy or depression. My response is simple, use that information to your strategic advantage. The system we have is collapsing, and understand that means you can stop trying to prop the old system up, but instead position yourself to prosper when the systemic collapse becomes glaring.

Trump understood, either consciously or more likely unconsciously, that the system was failing. He ran as someone outside the system who would replace the system. Clinton ran as part of the failing system who would fix that system. The collective unconscious knows the system is dying, and anyone trying to fix it by breathing life back into it will seem absurdly crazy to the collective. It is like performing CPR on a corpse, it is a fruitless and exhausting endeavor and will only end in fatigue and failure.

With this in mind, Jeremy Corbyn’s loss in the UK, or Beto’s loss in Texas or Gillum’s in Florida, seem less devastating, in fact, they seem downright invigorating. Centrist, globalist, neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative foreign policy are of the dying system, and Clinton’s loss in 2016 and the Democrats under-performing in 2018 are a death rattle for that ideology.

What liberals and leftists need to do is to keep their heads down and their nose to the grindstone. They need to be ready for when the system collapses entirely and that void sits at the center of our culture and state. Reaganism, Republicanism, Centrist Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism have all failed and will be rejected as akin to CPR on a corpse when the system dies. Liberals and leftists need a coherent and cogent substitute in order to step up when the time is right and make the case for what the New America will look like.

Bernie Sanders already planted the seed with his electric run in 2016. He has been followed in 2018 by numerous top-notch candidates as well as the Democratic Socialists of America who have a genuine alternative to the dying system, which gives them an edge going forward. No doubt we will see even more Democratic Socialists and Bernie backed candidates in 2020 and beyond.

Corbyn has done the same in the UK, and is poised to lead New Britain after Brexit…just as American liberals and leftists must themselves prepare to lead the New America after its inevitable collapse. Any liberals and leftists clinging to dreams that a Clinton-esque neo-liberal shift to the center will be the ticket to success in 2020 better disabuse themselves of that delusion because that will guarantee another four years of Trump and God knows what that will bring.

©2018

2018 Mid-Term Elections

Ever since Trump was elected president in 2016, the media have declared that he would face a comeuppance in the form of vast Democrat victories, or as they call it, a “blue wave”, come the 2018 mid-term elections. While I would like to think that would happen…I don’t think that will happen.

As long time readers know, I was one of “those people” who, in the face of a cavalcade of opposite opinion in the media and in my social circles, accurately predicted Trump’s victory in 2016. As I said in my writing from that time, I didn’t want Trump to win (nor was I a Hillary supporter), I just thought he would. I ended up being right and we have all had to suffer through the never ending reality show that is Trump TV ever since.

The formula I used to predict Trump’s 2016 victory is my McCaffrey Wave Theory, which again, I am sure long-time readers are sick of hearing about…but what can you do? My wave theory uses, among other things, popular culture, most specifically, at least currently, film and television, as indicators of the mood in the collective unconscious. The formula of the McCaffrey Wave Theory is actually very complex and complicated, and takes into account numerous cultural and historical “waves” or “cycles” that are all simultaneously in motion.

Interpreting the data from these waves/cycles and measuring their relationship to one another is how the McCaffrey Wave Theory is able to “predict” certain turn of events. And to be clear, this is not about being Nostradamus and saying planes will fly into buildings on 9-11, but rather about understanding the ebbs and flows of the collective unconscious and knowing when both big and small shifts will occur when portions of the collective unconscious become conscious.

The key elements of the McCaffrey Wave Theory are the archetypes, narratives and sub-texts prominent in films/tv along with their color scheme and visual/cinematic tendencies. These data points are how my wave/cycle theory is able to discern which films and/or television shows are leading indicators and which are lagging indicators of the collective unconscious. Leading indicator films are the ones that express the unconscious desires/fears of the collective, while lagging indicator films are the ones that express conscious fears or desires of the collective.

Some examples of leading indicator film and tv were pretty obvious in 2017 when HULU’s A Handmaid’s Tale (its narrative and vibrant red and green color scheme) and the DC film Wonder Woman (its narrative and red and blue color scheme) jumped to the fore of our culture in the early summer. These two successful projects accurately foretold of the coming feminist outcry and the rise of the #MeToo movement in the wake of the Weinstein revelations that came out in October of 2017.

A good example of a lagging indicator film was in 2017 as well, when Steven Spielberg rushed into production his thinly veiled anti-Trump/pro-Hillary film, The Post, that underwhelmed both at the box office and come awards time. The Post failed both artistically and financially because it was little more than wish fulfillment that attempted to give the audience what it wanted, not what the collective sub-conscious needed.

In the years leading up to the rise of Trump in 2016, there were numerous films and television shows that were ominous signs of a very dark impulse coming to the fore in American life and across the globe.

Two glaring examples were HBO’s Game of Thrones with its marketing campaign which for years was warning us all with their ice-blue billboards proclaiming that “Winter is Coming”. The other was Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, a show about what America would be like if the Nazi’s and Japanese won World War II, which hit the airwaves in 2015 accompanied by a prodigious marketing campaign which had the Nazi Eagle on the American flag and the Imperial Japanese flag plastered all over the New York subway and elsewhere. Both of those shows resonated within the culture because they accurately gave voice to what was lurking in our collective unconscious. On some level we knew what was coming…a horrible “winter” and the Nazi’s/Not Sees…and these shows knew it before we were even conscious of it. (and don’t kid yourself, the Nazi/Not See impulse is not solely of the right, the left has a strong Not See impulse too).

In 2015 there were many films that were also giving us warning signs of big trouble ahead. The Martian, The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were all through their narratives, color schemes (Martian - Red, Hateful 8 - Blue, Revenant - Blue, Star Wars - Red and Blue) and cinematic visuals (shots of foreboding vast expanses) the equivalent of a flashing red sign that a gigantic storm was coming.

In 2016 things got even clearer, as the blockbusters Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and even La La Land all revealed through their narratives (internecine warfare), sub-text and color schemes (all of them with vibrant clashes of red and blue) that our cultural train was headed off the track if not the cliff.

As I have previously written, last year cinema gave us some signs of what to expect going forward. The big archetype of the year in 2017 was Winston Churchill…with the films Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and the Netflix show The Crown. The Churchill archetype can be interpreted in numerous ways, but when seen in conjunction with other wave/cycles, it strikes me that the Churchill archetype is manifesting in the Trump’s of the world…in other words…it is actually the Churchill shadow archetype that is taking center stage.

Which brings us to this year and the mid-terms. As I said, there has been incessant talk of a blue wave and in its jubilant wake the possibility of a Democratic House and maybe even Senate where, like a scene out of The Godfather where Michael settles all family business, liberals exact revenge by impeaching not only of Trump but Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. As entertaining as that liberal porn may be…I don’t think it is going to happen.

According to my wave theory, there will be no blue wave. Not only will the Democrats not win the Senate, I don’t think they will win the House either, and if they do it will be by the skin of their teeth. Now…before you stick your head in the oven…to be very, very clear…I could certainly be wrong about this, God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. For starters, I have never used my wave theory to predict a mid-term before, and it could be I am interpreting the data entirely incorrectly, this is a distinct possibility. But with that said, ever since last June, when I wrote a piece for CounterPunch on the topic, along with a follow up posting on this blog in July, I have thought that this blue wave was a mirage.

As I stated in my CounterPunch piece, the big warning signs for me were the prominence and success of both Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War, both of which had narratives, sub-text and color scheme that spoke clearly of the failure of the opposition to Trump to succeed in toppling him.

Other films, such as A Quiet Place, Hereditary and even A Star is Born, that have all resonated deeply within the culture this year, are also leading indicators of a Democratic failure come the mid-terms because of their narratives and sub-text. Believe it or not, A Star is Born is remarkably insightful sub-textually and that sub-text very clearly (once you crack the code of it) states that if not Trump, then at least Trumpism, is here to stay as a replacement for the old paradigm, as indicated by the song in the film “Maybe it’s time we let the old ways die”. (I hope to have a full analysis of A Star is Born done soon).

Just as importantly, there are lagging indicator films that are, just like Spielberg’s The Post in 2017, falling flat, which highlight what isn’t resonating in the collective unconscious. Films with similar narratives, like the “aggrieved and under-appreciated genius wife/power behind the throne” stories of The Wife and Colette, or the “police shooting/racism” films The Hate U Give, Monsters and Men and Blindspotting, have all fallen flat in the broader culture. Even the colossal failure of the cinematic celebration of multi-culturalism and female empowerment, A Wrinkle in Time, is telling us what is going on in our collective unconscious, and it isn’t good news.

Now…maybe I am dead wrong about all this…maybe I am misreading and misinterpreting the data, that is a distinct possibility. Maybe the Democrats win a huge majority in the House and even get one in the Senate…but neither of those things will lead to a return to “normal”…only an escalation of the clash for civilization that is currently taking place.

Even if Democrats win, the intensity of the political turmoil here in America will not recede but proceed at an even quicker pace. Two more years of impeachment talk and congressional hearings will only heighten the tensions that are already near a boil. If you thought Trump was awful these last two years, wait until he faces an existential threat to his presidency from a Democratically controlled House and possibly Senate.

On the other hand, if, as I have been predicting since June, there is not blue wave, don’t expect tensions to lessen. If Democrats fail to gain the House, Trump will turn his obnoxiousness up to 11 and liberals and the media will ratchet up the crazy to unseen heights. And on top of that, if Mueller ends his investigation with no bombshells or smoking gun of “Russian collusion”, the liberal and Democratic meltdown will make Chernobyl look like a cookout.

In other words…no matter the outcome on November 6th, the conflagration that is American politics will only grow bigger, hotter and much more dangerous.

The reality is that there is no stopping the collapse of the institutions of western civilizations. Trust me, we have a very, very bumpy road ahead. That means more authoritarianism across the globe (Bolsonaro will win in Brazil) and more shocks to the system, like economic earthquakes, natural disasters and war.

The good news is that this current wave/cycle of collapse and destruction will not last forever. Eventually, after maybe a decade or so (or God help us a decade or two), this collapse and destruction wave/cycle will transform into a more optimistic wave/cycle of growth, stability, relative peace and prosperity. Remember, destruction is the first act of creation, and we will create, hopefully, a more just, localized, thoughtful and sustainable civilization in the crater where this one once stood.

As for the bad news…we are still in the destruction phase…and come November 7th there are going to be a lot of really pissed off Democrats, liberals and anti-Trumpers, who will still have no power in Washington with which to vent their rage. And if you thought things have been bad the last two years, what ‘til you get a load of what comes next because you ain’t seen nothing yet.

©2018

Fahrenheit 11/9: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.9 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful glimpse into America’s future and its not too distant past, that shows Trump is a tumor that grew out of the cancer that is the corporate controlled establishment political parties.

Fahrenheit 11/9, written and directed by Michael Moore, is a documentary that explores Donald Trump, the forces in America and American politics that made his presidency possible, and the repercussions of Republican and Democrat corporate rule upon regular Americans.

Michael Moore may not be the best documentarian of his time, but he is certainly the best known documentarian of his time. Moore is a polemicist and a provocateur, but to his credit he is a really good one.

Moore’s filmography is a testament not only to his liberal bona fides but his extraordinarily accurate instincts in regards to the American unconscious. His scathing Roger and Me swam against the Reaganite tide and exposed free-market, trickle-down economics for the charade that it is well before that was a popular notion.

His Oscar winning Bowling for Columbine exposed the deep psychological wounds inflicted upon generations of young people raised under a flag-waving dream of unabashed corporate militarism that led to the illusion shattering nightmare of Columbine.

His most financially successful film, and the most financially successful documentary of all-time, Fahrenheit 9/11, pushed back against the establishment media’s War on Terror hagiography and exposed it for the fraud that it was. Fahrenheit 9/11 was a cultural phenomenon, a lightning rod both for liberal anger at the Bush administration and for conservative angst with liberal fifth columnists.

Moore’s films in recent years have not had the same cultural cache of Fahrenheit 9/11. Sicko was a smart and insightful film, as was Capitalism: A Love Story, but it sells out at the end by embracing Obama, who ended up being a poison pill for any real Wall Street or health care reform that would work for regular folks.

Moore’s, Where To Invade Next, is a film that was widely overlooked and ignored, but which is a gem, and shows Moore to be at his most prophetic best. In the movie, Moore goes to various foreign countries to see what parts of their culture and government we should bring to America. This film was a precursor for the wave of progressive ideas that buoyed Bernie Sander’s campaign and which have animated the progressive left to such a degree that even some centrist corporate Democrats are parroting the same lines.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is Moore’s best film since it’s pseudo-namesake, Fahrenheit 9/11. It isn’t a perfect film, but it is pulsating with an anger bordering on desperation that shows the iconic filmmaker taking on not only Trump and the Republicans but establishment Democrats as well.

Moore wisely doesn’t focus on Trump for the majority of the film, we know Trump and most everybody is sick of the guy, instead, Moore takes side trips to Flint, Michigan, to reveal what the rest of America is going to look like if the corptacracy of establishment Republicans and Democrats stays in place, then to West Virginia to show what the power of unionization and solidarity can accomplish in the face of government corruption, and finally to Parkland, Florida to show the younger generation as the key to breaking the logjam of bullshit that is American politics.

The opening sequence, an homage to Moore’s own Fahrenheit 9/11, is exquisitely funny in the darkest of ways. Watching the “I’m With Her” crowd of fools and the media, so sure of her ascension to the throne, have their hopes dashed upon the rocks of reality is hysterically funny, especially for me, since like Michael Moore, I actually told people before the election that Trump would win. I was ridiculed before the election for saying that, and was pilloried after the fact for having been right.

As Moore dives into the loathsome oddity that is Trump, he covers much well-trod ground. What was refreshing about this section is that Moore holds himself accountable for not having taken Trump to task when they were on a talk show together, and for how Moore’s own career has been bolstered by Trump lackeys Steve Bannon and the crown prince himself, Jared Kushner. Moore’s honesty is refreshing and no doubt will blunt counter-attacks to his movie.

Trump is a pretty disgusting character and is a total conman, this we all know, and Moore backs up his claims to this fact, but where Moore stumbles in this section is in his gravitating towards the salacious and the prurient by making the argument that Trump and Ivanka have or had a sexual relationship. I get what Moore is doing, he is exposing Trump for being a gross and lecherous fiend, but this part of the film feels cheap and much too placatingly easy for me. I actually think Trump is a lech and a fiend, but Moore leaves himself too easily open to charges of being more tabloid propagandist than documentarian with this particular section of the movie.

The best parts of the film are the Flint and West Virginia sections. The Flint section is breathtakingly depressing, as it lays bare the craven contempt that politicians (of both parties) hold not only for the truth but for their fellow citizens. Moore’s compelling thesis is that Flint is the future of America, where corporate interests override all humanity, and people are left to live in an environmentally toxic open air prison.

Included in this indictment is the Holiest of liberal Holies, President Obama, who is shown to be a despicable shill for corporate interests and brazenly contemptuous of the working class and poor people of Flint. Adding to the case against Obama is the fact that not only did he aid and abet the poisoning of the population of Flint, he also terrorized them by using their city for target practice. Obama’s charlantanry, including his subservience to Wall Street (Goldman Sachs in particular), his callous drone program and his complicity in war crimes, is no shock to me, but I think the Obama adoring liberals I know will feel like this section of the film is an absolute gut punch. Fahrenheit 11/9 is a worthwhile film for no other reason than no liberal who watches this movie will ever feel the same way about Obama again.

The West Virginia section of the movie is as equally insightful as the Flint section, but much less depressing. As per Moore’s thesis, Flint is the future of America, but West Virginia is the model for how to fight back. Moore’s examination of the teacher’s strike and how unionization and solidarity are the the only way to stop the spread of government/corporate fascism that is destroying America, American cities and towns, and the American family, is so energized it makes you want to put a red bandana around your neck and go out and crack some skulls.

Moore makes an important point in both the Flint and West Virginia stories, namely that race and ethnicity is used by both Republicans AND Democrats to divide working class and poor people in order to maintain the corrupt and disastrous status quo. As a striking teacher says in the film, “class above all else”, and this clarion call for unity through class will no doubt be a sharp slap in the face to the establishment corporate Democrats, the Hillary Hypocrites first among them, but it is one, as Moore points out, that they so richly deserve.

