We Who Do Right
The mind, malleable to the extent that reasonable and/or good people can and often do hold moral positions antithetical to decency, rules as defender of one's actions, protecting itself and its user against disagreement and persuasion.
A prominent politician commanding a world-gripping military force, operates from a set of well-established viewpoints: security maintenance, force projection, interpretation of Constitutional law not benefitting the powerless, Orwellian speech designed to mask true actions and intentions, furtherance of corporate power coupled with state power (i.e. fascism), control and monitoring of communications, pretending amiability to the public while practicing one of the darkest of jobs.
When Blaise Compaoré, dictator of Burkina Faso from 1987 to 2014, was knocked out of power by a coup and popular uprising, the United States and Taiwan lost an African ally. After just two days of street protests (compare what happened in Syria three years earlier), Compaoré and his wife left the country. He had about a quarter of a billion dollars, so we shouldn't be overly concerned about them. During his tenure, the Bush administration in 2007 began inserting a small number of U.S. military "advisors" in Burkina Faso. By 2009, Obama had transformed that U.S. military parasite into a drone base, a command hub from which armed drones fly, able to cover the whole of Africa.
Obama, like many politicians, uses a term that never fails to bother me: "violent extremists."
Is violence itself not an extreme behavior? When he and others use the term, he's of course referring to ISIS and other non-state enemies of the United States and its allies. Using a Hellfire missile to kill Yemeni civilians is, I guess, from Obama's standpoint, not "extreme," though it is violent. If the United States uses violence, it's fine, like when Joshua is instructed by God to slaughter Canaanites. The controlled, clean, calm way of a man like Obama ordering death from a distance is regarded by some with admiration, his assassination of Osama bin Laden, for example, spoken of in the press as smugly as a football fan bragging about a quarterback's five touchdown passes in a single game.
Last January, Obama met in the Oval Office with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, two millionaires smiling at each other and affirming their countries' mutual goal to destroy ISIS, to combat "violent extremists." Turnbull said, "Archaic and barbaric though they [ISIS] may be, their use regrettably of the internet is very sophisticated. And so I'm pleased that we're going to be working on even closer collaboration there."
Wow, those barbarians really know their way with a computer.
Does it seem as if Turnbull's mainly concerned about ISIS's computer geeks, as opposed to their fighters? One thing standing out to me now is that Iraqi and Kurdish forces (real men and women armed with weapons from elsewhere) move against ISIS forces (real men armed with weaponry from elsewhere) in and around Mosul. We're all people of this world; a barbarian means someone from the outside. Modern communications connect people with information and ideas, cultures and contacts, globally. The close collaboration between Australia and the U.S. that Turnbull speaks of when referring to the internet hints at ECHELON, the surveillance program operated by those two nations, plus Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Typical of a multi-tentacled espionage entity, ECHELON likely practices the kinds of Orwellian shenanigans employed by the NSA. Obama and Turnbull, as guardians of this insane horseshit, in which we can imagine teenagers' text messages stolen and stored along with the occasional down-with-U.S.A. threat, want really to gain control of the infosphere. With such control, some information against the state of things can be suppressed while other information, what the leaders of the free world want us to think, can be emphasized, even if it's propaganda. War on terrorists, like those ISIS propagandists, thus means the actual underhanded attempt by first world states to gain control of internet freedom, meaning ISIS serves Obama's (and soon, Hillary Clinton's) purposes.
To an alarming degree, the mainstream news media already cooperates with the corporate government (the fascists) by underreporting news from around the world. Why doesn't MSNBC do a forty-five minute story, without bias, about Burkina Faso and its drone base with Africa-spanning reach? Why do Obama and the Pentagon strategists want to menace that continent with such technology? Did the al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terror attack that happened on January 15 of this year in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou have something to do with the nearby drone base and what it represents (as a hindrance to "violent extremism")?
It's more important, I guess, to air uninterrupted, as MSNBC did yesterday, Donald Trump's content-free speech as he continues to go down like a listing ocean freighter.
