Dispatches from the Shitshow: There and Back Again

ELECTION 2024 - POST-MORTEM #1

I’m picking up Bad Vibrations

In case you haven’t heard, former president, nepo-baby real estate mogul, and reality tv star, Donald J. Trump, has won the 2024 presidential election in resounding fashion.

I believed, due to my extensive expert analysis of “vibes”, that Trump would not win…or more accurately…would not be allowed to become president again. I was definitely wrong about the election results – as I thought the establishment would steal it fair and square, but I might still be right about whether Trump actually gets inaugurated.

A lot can happen between now and January 20th, and most of it can be very, very bad.

I had a conversation the other day with a good friend of mine, Red Dragon, who is a therapist. He and I avoid talking about politics for the most part but he called me to ask my Jungian thesis on Trump. I told it to him, which is essentially that Trump is the archetype of Loki, the Norse trickster god, personified.

Red Dragon, who is devoutly anti-Trump, then explained to me that he has a “feeling” and a “sense” that Trump’s astonishing story has one more gigantic twist in it and that twist involves some calamity befalling him. He wasn’t sure what it was…maybe a heart attack or stroke or worse.

What intrigued me about Red Dragon’s “feeling” and “sense” is that I have had the same feeling for some time now, and have even written about it. And to be clear, Red Dragon does not read my writing at all, so it’s not like he’s seen my pieces on the subject.

So my sense of the “vibes” around the election were wrong, but my “sense” of a calamity awaiting Trump persists – and is shared by other distant, yet kindred, spirits.

I fear, and I genuinely mean that I am fearful because I do not want anything bad to happen to the guy or to the country, that he will not make it to the presidency, and if he does, he won’t be there very long (remember the very murky and mysterious assassination attempt on Reagan in March of 1981 was a little over two months after he was inaugurated).

Trump may have a “heart attack” or “stroke” that aren’t really a heart attack or a stroke. Or he may get shot. Or blown up. Or poisoned. Or have an anvil fall on his head. Or may have a lawfare bomb blow up in his lap. Whatever it is, the powers that be, most notably the intelligence community, are out to get him, and when they want to get someone, they usually, but not always, do.

After Trump’s win he put out a series of videos describing his plan for his presidency. In one of the videos, he talks at length about his plan for the intelligence community and how he is going to bring them to heel. It is shocking to watch, and is the equivalent of when JFK said he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”. We all know how well that went for JFK…he got his brains blown out all over his Ivy League suit on a sunny November day in Dallas, Texas.

Trump further antagonized the intel community when he tweeted that he would NOT be inviting former CIA director, and unrepentant neo-con, Mike Pompeo, to join his administration. Pompeo was the one who convinced Trump to not release the JFK assassination files during his first term…something he has sworn to do this time around. Trump’s “no Pompeo“- announcement made me both cheer…and shudder, because Pompeo is a monster but his ouster will only further antagonize the villains in the intelligence community.

The point of all this is that Trump has a big old bullseye on his back, and the people putting it there are notorious for assassinations and coups. So the Trump drama may hold another turn to it that will be Shakespearean in its tragedy.

Again…I hope not…but it’s a distinct possibility.

It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I Feel Fine

I spoke to a high-ranking election official here in Pennsylvania on the morning after the election and they told me that Harris was poised to win Pennsylvania and therefore the White House until a single vote was cast in my small, rural, overwhelmingly conservative township for Jill Stein. According to this official, this single vote somehow miraculously, single-handedly, halted Harris’s momentum and began her precipitous electoral decline.

In case you’re wondering…it was me…I was the one who voted for Jill Stein and thereby destroyed Harris’s electoral bid and, according to establishment liberals and hysteric woke fools, the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.

Sorry about that. Just kidding…I’m not sorry at all.

While every liberal I know is freaking out, or inconsolably depressed and deep within the throes of despair, I feel fine.

The reason for that is simple, yet complicated. The simple part is this…Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to the establishment and the DEI, woke, pussy-hat brigade, identity politics obsessed portion of the democratic party, and I have, for many years, been loudly saying “fuck you” to this intellectually insipid and politically insidious faction.  

In this sense, Trump’s victory fills me with a shameful amount of schadenfreude – the German word for pleasure in response to another’s misfortune. Of course, my feeling of schadenfreude is only heightened by the woke cult’s extraordinarily expansive amount of self-righteousness and hubris over the last ten years.

So, in one sense I am giddy at the truly malodorous, mid-wit, machine politician mediocrity that is Kamala Harris and her supremely silly sycophants losing this election.

I fully acknowledge that this response is childish, vindictive and vulgar. I am not proud of it, but I do admit to it.

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness…like resignation to the End…always the End

There is another part of me though that is deeply concerned about Trump’s victory, and it has nothing to do with his policies or the American polity, and everything to do with my own humanity. Namely, that there are many people that I love dearly who have personalized their politics to the point where they are in a great deal of emotional pain at the moment.

While I am a notoriously vicious son of a bitch, I am only that way to my enemies, and am deeply protective of those that I love.