Moore’s multiple story lines don’t all work, as I found the Parkland narrative to be especially vapid and frankly illogical. Moore’s anti-gun sentiments are well-known, but it is striking to see these young Parkland students, so traumatized by the shooting at their school, be held up as the ideal because they are so stridently anti-gun, in the context of a documentary arguing that Trump may literally be the next Hitler. The lack of self-awareness in this Parkland section is staggering, especially in the midst of the Trump and Flint sections, which lay bare the fact that regular Americans are literally under assault and it is only going to get worse.

To watch earnest but misguided young people, so sure of their righteousness and rightness, vehemently argue for disarmament right after watching the U.S. military invade Flint and Trump contemplate being president for life, is breathtaking for its stupidity. Moore’s blind spot on this issue, like those of the teenagers he highlights, is due to being the victim of unabashed emotionalism. The young Parkland teens that Moore holds up as the paragon of virtue and the path forward, are not the solution to the problem Moore presents, but the problem itself. To see the effects of emotionalism laid so bare in the form of these Parkland teens is a remarkable thing.

An example of the illogic on display in the film is when Moore declares the danger of Trump as a potential Hitler, and then uses history professors from NYU and Yale to persuasively make the case that America is in peril but then transitions to the Parkland anti-gun crusaders, which completely undermines the intellectual and political seriousness of the thesis of the film. If Trump is Hitler, disarming is ridiculous if not absurd. The logical and rational response to the notion that Trump is a tyrant or Hitler is to go out and arm yourself, not disarm yourself and everyone else.

Despite the weakness of the Parkland section, Fahrenheit 11/9 pulses with a vitality and urgency because Moore, like many Americans, even Trump voters, feels America disintegrating before him. Moore is a polemicist, of that there is no doubt, but he is a damn fine documentarian and an even better political physician. In Fahrenheit 11/9 Michael Moore’s diagnosis of America is once again completely accurate, and his prescription is, for the most part, spot on as well. Moore makes the extraordinarily insightful case that the establishment Democrats are fighting for a return to the Pre-Trump America, but that Pre-Trump America is what got us to Trump. As Moore points out, the good old days before Trump weren’t so good and and the tumor of Trump grew out of the cancer of establishment Republicans and Democrats who are beholden to corporate interests over the interests of the people.

America, and liberals in particular, had better wake up and start listening to Michael Moore, who, like me, accurately foretold of Trump’s presidency. If liberals ignore Moore’s prescription and turn back to the old centrist Clinton medicine to heal the Trumpism that ails them, the disease of Trump will spread and gain strength, and once again liberals will have no one to blame but themselves, but will lack the self-awareness to do so.

In conclusion, if you like Michael Moore, go see Fahrenheit 11/9, you’ll love it. If you are a sturdy centrist Democrat who cheered Hillary and loved Obama, go see Fahrenheit 11/9 to be disabused of the notion that those two people are anything but different faces on the same evil machine of exploitation, abuse and destruction. If you are a progressive or liberal looking for hope, go see Fahrenheit 11/9, and learn the lesson that I have been preaching for decades, that hope is insipid. If you are an American citizen, the bottom line is this, go see Fahrenheit 11/9, if for no other reason than to see what has been done to Flint, and what can be done by West Virginians.

©2018

A Curious Case of Mystery Attacks, Microwaves and Media Manipulation

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 47 seconds

The U.S. media’s lazy reporting of mystery attacks on American personnel in Cuba takes the predictable path of blaming Russia without evidence.

I came across a story recently in the New York Times that was intriguing. The story, headlined “Microwave Weapons are Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers”, was written by William J. Broad and was about mysterious “attacks” that started in 2016 on U.S. personnel stationed in Cuba who had suffered the equivalent of concussive brain trauma and the ensuing after effects, such as hearing loss, dizziness and diminished cognitive function, yet had not been visibly assaulted or struck in the head. The article posits the “attacks” were made by a microwave-type of weapon that would invisibly strike its targets.

In the Times article it never states outright but certainly gives the distinct impression, that the mystery is now solved and that the “attacks” were made by a microwave type of weapon that would invisibly strike its targets.

The most striking thing about this story was the seemingly out of nowhere speculation that it was Russia that perpetrated these “attacks”. What was so odd about this assertion was that upon closer inspection it became clear the actual facts presented in the story indicate there is no consensus or actual evidence Russia was responsible for the attacks or that any attacks had even taken place.

The article begins by giving a brief history of microwave radiation as a weapon, stating in its opening sentence, “During the Cold War: Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control.”

For the next nine paragraphs, Broad never mentions Russia, but then with no background as to where his speculation comes from, he writes,

“The microwave idea teems with unanswered questions. Who fired the beams? The Russian government? The Cuban government? A rogue Cuban faction sympathetic to Moscow? And, if so, where did the attackers get the unconventional arms?”

In re-reading the opening paragraph, you will notice that there is no proof that Russia has ever had a microwave weapon, only decades-old “fears” it was “seeking” to develop one. It would seem the entire basis for the speculation blaming Russia in this article is nothing more than some old, fleeting sense of Soviet super-villainy, that this fact is hidden in plain sight reveals a deft but ultimately duplicitous hand writing the story.

In fact, the only person quoted in the piece claiming Russia as the prime suspect is a scientist, biologist Allan H. Frey, who has vast experience with microwave technology. Mr. Frey is described as having “traveled widely and long served as a contractor and a consultant to a number of federal agencies.” That description of Mr. Frey is curiously, if not suspiciously, lacking in specifics.

The New York Times goes on to write in regards to Mr. Frey, “he speculated that Cubans aligned with Russia, the nation’s longtime ally, might have launched microwave strikes in attempts to undermine developing ties between Cuba and the United States.” Mr. Frey describes his own analysis as a “perfectly viable explanation.”

So the New York Times bases the underlying assumption of Russian guilt on the uninformed speculation of a biologist, who has no expertise or insight into the subject, and who also admits that his beliefs only rise to the rather tepid level of being a “viable” explanation.

Frey’s credibility and believability takes a serious hit later in the article when he recounts the story of how, after he made a name for himself in the early 60’s with numerous papers about the effects of microwave energy on the human body which brought him a lot of attention, so much so that these effects were given the name the “Frey effect”, he was invited to the Soviet Union to speak.

The New York Times writes, “The Soviets took notice. Not long after his initial discoveries, Mr. Frey said, he was invited to the Soviet Academy of Sciences to visit and lecture. Toward the end, in a surprise, he was taken outside of Moscow to a military base surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire fences.”They had me visiting the various labs and discussing problems”, including the neural impacts of microwaves, Mr. Frey recalled. “I got an inside look at their classified program.

Now, just think about what Frey is claiming here. Frey is saying that at the very height of the Cold War, with the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh in everyone’s mind, he was invited to go to the Soviet Union and then WAS GIVEN AN INSIDE LOOK INTO THE SOVIET’S CLASSIFIED PROGRAM! In what universe is this even remotely plausible? This story has got to be at best embellishment and at worst a total fabrication. And yet, the New York Times prints it as if it isn’t a big deal and must unquestionably be true. Frey reveals himself to be a pretty dubious character with that statement, and yet the New York Times’ reporter, William J. Broad, still uses him as the backbone of his assertion that Russia was behind the “attacks”.

Another rather remarkable piece of news that appears towards the end of this article is some contradictory evidence to the notion that Russia is the culprit behind the attacks, namely that other alleged microwave attacks have happened to U.S. diplomats stationed in China.

What makes that fact all the more salient is that the article describes a list of states that may have the ability to make a microwave weapon.

“Russia, CHINA and many European states are seen as having the know-how to make basic microwave weapons that can debilitate, sow noise or even kill. Advanced powers, experts say, might accomplish more nuanced aims such as beaming spoken words into people’s heads.” (emphasis mine)

Obviously, if China is capable of making this sort of weapon and there have been “attacks” upon U.S. diplomats in China, wouldn’t China be a better suspect than Russia? And China also has deep connections to Cuba…so…why did the New York Times write so suspiciously of Russia and not China? It makes you wonder if an “advanced power” like the U.S. beamed this article into the head of reporter William J. Broad.

Further proof of something being greatly amiss about this article and story is the paucity of actual evidence that an “attack” even took place. According to thew York Times’ own reporting, the most clear cut pronouncement of an attack was made by James C. Lin, a scientist and expert in the field who wrote in a paper that the effects felt by the U.S. diplomats could “plausibly arise” from microwave beams. “Plausibly arise” is an extremely low bar, so much so that it is absurd to base any conclusions on that statement at all. Of course, many other things could be “plausible explanations”, and Broad even admits that no one really knows or agrees on what happened.

“Scientists still disagree over what hit diplomats. Last month, JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association) ran four letters critical of the March study, some faulting the report for ruling out mass hysteria.”

Mass hysteria sounds like it could be not only a “plausible” explanation for this alleged Russian microwave attack in Cuba but also for the Times’ slanted article, as well as the spate of Russo-phobia infecting America’s establishment media.

The Times article glosses over the skepticism of scientists that actually claim they do not know what happened, and instead embraces speculation it was a “microwave attack”, and then despite a total lack of evidence and in the face of some contradictory evidence, confidently speculates that it was Russia that is the likely suspect.

Furthering this journalistic malpractice was NBC News, which followed up on the Times article ten days later with even more vapid reporting on the subject. The NBC News headline of September 11th reads “U.S. officials suspect Russia in mystery ‘attacks’ on diplomats in Cuba, China”.

What is so amusing is that even the headline questions whether these events are attacks at all, putting quotation marks around the word. But that doesn’t stop NBC from devouring intel agency pablum hook, line and sinker. NBC relies entirely on anonymous sources for the story and never quotes anyone saying what the story so boldly asserts, which is that Russia is the main culprit in these “attacks”.

NBC News simply repeats unchallenged, the claims of anonymous intelligence officials that the suspicion of Russia is “backed up by evidence from communications intercepts”. The same paragraph making this assertion ends with this gem of a revealing statement, “The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence”.

So NBC, which ran the story on as “Breaking News” and hyped it endlessly on MSNBC, simply repeats intelligence agency speculation without ever seeing any of the alleged corroborating evidence or challenging the voracity of that alleged evidence, and calls it news. That isn’t journalism that is stenography.

The stenography charge against NBC shouldn’t come as a surprise since one of the reporters who “broke” the story is Ken Dilanian. Dilanian is a notorious intelligence agency shill, who was exposed by The Intercept as having shared his stories and outlines with the CIA before he submitted them while he was working as a national security reporter at the L.A. Times, a shockingly unprofessional journalistic practice. What is even more outrageous is that Dilanian’s lack of journalistic ethics never hampered him from getting a job at NBC as their lead national security reporter. And since he has gotten to NBC he has done nothing but regurgitate intelligence agency approved talking points and narratives non-stop.

NBC’s and the Times’ reporting on this issue is perniciously vacuous, insipidly shallow and riddled with an insidious anti-Russian bias. These articles are forms of malignant disinformation that alchemically transform speculation into fact and replace critical thinking with presumption, the final result of which is that these presumed “facts” will go unchallenged and become part of a wider and often nefarious narrative. An example of which is that last week cable news talking heads like Chris Matthews proclaimed “of course Russia did it!” and even comedian Bill Maher roared “Russia attacked us in Cuba!”

These incidents may very well be proven to be attacks, and Russia may ultimately be responsible for them, but we should wait for actual evidence and not accept whispered innuendo wrapped in a slavish deference to intelligence agency authority as proof.

After the media’s complicity in deceiving the American public into war with Iraq, followed quickly by their acquiescence on torture, or as the Times preferred to call it “enhanced interrogation”, and then concealing Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, of which the Times was aware but refused to publish for more than a full year, we the people must condition ourselves to read all of the establishment media news with an acutely jaundiced eye.

Similar to the delirious fever for war in the lead up to Iraq, the media are currently suffering from a virulent hysteria, this time of the anti-Russian variety. Now more than ever it is imperative to maintain a healthy and vigilant skepticism whenever Russia is blamed for misdeeds but there is a dearth or absence of concrete evidence. If we succumb to the corporate media’s Siren’s call of compulsive Russia blaming, our new Cold war may just turn very hot, and that will be a catastrophe for all of us.

A version of this article was originally published at CounterPunch.

©2018

Serena Williams and her Basket of Deplorables

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 04 seconds

On Saturday, September 8th, Naomi Osaka won the Women’s U.S. Open Tennis Championship by trouncing Serena Williams in resounding fashion. Instead of the media and fans focusing on the sublime athletic brilliance that was Osaka, they instead focused on Serena Williams, which is just how Serena wanted it.

WHAT HAPPENED

The big show at the U.S. Women’s Open final wasn’t Naomi Osaka’s dismantling of the 23 time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, it was Serena William’s rage-fueled meltdown and tirade against Chair Umpire Carlos Ramos.

What instigated Serena’s anger towards Ramos was that he had the temerity to actually hold Serena to the rules of tennis when he properly issued her a warning after Serena’s coach was caught coaching her in the first set, which is clearly against the established rules.

Serena claimed she wasn’t being coached and that Ramos was maligning her integrity by insinuating she was cheating, which infuriated her because as she was quick to point out, she “is a mother”…which I guess for some reason means she cannot cheat since mother’s are infallible and morally incorruptible

Later in the match after losing another game, Serena slammed her racket on the ground in frustration, breaking her racket, which again, is explicitly against the rules in tennis, so Ramos did what he was obligated to do and called Serena on her violation. Due to the fact that it was her second violation of the match, the first being the coaching, Serena was docked a point to start the next game.

Serena then returned to arguing with Ramos about the coaching call and how unfair it was, but to no avail, the lost point stayed lost. As the match progressed from there and it became even more glaringly obvious that Serena was going to lose, she relentlessly berated Ramos at every turn and during a change over lit into him, threatening he would never be on one of “her courts” ever again. She then called him “a thief” for having stolen a point from her, and Ramos cited her for the third time for a violation, this time for verbal abuse, which according to the rules of tennis, the third violation results in a loss of an entire game.

At that point Serena went into full victim mode and called for the tournament officials, who came out and listened to her argument that Ramos was being sexist and she was being punished simply because she was a woman. Serena said that men do much worse but never face sanctions. She claimed that Ramos was doing this to her because she was a woman. The Open officials seemed deferential to Serena, but never changed the ruling, and soon, amid a cavalcade of boos, the match re-started and Serena was finally beaten by Osaka and the tournament was over and Serena was the loser.

Sadly, things only got worse from there and it wasn’t just Serena being exposed as a deplorable human being. As the trophy ceremony went on, the crowd booed continuously, which caused Naomi Osaka to never break a smile and actually cry, not tears of joy, but tears of sadness, after having won the tournament fair and square.

DEMONSTRABLY WRONG

Serena’s wail of victimhood during the match and her argument that sexism was responsible for her being punished for violating the rules was repulsive, disgusting, shameless, contrived and manipulative…and also demonstrably wrong.

To start, Serena claimed she wasn’t being coached, but in the moment, during the live broadcast of the event, her coach admitted he was coaching her, which exposes Serena to charges of not only being a cheat but a liar. The coach’s defense was that “everybody does it”, which is a pretty weak argument.

In addition, umpire Carlos Ramos is notorious for being a stickler for the rules, a trait much needed in an umpire, and many of the top men’s players like Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokavic have had run-ins with him over his strict adherence to the rules, but none of those men ever escalated their disagreements like Serena Williams did.

More damning evidence against Serena came to light this past weekend when the New York Times released a study complied by officials at Grand Slam tournaments that shows that men are fined proportionally more often than the women. For instance, over the last twenty years (1998-2018) at Grand Slam events (Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, U.S. Open), men have been fined 646 times for racket abuse and 287 times for unsportsmanlike conduct while women have been fined for the same offenses 99 and 67 times respectively. In terms of verbal abuse, the violation that capped off Serena’s meltdown, men have been fined 62 times over the last twenty years and women 16 times.

While men do play more tennis in Grand Slam tournaments, with more qualifying spots and playing best of five set matches as opposed to the women’s best of three, the disparity in terms of fines for men is well beyond the greater percentage of tennis they play.

SERENA TRUMP

The reality of the situation is this, Serena Williams is an immature, spoiled brat, and when she was held to account for her misdeeds on the tennis court she had a tantrum. Does Ms. Williams behavior sound familiar? It should, because it is exactly what our President does on a daily basis.

Ms. William’s imitation of Trump was spot on, as she acted entitled, petulant, petty, vindictive, dishonest, aggressively defensive and disrespectful of the “authority” that admonished her for breaking the rules that everyone is supposed to follow but which she believes do not apply to her. On top of that Serena masterfully played the victim in order to garner sympathy and distract from her failings which is quintessential Trump.