My sense of Hillary Clinton is that she'll be as bad for human rights in the Arab World and other abused regions of the planet as is her predecessor.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Friday, October 21, 2016
Career Day: Aid Worker, or Mass Murderer? One Will Make You Rich
I'm not a journalist. I went to school for different purposes; I read literature and studied world religions, played music and made a strong effort to understand music theory. I didn't study politics in an academic setting. In 1984, during the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale contest, I began thinking on my own about politics. My parents, Democrats, never spoke kindly of Republicans. My father hated Richard Nixon. I heard him say, "I voted against that bastard five times." I look back at my own presidential voting choices: Mondale, Dukakis, didn't vote in 1992, Nader, Nader, Kerry, Obama, Obama. Democrat, Democrat, abstention, Green, Green, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, and in 2016 I'll vote Green for Jill Stein. Three Green votes, five Democratic, one abstention, making a mix reflecting my variable mind since I was twenty years old.
My lack of journalistic practice helps explain how I approach research and the presentation in writing of details. I combine a fiction writer's use of prose with a use of source materials not bound to a reporter's conventions. I read an article about some aspect of the Global War on Terror, for instance, and find that elements of the information soak into my mind; later, I may recall something from that article and just write it down in a post without citing its origin. I don't pretend to be a journalist, but rather an essayist combining a variety of techniques to convey my point of view. Cable news networks are partly characterized by their "experts," their "pundits," their think tank spokespersons, all of whom have points of view, none of whom possess absolute authority, but rather use their time before the cameras arguing for the agendas of their masters: corporations, the superrich, the government, the defense industry.
How I differ from any cable news pundit or corporate shill is a matter of degree. I don't offer my viewpoints for the sake of getting people in the Middle East killed, for example, as Dick Cheney and scores of politicians, Democrat and Republican, did in 2002 and 2003 in the propaganda effort to overcome Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein, possessor of imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Hillary Clinton, a Senator then, believed, or so she recently told Chris Matthews of MSNBC, that Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, in spite of United Nations evidence to the contrary that Iraq's nuclear weapons research program had been dissolved by international weapons inspectors in 1991 after Operation Desert Storm. Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense in 1991, would have known about Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons capability, just as Senator Clinton in 2002 and 2003, along with a majority of U.S. politicians who voted to destroy Iraqi society and its people, could have and should have known that the Hussein-has-WMD story was a fiction. Further thought should've led Clinton and her pro-war colleagues to wonder about why Cheney and Bush were manipulating them into committing an act of war against a nation posing no threat to the United States; the kind of thing an aggressive and dangerous power does for the sake of long term strategies benefiting, in this case, oil corporations, which have Americans in a tight crotch grip, given our habit of self-transportation using gasoline, a substance linked to the Bush-Cheney administration in their past dealings with oil speculation and development projects; in other words, their area of interest.
All these things I learned from reading books and articles that Hillary Clinton could have read. I assume that I, as a layman, am not as well-informed on national and world issues as Mrs. Clinton. If I can figure this shit out, I assume she also knows about it; that her response to Chris Matthews about Hussein's "nuclear capability," supposedly believed in by her and a Legislative majority in 2002 and 2003, is a lie covering the darker reality that Senator Clinton, wife of the man who relentlessly bombed Iraq during his presidency and enforced a sanctions regime which killed through neglect about a half a million children, wanted Iraq's leadership changed so that Cheney's vision of Iraq as a U.S. gas station could be enacted. She looked at the evidence, like other politicians did, saw, since she's smart, that it was bullshit but adequate enough to look convincing for the time being, and gave her support in a Senatorial vote to Bush and Cheney's desire to acquire black gold by rendering Iraqi human flesh immobile and bloody. The news networks cooperated, as they always do, being corporate-owned, concentrating on such pointless spectacles as the bringing down of a Saddam Hussein statue (with the aid of an American tank) on April 9, 2003, showing cheers of Iraqi men, most of whom are probably now dead or displaced, or fighting against the United States.
Hillary Clinton, then, has demonstrated her bloodthirstiness. One of her campaign bright points is that she "cares about children." Sure, American children, some of them, anyway. I haven't heard much about her plan, if any, to help the poisoned children of Flint, Michigan, who are the victims of a still sitting Republican governor not currently pacing in a prison cell.
Nor has she mentioned, in any of her three presidential debates against Trump, the plight of Yemen and its people, currently and for the last year and a half, victimized by the United States in its support of Saudi Arabia's war against Houthis. I've never heard her say anything about President Obama's drone strikes in Yemen that have killed numerous civilians, including children, those representatives of humanity that Mrs. Clinton claims to care about. Many of those strikes occurred during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, making her, obviously, privy to their bloody facts.
