Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky and the Deterioration of the American Mind

     In 1957, Philip K. Dick, by then a prolific science fiction writer of short stories, saw published his fourth novel, Eye in the Sky.  I own a copy of the Ace first edition.  The cover artist interpreted the title literally, showing a gigantic eye in the sky, with several people on a flat ground running in terror from it.  This image can be looked at in several ways.  Is it God's wrath we're seeing?  Is the Eye technological, or a religious symbol come to life?  Like the eyeball at the center of the triangle atop the pyramid on the one dollar bill's reverse side, the book cover's Eye seems to suggest the prefix omni-, as in all-seeing, all-knowing.
     In the novel, a particle accelerator accident at the "Belmont Bevatron" causes eight people to lapse into eight different subjective worlds based on their own belief systems, which eventually bleed into one another.  Supporting the premise's nightmarishness (imagine being stuck inside the viewpoints of someone whose beliefs are abhorrent to you) is Dick's recurring theme of how reality is perceived.  Individual reality perception often differs from reality perceived by groups.  A psychotic person's viewpoints are not shared by those going about their own business in society.  Still, a group may form a gestalt, generating a viewpoint or viewpoints believed in collectively as real, whether true or not.
     Dick understood, and worked with the idea often in his fiction, that "absolute reality" may not even exist.  That it's a construct, sometimes consisting of mutually agreed upon viewpoints.  In his most existentially horrifying novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, reality itself dismantles into a series of failing beliefs as the characters find themselves struggling to escape back to normalcy after encountering an alien drug that makes them believe they've found freedom, even as they're pulled in deeper, their perceptions manipulated by a demiurgic former human space explorer, Palmer Eldritch, who has returned to Earth to become, in effect, God.
     For me, the most nauseating thing about the Republican Convention, unfolding this week in Cleveland, is the relentless bullshit coming from the mouths of Republicans, from Trump's family, from Governor Mike Pence (Trump's VP pick), from campaign staffers, from politicians who had nothing good to say about their nominee for the past year but now pretend he's the best man for the job.  Asked reality-based questions about Trump and the behavior of the Conventioneers (the viciousness of the people on the floor chanting, "Lock her [Hillary Clinton] up!  Lock her up!"), Republicans on camera in Cleveland suddenly lose eye contact with journalists asking the questions, as they struggle to form answers that just sound inadequate and ridiculous.
     It's difficult even for Republicans with hard-ons for the ideals of their party to speak with genuine feeling about a man so determined to inflict damnation and dysfunction on his own country.  That Trump is a lying piece of shit with no redeeming qualities is obvious to more than half of this nation's voters.  There's a great deal of pretending (he's on TV all the time, after all) with Trump, and with those covering him and talking about him, wherein everybody gets into serious mode, asking the tycoon often sensible questions.  He, or his surrogates, respond with utterly false, inane, contradictory, and even reprehensible statements, and then we all go on, as if something extraordinary hasn't happened: the total and perhaps irreversible bewitchment of the American press and political class by a master propagandist, so uncaring and soulless he uses the word "compassionate" to describe himself, yet anyone who understands the human heart knows he more closely resembles the Emperor Caligula, not Jesus.
     Are journalists and politicians, and millions of Americans, in a "Belmont Bevatron" accident?
     "Perception is reality," Lee Atwater, the late Republican propagandist and campaign manager said famously in the 1980s.  In my view, perception isn't reality.  Quality of perception influences the degree to which one sees reality clearly.  Cleveland right now is populated with a large number of right wingers who are convinced that Hillary Clinton should be "locked up."  Her execution was recently called for by one of this nation's state senators.  Does Donald Trump have anything to do with this hatred?  His followers would say no.  They're wrong.  From the beginning of his campaign, he's generalized about and spoken against people (Mexicans at first), for the sake of gathering followers of a racist bent to his side.  Hardcore Trump supporters don't give a shit about any horrible statement coming from their hero's gross mouth.  They'll even sometimes say they don't agree with many of the racist and bigoted statements, but nevertheless, they support him because he's a successful businessman, and "we need someone outside the system to run things."
     By that, they don't mean a Christian Black man who was born in Hawaii and received schooling in Indonesia.
     They want a man whose wife plagiarized Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech. Of course this happened.  Everything about the Trump Campaign is so fucked in their collective head it stands to reason that they couldn't even find a speechwriter to craft an original text.  Trump could've asked his recently college-graduated daughter Tiffany to ask one of her university friends to write a speech for her step-mother, for pay, and it would probably have been at least adequate.
     First, we were told the morning before delivery of the speech, by Trump and his wife, that she wrote the speech.  She speaks five languages, including English, so sure, maybe she did.  Similarities, though, with Mrs. Obama's speech, were noted the next day, causing much exasperated pushback from Trump surrogates like Chris Christie and Paul Manafort, the campaign manager who resembles a crooked lawyer in a Brian De Palma film.  After two days of denials, the Trump campaign let it be known that a woman staffer had worked with Melania Trump on the speech.  Our possible next First Lady liked some lines in Mrs. Obama's 2008 speech, and asked the staffer (who I gather actually wrote the thing) to include them, or lines like them.
     Trump's position on this, I guess, is that yes, we plagiarized, but so what?
     Oddly, for Melania Trump to say Michelle Obama's own words when describing her (Michelle's) husband, she, Melania, managed to speak lovingly and admiringly about President Obama, the man Melania's husband has slandered as not being an American citizen.  The Belmont Bevatron works in mysterious ways.
     Today, I saw a remarkable line at the bottom of the screen on the MSNBC news feed:
   