Serena’s behavior on the court and in the interview room afterwards was Trumpian from start to finish, and what was even more telling was that her fans, in the stadium, online and in the media, the overwhelming majority of which despise Trump, all joined in a Trumpian chorus to blindly defend her.

As the equally entitled and obnoxious fans in the stadium booed during the match and trophy ceremony, it was reminiscent of Trump’s rallies where his crowds who Hillary described as a “basket of deplorables” boo the media for “attacking” Trump with “fake news”. And just as Trump spurs on his followers to boo the media for fake news, Serena spurred on her fans to boo Ramos for having attacked her for “fake rules”.

MEDIA MENDACITY

The media response to Serena’s petulant behavior was even worse. I watched ESPN on the following Monday and was astounded that of the six taking heads who chimed in with their hot takes during the network’s plethora of faux argument shows, only one, Frank Isola of the New York Daily News, had the intellectual integrity and testicular fortitude to take Serena to task for her aberrant behavior. The rest all agreed that Serena is the greatest female tennis player of of all-time (some even went so far as to proclaim Serena Williams the greatest athlete of all-time, which is so hysterical as to be absurd. Serena is certainly a great female tennis player, but if she played the top 100 male tennis players in the world, she wouldn’t even win a set, and if she played any of the the top 1,000 male tennis players she still wouldn’t win a match), that sexism and racism was at play in the situation, and that sexism and racism are a major problem in tennis, and to finish it off that even though Serena did violate the coaching rule it is a stupid rule and on and on and on.

In newspaper column after column Serena was hailed by female writers, particularly women of color, who proclaimed that Black women aren’t allowed to get angry in America, and Serena’s treatment at the hands of the official and the U.S. Open was an atrocious display of misogyny and racism. Other writers declared that Black women should follow Serena’s example and embrace their rage and let it out (horrendous advice).

This indulgent approach is what is wrong with America, the media and the #Resistance in particular and it is why we have Trump as president. To celebrate emotional incontinence and outrage for the sake of outrage is so counter-productive, self-defeating and foolish as to be astonishing.

The vast majority of writers and pundits pontificating on the subject have absolutely no knowledge of tennis, but would regurgitate some simple minded phrases they heard, such as, “McEnroe and Connors did much worse back in the day!” Of course, this is true, BUT THAT WAS THIRTY YEARS AGO! And on top of that, McEnroe and Connor’s horrendous behavior is why the rules that were applied to Serena were put in place in the first place in the late 80’s.

The mindless and shallow punditry continued throughout the week and the pro-Serena crowd were the vast majority in the media, at least in America, but certainly not across the globe, as British and particularly Australian writers were much more willing to hold Serena to account. The vapid pro-Serena punditry on ESPN and elsewhere reminded me of the vacuous pro-Trump nonsense that passes for news on Fox News.

The Social Justice Warrior/Identity Politics goosestepping done by the pundit class of the establishment is just as brazenly shameless and devoid of intellectual and moral integrity as anything you’ll see on Trump’s favorite show Fox and Friends.

A VOICE OF REASON - STOP YELLING AT YOUR KIDS!

Thankfully, a true champion and one of the greatest female tennis players of all-time, Martina Navratilova, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that was the opposite of Serena Williams because it was the epitome of thoughtfulness, integrity and class. Ms. Navratilova was respectful of Serena Williams and said that if women are being treated more harshly than men (which the study the other Times article proves is not true) than that injustice should change, yet proclaimed that Serena’s behavior was unacceptable and dishonored the sport of tennis regardless.

The same week Martina’s op-ed was published the New York Times ran an article that spoke to this issue even though it had nothing to do with sport or Serena Williams titled “ Why You Should Stop Yelling at your Kids”. The gist of the article is this, that yelling at your kids is a sign of weakness, not strength. I think Serena Williams, who is quick to point out she is a mother, and her basket of deplorable fans, should heed that sage advice, because embracing and venting your rage is not a sign of empowerment but of weakness. If you are raising a child and want that child to be successful in life, you will not teach them to display their rage and be ruled by their emotions. People who do those things are terrible people, and if you are teaching your child to behave that way, you are a terrible person too.

BEING SERENA TRUMP

Serena berating an official shows her to be a morally, mentally, emotionally and psychologically weak human being. Serena’s history of acting out when she is losing, such as her previous outbursts at the U.S. Open (in 2009 and 2011 Serena had similar meltdowns) reveals a bully mentality that is incapable of genuine reflection, introspection and taking of responsibility…again…she sounds just like Trump.

Will Martina’s perspective and the release of the study showing Serena is dead wrong about disparity in punishment for male tennis players, change the mind of any of Serena’s fans, or any of the identity politics contingent that came to her defense knowing nothing about the situation or even the sport? No, of course not, because these people are immune to facts and immune to reason, and just like Serena and Trump they only have their hysterical emotions and rage to guide them. Serena is as shameless a liar and manipulator as Trump, and both of them are blessed to have fans who are gullible fools who lap up their bullshit like cold water on a hot Summer’s day.

Because Serena is a woman, and boldly played the sexism card, and because she is Black, and always deftly plays the racism card, the wealthy fans in Flushing Meadows and those in the media, will wave the flag of identity politics as high as they can and refuse to see their own hypocrisy and moronity. These fans and media members excuse Serena’s inexcusable misbehavior simply because of her gender and the color of her skin. These people do not believe in equality, they believe in a separate set of rules…one for them and the people they like, and a harsher one for everyone else.

These same fans and media members think Trump and Trumpers are hateful buffoons, but the reality is that Serena Williams and her entourage of sycophantic media personalities and fans are Trumpian in their cult-like resilience to facts, reason and logic and their addiction to identity above all else. Serena and her fans, like Trump and his supporters, are incapable of understanding objective reality, and instead cling to their subjective experience as the incontrovertible Truth.

Trump may lose the mid-term elections or his re-election campaign or be impeached or resign, but the truth is Trump has already won in the biggest way imaginable, as he has made his enemies into mirror images of himself. Like a scene out of a horrifying remake of Being John Malkovich, everywhere you turn in America there are Trumps acting out in all sorts of selfish and self-gratifying ways. Those filled with fear and loathing of Trump have become the monster they so despise. When Trump is long gone, the Trump infection will live on, in the hearts, minds and actions of those who pretend to be his antithesis.

The Trump virus is spreading and the abysmal display put on by Serena Williams and her acolytes in the media and stands is a stark reminder things are going to get much much worse here in America before they ever get better…and they might never get better.

©2018

In a Fit of Anti-Trump Pique, Liberals Shamelessly Embrace 'Deep State' Criminals

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 11 seconds

In their blind hatred for Trump, liberals have sunk to an all-time low by unabashedly cheering a war criminal.

On Friday August 24th, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher had former CIA director John Brennan on as an interview guest. Brennan has been in the news lately because he accused Trump of treason, or more precisely, "nothing short of treason", due to the President's weak-kneed, post summit news conference with Vladimir Putin.

In retaliation for Brennan's remarks Trump revoked his security clearance which has caused an uproar from establishment intelligence toadies and in a case of strange bedfellows, the allegedly liberal anti-Trump movement which has dubbed itself the #Resistance.

On the episode of Real Time, the usually acerbic Maher, or as I am fond of calling him due to his petulant demeanor and intellectual dwarfism, Little Bill, immodestly degraded himself by nearly fellating John Brennan before the former CIA chief ever got on stage by gushing that he was a “true American patriot”.

The nadir for the #Resistance occurred shortly thereafter as Brennan rumbled on stage and was greeted by the eruption of a raucous standing ovation by the liberal audience, with Little Bill calling it a "well-deserved standing ovation". Only in the bizarre universe where a silver-spooned, multi-bankrupted, reality television star is president does a former CIA director who has committed crimes and war crimes such as implementing and covering up Bush's rendition and torture regime, spying on the U.S. Senate and masterminding Obama's deadly drone program, get a delirious ovation from those on the left.

As Little Bill sat across from Brennan his sycophancy swelled further when, like a pimply faced teenage boy on his first date, he rapturously declared, "I don't say this very often, but it is an honor to meet you and have you here." If this interview were taking place in the back seat of Little Bill’s parent’s station wagon the windows would've have been completely fogged by this point.

The interview was one rambling study in conformation bias, as Brennan bemoaned not having a security clearance for the first time in 38 years, and Maher stomped his feet and wailed "everyone with a brain is on your side!" Neither man was self-aware enough to realize the brazen level of entitlement that oozes from their belief that a security clearance for a former government official is a right, not a privilege.

Brennan then blamed Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for starting the whole mess and Maher breathlessly screeched, "Rand Paul is dead to me!" In the throes of his Brennan crush, Little Bill all but promised to fight Rand in the parking lot after school to defend the former CIA director's honor.

Brennan then waxed poetic about how "national security is one of the most sacred and solemn professions in this government". I wonder which part of his national security work Brennan finds so sacred...was it the torture? The extraordinary rendition? The kill lists? The murdering by drone strike of innocent people, American citizen's included? The spying on the Senate in order to scuttle any impartial investigation into the torture program? The teaming with fascists in Ukraine to overthrow a democratically elected government? Or teaming with terrorists in an attempt to overthrow Assad in Syria?

Little Bill, no doubt hoping to get lucky on his dream date, did not ask any of those questions or raise any of these topics, he just pursed his lips and shook his head as he proclaimed his horror that Trump dared to call Brennan, the man who "defended our country after 9-11", a "low life".

Maher's on screen love affair with Brennan is in keeping with his erotic profile, as his history shows he is most certainly aroused by high-ranking intelligence agency criminals. Maher has had similarly fawning, to the point of bootlicking, interviews with former head of the NSA and CIA, General Michael Hayden. Little Bill's modus operandi is to never speak ill of such mendacious intelligence officials as Hayden, Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, all of whom have lied to the American public and committed numerous crimes and moral atrocities such as their culpability in the rendition, torture and surveillance programs, but he instead chooses to speak only in the most overly reverential tones about their bravery and patriotic work keeping America safe.

I find it very curious that both Little Bill and his fellow liberal HBO comedy comrade John Oliver of Last Week Tonight, are so enamored with the intelligence agencies. Oliver too is an unrepentant establishment shill and brownnoser who has routinely ignored intelligence agency misbehavior and parroted the pro-intel line at every opportunity, a perfect example being his softball interview of former NSA chief General Keith Alexander and his aggressive take down of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What is even more disheartening than two insipid cable television comedians being so obviously in the pocket of the intelligence agencies, is the total lack of intellectual and moral integrity on the part of the liberals in their audience.

The buffoons in Maher's studio audience who gave Brennan a Pavlovian standing ovation on Real Time are probably the same fools who have donated money to the GoFundMe campaigns for fired FBI officials Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok to the tune of more than a million dollars between them. Do these liberals not know who the FBI is and what they do? The FBI are the ones who wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and tried to blackmail him into killing himself. The FBI also infiltrated environmental, anti-war and civil rights movements in a concerted attempt to destroy them. According to Human Rights Watch, the FBI has gone above and beyond in subverting civil rights and due process in post-9/11 America by being "directly involved" in high profile terror plots in the U.S. where Muslims were entrapped and imprisoned for phony plots proposed or led by FBI agents or informants.

The liberal adoration of FBI flunkies and intelligence big wigs like Brennan, Clapper, Hayden and even the media anointed saint, former Director of the FBI and current Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who rounded up Muslims in the wake of 9/11, botched the anthrax investigation and lied about WMD’s in Iraq to the American public, is repugnant and will ultimately be counter productive if not downright self-defeating to any progressive movement.

I understand the liberal anger with the demagogue Trump, what I do not understand is why the left is so intent on embracing the most deplorable of war criminals and police state apparatchiks who have routinely flouted the constitution and flaunted their power, in order to try and bring down Trump, who progressives claim has flouted the constitution and flaunted his power.

Towards the end of the interview Brennan received a cacophony of cheers when he described Trump to Little Bill as a man who is "dishonest, unethical, doesn't have principles...or integrity", but Brennan's description of Trump is a case of the former CIA official doth protest too much, methinks. When seen in the light of Brennan's own dishonesty regarding torture, his unethical spying on the Senate and his overall lack of principles and integrity throughout his career, this statement reeks of shameless hypocrisy. Brennan's condemnation of Trump would equally fit Brennan or any of his other media darling intelligence agency cohorts, along with the liberal lemmings who send them money, give them standing ovations and take their word for gospel.

In closing Brennan postulated that things will "get worse before they get better" and reminded viewers that this country "fought hard for the freedoms and liberties we have right now". I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment, which is why the #Resistance must jettison from their ranks all criminals like Brennan, Clapper and Hayden who have dedicated their careers to usurping the "hard fought freedoms and liberties we have right now".

The pied pipers in the media, including court jesters like Little Bill Maher and John Oliver, are leading liberals down a road to perdition by holding insidious intelligence officials and agencies up as paragons of nobility and truth. Brennan, Clapper, Hayden and their ilk are professional liars whose main priority is not to uphold and defend the constitution but rather to uphold and defend the corrupt establishment and the military industrial complex. 

In 2016 liberals lost the election, but since that time, as evidenced by their deification of Brennan and his intel cohorts, they have proceeded to lose not only their minds, but their souls as well. In the face of the Trump demon, liberals have conjoined themselves to truly despicable people who have perpetrated great evil at home and across the globe. In the long run, the #Resistance is going to learn the hard way that with friends like Brennan, Clapper and Hayden, who needs enemies?

A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT RT.COM

©2018

The Awful File - Oscars, Millennials, Brie Larson and More!

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 01 seconds

I keep a file on my computer that I call the "Awful File", in which I store all stories of awfulness upon which I stumble. As you can imagine...it is a big file. There is always a plethora of awful things going on in the world but writing about them all is a Sisyphean task. So instead of tackling the big awful issues, I thought today that I'd write about some of the more minor awful things floating around in my Awful File.

ACADEMY AWARDS NEW CATEGORY

To begin, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) also known as The Academy, home of The Oscars, made a big decision last week to expand their awards. The geniuses over at the Academy decided to create the new category..."Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film"...or as I like to call it the "Award for Outstanding Achievement in Pandering" or the "Desperation Award".

Some in Hollywood, like Mark Wahlberg, are pleased with the new category, of course Marky Mark is happy about the new award because it gives his sellout ass a shot to win an Oscar, but those with any semblance of artistic integrity are dismayed if not disgusted by the move. .

The biggest problem with the the "Achievement in Popular Film" award is that there is already a metric by which that talent is measured...it is called the box office...and the entire populace votes on it by either attending or not attending a movie.

The Oscars are supposed to be about excellence in cinema, not popularity, that may rub some rubes the wrong way, but that is the truth. The Oscars are meant to reward artists and craftsmen, not salesmen.

By creating this new populist award, AMPAS is pandering to the lowest common denominator and is diminishing the value of an Oscar. But this isn't the first time they've done that in recent years.

After the inane moronity of the #OscarsSoWhite nonsense a few years back, the Academy pandered to the outraged online mob by jettisoning older White members and bringing in a cavalcade of minorities and women. The Academy made it very clear that they wanted more Black actors and films nominated and winning awards regardless of their artistic merit...and sure enough we got more Black artists and films winning Oscars. To their great discredit the Academy managed to water down the prestige of the Oscars by making it based on identity and more a minority achievement award than one based on merit.  

The "Achievement in Popular Film" award is once again another attempt by the Academy to water down the awards and is a blatant attempt to make sure that the stultifyingly average Black Panther wins an Oscar, even though it is, at best, the third best comic book film of the year so far (behind Infinity War and Deadpool 2).

I bet dollars to donuts that the Academy will also prop up with nominations other identity-driven "popular" films like...God help us all...A Wrinkle in Time...in order to pad their "woke" bona fides. This is the shameless beast that has been unleashed by the Academy of dopes desperate to snag television ratings in an ever splintering television market.

Sadly, by watering down the prestige of the award, the Oscars are unwittingly creating a much larger pool of competition for viewers attention for themselves. Since the Oscars are no longer the gold standard of awards they have sullied themselves enough to be lumped in among the hoi polloi of other forgettable awards like the Golden Globes, People's Choice Awards and MTV movie awards and the like.

By stooping to appease a non-existent audience yearning for blockbusters to be included in a prestigious industry insider event, the Academy Awards have cut off their nose to spite their face. It is a foolish, hapless and hopeless maneuver, and its level of delusion reminds me of Norma Desmond's famous line from Sunset Boulevard, "All right Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up!"