Her opponent, Donald Trump, continues to reveal himself as an incompetent boob. One difference between the two candidates is never talked about on cable news: Trump, unlike Clinton, has never made a governmental policy decision affecting the lives, and causing the deaths, of millions of people. Hillary Clinton's stain on humanity is real, but that just means, in some sad respects, she's an American politician playing games with foreigners' lives, an old habit of those who want to control the world. Trump, too, wants control of an unsavory sort. He has affected news media and the manipulation of images, has further poisoned an already diseased body, making the American political process an absurdity. This devolution of political discourse, of ideas, will continue into the near future, making the 2020 election cycle even worse and more degenerate than that of 2016, meaning that the character of a human being wanting to be president is on the same level as that of a violent criminal.
Vic Neptune
I'm not a journalist. I went to school for different purposes; I read literature and studied world religions, played music and made a strong effort to understand music theory. I didn't study politics in an academic setting. In 1984, during the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale contest, I began thinking on my own about politics. My parents, Democrats, never spoke kindly of Republicans. My father hated Richard Nixon. I heard him say, "I voted against that bastard five times." I look back at my own presidential voting choices: Mondale, Dukakis, didn't vote in 1992, Nader, Nader, Kerry, Obama, Obama. Democrat, Democrat, abstention, Green, Green, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat, and in 2016 I'll vote Green for Jill Stein. Three Green votes, five Democratic, one abstention, making a mix reflecting my variable mind since I was twenty years old.
My lack of journalistic practice helps explain how I approach research and the presentation in writing of details. I combine a fiction writer's use of prose with a use of source materials not bound to a reporter's conventions. I read an article about some aspect of the Global War on Terror, for instance, and find that elements of the information soak into my mind; later, I may recall something from that article and just write it down in a post without citing its origin. I don't pretend to be a journalist, but rather an essayist combining a variety of techniques to convey my point of view. Cable news networks are partly characterized by their "experts," their "pundits," their think tank spokespersons, all of whom have points of view, none of whom possess absolute authority, but rather use their time before the cameras arguing for the agendas of their masters: corporations, the superrich, the government, the defense industry.
How I differ from any cable news pundit or corporate shill is a matter of degree. I don't offer my viewpoints for the sake of getting people in the Middle East killed, for example, as Dick Cheney and scores of politicians, Democrat and Republican, did in 2002 and 2003 in the propaganda effort to overcome Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein, possessor of imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Hillary Clinton, a Senator then, believed, or so she recently told Chris Matthews of MSNBC, that Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program, in spite of United Nations evidence to the contrary that Iraq's nuclear weapons research program had been dissolved by international weapons inspectors in 1991 after Operation Desert Storm. Dick Cheney, as Secretary of Defense in 1991, would have known about Hussein's lack of nuclear weapons capability, just as Senator Clinton in 2002 and 2003, along with a majority of U.S. politicians who voted to destroy Iraqi society and its people, could have and should have known that the Hussein-has-WMD story was a fiction. Further thought should've led Clinton and her pro-war colleagues to wonder about why Cheney and Bush were manipulating them into committing an act of war against a nation posing no threat to the United States; the kind of thing an aggressive and dangerous power does for the sake of long term strategies benefiting, in this case, oil corporations, which have Americans in a tight crotch grip, given our habit of self-transportation using gasoline, a substance linked to the Bush-Cheney administration in their past dealings with oil speculation and development projects; in other words, their area of interest.
All these things I learned from reading books and articles that Hillary Clinton could have read. I assume that I, as a layman, am not as well-informed on national and world issues as Mrs. Clinton. If I can figure this shit out, I assume she also knows about it; that her response to Chris Matthews about Hussein's "nuclear capability," supposedly believed in by her and a Legislative majority in 2002 and 2003, is a lie covering the darker reality that Senator Clinton, wife of the man who relentlessly bombed Iraq during his presidency and enforced a sanctions regime which killed through neglect about a half a million children, wanted Iraq's leadership changed so that Cheney's vision of Iraq as a U.S. gas station could be enacted. She looked at the evidence, like other politicians did, saw, since she's smart, that it was bullshit but adequate enough to look convincing for the time being, and gave her support in a Senatorial vote to Bush and Cheney's desire to acquire black gold by rendering Iraqi human flesh immobile and bloody. The news networks cooperated, as they always do, being corporate-owned, concentrating on such pointless spectacles as the bringing down of a Saddam Hussein statue (with the aid of an American tank) on April 9, 2003, showing cheers of Iraqi men, most of whom are probably now dead or displaced, or fighting against the United States.