     "Donald Trump's speech to be analyzed by anti-plagiarism software."
   
     Trump gives his speech tonight.  I guess he and his people want to make sure we realize it's 100 percent Trump.  I'm struck, though, through my own knowledge of being a writer, that since I have a unique perspective and express myself in my own way, I don't need a computer program to tell me if I've plagiarized or not.  Maybe in life it's useful for undergraduate college students to have a sense of that, because in their case, plagiarism brings actual consequences.  In Melania Trump's case, I guess she's just too beautiful for it to matter, or, as I suspect, too much of an asshole to care.
     Genuinely expressed words mean something, even when they're mundane.  Donald Trump needs a machine to find out if he's real or not.
   
                                                                               Vic Neptune      

     Donnie Loves Chachi

     Vociferous anti-Trump protests in Cleveland so far overwhelm in energy the one pro-Trump rally reported on by MSNBC today.  At the latter, a woman screaming into a microphone about the greatness of Trump, name repeated over and over again like the key element of a spell, about a hundred people sat or stood on a grassy bank by a body of water, possibly Lake Erie.
     I picnicked by Lake Erie with my family in 1967, when that water was a byword for pollution.  It's improved a great deal since then, but there are many kinds of pollution, including the twisted beliefs of Americans who believe in a man who claims omniscience but doesn't know shit about missing a meal.
     The Republican National Convention starts today in Cleveland.  The city's police department was granted fifty million dollars by the federal government to strengthen its security.  Given the recent killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, there's a tense expectation in this country of impending trouble in Cleveland.  Cleveland, with its fifty million dollar gift, now has bicycle cops acting as rapid deployment crowd control personnel.  From a distance they look like ordinary bicycle cops.  Up close, they're a cross between something one might see in Star Wars and Tron.
     I grab William S. Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night, lying close at hand, open it at random and read, "How will you get information from the prisoners?"
     Indeed; through questioning?  Torture?  The agenda represented by Donald Trump and his recently announced (classily, in a tweet) vice presidential running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, includes eager embrace of human rights violations, although clean-cut Pence hasn't been asked about pouring gallons of water into restrained prisoners' lungs, and what does he think of that as a thing to associate himself with?
     Pence, last year, condemned Trump's proposed Muslim immigration ban.  Trump has "dialed back on that," according to his spokespeople, but he's interested in preventing immigration from countries that "practice terrorism."  This would, of course, blame citizens of, for instance, Syria, for terrorism committed by the Assad regime, a non sequitur that doesn't bother Trump, for he will embrace illogical arguments as readily as any demented person.  And why is it admirable for Trump, or Pence who now supports his master's crazy ideas, to "dial back" on a subject of utter evil insanity (the Muslim immigration ban) after having proposed the contemptible notion in the first place?
     The keynote speaker at the convention tonight will be the third Mrs. Trump, Melania, a former Slovenian model, who, in my opinion, resembles a Star Trek alien.  I heard Mrs. Trump today on MSNBC discussing Jacqueline Kennedy; her refined sense of fashion, her glamour, which in reality was a quiet projection, easy for her, despite being a natural introvert, to accomplish because she had real humility.  Princess Diana Spencer, in my view, was of the same caliber, but Melania Trump?
     I heard in the same cluster of Melania tidbits that she doesn't like it when her husband retweets neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda.  Gee, she must be a real humanitarian!  Even so, considering the dozens of times Trump has re-broadcasted white power and anti-Semitic propaganda on his Twitter account, it doesn't seem like Melania has any sway over her husband's willingness to portray himself as a pseudo-Josef Goebbels.
     Melania, in her speech tonight, will reportedly "humanize" her husband, much like Ann Romney did for Mitt four years ago, or tried to do.  Mrs. Romney, at least, had one thing going for her when she spoke at that last convention that Mrs. Trump doesn't: Ann Romney is married to a recognizably human person, who, if flawed and out of touch with the American people, is at least not absolutely loathsome.