Rest assured, the Academy's attempts to be relevant will only hasten to make it all the more irrelevant.

MILLENNIALS

I read an article in The Guardian last week that claimed that there was a survey taken that asked Millennials what movies from the 2010's should be put in a time capsule. I will get to their answers in a moment, but let me first say that I have no idea what the survey question was, or who did the survey or any of the parameters of the survey because the hack who wrote this dreadful column, Stuart Heritage, never tells me or provides a link. Great work, Stuart. How this numbnuts can be employed as a writer at a major newspaper is beyond me.

Now...back to the list of films that millennials allegedly chose for the time capsule. Here it is...

1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
2. Black Panther
3. Frozen
4. Wonder Woman
5. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part II
6. La La Land
7. Fifty Shades of Grey
8. Moana
9. Get Out
10. Coco
11. Moonlight
12. The Social Network
13. The Greatest Showman
14. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
15. Blade Runner 2049
16. Call Me By Your Name
17. The Post
18. Spotlight

Ummm...my initial reaction is this...what in the fuck is wrong with millennials? I mean, Holy Shit that list is an abomination.

Out of the top ten, only two films are even decent, Wonder Woman and La La Land, and only La La Land is cinematically noteworthy.

As for 10 through 18, The Social Network is the best choice on the entire list, as it perfectly encapsulates the cold, disconnected social media world in which we live. Even though I disagree with it, I can see why they'd choose Moonlight, it did win Best Picture after all, as did Spotlight, a choice with which I can agree. But The Post? Call Me By Your Name? The Greatest Showman? What in the hell is wrong with these people?

As for the problems with the top ten they seem so glaring as to be obvious...why in the world would anyone in their right mind have Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh movie in a franchise that was iconic back in the 70's, as the number one choice for anything? Black Panther? Frozen? The eight and final film of the Harry Potter franchise? The steaming pile of cinematic excrement also known as Fifty Shades of Grey?

What this list shows me is that millennials are corporatized and infantilized to such a degree that they are morally distorted beyond human recognition. For example, seven of the top ten films are franchise or Disney animated kid's films. This is contrasted by number sixteen, Call Me By Your Name, which is a pedophile love story and number seven, Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a degenerate story of sadism and masochism. So you have a generation emotionally and intellectually stunted who have been conditioned to enjoy childish entertainments and yearn to be sexually controlled or manipulated by a dominant elder. Yikes.

I am joking...about millennials...sort of. I actually coach a lot of millennials and have found them to be a decent bunch of human beings whose main failings are that they are addictively myopic to a self-destructive degree. That said, what concerns me most about them is their taste in film...which according to this survey is atrocious.

Here is a list, off the top of my head, for films that I nominate to put in the time capsule. This isn't the list of best films, but a mix of best, most relevant and most insightful about the decade. In no particular order...

Hell or High Water, Sicario, Phantom Thread, The Master, Dunkirk, Inception, Ex Machina, The Social Network, A Quiet Place, The Big Short, Whiplash, Nightcrawler, The Tree of Life, Django Unchained, Her, 12 Years a Slave, Deadpool, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes.

BRIE LARSON

Back in June, according to Variety, Brie Larson said this at the heretofore unheard of Crystal and Lucy Awards show,

“Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I’m not"...

But then she went on to say...

"I don’t want to hear what a white man has to say about ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I want to hear what a woman of color, a biracial woman has to say about the film. I want to hear what teenagers think about the film.”

“If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is a chance that a woman of color does not have access to review and critique your film,” she said, while revealing plans to roll out an opt-in program that will provide studios with access to underrepresented journalists and critics. “Do not say the talent is not there, because it is.”

Ok. Well...let me preface this by saying, just like Brie Larson doesn't hate "White dudes", I don't hate White "chicks" or "chicks" of any color...BUT...that being said, I think Brie Larson may have huffed a little too much King Kong dung.

Let's embrace Ms. Larson's logic for a moment and see where that gets us. Fine...she doesn't want to hear what White "dudes" think of A Wrinkle in Time. Great...so then White dudes don't have to go see that piece of shit movie...thank you...that is a relief.

According to Ms. Larson, that movie is a love letter to teens of color, I wonder if the director Ava DuVernay told Disney that before she got financing, that she was only interesting in teen girls and girls of color seeing the movie? Disney would have absolutely loved that idea since, as their history shows, they don't care about money at all. Also, Brilliant Brie might want to consider what it means for the box office if a film is meant to exclude White dudes, she might discover that White dudes not seeing a movie could possibly, maybe...oh, I don't know...hurt the film at the box office? Maybe Ms. Larson might reconsider that alienating "White dudes" might end up being not such a great deal for the filmmaker or the people at Disney.

And is A Wrinkle in Time really hill Ms. Larson wants to plant her flag on in trying to make the case for more diversity in film criticism? The film has a 40% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, which Ms. Larson will no doubt blame on vicious White male critics, but the problem with that is the audience score, which is no doubt made from many women, women of color and teens, is a dismal 29. So instead of implying White male critics sabotaged A Wrinkle in Time's chances for success, maybe she should listen to all the female and minority amateur critics who are saying the movie sucks.

Ms. Larson's Identity-Based Critic Policy basically mirrors the argument heard from nerds she would deem hateful in regards to Gamergate and Star Wars movies and such. Nerd stuff is overwhelmingly guy stuff, and so if we follow Ms. Larson's own rules, women are no longer allowed to review stuff made for guys...you know...like Star Wars and Marvel movies...or Martin Scorsese, PT Anderson, Terence Malick or Christopher Nolan films. I am happy about that because, like how Ms. Larson doesn't hate "White dudes", I don't hate "chicks", and just like Ms. Larson doesn't "want to hear what white dudes think of A Wrinkle in Time" and wants their voices excluded regarding "chick flicks", I want all chick's voices regarding the aforementioned guy projects to be silenced.

Much like Ms. Larson's feelings regarding White male critics, I think the opinion of female critics taints the films they review and skews it towards a feminist perspective...so they all must go!! Leave guy stuff for guys and girls stuff for girls. I'll bask in the blockbuster entertainment of Star Wars and Marvel movies and basically all the best cinema on the planet while chicks get to have Ava DuVernay girlie junk like A Wrinkle in Time and the Sex and the City movies. Sweet deal!!

Does any of that sound rational at all? Of course not, it sounds hateful, bigoted, vicious and entirely counter productive. So maybe Ms. Larson should try and actually think before she speaks and takes actions against an entire group of people based on nothing but their race and gender.

And finally...Ms. Larson's demand that I not say that "there is no talent there"...is something I will completely ignore. There is no talent there...you know how I know that? Because if there were talent there, these allegedly ignored minority/female critics would write a review and someone would read it and like it. How do I know that? Because that is what I did and now I have people all over the world reading my reviews and I never had any special access to film festivals or studios or any special program to give me a leg up...hell, I never even used Facebook or Twitter...ever.

It is amazing that all you have to do to become a writer is to...you know...write something. In my case, I love cinema, I studied it as a young man and now I write about and some people read it...there is absolutely nothing stopping women or minorities from doing exactly the same thing...nothing.

And by the way Ms. Larson...there is plenty of access for writers to write film reviews...tons in fact...look at me...I review films on my blog...amazing...how did I think of something so ingenious? People can write reviews on Facebook or they can write reviews and leave them on Rotten Tomatoes if they like..lots and lots of people do!

So instead of bitching about lack of access or diversity or opportunity, why not encourage women and women of color to actually, you know, learn something about cinema and then actually write reviews of the movies they see. What an incredible idea!! But Brie Larson wouldn't go for that because all that matters to her and her ilk is a person's identity, not their ability.

RUBY ROSE - BATWOMAN

Speaking of the bat shit crazy world of identity politics, there is now the story of the outrage over Australian actress Ruby Rose being cast as Batwoman in the CW's "Arrowverse". Ms. Rose has quit Twitter (a healthy choice) and Instagram because of the vitriol she has received in response to her casting.

Now, Ms. Rose is not the first actor to face a backlash by fans after being cast to play a beloved character. The choice of Michael Keaton to play Batman in Tim Burton's original film and Heath Ledger being chosen as The Joker in The Dark Knight were both met with cries of despair and anger from the DC comic fan base.

What makes the outcry over Ms. Rose's casting is that those creating the uproar are not "fanboys", but "fangirls" in general and lesbian and Jewish fangirls to be more precise. You see Batwoman, according to the DC comic book canon, is a Jewish lesbian and apparently Ms. Rose, who has been out as a lesbian since she was 12, has been deemed not "gay enough" for the lesbian contingent and she is not Jewish at all which offends some in the Jewish fanbase.

Obviously, this is identity politics run amok. Actors can play characters that are not exactly like them...gay actors can play straight characters and straight actors can play gay characters. This is what acting is...and if identity politics adherents in Hollywood want to really think about it, by holding such stringent requirements for actors that they can only play roles for which they already "identify" in their real lives, then it is minority actors who will suffer most.

For example, in a recent New York Times op-ed by Jennifer Finley Boylan (a transgender woman), Ms. Boylan wrote that she thought Scarlett Johannsson should not play a trangender character because she isn't trans. I get the feeling behind the thought, but taken to its logical conclusion that means that trans actors can only play trans characters...and gay actors can only play gay characters. Therefore, since LGBTQ people make up about 3.8% of the population, there will be a considerable disadvantage for LGBTQ actors to get work since there will be far fewer characters that identify as LGBTQ just because of the reality of their statistical insignificance in the general population.

I find the identity politics fury and the charges of "cultural appropriation" and things like that to be so devoid of substance as to be ridiculously absurd. My counter argument is that we should be judging actors, writers, filmmakers and other artists on the quality of their work not on whether or not they check the right identities on the racial, ethnic, sexual and gender boxes.

I would like to say that this storm of idiotic identity politics will pass...but I have a sinking feeling this is the way it is going to be from here on out, and the arts are going to suffer greatly because of it.

JOHN OLIVER

No discussion of awful things is complete without mentioning John Oliver.

This past Sunday John Oliver did a brief bit on Saudi Arabia being pissed at Canada during his God awful show Last Week Tonight. It was...as usual...the most flaccid and impotent of comedy imaginable. What made it egregiously insipid and insidious though was that Oliver never mentioned the U.S. involvement in the grotesque war and genocide in Yemen. It is like the war in Yemen barely exists and even if it does then America certainly has nothing to do with it. This whole segment is strong evidence in my case claiming Oliver is a shamelessly venal shill for American neo-liberalism and the establishment.

To Oliver's credit, he did mention, sort of, Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9-11, something he has failed to do in the past...but again never spoke of the oddity of the US supporting a brutal dictatorship that is not only committing war crimes and genocide in Yemen and being aided and abetted in those war crimes and atrocities by the U.S.)...but attacked the U.S. on 9-11 and killed 3,000 people.

Instead of spending his precious HBO time making liberals painfully aware of the atrocities in Yemen and America's complicity in that evil, Oliver instead did a lengthy piece on that most pressing of issues...astroturf (fake populist ads)...oooh...how daring! Oliver is such a dissembler and disinformation agent that it is staggering and frankly horrifically disheartening that so many liberals hang on his every word and take it for gospel truth.

The bottom line is this...John Oliver is a scumbag shill of the highest order. I think we should toss him in a sack and fucking airmail this useless douchebag back to whatever British shithole he crawled out of.

And thus ends a brief foray into my Awful File...sadly, it is still chock full of awfulness but I don't have the heart to keep going through it. But know this, there is always one thing you can count on...the Awful File will never run out of material.

©2018

Thar He Blows: Charles Blow Has a Question...I Have an Answer

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 48 seconds

This past Friday, after a very long day, I sat down to try and unwind by watching some television. I then remembered that my work was not yet done as it was Friday and that meant Bill Maher's Real Time with Bill Maher was on and I would be obligated to watch that heinous show so that you dear readers wouldn't have to. So I turned on HBO, sat back and took in the vacuous shitshow.

After Maher's as-usual completely forgettable monologue, Little Bill fellated Intelligence agency charlatan Malcom Nance, including using Maher's signature pucker up line, "thank you for your service". One of the many downsides of having a con artist reality TV president is that dung beetles like Malcolm Nance crawl out from their pile of shit to inflate themselves and exploit the wishful thinking opposition in order to cash in on their 15 minutes of fame.

After Maher wiped his chin of Nance's precious bodily fluids, this week's panel of mid-wits arrived, led by Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist. Schmidt, or as I affectionately call him Schmidty, in a glaring case of 'the lady doth protests too much, methinks", now is a rabid anti-Trumper and blames Trump for absolutely everything wrong with America and the Republican party. I think it is awesome how Schmidty and every liberal, Maher included, who have him on as a guest totally forgets that it was good ole Schmidty who thrust Alaska's genius hockey mom Sarah Palin onto the American people in 2008, thus unleashing the voracious beast of American Idiocy into the mainstream of politics. In keeping with the current media trend of revisionist history or outright ahistoricalism, Sarah Palin, or as I call her Poor Lady Trump, was never mentioned on Real Time.

The other two panelists were pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, who seemed very out of place on the show because she is someone who bases her opinions on facts and numbers as opposed to emotions, and the aptly named Charles Blow, the resident hysteric and columnist at New York Times.

Reading Blow in the Times is one of the more uncomfortable things I have to do in my life...not because he reveals uncomfortable bold truths or anything, but because his writing is little more than masturbation meant to derive his own self-pleasure rather than illuminate or elucidate an issue or perspective.

Blow writes essentially the same column every single week where he ejaculates his self-serving emotionalist nonsense that only the most ardent true believers take seriously. Blow's formula begins by his proving to his liberal admirers that his panties are in a perpetual bunch and finishes with his bitching and moaning that Trump is a racist who must be stopped. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

In keeping with Blow's signature irrational emotionalism, on Maher's show he vomited his standard holier-than-thou diatribes and was a bookend to the self-righteous and self-delusional pontificating done by Sarah Palin's enabler and accomplice Steve Schmidt.

The most interesting guest was the final interview, Duke University professor Nancy MacLean. MacLean, author of the book "Democracy in Chains", was a rapid fire information machine as she spoke fast and furious in a bid to get all of her very relevant and insightful knowledge to a wider audience before Maher interrupted with his usual buffoonery. Watching the thoroughly informed and insightful MacLean I wished that she had a weekly show in HBO instead of Maher, granted she isn't a comedian but God knows neither is Little Bill.

As the show wore down MacLean made some vital points about liberals needing to stop being distracted by Trump and his tweets and instead to look at the long game and what the Koch brothers are doing. She also said that liberals should be more curious about the other side and read what they are writing and talking about. Maybe I liked Ms. MacLean so much because she sounded a hell of a lot like me.

Ms. MacLean finished her breathless dissertation by saying liberals need to be much more "strategic" in dealing with Trump voters...and that comment was what triggered Charles Blow to jump in. Blow rose up in his chair and asked Ms. MacLean accusatorily, "I'm curious about that argument, I keep hearing it...but...how do you meet a bigot halfway?"

Blow's comment was received with rapturous applause by the dopes and dullards in Little Bill's studio audience, and Blow responded as smugly as he could, like a toddler proud of the mess in his diaper.

Blow followed up by declaring "it was curious" that people keep asking how to make White people less anxious. Ms. MacLean never got a chance to respond to Blow's veiled accusation because both Schmidty and Little Bill chimed in with nonsensical comments of their own and then the show ended...thank the good Lord.

But since Mr. Blow opined..."how do you meet a bigot halfway?"...I thought I'd answer him. You meet a bigot halfway by finding common ground between you. For instance, like common economic issues such as de-unionization that adversely affect working class Black, White, Latino and Asian people who are routinely exploited and feel immense economic anxiety under the boot of American capitalism. Gee...meeting a bigot halfway by finding common ground wasn't so hard at all.

Of course, the real question Blow is asking is not "how" you meet a bigot halfway...but "why" you would meet a bigot halfway. The answer to that is pretty clear too...you meet a bigot halfway because it is in your best interest to do so. How could working with bigots be in your best interest...oh...I don't know...by maybe being a strategically wise thing to do to advance your agenda and make allies where enemies once stood. So, to use our first example, Black, White, Latino and Asian working class people could see put aside their racial bigotry in order to come together (in a union maybe) and demand better pay, working conditions etc. In this example economic issues trump bigotry.