In the broadest sense, my enemies are those in politics, like the entire democratic party and their shills in the legacy media, who have embraced a self-righteous racial, gender and ethnic identity politics over class politics. I despise these vapid and vainglorious villains because they are the most duplicitous, diabolical and deceptive scoundrels in American life, as they have irreparably destroyed the middle-class and decimated the working-class, and thus given us President Donald Trump…not once, but twice.

But then there are people in my life – most notably women, and everyone knows how much I obviously respect and adore women, like my wife, and my girlfriend, and my other girlfriend, and the prostitute I frequent, and the other prostitute I frequent, and this other women who may or may not be a prostitute who I’m trying to make my girlfriend but she’s kinda being a bitch about it so who knows where that will go…anyway…these women are deeply upset that Trump won, and I don’t like them being in anguish.

In all seriousness, I know a bevy of women who are either furious, or despondent, or inconsolable, or all of the above, regarding Trump’s victory. I totally get it. I do.

Therefore, I will not try and convince them to feel otherwise because how they feel is how they feel and I am not going to mansplain to them how their feelings are wrong no matter how wrong they are.

What I will do is encourage them to, in due time, put aside their feelings and try and analyze not so much their political beliefs but their political strategy and tactics and try and find how we, and they, got us where we are.

I would also try to encourage them to, going forward, not catastrophize and internalize their politics, because, as I have learned through experience – the Bush years were hell on earth for me, that is a terrible waste of time and an egregious waste of a glorious life.

I’m NOT looking at the Man in the Mirror, oh yeah, I’m NOT asking him to change his ways

In my final dispatch from before the election, I wrote that if liberals lose, they should, “look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.”

Thankfully, liberals are taking my sage advice and looking deeply inward in an attempt to learn from failure.

Just kidding…liberals have learned nothing and are once again doubling down on identity politics in order to explain their catastrophic defeat in this year’s election. The top three reasons I’ve heard for why Kamala lost are…you guessed it…racism, sexism and white supremacy. Yawn. I guess liberals think they didn’t screech “racist, fascist and sexist!!” quite loud enough over the decade. Maybe if they yell it louder, they’ll win next time. Addiction to wokeness is a hell of a thing.

A glance at MSNBC, CNN or ABC in the hours and days following Trump’s win and you were treated to intellectual titans like Joy Reid, Eddie Glaude, and Sunny Hostin, declaring that the only reason Trump won is because of racism and sexism….some of that racism and sexism even coming from “people of color” and women.

Glaude, a Princeton professor and one of the griftiest of race grifters, responded to an argument that people voted for Trump due to economic reasons, by saying, “I do not believe that…I CANNOT believe that…”. Exactly. Glaude, like the rest of the identity politics hucksters, CANNOT believe that because his entire career is premised on race being front and center at every moment in America….so if racism goes away...so does his income stream and prestige.

Glaude is, like his fellow race hustlers, Ibram X. Kendi, Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and their ilk, an intellectual midget and political and cultural snake oil salesman and charlatan.

These mendacious morons are the same ones denying the fact that Kamala Harris was one of the most grotesquely inadequate politicians of the modern era and, in fact, have over and over, along with fellow talking heads and pundits in newspapers, declared that Kamala ran a “flawless” campaign. It’s impossible to take anyone who says that seriously. Kamala’s campaign was a lot of things, but “flawless” was not one of them. Kamala’s campaign was just like her in that it was fearful and entirely forgettable.

Thankfully I haven’t yet heard my favorite term “misogynoir” (hatred of black women), but that may be only because I’ve not watched enough cable news…as it is sure to be thrown around quite a bit in the coming days by the race hustler du jour trying to sound smart.

The reality is that Kamala Harris is not just a not-ready-for-prime-time player, she’s a never-will-be-ready-for-prime-time player. She is a generic, disingenuous, California machine politician who never had to actually convince people of anything in her entire career, just got to show up with the “D” next to her name to get elected. She never got a single vote in the democratic primary and was chosen to be vice-president, and democratic nominee, not despite being a black woman, but simply because she’s a black woman.

The KHive, a collection of rabid Kamala fans in both the media and public at large, loved Kamala but couldn’t name a single policy she believed in…because her identity as a black woman was all they needed, as supporting her was a self-righteous way to signal their virtue. This is why Kamala is the ultimate candidate for DEI-obsessed democrats.

This is also what made her such a disastrous presidential nominee, not to mention a heinous vice-president and senator. This is why she didn’t do the Joe Rogan interview…because she can’t sit for three hours and talk to anyone about anything. The reason for this is because there is no there - there. She is as vacant and vacuous as Trump is venal and vile…which is saying a lot.

But to Trump’s credit…he may be a bullshitter but at least he is dexterous enough to go on Joe Rogan and bullshit for three hours and not crumble and cackle his way into a warm puddle of his own piss.

Thankfully, Kamala Harris will, barring something extraordinary, disappear from public life forever because she will be a stark reminder of the failures of the DEI, woke, identity politics driven hysteria that put her a heart-beat away from the presidency…and put Trump in the Oval Office for a second time.

Alright…that’s enough ranting and rambling for today. Until next time America!!

©2024

Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022