     MSNBC reporter Hallie Jackson said that Melania Trump will give us a sense of the family Trump, the domestic Trump, the Trump who cherishes his children and grandchildren, just as Hitler loved and cherished his dogs and Eva Braun.
     Even vile people can love their families, their spouses, their pets.  It isn't a special mark of goodness when a ruthless son of a bitch plays a game on the floor with his grandchild.  In The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola captures this idea brilliantly when he has Marlon Brando, as the retired mafioso, putting orange slices in his mouth and running after (playfully) his grandson, and then dropping dead from a heart attack.
     The Convention has been characterized by the no-shows: former Presidents Bush, Jeb Bush, even Sarah Palin for some reason, won't appear or speak there.  Ohio Governor and former presidential candidate John Kasich won't be there, the most serious statement of non-participation, since Ohio is such an important state in presidential elections, and he's the sitting governor.  Kasich said he wouldn't be able to look his daughters in the eyes after attending a convention celebrating such a misogynistic candidate.  I accept this noble statement for what it is, but there are many Republicans not attending (including Kasich, I think), who want the stars of their careers not dimmed by association with Trump, a man they feel is a complete disaster for the Republican Party.  They must be banking on his loss in November, for what will they do if the vindictive Trump (wonderful family man that he is) wins, and proceeds over at least the next four years to punish in various ways possible politicians who didn't fall in line in 2016?
     "How will you get information from the prisoners, Mr. Trump?"
     Chris Christie's servile behavior (not rewarded with the running mate selection) towards Trump can be explained by a desire to get out of his home state, New Jersey, where Bridgegate remains unresolved, but also by a Trump promise (get it in writing and notarized, Christie) to put him in the upcoming Republican administration.  Whatever.  It's hard for me to imagine what kind of lack of fortitude and decency it takes to ally oneself to a criminal-in-the-making like Donald Trump.  Hitch yourself to that wagon and you're fucked for good.
     Another speaker today will be Scott Baio.  In the 1970s and 1980s, he played Chachi on Happy Days and on its spinoff, Joanie Loves Chachi.  Trump promised a bevy of great celebrity speakers.  Charlton Heston is dead; so is John Wayne.  How about soap opera star Antonio Sabato, Jr.?
     Baio last weekend revealed on Fox News that he attended a Trump fundraiser in Los Angeles.  At the end, he introduced himself to Trump, who recognized the actor.  "Out of left field," Baio said on Fox, (although he should've said "right field") Trump asked him if he'd like to speak.  "Here?" Baio asked, confused.  "No," Trump said, "the Convention."  Baio was a bit speechless, but they went into another room and worked out an arrangement.
     This story demonstrates Trump's tendency to decide on things on the fly.  It registers in my assessment as an accurate account of what happened.  I doubt that Baio was angling for a Convention speaking engagement when he made a point of introducing himself to Trump, who's the nominee of the Party Baio supports.  Baio's story also shows that even very recently, Trump was desperate to find people to speak on his behalf at the Convention.  The political class largely deserted him, so he had to fill the days and nights of the Convention with makeshift speakers, including his children (excepting his youngest child) and wife, but also Phil Robertson (the Duck Dynasty patriarch), a woman tennis player ranked 363rd in the world among her gender, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, and of course, actors Sabato and Baio.
     We can assume Trump's promises of a "great" Convention will, if he wins in November, be reflected during his presidency.  For Cleveland, he's promised great celebrity speakers, and today's message is "Make America Safe Again."  The very presence of this Convention in Cleveland, with its giant asshole of a candidate being honored at it, makes that city more likely to be less safe for a while, the Convention zone blockaded and militarized, Trump's mere presence drawing protest and anger in his direction, a small facsimile of affronted America should he win.