Blow, and most of #TheResistence, believe that anyone who voted Trump is a irredeemable racist. This conveniently ignores all the Trump voters who voted for Obama and then voted Trump in 2016 or who were fed up with business as usual in Washington and chose Trump to shake things up. You can call those people bigots if you like, but it is strategically unwise and as a matter of fact, difficult to prove based on previous actions, namely voting for a Black man for president twice, thus revealing that calling all Trump voters bigots is actually a form if ignorant bigotry.

In Blow's hypocrisy is glaring on the "meeting bigots halfway" issue, as in his own life he meets bigots halfway all the time. It is ironic that Blow would publicly ask "how do you meet a bigot halfway" the same week that the New York Times hired Sarah Jeong to their editorial board, as Ms. Jeong has been exposed as an anti-White bigot after it was revealed that she wrote numerous anti-White racist screeds on social media. So Charles Blow has met anti-White bigot Sarah Jeong halfway by ignoring her predicament in his weekly column and never mentioning it on Maher's show.

Blow has also previously proven himself capable of meeting bigots halfway in order to find common cause...like how he doesn't chastise and attack the Black community for their long and notorious history of bigotry against LGBTQ people...of which Mr. Blow is one.

Blow is able to meet his own community of African-Americans halfway even though there has been historic animosity towards people of Mr. Blow's sexual persuasion, and he is also able to meet Ms. Jeong halfway even though she is bigoted but he is unable to fathom why or how he could ever meet allegedly bigoted Trump voters halfway....I find that...to borrow a loaded accusational word from Mr. Blow himself..."curious".

As for Blow's "curiosity" regarding why people are interested in how to make White people comfortable...the answer is extraordinarily obvious too. White people are nearly 70% of the U.S. population. Making them feel comfortable is obviously important because besides being the overwhelming majority of the population, they are also the overwhelming majority of the electorate. Ignoring White people is electoral suicide.

And just to make the math even more clear...White's are two-thirds of the population and Mr. Blow's racial group, African-Americans, make up roughly 14% of the population. So...it is pretty glaringly obvious why understanding the White voter is important if you want to succeed. I understand Blow's discomfort with the reality of his minority status, and I keep hearing that White's will soon become a "minority" in America...but I have bad news for Mr. Blow...that still doesn't mean that he will be able to ignore White people in the future. America will supposedly become a minority majority country by 2050, but White's will still be largest minority group and African-American's will, if historical trends hold, be an even smaller minority as their population will decline while Latino and Asian populations grow.

The bottom line is this, as much as it pains Blow to "meet bigots halfway" or to have to 'understand White people', if he wants to advance his agenda, it would be in his best interest to do both of those things.

The reality is that Blow claims he doesn't know how to "meet bigots haflway" because he is full of emotionalist shit. Blow is emblematic of the hysterical, effeminate and inept bunch of fools leading the alleged resistance against Trump. The problem is that Blow is the flip side of the same coin as Trump. Blow is downright Trumpian in the scope and scale of his embrace of victimhood and his naked tribalism and emotionalism. Just like Trump, Blow is self-righteously full of himself and is unquestioningly positive that he is totally 100% "right".

Blow's blindness to his own bigotry and the bigotry of his own side, which was brazenly on display even during his guest appearance on Maher's show, where Little Bill did a bunch of impotent gags making fun of Christians, is staggering. Just like Little Bill's tv show, Blow's commentary is shallow, vapid and vacuous commentary and should be an embarrassment to all thinking liberals.

The truth is that yes, White people are bigots, but so are Black people, Asians, Latinos and any other "group" you want to mention. Even the liberal saint Charles Blow is a bigot, but he thinks bigotry for his own side is no bigotry at all. In the case of Charles Blow, bigotry is only something other people are guilty of, and if Blow were able to recognize his own bigotry and put aside his intellectual and political paralysis in the face of what he deems White bigotry, just like he is able to do at work and in the Black community, then he might be able to convince others to help  do what he claims is so imperative...namely to topple the "racist" Trump. But that isn't Charles Blow's, #TheResistance or the New York Times business model...they are more interesting in satiating their audience's desire to feel morally and intellectually superior...so that ain't gonna happen...thus proving that the establishment is not interested in actual change, just emotional catharsis through venting while maintaining the status quo.

As the mid-term elections fast approach, and right on their heels the 2020 presidential election, establishment Democrats like Blow better quickly come to understand that outrage isn't a strategy, fury isn't a plan and quenching your emotional needs will not solve the problem. Locking yourself in the self-gratifying Charles Blow echo chamber and ignoring reality will not defeat your enemy. If the threat of Trump is as grave as Democrats keep saying it is then they better start acting accordingly. Charles Blow is an establishment errand boy, a sheep in #Resistance wolf clothing. He is a pied piper of failure, follow him and mimic his thought process and liberals will end up in an even worse spot than they are now.

So to answer the question...how do you meet a bigot halfway, Charles Blow? You think and act strategically by keeping your eyes on the big picture prize and your myopic, self-righteous, self-serving and self-defeating diatribes in the closet.

©2018

Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 57 seconds

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH...JUST WATCH WHAT YOU SAY" - ICE-T

On July 27th, I published an article at RT.com about Disney firing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 director James Gunn over some nearly decade old tweets in which he made bad rape and pedophilia jokes. In that essay I made the argument that Gunn's firing was the result of expansive corporate power and the effects of suffocatingly myopic political correctness on both corporate and American culture.

I got a lot of push back from readers of the piece in my inbox and at the comment section at RT. A reader left a comment on this website (oddly enough on a different article) that accurately represents the arguments made against my essay.  The comment is as follows:

"Just read your spirited defense of child rape enthusiast James Gunn. I have to assume you haven't read those vile tweets by Gunn, and that they go back nearly a decade doesn't make them funny, nor is it an excuse to defend this vile filth.

There is NOTHING funny, tweeting about doing degenerate perversions to kids, no matter what movies he directed.

But I see you're part of that Hollywood crowd that chortles about raping kids and babies, so either you're a pedo or just trying to protect your business.

Either way, that RT article almost made me vomit, they way you vigorously defended Gunn, making him out to be the victim of a nation gone mad on PC. I'll agree the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control, but not in this case.

What's your next article, defending Dan Harmon's skit about raping a baby doll? Oh yes, that's a real knee-slapper. Or maybe you'll claim that 'Steve-O' from the aptly name "JACKASS" franchise, who had a tattoo of a grown man sodomizing a baby was just youthful ignorance, and he has since repented by covering up the baby with the man now engaging in bestiality with an ostrich.

This is the crowd of sickos that love, and support that traitor Hillary Clinton, who had a good laugh about Qaddafi getting sodomized to death with a bayonet, and that crowd still wonders why she lost?

Looks like the Hollywood casting couch is still very much alive.

Greg Bacon"

THE JOKES POLICE

Mr. Bacon's thinking, or lack thereof, is emblematic of the rot at the core of American culture. He agrees that "the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control"...except in the case of Gunn. This sort of intellectual acrobatics is always how it goes when it comes to issues like this...we want freedom of speech for the things we agree with but not for the things we dislike. There is always some bright red line but it is always drawn around only the topics we hold dear. Mr. Bacon is either genuinely distraught by James Gunn's rape and pedophilia jokes or is cynically using them to take down a prominent member of the opposing political tribe, either way, Mr. Bacon is cooked in the grease of his own lack of intellectual integrity.

So, for example, while Gunn's rape/pedo jokes offend Mr. Bacon no end, there are people I know who would find his calling Hillary Clinton a "traitor" to be extremely offensive. He would laugh that off as absurd, just like others would laugh off Gunn's poor attempts at humor. Should Mr. Bacon lose his job as a probation officer or exotic dancer or whatever he does for a living just for his comment? Obviously the answer is no, and in my opinion, neither should Gunn.

Mr. Bacon's entire comment is soaked in the sort of emotionalist distortion that so often clouds rational and logical judgements. For instance, he repeatedly claims that I made a "spirited" and "vigorous" defense of Gunn's comments. If you read my piece it is pretty clear I do no such thing, what I argue is the overarching philosophy that currently drives our corporate and online culture is demented and damaging. I never quote Gunn nor do I defend him, what I am defending is a calm, cool rationalism.

THE SCURRILOUS AND THE RIDICULOUS

As Mr. Bacon's comment continues he descends further and further into his emotionalist fury, ejaculating out accusations that I am either a pedophile or selling my soul in order to "protect my business". If Mr. Bacon had done even a modicum of reading prior to commenting, he would've noticed that if there is one thing I certainly do not do in my writing it is put my business interests above my search for truth. I have written scathing articles here and at RT that have no doubt infuriated and offended numerous clients and prospective clients, the result of which is I have been made a pariah in some circles out here in Hollywood...so this charge is scurrilous at best.

As far as my being a pedophile or giving a pass to pedophilia, Mr. Bacon would be wise to read some of my yearly Slip-Me-A Mickey awards articles, where I repeatedly call out the worst sex offenders in Hollywood for their immoral proclivities. Even before the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement came to the forefront, I had implored actors and actresses to come forward and take on sexual predators in Hollywood.

Mr. Bacon's lazy charges that I am a pedophile also highlight another issue with his lack of reasoning, namely that James Gunn wrote jokes about rape and pedophilia, he did not rape anyone or prey upon children. Mr. Bacon would be wise to learn that words are not action and there is a big difference between the two. For example, joking about rape, even if it is child rape, is in fact, not rape. This is the biggest difference between me and apparently everyone else on the internet...I do not care what someone says on Twitter (even, as I wrote immediately after the election, President Trump) or Facebook (and cannot understand why anyone would ever be on either of those platforms), what I care about is what people actually do.

THE BEST DEFENSE IS TO TAKE OFFENSE

In terms of being offended by something...here is some news for you...you do not have the right to NOT be offended. If someone or something offends you, that is about you, not the person or thing allegedly offending you. If you do not want to be offended, dig a bunker with no internet access and stay in it for the rest of your life.

If you do venture out into the world and are offended, take that as an opportunity to sharpen your argument against the offender or open your mind to their point of view or to grow thicker skin, but do not take it upon yourself to make sure that the alleged offender loses their job when others like their work or is otherwise punished just for saying something that hurts your delicate sensibilities.

PRINCIPLES OVER TRIBALISM

For me it is pretty simple, I think James Gunn should not have been fired. I also think Roseanne Barr should not have been fired. I also think Sarah Jeong, an Asian woman who just got hired by the New York Times, and who has a history of tweeting racist and hateful things about White people, and who remarkably blames White people for her tweeting those racist things, should not be fired. I am "offended" by Ms. Jeong's tweets, but I think it is more important for me to sit in my discomfort than demand that others rights to free speech be diminished in any way...to react any other way would be hypocritical.

If Roseanne Barr's tweet comparing a public figure, Valerie Jarrett, to Ari from Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes movie, offends you and you think Barr deserved to be fired, but you think Jeong should keep her job, you have zero intellectual integrity. You are nothing but a tribal activist wanting a "win" over the other side. The same exact thing is true if it is reversed, and you support Roseanne but not Jeong, or in the case of Mr. Bacon, you think PC/SJW's are out of control EXCEPT for when it comes to James Gunn. Now if you want to talk about truly offensive things that deserve to end in not just firing but imprisonment, torture and maybe even the death penalty, then Tim Burton and his atrocious Planet of the Apes movie is a legitimate target...I am just kidding...sort of...but not really.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

In terms of Roseanne Barr, I know I am in the minority in not wanting her fired but my reasons are not just principled but strategic. Liberals were elated by the take down of Ms. Barr especially as a proxy in their war on Trump, but I find this thinking to be backward and self-defeating because in my eyes the Roseanne scandal was an opportunity, not for revenge, but for strategic gains.

Roseanne's show was enormously successful and it was a direct line into the living rooms of the Trump voters that liberals need to convince to come back into the Democratic fold. Her ratings were spectacularly high and the top ten cities where she performed the best were in order...Tulsa, Cincinnati, Kansas City (Mo.), Pittsburgh, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Some may say that getting Trump voters to flip is an impossible task, but the numbers say otherwise, as many of the Midwestern Trump voters were Obama voters in 2008 and 2012...in fact Roseanne used to be a Democrat. Looking at the list of the cities where she performed highest, two are in Missouri, which has a female Democratic senator, and one each in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan...all states where Democrats lost in 2016 and could use all the help they can get in 2018 and 2020.

In my eyes, using Roseanne's racist tweet as leverage to get Roseanne, whom Midwestern Trump voters admire and respect, to use her show as a conduit to reach White working class Mid-Westerners and explore commonalities between working class people of all colors would have been a much more thoughtful and strategic thing to do rather than just emotionally firing her the same day as her infraction.

Two things could have happened in the Roseanne situation if liberals hadn't reacted so emotionally...the first is they could have attempted to use her as a direct line to communicate their message to White working class voters in the  Midwest, and two they could have maintained the high ground in regards to free speech. By firing Roseanne so quickly, liberals shot themselves in the foot and lost an opportunity to erode some of Trump's voting base. 

If liberals hadn't been so desperate to fire Roseanne and instead saw her situation as an opportunity, they could have not only started to sway Trump voters to change their votes, but maybe even change their perception of people of other races...then that would really shake things up...which is probably why ABC/Disney, the corporate embodiment of the establishment, acted so impulsively (and if Roseanne failed to live up to her end of the bargain than you fire her). ABC/Disney and the rest of the establishment, do not want things to change, they want racial animosity to divide the working class because then they are able to control the working class...but that is a story for another day.

"THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!" - BRAVEHEART

The truth is that I am also one of those crazy people who thinks that NFL players should not be stopped from protesting during the national anthem and that Colin Kaepernick should have a job. I also think flag burning should never be a crime and that White supremacists should be allowed to march in Charlottesville or anywhere they damn well please as long as they get the proper permits to do so. I also think that corralling protestors into "free speech" zones at political events violates both the spirit and the rule of the law and degrades our Constitutional rights.

I vehemently oppose liberals who demanded the ACLU not defend groups that carry legal weapons to protests. I also vehemently oppose tech companies or any other Orwellian entities policing the internet or anywhere else for content they find offensive.

I have been called a First Amendment fundamentalist by both liberal and conservative friends of mine for these stances. I find that hysterically funny. I've also been called a Second Amendment fundamentalist for my stalwart support of gun rights...and called even worse for my unbending support of all our constitutional, God-given rights.

YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Liberals and conservatives who are so quick to socially police the speech and thought of their opponents will quickly learn that double edged sword will be the tool with which the establishment powers execute you. If you are comfortable with an online mob or the totalitarian tech companies or big media being in charge of policing thought and speech in America, you are a brain-addled fool of epic proportions because they won't silence your enemies, they will end up silencing you.

In our current emotional pique, we have devolved into short-sighted fools who disregard the rights of others while we demand subservience to our personal feelings and whims. As the classical liberal foundation upon which our culture and civilization was built is torn asunder by the impulsive and despotic, we are quickly being stripped of any and all defenses save our over-inflated, self-serving sense of moral outrage and righteous indignation. When the manically totalitarian arbiters of thought and speech come for us, one by one, those flaccid defenses will leave us all at the mercy of our enemies...who, just like the rest of us...have proven themselves to be both vicious and merciless.

In this age of hyper-polarization and emotionalism where we no longer make arguments but only accusations, and where tribalism trumps principles, we are quickly spiraling down into an abyss of vacuousness and vapidity where the foundational pillars of our civilization will be crushed under the weight of our own insidiously myopic narcissism.

©2018

Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 08 seconds

America is spiraling downward into a politically correct madness and big Hollywood corporations like Disney are hastening the descent.

On July 20th Disney fired outspoken liberal writer/director James Gunn from the film Guardians of the Galaxy 3 for a series of tweets he had written from 2008 to 2011 which the company deemed “offensive”.

The tweets in question, which were Gunn’s attempts at humor, were jokes about rape and pedophilia that were dug up by alt-right firebrand Mike Cernovich looking to bring the archliberal Gunn down a peg. Cernovich and his merry band of alt-right tricksters couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams that due to their twitter/media campaign against Gunn, the man who wrote and directed the first two  highly successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise films, he would end up being kicked to the curb by Disney.

Many liberals in Hollywood are outraged that Gunn was fired and a petition with 200,000 signatures is even going around to get him re-hired.

Others in the film industry, like the writer and director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (a Disney production) Rian Johnson, are quaking in their designer space boots over Disney’s reactive and swift punishment of Gunn. Johnson wisely erased his entire twitter history in the wake of Gunn’s firing, no doubt fearful he may have unwittingly violated Disney’s moronic retroactive bad joke policy.