Hillary Clinton, then, has demonstrated her bloodthirstiness. One of her campaign bright points is that she "cares about children." Sure, American children, some of them, anyway. I haven't heard much about her plan, if any, to help the poisoned children of Flint, Michigan, who are the victims of a still sitting Republican governor not currently pacing in a prison cell.
Nor has she mentioned, in any of her three presidential debates against Trump, the plight of Yemen and its people, currently and for the last year and a half, victimized by the United States in its support of Saudi Arabia's war against Houthis. I've never heard her say anything about President Obama's drone strikes in Yemen that have killed numerous civilians, including children, those representatives of humanity that Mrs. Clinton claims to care about. Many of those strikes occurred during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, making her, obviously, privy to their bloody facts.
Her opponent, Donald Trump, continues to reveal himself as an incompetent boob. One difference between the two candidates is never talked about on cable news: Trump, unlike Clinton, has never made a governmental policy decision affecting the lives, and causing the deaths, of millions of people. Hillary Clinton's stain on humanity is real, but that just means, in some sad respects, she's an American politician playing games with foreigners' lives, an old habit of those who want to control the world. Trump, too, wants control of an unsavory sort. He has affected news media and the manipulation of images, has further poisoned an already diseased body, making the American political process an absurdity. This devolution of political discourse, of ideas, will continue into the near future, making the 2020 election cycle even worse and more degenerate than that of 2016, meaning that the character of a human being wanting to be president is on the same level as that of a violent criminal.
Vic Neptune
Friday, October 14, 2016
Desperate Reality TV Star Quotes Shakespeare
"To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe
No more..."
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
"I've seen firsthand the corruption and the sickness that has taken over our politics...They knew they would throw every lie they could at me, and my family, and my loved ones. They knew they would stop at nothing to try and stop me. But I never knew as bad as it would be, I never knew it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious. Nevertheless, I take all of these slings and arrows gladly for you--gladly."
Donald Trump, Final Act
The funny spellings in the Shakespeare quote above derive from the 1623 Folio. Despite the passage of 393 years, a longer span than this country has even existed, Shakespeare's meanings, coming from the melancholy Dane's mouth as he contemplates ending his life amid a set of problems too overwhelming to surmount, remain clear: live, or don't live; fight, or don't fight; put up with turmoils one has gotten oneself embroiled in, or don't. In Hamlet's case, his problems stem from his failure to act upon his dead ghostly father's command to kill the usurper who poisoned him and then took for wife Hamlet's mother. Hamlet's back and forth philosophizing, rather than engaging in direct action, lead to multiple homicides and a suicide.
It's hard to say who in the Trump Campaign (an organization resembling more and more the feel of the Hitler-in-the-Bunker film, Downfall) borrowed from Shakespeare for his West Palm Beach, Florida, speech on October 13. I almost expect him to be quoting Old Testament prophets next. He said he "[takes] all of these slings and arrows gladly for you--gladly." For you, because Trump the Candidate died (like a stand-up comedian dies) for your sins. Because he suffers, we are saved. He's announced his martyrdom, and his loss of the election, already known by the Republican Party at large, is not his fault, because he, in his innocence, "never knew it would be this vile...this vicious."
Radioactive Man Surprised Someone Notices He's Radioactive.
His initial statement above, "I've seen firsthand the corruption and the sickness that has taken over our politics," reveals he knows something about one obvious origin of that corruption and sickness: himself. That his "Campaign CEO" Steve Bannon, a Breitbart News scum-mucker, has been lately running the Trump machine, shows at least that corruption and sickness in news media and politics fester inside Trump Tower, like the malicious schemes of the Dark Lord Sauron in his own tower, the Barad-dûr, in The Lord of the Rings.
Trump's "hot mic" statements from 2005, talking about how he "grabs a pussy," and gets away with it because he's a "star," that he kisses women without restraint, all jibed with recent accounts of women coming forward with their stories of past Trump violations of their bodies and personal space. One New York Times account from two days ago prompted a phone call from Trump to the paper's offices wherein he lashed out, threatening a lawsuit (something he's done thousands of times, including to comedian Bill Maher for saying Trump's parents were orangutans, thus explaining the tycoon's appearance). His tone in the described call was vehement enough to warrant my reaction that, from a psychological standpoint, the story's writers hit a nerve, meaning, the abused woman's account is true.