                                                                               Vic Neptune
   

     With Iggy Azalea More Things Are Possible

     Jonas Mekas, the Lithuanian-American filmmaker, said in a film of his from 2007 that in the Cabala, evil is what doesn't change.  In the film he talks about changing one's mind, how in political discourse it's a sin to change one's mind, as in (my example) the John Kerry criticism that he "flip-flopped" on his support for invading Iraq.
     I remember Sean Hannity on Fox News, taunting a Democratic guest with the word, "flip-flop, flip-flop," like a classroom pest with a squirt gun.  Hannity now supports Trump, a candidate who's made a regular habit of agreeing with both sides of every issue, depending on the political weather.
     Mekas ends his short film talking about Paris Hilton, who had taken heat in the entertainment/news media (are the two media the same these days?) for saying she often changes her mind, not believing in something she accepted as truth even two days ago.  In Middle English, the word for change was windy.  Medieval Brits took an atmospheric everyday phenomenon and applied it to a concept with abstract dimensions.  One can change physically--lose weight or get badly injured in a car accident--but there are those many changes occurring invisibly, like the feel of no longer being in touch with a former close friend.  The special conversations had with that friend, the chemistry shared, are gone; therefore, a certain type of experience no longer exists and that change is an absence influencing the present.  I call this kind of thing, nevering.  To never is to experience that which didn't happen, but could have.  Had it happened, your life would be different.  These things that don't happen can affect us.
     I could've been with her, but she broke up with me, and I was very happy with her, but I'll never know how our lives would now be different.  George Bush could have not ordered the invasion of Iraq, and we now feel that nevering that never happened whenever ISIS-inspired fanatics with automatic weapons kill.
     Changing the mind is related to relenting.  Hardass solutions to social problems rarely work, although they break bodies.  Minds, however, don't die.  Someone's ideas can last thousands of years.  Behind The Blue Boy is Thomas Gainsborough looking at the same canvas two and a half centuries ago, standing where you are, if not in the same spacetime, but his idea lives.
     Last week four black American men were killed by cops.  Two of the killings were caught on cameraphone, one of them by the girlfriend of the man dying next to her while her young daughter watched from the car's backseat.  Imagine what that would be like.  Demonstrations across the country happened.  In Dallas, a Black veteran of the war in Afghanistan killed five cops during the demonstration there and wounded nine others.  He was killed by police, using a robot bomb.  Motive seems to have something to do with his enmity toward white cops.  Something was building up inside the man for some time, I expect.  He accumulated a large arsenal over the last two years (legally, since the NRA lobby believes every American should have an unlimited number of firearms), and planned on blowing up areas of Dallas, which he failed to do.  ISIS propagandists have praised his work.  Fuck you, ISIS, and in any event, it doesn't seem to be the case (unless future evidence reveals otherwise) that Micah Johnson committed his anti-police act out of solidarity with the kinds of people who blow up ancient ruins and set fire to their prisoners.