Regardless of how entertainment professionals feel about Mickey Mouse being quick on the draw to take down Gunn, they better understand that this sort of hypersensitivity combined with zero tolerance is now the new normal in corporate Hollywood.

Proof of this is that Gunn is not the only Tinseltown big shot to have recently had their careers tossed overboard from the good ship Hollywood after running afoul of the p.c. police.

The most high profile case occurred on May 29th when ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, fired vociferous Trump supporter Roseanne Barr from her show Roseanne, the most popular new TV show in America, after she had tweeted racist remarks about a former Obama official.

Also, the same week that Disney had Gunn walk the plank, Paramount fired Amy Powell, head of their television division, after Powell allegedly made a comment about “angry Black women”. Powell strenuously denies the allegations, and is planning on suing Paramount for wrongful termination. The irony is that the comment in question was made during discussions about Paramount’s production of a series based on the film First Wives Club that has an all-Black cast.

While the obvious through line of all of these stories is political correctness run amok and the internet mob targeting and destroying people’s careers, another common feature of these stories is just as insidious…the expansion and abuse of corporate power.

It is bad enough that corporations are so short-sighted as to only make decisions based on quarterly earnings rather than long-term financial health, but now these business behemoths no longer seem beholden to shareholders or the bottom line at all, but rather, like impetuous adolescents, are slavishly and myopically addicted to such frivolous and fickle short-term measurements of their success as online popularity.

The fact that Disney would fire Gunn, whose two previous Guardian of the Galaxy films made the company nearly two billion dollars, over years old bad joke tweets, is astonishing for a media giant that has built its exorbitant power making money, not friends.

ABC/Disney’s decision to fire Roseanne, while more understandable in terms of the offensive content and recent timing of her tweets, also goes against the financial bottom line as it is estimated that it will cost the network tens of millions of dollars. And yes, firing Roseanne will appease people who were offended by her tweets, but in this hyper-polarized political atmosphere it will also alienate people who are her fans, making the whole enterprise a public relations wash at best.

Paramount’s firing of Powell will no doubt hit the company in its pocketbook as well, since Powell has stated she will sue for wrongful termination, and from all of the information currently made public, she has a very strong case.

This recent upsurge in political correctness and zero tolerance in the entertainment industry is born out of impotent liberals in Hollywood needing to vent their rage at Trump, so they use any chance they get to punish a proxy, whether deserving or not. Barr and Powell are no doubt stand-ins for racist Trump in the eyes of Hollywood liberals and make for useful and momentarily satisfying scapegoats.

The big studios have now co-opted the mindset of their liberal La La Land neighbors, enshrining into corporate policy the idea that error has no rights, and that those who don’t preach the politically correct party line are not only wrong but irredeemably evil.

While liberals cheered Roseanne’s firing as a victory over “racist” Trump supporters, hubris blinded them to the uncomfortable fact that using politically incorrect tweets as a cudgel to bludgeon their enemies is a tactic that others could turn against them, thus the alt-right used the same approach to bag their own big game in the form of James Gunn.

The inevitable outcome of Hollywood social justice warriors using revenge fueled, emotionally driven political correctness as a weapon is that it will invariably devolve into a self-defeating circular firing squad where liberals destroy and alienate just as many allies as enemies in their scorched earth approach at policing speech and thought.

This approach also conditions corporations into abandoning context and logic from their decision making, such as being able to see the difference in severity between Gunn’s old rape jokes and Roseanne’s recent racist barbs, and replacing them with a draconian and manic zero-tolerance policy in order to satiate whatever online mob, regardless of their political affiliation, targets them.

And so, while Trump-loving Roseanne is out at ABC, so is devout Democrat James Gunn at Disney. And while the liberal goal is for more diversity and racial sensitivity in studios, Amy Powell’s quick-trigger firing from Paramount will result in White studio executives being less willing to work with minorities for fear that they will unwittingly say something offensive and instantly lose their jobs. In mediation this is what they call a lose-lose scenario.

The scariest part of all this is that since the disease of zero tolerance political correctness has spread from universities to Silicon Valley and now to the behemoths of corporate Hollywood like Disney, which is on the precipice of controlling an astounding 40% of the box office market with their pending purchase of Fox, the contagion will only spread further to the rest of American industries through the mindless and spineless group think of human resource departments in corporations across America.

Being beholden to the whims of whatever mob of snowflakes or cynically inspired career assassins shriek the loudest is no way to run a business, an industry or a nation. The sort of Orwellian, Stasi level policing of thought and speech that brought down James Gunn, Amy Powell and even Roseanne Barr is pure and utter madness. I can assure you one thing…this insanity can not and will not end well for Hollywood or America.

A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT RT.COM

UPDATE: Right on schedule...Sarah Silverman is the newest Hollywood liberal to be idiotically raked over the coals for old pedophilia jokes on twitter. Once the Politically Correct beast is unleashed it cannot be controlled...a lesson Hollywood liberals are learning the hard way.

©2018

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot: A Review

***THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!***

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT: Skip it in the theatre (unless you have MoviePass) but due to terrific acting you should see it on cable or Netflix.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, written and directed by Gus Van Sant, is a dramedy bio-pic based upon the memoir of the same name by quadriplegic cartoonist and recovering alcoholic John Callahan. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Callahan, with supporting turns from Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara and Jack Black.

I have been to rehab more times than I can even remember...maybe it's because I was in a booze-fueled blackout during those years...who knows? The thing that I do remember from my various rehab stints was that at every single one of them they were so bereft of ideas on how to help us degenerate drunken sons of bitches that they would always, at some point, resort to having us watch a movie. The movie they ALWAYS showed at every single rehab was the 1988 film Clean and Sober starring Michael Keaton.

The showing of Clean and Sober was preceded by comments from counselors as to what a "great movie" it was...which only further undermined my trust in them. Clean and Sober is a decent enough teaching tool for a rehab...but it sure as hell is not a "great" movie.

I thought of my seemingly endless rehab days often as I watched Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and couldn't help but wonder if this film could morph into the new cinematic entertainment/teaching tool for rehabs across the country. 

You never know what you're going to get with director Gus Van Sant. Sometimes he rolls out a total impressionistic arthouse piece of cinema (Elephant) and other times he'll give you a rather solid but conventional movie tinged with some arthouse flair (Milk, Good Will Hunting). With Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, he falls decidedly into the former category, as the film is a surprisingly standard and conventional "sobriety" bio-pic.

Van Sant does mess around with some less than linear storytelling, but that only confuses matters, as it is at times hard to tell where Callahan is in his recovery or non-recovery as the case may be.

As a recovery story the film works but for all the wrong reasons, namely the incoherent timeline mimics the confusion inherent in addiction, but also makes for a discombobulating cinematic experience. It is frustrating to the point of infuriating watching Callahan consistently get in his own way and stumble and stagger his way from bar to bar and AA meeting to AA meeting and back again and not knowing if we are in "real time" or a flashback or flash forward.

The cycle of alcoholism and addiction is highlighted in a cartoon by John Callahan which shows the evolutionary scale from an amoeba in a swamp all the way up to a man accepting an award at a podium. Watching someone on screen so convincingly go through that heart breaking, gut wrenching and shame-filled struggle from the drunken swamp creature to the victorious award winner is uncomfortable for anyone like me who has made a similarly arduous journey.

In this context, Van Sant's less than coherent narrative is effective in relaying the psychological and spiritual vertigo that accompanies addiction, which is like a hall of funhouse mirrors where up is down, left is right and right is wrong. It is a horrifying and soul crushing experience to endure (and for loved one's of the afflicted to endure as well) the climb up and then falling back down of Callahan's evolutionary scale. The climb to sobriety is much like Christ's gauntlet to his own crucifixion, but at least Christ had the benefit of a clear path to Golgotha where he wasn't constantly taking one step forward and two steps back.

John Callahan's struggle for sobriety is doubly difficult because of how painful and hopeless his unique situation is in regards to his spinal injury. Being unable to literally run away from his demons is an added burden that makes his climb all the steeper and also gives him a built in self-pitying excuse. Addicts love to self-pity and embrace the victim archetype...whining "poor me, poor me, poor me...pour me another drink". Callahan's victimhood is valid, but that doesn't make it useful in trying to ease and transform his feelings of emotional myopia, abandonment, betrayal, self-loathing and rage that can strangle recovery in its cradle.

I don't know if Don't Worry He Won't Get Far on Foot will be embraced by rehabs in the coming years as it is a little too realistic in showing how sobriety is a series of very small victories floating in an ocean of abysmal failures. That cold, hard reality might be too much for the newly sober to grapple with in such a fragile and delicate stage of their very long journey up and out of the muddy pit of addiction and onto the terra firma of an "ordinary" life.

As far as the particulars go, the film is definitely elevated above the likes of Clean and Sober because it boasts two top notch performances, one from lead Joaquin Phoenix, who I believe is the best actor in film today, and Jonah Hill, who plays sobriety guru Donnie Green.

Phoenix's Callahan has a festering wound eating away at his soul that is only heightened when he (literally) cannot run away from it any longer. Phoenix is a combustible talent, but his skill and mastery of craft is equal to his prodigious talents, and watching him imprisoned in a motionless body for two hours is a masterclass. At once charming and infuriating, self-destructive, self-absorbed, self-pitying and yet always magnetically compelling, Phoenix does Callahan justice by pulling no punches in his complex portrayal of him. . 

Phoenix uses his breath to great effect to simulate Callahan's sensation of suffocating as his body struggles simply to inhale and exhale as he is born again in a useless body. He speaks so softly at times you lean forward in your seat to hear him, and at times explodes in such a visceral rage that you recoil from his inner ugliness being vomited upon the scene.

Phoenix is the best acting going right now, and his work in Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, is just another monument to that fact.

Jonah Hill is tremendous as Donnie, a sort of new age aristocrat and golden haired Dr. Phil. Donnie is definitely a character, but Hill never pushes or gets showy with him, he keeps it grounded and contained and so fully inhabits Donnie that he disappears into him. Hill is an actor you never would have guessed would end up being so good. As a comedian and a comic actor he is pretty predictable and rather mundane, but as a serious actor he has developed a solid base of skill and craft along with the courage to abandon his ego and persona and lose himself completely in roles...and it is a joy to behold.

Rooney Mara is such a luminous screen presence in the film that I kept expecting her to be revealed to be an angel or a figment of John Callahan's imagination at some point...but she isn't, she is a real person...well...sort of...her character Annu is so thinly written she is little more than a sparkle of sunshine dancing ever so briefly on a butterfly's wing.

In terms of the hidden sub-text of the film...there was one little gem that I discovered and was surprised by...namely that John Callahan is symbolic of Donald Trump. Yes, I know, maybe I, like the rest of America, am seeing Trump in every Rorschach test, but bear with me, I think this is valid as the similarities are striking. For instance, Callahan is an orange-haired cripple and Trump is an orange-haired emotional cripple. Both men are victims of an absent mother who abandoned them to either a cruel world or a cruel father. And both men vented their shadow by flouting political correctness and finding validation by offending other people. They also both claimed to be merely "saying what everyone is thinking" when they disregarded political correctness. Trump, like Callahan, is a shameless liar who is able to deceive nearly everyone, including himself. And finally both men have a thing for beautiful European women.

In regards to Callahan's evolutionary scale cartoon in relation to Trump, both men think they are on top of the scale, when in reality they are just at the top of this cycle of the scale, and will frequently devolve back into the swamp of their own tormented psychology, only to rise again over time.

Trump's presidency is a sign that America is in a stage of devolution right now (and frankly a much needed devolution). We are returning to the swamp in order to purge ourselves of everything but our most basic survival needs. As the cycle dictates, we will return to the mountaintop eventually and will stand at the podium to accept our award...only to be followed by our neck breaking dive head first into the swamp once again...and so goes the circle of life.

In conclusion, overall as much as I loved the performances, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot was slightly underwhelming and dare I say it disappointing due to structural flaws in the narrative that prove dramatically fatal. Van Sant was definitely off his game with this film because the second half loses momentum and also Callahan's drawing ability seemingly comes out of nowhere and is never satisfyingly explained.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot is worth seeing on cable of Netflix for free (or in the theatre's with MoviePass if you like), but even with the great cast it doesn't rise to the level of paying full price to see it at the theatre. So there is no need to run, walk or crawl to the cineplex to catch Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot...but if you they show it at your rehab be thankful, it is much better...and more honest...than Clean and Sober.

©2018

Captain America v Trump in Battle of the Useful Idiots

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 38 seconds

President Trump’s summit and press conference with Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki went so poorly that even superheroes and superhero wannabes went into hysterics over Trump’s alleged betrayal of the American intelligence community.

The reason for the media uproar in the wake of the Helsinki summit was that in reply to a reporter’s question Trump stated, or misstated depending on whom you listen to, that he believed Putin when the Russian leader claimed there was no Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

On CNN, that silver-spooned, silver-haired Silver Surfer clone Anderson Cooper, immediately responded to Trump’s performance by shrieking,

“You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader certainly that I’ve ever seen.”

Former head of the CIA John Brennan, who looks and acts frighteningly similar to Thing of the Fantastic Four, tweeted…

“Donald Trump’s press conference in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Former director of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden went full Hulk when in response to Trump’s contradicting the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Hayden monosyllabically rage tweeted…

“OMG. OMG. OMG”

Then a “real” superhero jumped into the fray. Chris Evans, the actor who plays Captain America in the Marvel franchise films who is the perfect representation of America because he is so boyishly handsome, ridiculously muscular, emotionally infantile and staggeringly empty-headed, tweeted of Trump…

“I don’t even know what to say. Today was a disgrace. @realDonaldTrump embarrassed America and should be ashamed of himself. Shame on anyone who chooses to ignore Russia’s interference in our democracy for the sake of Trump’s political well-being. I’m at a complete loss.”

I have a sneaking suspicion Mr. Evans is often at a complete loss…like when he comes upon a doorknob. Apparently the Captain’s twitter finger is even more powerful than his vibranium shield because he didn’t stop there…he followed up by tweeting…

“This moron, puppet, coward sided with Putin over our own intelligence agencies! On a world stage!! BASED ON NOTHING MORE THAN PUTIN’S WORD! Why? Can ANYONE answer that?? What the hell is happening. Politics aside, this is 100% un-American. Where are you @GOP???”

Captain America’s logic is pristine…I mean how could anyone in their right mind dare to question America’s saintly intelligence community about their limited and still evidence free “assessment” that Russia interfered in the American election?

Sure, the American intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel on 9-11, wrong about WMD’s in Iraq, ran a secret rendition and torture program, spied on American citizens, international allies and the U.S. congress, and then lied and perjured themselves about all of the above in order to cover their backsides…but when it comes to what happened in the 2016 election we should totally take their word for it!

Evans was joined in his twitter rampage shortly thereafter by fellow Marvel talent James Gunn, who in addition to writing and directing the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also produced this year’s smash hit Avengers: Infinity War movie. Gunn re-tweeted this…

In an ironic case of “he who liveth by Twitter, dieth by Twitter”, Gunn, who is notoriously quick on the draw when it comes to tweeting, transformed into an ex-Marvel talent later in the week when he got fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after some entirely unrelated decade-old tweets of his surfaced in which he joked about rape and pedophilia. No doubt Gunn’s Twitter handle will now be holstered.

While Gunn’s re-tweeted Thanos meme is legitimately funny, equating Thanos, the villain in Infinity War who kills half of all beings in the universe in order to restore balance, to Putin, is hysterical…literally.

The mainstream media may claim otherwise, but the truth is Putin is not some omnipotent super-villain intent on universal or even global domination. Putin presides over a nation with only the 9th largest population, 11th largest economy (by projected GDP) and the 4th largest military budget (which is nearly ten times smaller than the U.S. military budget), that is not a Thanos level of super villainy…that doesn’t even rise to the level of Ultron, Loki or Lex Luthor for goodness sakes.

If Putin were truly a Thanos-level super-villain he would at least have the world’s largest economy, largest military budget, more foreign military bases than any other nation in human history, the largest prison population, a vast worldwide eavesdropping surveillance system along with extra-judicial kill lists and also have fomented coups and waged wars  in such far off and diverse lands as Ukraine, Libya, Egypt, Honduras, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. Of course in order to have all of those things Putin would have to be the President of the United States.