That's my opinion, though. But it's fascinating when someone so vicious and vile himself complains about not realizing, when he entered the presidential race, he was getting into a game that goes both ways, as in football, with offense and defense. He's being hit now with stories about his misconduct with women, and it looks as if his victims are legion, and some of them want to talk, especially during the next few weeks, when it will do the greatest good. Used to the position of power, Trump finds himself struck at by unpredictable sideswipes at his character, the quality of which reveals itself as the foul thing I and others saw many years ago, before he inflicted his grotesque Fascist persona on America the day he announced his candidacy for president.
My advice to Hillary Clinton for the final presidential debate is to grab her opponent's cock.
Vic Neptune
"To be, or not to be, that is the Question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outragious Fortune,
Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleepe
No more..."
Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
"I've seen firsthand the corruption and the sickness that has taken over our politics...They knew they would throw every lie they could at me, and my family, and my loved ones. They knew they would stop at nothing to try and stop me. But I never knew as bad as it would be, I never knew it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious. Nevertheless, I take all of these slings and arrows gladly for you--gladly."
Donald Trump, Final Act
The funny spellings in the Shakespeare quote above derive from the 1623 Folio. Despite the passage of 393 years, a longer span than this country has even existed, Shakespeare's meanings, coming from the melancholy Dane's mouth as he contemplates ending his life amid a set of problems too overwhelming to surmount, remain clear: live, or don't live; fight, or don't fight; put up with turmoils one has gotten oneself embroiled in, or don't. In Hamlet's case, his problems stem from his failure to act upon his dead ghostly father's command to kill the usurper who poisoned him and then took for wife Hamlet's mother. Hamlet's back and forth philosophizing, rather than engaging in direct action, lead to multiple homicides and a suicide.
It's hard to say who in the Trump Campaign (an organization resembling more and more the feel of the Hitler-in-the-Bunker film, Downfall) borrowed from Shakespeare for his West Palm Beach, Florida, speech on October 13. I almost expect him to be quoting Old Testament prophets next. He said he "[takes] all of these slings and arrows gladly for you--gladly." For you, because Trump the Candidate died (like a stand-up comedian dies) for your sins. Because he suffers, we are saved. He's announced his martyrdom, and his loss of the election, already known by the Republican Party at large, is not his fault, because he, in his innocence, "never knew it would be this vile...this vicious."
Radioactive Man Surprised Someone Notices He's Radioactive.
His initial statement above, "I've seen firsthand the corruption and the sickness that has taken over our politics," reveals he knows something about one obvious origin of that corruption and sickness: himself. That his "Campaign CEO" Steve Bannon, a Breitbart News scum-mucker, has been lately running the Trump machine, shows at least that corruption and sickness in news media and politics fester inside Trump Tower, like the malicious schemes of the Dark Lord Sauron in his own tower, the Barad-dûr, in The Lord of the Rings.
Trump's "hot mic" statements from 2005, talking about how he "grabs a pussy," and gets away with it because he's a "star," that he kisses women without restraint, all jibed with recent accounts of women coming forward with their stories of past Trump violations of their bodies and personal space. One New York Times account from two days ago prompted a phone call from Trump to the paper's offices wherein he lashed out, threatening a lawsuit (something he's done thousands of times, including to comedian Bill Maher for saying Trump's parents were orangutans, thus explaining the tycoon's appearance). His tone in the described call was vehement enough to warrant my reaction that, from a psychological standpoint, the story's writers hit a nerve, meaning, the abused woman's account is true.
That's my opinion, though. But it's fascinating when someone so vicious and vile himself complains about not realizing, when he entered the presidential race, he was getting into a game that goes both ways, as in football, with offense and defense. He's being hit now with stories about his misconduct with women, and it looks as if his victims are legion, and some of them want to talk, especially during the next few weeks, when it will do the greatest good. Used to the position of power, Trump finds himself struck at by unpredictable sideswipes at his character, the quality of which reveals itself as the foul thing I and others saw many years ago, before he inflicted his grotesque Fascist persona on America the day he announced his candidacy for president.
My advice to Hillary Clinton for the final presidential debate is to grab her opponent's cock.