     It's been called by some "domestic terrorism," but mostly it's seen as a need to appreciate the good things police do for our communities.  Thus, tributes to the fallen cops have been plentiful from both political parties and candidates for president.  Some still prefer to ignore abundant cop on Black violence that sparks the protests in the first place, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani saying that the slogan "Black Lives Matter" is racist, when in fact it isn't.  If the slogan read, "Only Black Lives Matter," then it would be racist.  Giuliani, as all scoundrels of his caliber do, points out that "All lives matter."  Does he then give a shit about Syrian refugees?  Palestinians?  Poor Latinos?  Black motorists pulled over for a broken taillight then shot to death by a lousy cop?  I've heard the same arguments from Giuliani, Trump, Fox News commentators over the years; clean cocksuckers in suits wearing TV studio makeup talking big about lives and conditions they know nothing about.
     Trump today said he will be "the law and order candidate" and the "candidate of compassion," adding that "you can't have true compassion without providing safety for the citizens of our country."
     Take a moment and laugh.
     His Orwellian words mean he wants a police state, but a compassionate one.  That would be a country where everyone knows where their proper places are, like in the People's Republic of China, perhaps, post-Tianenmen Square.  It would not mean hurt and outraged citizens protesting the murders by cops of young Black men.  Such protests can get out of hand, although at Trump rallies it's been okay with the "compassionate" candidate for his supporters to commit violent acts against anti-Trump protesters.
     For Trump, "true" compassion equates with safety, but for whom?  Everyone, he claims, yet, he wishes to deport eleven million undocumented aliens.  That will, if he attempts it, involve violence, uprooting families by splitting them apart, imprisonment, return for many to wretchedly bad political and social situations in their countries of origin; i.e. some get murdered when they go "home."
     Trump could mean, bearing in mind his fame in reality TV, that he plans on appearing on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, after his candidacy ends.
     Is lack of change evil, as Jonas Mekas ponders in his film on Paris Hilton?  That the idea comes from the Cabala indicates that Jewish mystics of long ago believed that God is process.  In process, war and famine occur, giving way to peace and abundance.  The mind, positioned permanently on one idea, is said to be monomaniacal.  Is Trump such a static point in the plane of our reality, because he thinks about only one thing, himself?  Sure, one can point to his frequent praise of his daughter, Ivanka, but since he provided the ejaculation that helped make her ("It was a tremendous ejaculation, believe me!"), she is thus glorious in his eyes, but we can all be grateful, every time we see her face, that she favors her mother's side of the family.
     Is Trump the immovable spot for me?  I've written how many essays focusing on that creature?  I can't look at him without feeling contempt and analyzing his depraved idiotic blather as if it's really worth thinking about?  Did German intellectuals in 1932 contemplate the phenomenon of the rise of Hitler and his words and ideas without feeling contempt?  Dismay at some of their fellow citizens for following such shit?  Were they unmoved by the mere existence of the little blue-eyed Austrian racist fuck, spouting his crap about destiny--Make Germany Great Again?
     Maybe I'm not hip enough, but last night, for the first time, I became aware of Iggy Azalea.  I watched some concert clips and two of her music videos.  I'm enchanted; I'm glad she exists and makes the music she makes.  At the end of Jonas Mekas's little film about the importance of changing one's mind, he brings up Paris Hilton.  His willingness to accept Paris Hilton's claim of changing her mind frequently seems like a moment of an old man looking compassionately at a young woman, all the lights of fame shining upon her, and accepting her windiness, in the Middle English sense, just as I, a middle-aged man, looked upon Iggy Azalea singing and moving on her stage and saw again the welcome turning of a world too often frozen by unforgiving ideologies.