The reality is that Putin is nothing more than a Russian nationalist whose interest is in protecting Mother Russia and its people from existential threats, which historically for Russians are a much more pressing matter than for those of us living in the United States.

It is difficult for Americans like James Gunn and Chris Evans to grasp, but a little over 75 years ago the elite of the Nazi war machine were a stones throw from Moscow. Maybe if we Americans learned our history from somewhere other than Marvel movies we would know that it wasn’t Captain America that defeated the Nazis, it was the Soviets who broke the back of Hitler’s military monstrosity and who lost more than 26 million lives in the process.

Even in the last thirty years, Russians have had to survive the chaos and calamity that befell them when the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO encroached on their borders and America shamelessly meddled in their elections and economy.

The truth is that Anderson Cooper, John Brennan and Captain America Chris Evans, all inhabit different wings of the same American propaganda machine that has no interest in hearing differing or nuanced view points and has its heart set on demonizing and castrating Russia.

Cooper, a former intern at the CIA, cheerleads for American militarism and stokes the flames of Russo-phobia nightly on his CNN “news” show.

Brennan now plays a “serious” pundit on MSNBC, who routinely calls Vladimir Putin a “low-life thug”.

Since Brennan aided and abetted torture and treasonously spied on his own government while he was at the CIA, should he be considered a “high-life” thug because he is well paid as a member of the political and media establishment?

Chris Evans is also part of the American propaganda machine – the Hollywood wing. Is Evans aware that most of Hollywood, including Marvel and its parent company Disney, make movies in cooperation with the Pentagon? Does he know that in exchange for use of military equipment, personnel and expertise, the Pentagon gets creative control of those projects and eliminates any negative narratives that shed a bad light on the U.S. or its military to insure that those films will be coercive advertisements for American militarism?

Is Chris Evans aware and comfortable with the fact that America’s intelligence community also has a fruitful working relationship with Hollywood that has distorted history and whitewashed torture?

Does Chris Evans also support the cavalcade of anti-Russian films and television shows being churned out in recent years by Hollywood that brazenly dehumanize Russians and make Americans more susceptible to believe any negative story they hear about Russians in the mainstream media?

Maybe the vacuous gruel that is the Russiagate case will expand to become a sumptuous feast of evidence proving Putin’s guilt and Trump’s complicity. And maybe Trump is exactly what the media and Captain America claim he is…a useful idiot who is a “moron, puppet and coward”…but upon closer examination, the same could also be said of Evans who, wittingly or unwittingly, enables the Pentagon and Intelligence agencies’ militaristic and Russo-phobic propaganda campaigns to indoctrinate the American people to be gullible to the media, subservient to authority and aggressively belligerent toward Russians.

Add in the fact that liberals in Hollywood and the media are now so deeply in the throes of their virulent anti-Russian hysteria that they actually equate any alleged Russian election interference with the atrocities of 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, and you have a perfect recipe for a potential war…talk about useful idiots.

This article was originally published at RT.

©2018

Disturbing Dispatches From "Real America"

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 11 seconds

I just returned from two weeks spent outside of my Hollywood enclave in what some would describe as "real America" where I went on a road trip from Central Pennsylvania (aka Pennsyl-tucky) to Cape Cod with various stops in between. On my journey I spoke with some regular people about their thoughts on Trump and American politics and came away struck by the disconnect between those ordinary folks and the liberal bubble in which I exist.

Since all of the information that I gathered is entirely anecdotal it should be subject to skepticism as it may very well be a result of my own confirmation bias, but with that said, the conclusion I came to after this jaunt through "real America" is that I am positive that in the battle for hearts and minds here in America, Trump is winning and winning bigly.

As I spoke with these "regular people", none of whom are particularly political, it became clear that Trump is going to win in November of 2018 (Republicans will hold onto the House and Senate) and will win re-election in 2020.

One of the most glaring things that stood out to me in my travels were the remarkable number of American flags on display. It reminded me of my childhood in Reagan's America as I have not seen that sort of unadulterated display of patriotism since the 80's. But what was fascinating to me was that the definition of patriotism and even of America has changed dramatically. "America" is not what the media thinks it is..."America" is not its institutions - the FBI, CIA or the rest of the establishment and government. "America" is now regarded as only the "regular people" throughout the country and not the leadership class. This new "America" is stridently nationalist and populist and marginally traditionalist.

This new form of nationalist populism is striking because it doesn't bring with it a muscular and belligerent militarism like Reaganism, quite the opposite. The folks I spoke with had no interest in spreading American exceptionalism overseas at the end of a gun but what they were interested in was a nativist isolationism at home where immigration is either slowed or stopped, illegal immigration is dealt with swiftly and effectively and free trade is drastically reduced.

The people with whom I spoke are not members of any political party, are not active in politics and have voted for both Republicans and Democrats at one time or another.  Nearly all of these people, even the ones who usually vote Democrat, commented on how much they loathe the waves of immigration from Central America that they believe negatively effects the "American" culture.

On the bright side, no one I spoke with said they liked Trump, in fact, even among his most ardent supporters, he was routinely called a "jackass" or a "clown", but they still supported him because he "gets things done". To a person, the Trump "voters/supporters" were not enthralled with him personally but they were most definitely much more disgusted with business as usual in Washington than with Trump's antics. Each and every one of them expressed contempt for Washington and most especially the media.

The venom spewed towards the media by these folks was pretty intense. I was thinking about these "regular Americans" when I sat in an airport waiting for my flight home and saw the news of Trump's summit with Putin and his allegedly disastrous press conference afterwards. CNN had a headline on the screen that read "Trump throws intelligence agencies under the bus". I laughed when I read it because I knew how "real Americans" were going to see that headline and the media coverage of the Russia summit, and it was the exact opposite of what CNN and their establishment media cohorts intended.

According to "regular Americans", the intelligence agencies are symbolic of the corruption of Washington and they, along with the mendacious media, are not to be believed in the slightest. The disconnect between how "regular Americans" view the Trump-Putin summit and how the media and establishment view it, would absolutely shock those making a fuss over Trump's performance at the summit. In addition, the Russian election hacking story and Mueller probe did not even register on the radar of these "regular Americans", as the story held zero interest to them.  

The subjects that did resonate with them were immigration and the economy. They liked Trump's approach on immigration, including the Muslim ban, and were very pleased with the economy, even though many of them felt no tangible results from any of Trump's policies, and in a remarkable bit of disconnect, some even had felt negative consequences from his policies (tariffs).

These "regular Americans" consistently gave Trump the benefit of the doubt whenever he had made an error and blamed the media for being too tough on him. Trump, even though he is President and controls both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, is seen as an underdog and an outsider fighting against a thoroughly corrupt system. 

My discussions with these "regular Americans" put my Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory research into very clear focus. In an almost horrifying realization...I discovered that the Churchillian archetype that was so prominent last year in the films Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and the television show The Crown, has manifested itself in the form of Trump (and to an extent in other authoritarians like Putin, Erdogan, Xi and Duterte) and not in resistance to him.

This Churchillian archetype has coalesced around Trump not in a war against an external enemy but rather in the internal civil war against the establishment (globalists). The Trump brand of nationalism, a concoction made up of a pinch of Reaganism, a dash of traditionalism and a glob of reality television populism, that my fellow Hollywoodites see as unadulterated fascism, is what the Churchillian archetype is fighting for, and that is a chilling realization when you understand how compelling that archetype currently is in our collective unconscious. This is why Trump is perceived by "real Americans" as the underdog and outsider and given the benefit of the doubt in his battle against the globalist establishment.

As Jung teaches, archetypes are neither good nor bad, they are amoral and can manifest and express themselves through a multitudes of ways. America being in the throes of the Churchillian archetype and Trump being the one through which it manifests, is a stunning turn of events, but it rather makes sense when you look at it through the prism of the other, overarching archetype also revealing itself in our world (and through Trump) at the moment...Mercury...the trickster god.

Psychologically and emotionally, Trump is terribly ill-equipped to carry the weight of the Churchillian archetype, nevermind the extremely powerful Mercury archetype, which is why we get such erratic and incoherent performances from him, but to be fair, Churchill was ill-equipped to carry the Churchillian archetype as well (which would explain his numerous battles with the Black Dog of depression)...and upon closer inspection the mythos surrounding Churchill is riddled with canyon sized cracks.

Trump supporters are not blind to his faults, they just don't care about them. Trump the man, just like Churchill the man, is almost irrelevant, it is the myth of Trumpism that matters just as it was the myth of Churchill that carried Great Britain through its Darkest Hour.

In the 80's, America fell for the flag waving, free market nonsense of Reaganism, and we still haven't even come close to recovering nearly 40 years later. Trumpism will have an even longer lasting effect on America, and it may very well be the end of the "American experiment" either because Trumpism wins, or because of the means the #resistance, including the intelligence community, use to rid themselves of this troublesome priest (Trump) will, like Brutus and friends when they conspired to eliminate the threat of Caesar to the Republic of Rome, lead to a path of self-destruction.

Regardless, those who think things will go back to normal when Trump is gone are in for a rude awakening...there is no going back. There is a new normal, and it is Trumpism. The fever of Trumpism is spreading and before it's done America and Americans across the political spectrum will be transformed into something they would not have been able to recognize a mere two years ago.

In conclusion, from my admittedly limited investigation into "real America", I came away stunned by the instinctual support not so much for Trump but for Trumpism out there. This is very bad news for anyone who opposes Trump (I know a lot of people who do), and I know the polls say otherwise, but my impressions are that his support is very strong and growing. Make no mistake about it...Trump is winning and the resistance is losing.

Deserving or not, Trump is the vessel in which the Churchillian archetype has manifested and is a vassal to the powerful Mercury archetype. One result of which is that the old knee-jerk patriotism of Reaganism has morphed into the new "nationalism" of Trumpism, and there is no breaking that spell in the short-term.

We can think that the buffoonish Trump is a joke...but the reality is that the joke is on us, and Mercury, as always, will get the last laugh...on all of us...including Donald Trump.

©2018

Hollywood's Self-Serving and Misguided Immigration Protests

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

Hollywood celebrities are furious over Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families, but their outrage is selective and often self-serving.

In recent weeks the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their families when they attempt to enter America illegally or to seek asylum has been the top story.

Media coverage has included horrific pictures and video of young immigrant children in anguish over being taken from their families. Pundits have repeatedly used the phrase “babies in cages” to describe the situation.

Hollywood celebrities like Oprah, John Legend, Ellen DeGeneres and Evan Rachel Wood are among the many stars moved by the plight of these children who have gone public with their disdain for President Trump and his immigration policy. 

While it strikes me as obvious that Trump’s family separation policy is cruel and horrifying, I also have to admit I find the pose of child advocacy on the part of some of these celebrities to be at best misguided and at worst a form of vacuous virtue signaling. 

For instance, Evan Rachel Wood, star of HBO’s Westworld, went to the Texas border to join in an organized 24-hour hunger strike to bring attention to the issue. She implored people to follow her on Instagram to stay current on her progress. When I read that story I found it so asinine that I had to double check to make sure I wasn’t reading the satirical news website The Onion. Sadly, I wasn’t, it was a real story that left me wondering if she was starving herself for a good cause or starving for attention?

While Ms. Wood’s heart may be in the right place, it’s her mind that I’m worried about. Here are a few things to consider in regards to Ms. Wood’s 24-hour hunger strike.

First of all, if you’re an actor living in Hollywood, if you’re not fasting at least one day a week, you’re simply not trying.

Secondly, starving yourself for 24 hours is not going to do a single thing for frightened toddlers and infants separated from their mothers and fathers at the border.

And third, if the argument is that Ms. Wood and the rest of her fellow 24-hour hunger strikers are, like other famous hunger strikers in the past such as Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Bobby Sands and the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay prison, starving themselves to bring attention to an issue, in this case the immigrant family separation policy, then they are a little late to the party.

The media has been relentlessly reporting on this topic for the last few weeks and have flocked to the Texas border to breathlessly cover the story. And that, it seems, is the point for some of these celebrities, namely that the media is already focused on this issue and therefore when seemingly well-intentioned stars use stunts like hunger striking or going to the border, they aren’t bringing attention to the issue…but rather to themselves.

Another problem with the spate of Tinseltown voices demanding action to stop Trump’s brutal family separation policy is that these stars didn’t get up in arms when President Obama had a similarly callous policy towards illegal immigrant families.

Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson recently went on Fox News and commented on startling images of young immigrant children separated from their parents and put in makeshift jail cells by the Obama team in 2014. Johnson said, “without a doubt the images, and the reality, from 2014, just like 2018, are not pretty.”

Johnson then said of Obama’s family detainment policy, which at times included child separation, “We expanded it, I freely admit it was controversial, we believed it was necessary at the time, I still believe it is necessary …”.

Johnson also proudly said that the Obama administration had deported and repatriated over a million people.

One wonders why Hollywood bigwigs like musician and actor John Legend only seem to care about draconian immigration enforcement policy when Trump is doing it. Legend, who recently donated $72,000 to the ACLU over Trump’s inhumane border control practices, must have been blissfully unaware that the ACLU lambasted Obama in 2015 for his family detention and fast track deportation policy for Central American illegal immigrants.

Again, Mr. Legend’s heart is in the right place but his failure to advocate for the immigrant children brutalized under Obama, seriously degrades his legitimacy when he chastises Trump for doing the same thing.

Another problem with the celebrity outrage machine regarding the Trump immigration issue is that none of the stars speaking out ever dig deep enough to get to the root of the problem.

For instance, ‘comedian’ Bill Maher postulated on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher last week that he thinks the wave of illegal immigration from Central American countries, like El Salvador and Honduras, both of which are among the most violent places on earth, is due to the drug war.

Maher and his panel of establishment sycophants were incapable of seeing the forest for the trees and lay the blame for the immigration fiasco either on Trump, the drug war, or both and entirely failed to notice the neo-liberal elephant in the room…namely, America’s colonialist and imperial foreign policy.

For example, El Salvador didn’t become a violent hellhole all by itself. From 1980 to 1992 the U.S. fueled a dirty civil war in El Salvador by sending hundreds of millions of dollars in economic and military aid, and military advisors who trained paramilitary death squads that kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of innocent Salvadorans. 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in that brutal, U.S. backed proxy war that so destabilized El Salvador that it still hasn’t recovered.

Honduras is also a hot mess of a country, in part, because in 2009, in opposition to the Organization of American States, the E.U. and United Nations, the U.S. backed and supported a coup that toppled a democratically elected government.

None of this is new, as children from all over the world have had to pay the price for America’s militarism for a long time now.

For example, America’s recent history of nefarious military meddling in the Middle East has had devastating consequences for children. Millions of children have become refugees, orphans or been killed or maimed by America’s recent military adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Yemen. 

According to the Pew Research Center, from 2005 to 2015 the number of displaced migrants in the Middle East is a staggering 23 million, the majority of which were the result of American backed wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. If Hollywood genuinely wants to protect children, a good place to start would be to stop collaborating with the Pentagon in making muscular propaganda for American militarism that leads to endless military actions across the globe.

And finally, if these celebrities were genuine in wanting to help children separated from their parents, they wouldn’t have to go to all the way to the border to find them.

Los Angeles County, home to Hollywood, has the largest foster care system in America with nearly 20,000 children in their care. Over 81% of these kids have been removed from their homes due to neglect. These children, just like those taken from their families at the border, have been traumatized and are in desperate need of a warm bed and a kind soul to care for them.

So celebrities, if you want to prove that you are genuine in your concern for displaced and vulnerable children you should start by doing two things: one, become foster parents and two, vociferously advocate against America’s relentless militarism. Because the truth is, preening at the border, posing as a hunger striker and tweeting your outrage doesn’t bring comfort or alleviate a child’s suffering, it only heightens your sense of self-satisfaction and feeds your ego.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2018

Suffering Children as Propaganda

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAY 11, 2017. DUE TO THE CURRENT SCANDAL OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CHILDREN BEING DETAINED AND SEPARATED FROM THEIR FAMILIES, AND THE ENSUING MEDIA COVERAGE WHICH HAS USED THE PHRASE "BABIES IN CAGES" SO INCESSANTLY AS TO BE A MANTRA, I THOUGHT I WOULD RE-PUBLISH THIS PIECE AS IT SEEMS SALIENT TO THE CURRENT SITUATION.

Estimated Reading Time : 8 minutes 22 seconds

Lately, the media has been loaded with images of suffering children in different settings around the world. In some unfortunate cases, especially in the case of war, the imagery seems to be used as a form of propaganda. 