Vic Neptune
Friday, October 7, 2016
Another Star Gone Out
Some films' plots hinge on strangers meeting. The cliché, "Fate drew them together," holds for those who accept destiny as real, rather than something made up and believed in by those who think backwards. Deconstructing the hows, wheres, whys, and whens of knowing someone can be an interesting thought exercise. How did you meet your wife? What led you to be where she was when you met her? What led her to be there? Did knowing a certain person lead you to go to a specific bar at a specific time, or do you do all your hooking up through the internet? If the last mentioned is the case, you're still part of a generation created by older people who didn't have computers and mobile phones omnipresently in their lives. How did your parents meet? Did one of them grow up in Connecticut, but moved to Indiana where he met your mother "by chance," leading to you?
I'm not sure I believe in fate, because it seems like just a substitute for believing in God, and I'm an agnostic; more accurately, I don't care if God exists or not. You can make things happen in your life, things happen to you; some conditions, like the struggle humans have dealing with reality, never change. Whatever's really happening on an ultimate level, what some think of as the business of the divine, one still has to live one's life, making it with or without transhuman guidance. For me, chance is real. Randomness something to embrace.
Making the meeting of strangers a crucial plot element is a fairly easy way for a filmmaker to generate intrigue, since the strangers will get to know each other, their personalities blending and clashing, as in life. The last three films I've watched, over the last two days, feature this motif of strangers meeting, followed by things happening because they've met. Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning. I happened to pick these films from a local library's DVD section, their commonality at the time of selection a simple desire to see them. I'd seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea once before, been deeply impressed by it, so it was an easy choice. Jean Renoir's Bondu, an early sound film, is a classic of French cinema; it's been on my unwritten must watch list for many years. Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, directed by Mark L. Lester, struck me as worth watching because it stars Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in a 1970s TV series I watched at the time. She's very beautiful and buxom, so for basic male heterosexual reasons I wanted to see the film. What mostly surprised me about it was Lynda Carter's poor acting performance, something attributable, perhaps, to the director's seeming lack of interest in coaxing anything compelling, from a realistic human standpoint, from most of his characters, except for Marjoe Gortner, playing the eponymous Outlaw. He has real charisma and screen presence, something imbued in him, maybe, from childhood, when he was a child preacher.
The film consists of this: man steals car, man meets woman, man and woman go on crime spree joined by three others, they're pursued, four of them die from gunshots, woman lives and is arrested.
In Medea, from the myth of the Golden Fleece, Jason goes to steal the Fleece, meets Medea, she helps him and travels with him back to his land, has children with him and a falling out, and then kills her children.
In Bondu Saved From Drowning, a bookseller saves a bum from killing himself in the Seine. The bum lives with the bookseller, seducing his wife and later marrying their maid, all the while misbehaving, a creature of pure id.
All three films rely on combinations of people coming together by chance. Even in modern times, there are those who see God's hand (or Hand) in every encounter in our lives. Pat Robertson tried to blame 9/11 on Americans' sexual immorality. His own immorality in his business dealings (Central African diamond mining) had everything to do with the corrupt mind and heart of Pat Robertson.
Strangers meeting in movies, as in our lives, is a regular theme. The idea, coupled with the currents of chance, has been one of my frequent topics of thought for decades, maybe three. For me, fate makes the most sense as a real thing only if time runs backwards. I had an idea once about the Big Crunch, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe will eventually stop expanding, leading to a crunch, or contraction. Will time, then, go backwards all the way to the Big Bang? Will it then restart? Have we been undergoing existence, nonexistence, existence, ad infinitum, doing the same things repeatedly forwards and backwards forever? Has it been going on so long that sentient beings have found ways of skirting boredom by accepting randomness into their lives; the chaos factor that at least makes things interesting, creating possibilities of growth through new experiences which are then put into the mix of Bang, Expansion, Crunch, Contraction?
In not caring whether God exists or not, have I latched onto a religious approach revolving around chance? The chance moments of my eyes seeing the titles, Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning, at the library, watching them, and seeing the strangers-meeting connection that probably exists in thousands upon thousands of movies?
I don't know the answer, but Lynda Carter, if the theory is right, will be twenty-five again, Bondu will try again to end himself in the river, and Medea will meet Jason inside the temple housing the sacred Golden Fleece, everyone becoming embryonic again, leading to conceptions, fucks, and beyond that to, as Laurie Anderson put it in a song, "When I was just a candy bar/in my father's back pocket."