                                                                             Vic Neptune

       

                                                               
   
                     

     Making Magda Goebbels Proud

     Donald Trump and those involved in handling his Twitter account have a habit of retweeting racist tweets for the purpose, probably, of courting the vilest Republican voters.  This past weekend, a tweet on his account showed a picture of Hillary Clinton's face collaged with a carpet of cash and a six-pointed star, technically a hexagram but obviously with reference to Jews being moneylenders, a trope used as official propaganda by Germany's Nazi Party from the 1920s to 1940s.  Today's white American anti-Semites can count on their own orange American anti-Semite (who claims an unsurpassable love for Israel) to feed back to them, in Twitter, their own already chewed food.
     Trump's mouthpieces, of course, had "innocent" explanations for the anti-Semitic tweet.  The six-pointed star is "just a star," or, it's a "sheriff's badge."  I'm reminded of Trump's own accusations of dirty-mindedness against anyone suggesting his Megyn Kelly menstruation comment--"she had blood coming out of her wherever"--was deliberate and misogynistic.  When he makes a horrible statement or does something reprehensible, it's always the fault of anyone pointing out his badness.  Thus, in his words, Elizabeth Warren is a "racist" because she's claimed descent from Native Americans, while he frequently calls her "Pocahontas," proving his own bullying racism, which appeals to the rabble attending his rallies.  Deeper than that, through Twitter, he reaches the variety of white moron who believes Hitler was a misunderstood genius who had nothing to do with slaughtering millions of Jews, as well as Gypsies, political enemies, and Slavic Europeans.
     Trump, I believe, knows the Holocaust happened, but around the same time that Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and world famous author, died, he, or one of Trump's employees, retweeted an image suggesting, in its bluntness, that Hillary Clinton is funded by Big Jew.  It took a few days for the image with the Star of David (or, if you're an idiot, sheriff's badge) to be replaced by the same Hillary-cash image, but with a circle over the six-pointed star.  Nevertheless, the circle is just undersized enough to retain the star's six points.  Was that on purpose?  Was Trump saying, "Sorry, Nazis.  Had to obliterate Jew star due to complaints from over-imaginative news media.  Political correctness is ruining this great country!  #Retake Sudetenland."
     It turns out this is not an isolated occurrence.  Trump has, according to news media people who have scanned his Twitter feed (a job akin, I imagine, to having to read and grade 200 freshman English essays at semester's end), retweeted racist tweets seventy-five times.  That's a pattern of behavior suggesting sympathy with white supremacists.  Since Trump is not the kind of man I can imagine actually hanging out with Neo-Nazis or KKK members, he's probably not a true believer, but he'll accept their support, since they represent a chunk, not a huge one but big enough, of America's electorate.  That he courts their support rather than the support of women, Latinos, and African Americans, is hard to figure if he actually plans on winning in November.  Meantime, the spectacle of the Republican Party's presumptive nominee race baiting causes the mild scolding outrage typical of the feckless GOP.  Whining about how Trump needs to stop doing such things, as Paul Ryan has done, overlooks the fact that there are some little kids who will look right into your eyes, undeterred as they defile your living room wall with a crayon, oblivious to pleading or threats.
     If your candidate for president has already proven he's a racist, in just his Twitter account a total of seventy-five times, and the election is still four months away, it's time to either reject him or accept him wholeheartedly.  Paul Ryan and other lights in the Party may try to defend its honor by saying, "That's not who we are," but their handling of Trump thus far shows that they too, by supporting him, the damn fools, have become what he is: a Neo-Nazi propagandist.
     Josef Goebbels's petrol-covered body didn't burn outside the Bunker for nothing, after all.

                                                                            Vic Neptune
   
   