Last August Omran Daqneesh, a 5 year-old boy Syrian boy living in Aleppo, was wounded in a bombing alleged to be carried out by Russian or Syrian aircraft. Omran was photographed sitting in the back of an ambulance, covered in dust and blood. This gut-wrenching photo was soon on the front page of nearly every western newspaper and news channel.

The New York Times description of the photo is illuminating, “Omran, as he is carried from a damaged building in the dark, could be Everychild.“

This is what we do with the children in peril we see in photographs, we project ourselves, or our children into the same scenario, and this heightens our emotional connection and reaction. This is a normal, even healthy human response, the trouble is that it can leave us open to being manipulated by those who would exploit the suffering of children for their own means.

Similarly, in September of 2015 when Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy, was photographed dead on a Turkish beach after drowning trying to escape the Syrian civil war. Viewers were left horrified at the sight of Alan’s limp and lifeless body lying still in the sand, and they emotionally projected their own children onto the scenario.

The most recent example of the “children in peril” narrative was on April 4th, when video of an alleged chemical attack in Idlib province in Syria came to light. The horrifying video showed young children gasping for air and others lying motionless, presumably dead. The video was impossible to escape in western media, just as it was impossible not to have an emotional connection to those children and a reaction to their torment.

The Times was right, Omran could be Everychild, so could Alan Kurdi and the children in the Idlib video, because that is how they are presented to us in the media, they are our children, and we react accordingly, directing our righteous anger at those we are told are responsible for their suffering, in this case, Assad and Russia. Of course, since we are reacting emotionally and not responding thoughtfully, we are more easily manipulated into directing our aggression at persons who may not be fully to blame.

In the Omran photo, our rage could have easily been directed at rebel fighters and ISIS who created that situation in Aleppo instead of the Russians and Assad. The same for Alan Kurdi, who was trying to escape civil war, which is the fault of many, including Assad, Turkey, Europe and the U.S. The photos of Omran and Alan were props used by the establishment press to sell a very specific narrative, one that we, in our vulnerable emotional state, would not even think to question.

The greatest example of this was the video of the attack in Idlib. Trump himself was manipulated into acting emotionally, rather than rationally. Trump told reporters, “I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me – big impact. I’ve been watching it and seeing it, it doesn’t get any worse than that…even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack.”

Since beautiful children had been killed, Trump impulsively reacted by launching “beautiful weapons”, as NBC’s Brian Williams described them, to attack an airbase killing 15 people, who one can safely assume, were once beautiful children themselves.

Blaming a villain helps us to transform the uncomfortable emotions evoked by these images into action. Action gives us catharsis and we are purged of the negative feelings that these images bring about. Trump did not like the way the video of the Idlib attack made him feel, so instead of deliberating and gathering all of the facts and evidence, he impetuously attacked Syria to quell his discomfort.

This is what happens when we react emotionally to things instead of thoughtfully respond, we are susceptible to being suckered by those who may try to manipulate us.  If Trump had thought rationally about the Idlib video, he would have realized that the rebels had already used a false flag chemical weapons attack in 2013, in order to try and draw the U.S. deeper into the conflict against Assad. The west blamed Assad back then too, but after emotions waned and reason waxed, the truth finally came out. Even though we are only a month past the Idlib attack, the same is happening regarding the facts of that case.

The dead giveaway that reveals the media’s deceitfulness regarding the use of children’s suffering as a political prop, is not just in the images they do show, but the ones they don’t.

The establishment press relentlessly pushed the picture of Omran on the public in order to demonize Assad and Russia, but deliberately ignored Hawraa, the 5 year old Iraqi girl who was the only member of her family to survive a U.S. led air strike on her home in Mosul. The video of Hawraa is just as emotionally wrenching as Omran’s picture, but it tells a story that contradicts the MSM’s narrative and undermines America’s sense of moral superiority over Russia and the Syrians.

VIDEO LINK

And what about 8 year-old Nora Al-Alwaki, the American girl shot in the neck and killed by Navy SEALs when they raided her Yemeni village on January 29, 2017? Nora was a “beautiful” little girl, and an American one. Why wasn’t her picture continuously streamed to the American public by the MSM? Instead of Nora, we were fed the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens who was killed in the same raid. Trump’s bold-faced exploitation of Mrs. Owens was hailed as Trump’s first act of “being presidential”. I suppose he was acting like a U.S. president when he callously ignored Nora and the other Yemeni children killed.

Whenever a child in peril is used to sell a political agenda, particularly a violent one, this must give us tremendous pause. In many cases, however, there exists an altruistic reason for showing the suffering of children, and that is a way of preventing such things from happening again. 

Iconic images, like that of the “Napalm Girl” from the Vietnam war, for example, can at times wake America up to reality by breaking through the endless propaganda from the usual suspects, at other times though, similar images or stories can be manipulated by governments and the media for less noble causes.

At the same time, Hollywood utilizes our weakness for children in peril well. A perfect example is Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. In the black and white film, there is a harrowing sequence where Nazi’s forcibly remove Jews out of the Krakow ghetto. The scenario is horrifying enough, but Spielberg uses a little girl wandering through the mayhem to elicit more tension in the viewer. The girl stands out from the surrounding chaos because she wears a red coat, which is distinct since it’s the only splash of color in the entire film.

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The girl in the red symbolizes the hopes, dreams and innocence snuffed out by the Nazi’s. The same is true when we see suffering children in the media, those images evoke in us deep feelings of empathy, sadness, and anger because those children symbolize our own hopes, dreams and innocence. Seeing graphic pictures of brutalized children leaves us thinking emotionally, not rationally, which is a good place to be when watching a film, but a bad place to be when operating in the real world.

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Last week, Jimmy Kimmel, host of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, delivered a heartfelt monologue tearfully recounting his newborn son’s struggle with a serious heart defect. Kimmel’s story was made all the more powerful because the usually sarcastic comedian struggled to maintain his composure throughout.

Kimmel, normally an apolitical comedian, ended his monologue by pleading to Americans from both sides of the political aisle to make sure children receive medical care regardless of their ability to pay for it. Kimmel poignantly ended his speech by saying, “No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child’s life.”

Hereditary: Political Sub-Text

****WARNING - THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILM HEREDITARY!!! THIS IS YOUR LAST SPOILER WARNING!!****

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 19 seconds

Hereditary isn't a great movie, but it does speak volumes about the state of America's collective unconscious and most definitely about our political future. Here are some random thoughts on the film, its subtext and its deeper meaning…to be clear, I am not saying these are my politics, but rather the film's politics.

There are multiple ways to interpret Hereditary. One of which is that Toni Colette's character Annie is Donald Trump. Annie's character even utters the Trumpian line of "I am the only one who can do it…only me". 

The film opens with a funeral for Annie's mother…think of it as a funeral for the old guard GOP. Annie gives a speech at the funeral where she says, "It’s heartening to see so many strange new faces here today. I know my mom would be very touched and probably a little suspicious. My mother was a very secretive and private woman. She was a very difficult woman, which maybe explains me."

Seen in the 'Annie as Trump' context, that speech makes sense for the current Republican party. It is not the old blue blood Republicans, but a new group of "strange new faces" (populism) which would make the old guard "a little suspicious". The old guard was "very difficult…which maybe explains me", "me" being Trump. Annie/Trump is explaining that without the old guard of Republicans being the way they were, he never would've found the fertile ground upon which he could blossom into power.

Annie's mother is Reagan and/or Reagan Republicans, this is clear when she says of her mother, "She wasn't all there at the end", echoing the fate of not only Reagan and his Alzheimer's but the tone deafness of Reaganomics in the last decade. 

The grandmother as Reagan is made even more clear when seeing the rather strange daughter Charlie as symbolic of not just the white working class, but the white underclass and poor. Charlie looks like a descendant of one of the banjo playing kid from Deliverance, and it seems like she is either autistic or mildly retarded, 

Charlie as the "stunted" white working class in relation to grandmother Reagan, is made clear when Annie says to Charlie, "That’s grandma, you know you were her favorite, right? Even when you were a little baby she wouldn’t let me feed you because she needed to feed you." Meaning that Reagan wouldn't let the populists actually empower the white lower classes, he only wanted to "feed" them his meal of Reaganomics…keeping them under his control…which they lapped up with a flag waving fervor. 

Annie's teenage son, Peter, is a fascinating character when seen through the context of Annie as Trump. Annie loathes Peter, and even tried to kill him when he was a child by lighting him on fire. Annie blurts out during an argument that she "never wanted to be his mother!" What is interesting about Peter (actor Alex Wolff) is that he actually looks very different from the other family members. Peter is darker skinned and has darker features than his mother Annie and sister Charlie who are blond and light skinned. Peter looks either Latino or Middle Eastern. The actor who plays Peter, Alex Wolff, looks "other-ish" enough to have convincingly played Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev in the film Patriots Day. 

Annie/Trump hates Peter/Latinos/Middle Easterners regardless of the fact that he/they are members of Annie's/Trump's family/residents of his country. The fact that Peter "accidentally" kills his sister Charlie/white working class in a bizarre car accident, only fuels Annie/Trump's rage even more. Annie/Trump cannot forgive or forget what Peter has done, not just to Charlie/white working class but specially to her/Trump. She takes Peter's accidentally killing Charlie as a personal affront because Annie is the one who found the grotesquely mutilated body. 

Speaking of that body, Charlie, again symbolic of the white working class, is decapitated when Peter swerves to save a deer and drives too close to a telephone pole while Charlie is gasping for air with her head out of the car window. Charlie/white working class being decapitated is symbolic of the white working class "losing their heads" meaning abandoning intellect and reason. To put it even more clearly…intellect/reason, in the form of Charlie's head, literally flies out the window in regard to the white working class and Peter/Latinos/Middle Easterners. 

To dive even deeper into the Charlie character, she is "allergic to nuts", literally and figuratively. When Charlie is forced to go with Peter to a party, he abandons her to use drugs and chase girls, and Charlie eats some chocolate nut cake, causing her throat to swell shut. The "chocolate nut cake" poison is Obama, and the white working class were unable to speak (their throats closing shut) or breath as a result of ingesting what he served them because they are allergic to it. Peter then carries Charlie to the car and drives quickly towards a hospital, but before he can get there he has his accident and Charlie is left without her head. 

Charlie/white working class being "allergic to nuts" is obviously a matter of perspective in regards to their political favor over the years, but because Charlie ingests some Obama "poisoned" chocolate cake after she follows Peter/Latino/Middle Easterner to a party, it is symbolic of the white working class being poisoned, choked and eventually dying by ingesting the "multiculturalism/diversity" brought to her by "others" in the form of chocolate cake (Obama). 

Annie/Trump spirals into madness after Charlie/white working class death and fumes against Peter/Latino/Middle Easterners. She is then seduced into an odd relationship with an older woman Joan, who convinces her to do a ceremony to bring Charlie's spirit back and communicate with it. 

Joan is the conduit for Annie/Trump to let in the real power behind the throne…think of Joan as a Steve Bannon/John Bolton type of character. Annie/Trump is so desperate to connect with her deceased daughter/white working class that she falls into a trap set by a conniving, Machiavellian sorceress. 

As Annie/Trump follows Joan's advice, she falls deeper and deeper into a tangled web of madness and manipulation, resulting in her lighting her husband on fire and trying to kill her son. Ultimately, after finding an altar to evil in her attic (houses are symbolic of the psyche, with the attic being high minded intellect and the basement being sub-conscious thought) she herself is sacrificed on the altar of an even greater power that has been using her to manifest in the world and take the throne of global domination. 

The entity that uses Annie, and Charlie and eventually Peter is King Paimon, a powerful spirit that is one of the eight kings of hell. Paimon leaves Annie/Trump headless after she cuts her own head off (literally severing her intellect so she can only function by feel/emotion) and bowing at his feet as he implants himself into the body of Peter and is crowned as king of this world. 

Joan and a cavalcade of old white naked people (a perfect description of modern day Republicans - they are overwhelmingly old, white and their ambitions and sensibilities are naked for all with eyes to see) bow to Paimon in his elevated tree house palace. These people are Republicans bowing to power like they have bowed to Trump. Annie and Charlie, both headless (without reason), bow to Paimon in fealty. The treehouse is elevated because it is not grounded except through trees, to the earth. trees are symbolic of antenna, they wave in the air receiving the silent, unconscious messages floating through the ether. 

King Paimon is what comes after Trump, and he is what we should all truly fear. Trump/Annie has opened the gates of hell and let out a powerful force, King Paimon, that will usurp the crown and rise to power with minimal effort and maximum impact. 

Another interpretation of the King Paimon character is that he IS Trump. King Paimon, who is a real spirit mentioned in various religious type of texts, is a trickster demon who is in service of Lucifer. Trump is the ultimate trickster, and whether he is in service of Lucifer or not I will let you decide. 

According to Wikipedia, King Paimon's powers include, "knowledge of past and future events, clearing up doubts, making spirits appear, creating visions, acquiring and dismissing servant spirits, reanimating the dead for several years, flight, remaining underwater indefinitely, and general abilities to "make all kinds of things" (and) "all sorts of people and armor appear" at the behest of the magician". 

Trump has certainly acquired and dismissed many servant spirits in his administration, but as for the rest of it, you can make the case that symbolically he has done a good number of them. From making spirits appear/creating visions (manipulating the media) to reanimating the dead for several years (non-stop talk about Hillary and lock her up), Trump has a King Paimon-esque quality about him.  

Another interpretation of the film has the Charlie character as a sort of Sarah Palin, a near nitwit bumpkin who is chosen by power elites to temporarily carry the torch, who then passes it to Annie, the Trumpian figure, who is then replaced by Peter, a Latino/Middle Easterner other, who is possessed by the most duplicitous and vicious of demons King Paimon, who uses Peter to take the crown and power, and one would assume, use it in the most diabolical of ways. 

Annie being a miniature artist is a pretty terrific part about Hereditary. Annie as Trump, being adept at manipulating the little world she controls, while in turn King Paimon manipulates Annie's/Trump's little world from a higher vantage point. To Trump, we are all pawns in his personal power game, and to King Paimon, Trump is his pawn in a much grander power game. This reminds me of the line from Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone's The Doors, when during an acid trip on Sunset Boulevard Morrison climbs atop a car and pontificates to the astonished crowd that "we are all plastic soldiers in a miniature dirt war!" 

Charlei is a budding miniaturist as well. She creates crude dolls from various scraps she finds…including a dead birds head. Charlie, like Annie and like King Paimon, manipulates and controls the world at her finger tips. 

I'm sure most rational people will scoff at the idea of Trump as King Paimon, but CG Jung wrote extensively on how Hitler was a manifestation of the Norse God Wotan (otherwise known as Odin). Wotan is no joke of a god, he is the father of Thor after all. Jung had been in Hitler's presence on occasion and noticed that he was an empty man, devoid of any charisma or personal power, there was no there there. But like an empty vessel, Hitler would be filled by the powerful spirit of Wotan when he spoke to crowds. Jung claimed that Hitler was speaking for the unconscious of millions of Germans and for Wotan, which is why he resonated with them in such a frighteningly electrifying way. 

Trump is no Hitler because King Paimon is no Wotan. Trump does speak for the unconscious of many Americans though, and by brining their voice from the shadow into the world, he has earned their undying love. Trump as a conduit for King Paimon to manifest int he world as Hitler was a conduit for Wotan to manifest in the world, may sound like nonsense to some, but rings of truth to me. 

The idea of Trump being the conduit by which King Paimon manifests in the world through another person seems even more likely to me. As I ahem been saying during the course of Trump's rule, he has caused not just his followers, but his opponents to go mad. The madness that is sweeping America knows no ideology, it crosses all sorts of boundaries. Trump has opened the doors to the unspeakable, and even those opposing him have fallen under his spell, which does not bode well for our future. 

When Trump leaves…King Paimon enters…and then the real darkness descends. As Hereditary reveals, Trump could be a conduit for a much higher (or lower as the case may be) and even more nefarious entity to come to power in the guise of saving us from Trump.

Hereditary does not paint a pretty picture for our future, but if I am being honest, I think it certainly paints a dramatic, symbolic, but not unrealistic, vision for what lies ahead for America and the world. 

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with my analysis of Hereditary and its political sub-text, if you get a chance to watch Hereditary multiple times, looking at the film through this unique perspective may add to your enjoyment of it, or at the very least it will prepare you for King Paimon's 2020 presidential campaign.

©2018