Vic Neptune
Some films' plots hinge on strangers meeting. The cliché, "Fate drew them together," holds for those who accept destiny as real, rather than something made up and believed in by those who think backwards. Deconstructing the hows, wheres, whys, and whens of knowing someone can be an interesting thought exercise. How did you meet your wife? What led you to be where she was when you met her? What led her to be there? Did knowing a certain person lead you to go to a specific bar at a specific time, or do you do all your hooking up through the internet? If the last mentioned is the case, you're still part of a generation created by older people who didn't have computers and mobile phones omnipresently in their lives. How did your parents meet? Did one of them grow up in Connecticut, but moved to Indiana where he met your mother "by chance," leading to you?
I'm not sure I believe in fate, because it seems like just a substitute for believing in God, and I'm an agnostic; more accurately, I don't care if God exists or not. You can make things happen in your life, things happen to you; some conditions, like the struggle humans have dealing with reality, never change. Whatever's really happening on an ultimate level, what some think of as the business of the divine, one still has to live one's life, making it with or without transhuman guidance. For me, chance is real. Randomness something to embrace.
Making the meeting of strangers a crucial plot element is a fairly easy way for a filmmaker to generate intrigue, since the strangers will get to know each other, their personalities blending and clashing, as in life. The last three films I've watched, over the last two days, feature this motif of strangers meeting, followed by things happening because they've met. Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning. I happened to pick these films from a local library's DVD section, their commonality at the time of selection a simple desire to see them. I'd seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medea once before, been deeply impressed by it, so it was an easy choice. Jean Renoir's Bondu, an early sound film, is a classic of French cinema; it's been on my unwritten must watch list for many years. Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, directed by Mark L. Lester, struck me as worth watching because it stars Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in a 1970s TV series I watched at the time. She's very beautiful and buxom, so for basic male heterosexual reasons I wanted to see the film. What mostly surprised me about it was Lynda Carter's poor acting performance, something attributable, perhaps, to the director's seeming lack of interest in coaxing anything compelling, from a realistic human standpoint, from most of his characters, except for Marjoe Gortner, playing the eponymous Outlaw. He has real charisma and screen presence, something imbued in him, maybe, from childhood, when he was a child preacher.
The film consists of this: man steals car, man meets woman, man and woman go on crime spree joined by three others, they're pursued, four of them die from gunshots, woman lives and is arrested.
In Medea, from the myth of the Golden Fleece, Jason goes to steal the Fleece, meets Medea, she helps him and travels with him back to his land, has children with him and a falling out, and then kills her children.
In Bondu Saved From Drowning, a bookseller saves a bum from killing himself in the Seine. The bum lives with the bookseller, seducing his wife and later marrying their maid, all the while misbehaving, a creature of pure id.
All three films rely on combinations of people coming together by chance. Even in modern times, there are those who see God's hand (or Hand) in every encounter in our lives. Pat Robertson tried to blame 9/11 on Americans' sexual immorality. His own immorality in his business dealings (Central African diamond mining) had everything to do with the corrupt mind and heart of Pat Robertson.
Strangers meeting in movies, as in our lives, is a regular theme. The idea, coupled with the currents of chance, has been one of my frequent topics of thought for decades, maybe three. For me, fate makes the most sense as a real thing only if time runs backwards. I had an idea once about the Big Crunch, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe will eventually stop expanding, leading to a crunch, or contraction. Will time, then, go backwards all the way to the Big Bang? Will it then restart? Have we been undergoing existence, nonexistence, existence, ad infinitum, doing the same things repeatedly forwards and backwards forever? Has it been going on so long that sentient beings have found ways of skirting boredom by accepting randomness into their lives; the chaos factor that at least makes things interesting, creating possibilities of growth through new experiences which are then put into the mix of Bang, Expansion, Crunch, Contraction?
In not caring whether God exists or not, have I latched onto a religious approach revolving around chance? The chance moments of my eyes seeing the titles, Bobby Jo and the Outlaw, Medea, and Bondu Saved From Drowning, at the library, watching them, and seeing the strangers-meeting connection that probably exists in thousands upon thousands of movies?
I don't know the answer, but Lynda Carter, if the theory is right, will be twenty-five again, Bondu will try again to end himself in the river, and Medea will meet Jason inside the temple housing the sacred Golden Fleece, everyone becoming embryonic again, leading to conceptions, fucks, and beyond that to, as Laurie Anderson put it in a song, "When I was just a candy bar/in my father's back pocket."