     The Religion of Fuck

     The mid-point of 2016 made me wonder, as I drove home from a few errands today, if I like 2016. A band I just discovered and like, Autolux, was playing in the CD player, as I watched the big and small cars, the trucks, moving around and before me.  At a stoplight, a woman in her twenties, wearing a dark mauve dress and pushing a baby carriage used the crosswalk.  She had long, wavy brown hair and a beautiful face.  Her existence, appearing in that traffic space and in that four in the afternoon on a lovely summer day time, seemed to have nothing to do with the pain or chaos so characteristic of Earth as it's currently run by human beings.
     Once home, I heard from TV about a hostage situation in Dakha, Bangladesh.  A bakery was stormed by men armed with guns and swords.  Speculation from the anchorwoman's guest that the Holy Month of Ramadan has inspired acts of killing by Muslim extremists.  I think about how bizarre this is to my idea of living: that some feel religious, therefore they kill people.  If that's the case, then fuck religion, or give me a religion of fuck.
     Later, another terror expert was telling Kate Snow (who I find very attractive and would like to fuck; thus, I was watching her) of MSNBC, that the lack of night vision goggles discernible from footage of Bangladeshi policemen dealing with the crisis in their city on the other side of the world, suggested to him that they're not well-equipped to handle the hostage situation.  He lauded the performance of Istanbul security at the recent airport bombing there, their actions preventing a bad situation from becoming much worse.  I wondered if the terror expert interviewed by the lovely Kate Snow found the Turks more understandable, somehow, because Istanbul is so close to Europe, whereas Bangladesh is part of hot, humid Asia; heavily populated and a source of cheap labor for products imported into America, including men's wear items sporting the name, Trump.
     I made a good spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight, letting the stuff simmer most of the afternoon.  Italian sausage and mushrooms made it lumpy, but it was good.  Last night I watched Phillipe De Broca's funny action comedy from 1965, Up To His Ears, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Ursula Andress, who actually looked cute.  I've never thought of her as cute before this.  She has a very gracefully sculpted face and splendid body, first made famous in Dr. No, the first Bond film, but cute?  Not really.  Even so, her liveliness in the De Broca film made me think about her differently.  Ever since childhood, when I saw her in The Blue Max, she seemed like an unapproachable statue; remote and frosty, though great to look at.  I read somewhere that her voice was sometimes dubbed in films by other actresses.  Who is Ursula, then?  Some remote personage whose voice we're not allowed to hear?
     There's a constant battle in human life when it comes to embracing or rejecting the other.  The thing we don't understand, don't know, don't want to know.  Trump's xenophobic movement thrives on a shuddering reaction to the other.  Latinos coming to America to take our jobs, to take up space, to take freedom they haven't earned.  It's funny that these Trump-tickled boobs don't realize that being born in the United States, as they have been, isn't an admirable fact by itself.  One doesn't know where one will be born.  It's out of a fetus's hands.  Get born in Ohio, say, to an American citizen mother, and one is automatically American, no tests or papers required from the newborn.  It's a virtueless way of becoming an American.  Coming from somewhere else, however, and going through many trials to citizenship, can be admirable.
     The main thing I don't like about Americans (though I am one), is the tendency they have to be proud, to the point of vainglory, of an "Americanness" they, those born here, neither earned nor have used responsibly towards their fellow world citizens.  Hating people because they're from somewhere else is an old habit.  I remember a girl from Georgia in my fifth grade class.  She dressed really well, but in a kind of old-fashioned manner not in touch with 1974 kid tastes.  She was very polite, tried to make friends, failed, shut down after a while, got made fun of by mostly boys but a girl or two as well.  The teacher finally figured out something abusive was going on and spent half a class period questioning, in front of everyone, each student besides the bullied girl (who also wore glasses, which didn't help) what exactly they'd been saying to her and about her.  It was a very uncomfortable experience.  When my turn came, I just said her accent was strange--several others had said the same.  Others owned up to saying far worse--the teacher was a tough woman.
     Ursula Andress, shocking the movie world when she rose from the waves like Botticelli's Venus in Dr. No, had a voice the moviemakers determined needed to be covered over by someone else.  In that first Bond film, she's a presence.  Her character, in the way of the Bond universe, is called Honey Ryder.  In Goldfinger, Honor Blackman plays Pussy Galore.  Bond, in my view, to even the score, should've been called Dick Thrust.
     I think this cuter version of Ursula Andress whom I saw in the De Broca comedy is closer to the personality of the real woman, rather than the statuesque, stony version, some fantasy of a woman with an outrageous name, who ends up off-screen fucking James Bond at some point, before he moves on to the next assignment.  Strangely, in the way of comedy, the De Broca film's wackiness notwithstanding, Andress's character, Alexandrine, is realistic because warmer than Honey Ryder, thus more alive and believable as a human being.
     Like my fellow mean fifth grade students, I missed Marcelle's (the Georgia girl's) humanity because she didn't seem to be like us.  Back in America, far from Dakha, the terror expert on MSNBC commenting, condescendingly, about brave men of the Bangladeshi police as they waited to confront maniacs with guns and swords in a hostage situation, showed me he was looking at otherness, and finding it lacking.  Yes, we Americans are so good at the War on Terror.  Look, it's only been going on for fourteen years, we still have troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, terror groups more vicious than al-Qaeda have been born from George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq in 2003.  In truth, we really suck at this.
     The pain, the reality of this world has been with us, and our ancestors, for countless millennia.  That will never change.  Perceptions in the eyes of poets, of idiots, of arms manufacturers, will form many currents, some clashing, in the oceans of experience.  Some will see her rise from the waves and think about sin, others, the less self-tormented, will see perfection, like the movement of the woman in mauve pushing the baby carriage.

                                                                                Vic Neptune