Vic Neptune
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Pick a Topic
Cable news is all over Hurricane Matthew as it menaces Florida and the Bahamas. It already hit Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In Haiti, approximately 350,000 people are in dire need of assistance. Reports from West Palm Beach, Florida, and Nassau, receive more attention.
I've wondered about what it was like for the inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be in a Category 4 hurricane. An oubliette is "a secret dungeon with a trapdoor in its ceiling." The word comes from French, oublier, "to forget." The forgotten prisoners of Bush and Obama languish in Cuba and elsewhere; Edward Snowden is only steps away from a drone strike. Haiti, a forgotten country, killed and pummeled by nature and human corruption, faces an election on October 9, the outcome of which will sharply affect its people as they struggle to cope with a hurricane that now endangers Florida mansions. Rick Scott, the crazy Christian Governor of Florida and Donald Trump supporter, has "three" words for Florida residents: "Evacuate. Evacuate. Evacuate." That's actually one word that ignores those who don't have the means to do so, as in New Orleans in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina stranded thousands in poor neighborhoods and in a football stadium, all of them left by Bush's administration to a purgatory of waiting for a federal government to act on behalf of Black people.
Apart from the hurricane, the presidential race, and the theft of Kim Kardashian's jewels, the news craze of recent past weeks involves "creepy clowns." In Greenville, South Carolina, a young boy told his mother he was approached in nearby woods by a clown urging him to go with him to a dilapidated house. A similar structure is the setting for some of Stephen King's clown-oriented horror novel, It. That King, as is his talent, created a fearscape involving a clown in that hefty 1986 novel (I've read it, and it weighs, in hardcover, a few pounds), means he helped add to the notion of clowns as creepy, something believed in already by many people. One "creepy clown" in Alabama (this has become a nationwide nocturnal phenomenon) had a Facebook account, posing in a picture with "blood" covering the upper part of his body and the caption, "I kill people for a living." This person was apprehended by the police and found to be a woman, which goes to show there's no telling who's wearing the clown suits. Some communities have banned the wearing of clown suits for the upcoming Halloween, meaning that just as one can't pretend to be a cop, one can't pretend to be a creepy clown.
A real life creepy clown, Donald John Trump, continues to thrive on the fear of the other he's helped stoke. Here is a key, I think, to the creepy clown phenomenon, coming as it does, so far into America's experience of the Global War on Terror (which I regard as World War Three). Three days ago, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, an alleged creepy clown sighting led to a social media-driven panic, causing students to run pellmell from shadows projected from their minds. Is this kind of thing not similar to government and news media authorities stimulating fear in the populace about Islamic terrorists? About Syrian refugees (a frequent Trump bugbear)? About Mexicans breaching an international boundary? During the 2012 election, alleged Black Panthers supposedly intimidating White voters, Fox News Channel showing, seemingly endlessly, a clip of precisely two Black men at a voting location, wearing the traditional Panther garb?
Hurricane Matthew has killed and displaced thousands of Haitians, Bashar al-Assad's war against his countrymen has killed hundreds of thousands, Duterte of the Philippines wages a war on drugs (people, actually), arresting and killing mercilessly, and we have clowns. And, granted, too many trigger-happy cops. And a hopelessly corrupt political system driven by greed and power-mongering.
The fear inspired by the clowns, though, is real, and seems to satirize the Global War on Terror. Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dick Cheney, Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump, and other "respectable" clowns, have worked and currently work the fear message: they're coming to get you. Even though it's really American and other first world powers continually striving to "get" the rest of the world and make it conform to lofty plans concealing that most base political condition going back to prehistoric times: whoever chops off the most heads is chief.
Unlike the Belmont students, we free and democratic peoples don't run from that which legitimately causes fear in this world; we vote, without a wondering thought in our heads, for people who advocate and practice state terrorism.
The people of Haiti this Sunday have to hope their next leader won't be a useless douchebag. Many of them have already given up hope that the first world, particularly its primary representative to the north, will do well by them after natural disasters, incompetence, and cupidity have combined, leaving the nation drowning figuratively and literally.
Vic Neptune
Cable news is all over Hurricane Matthew as it menaces Florida and the Bahamas. It already hit Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. In Haiti, approximately 350,000 people are in dire need of assistance. Reports from West Palm Beach, Florida, and Nassau, receive more attention.
I've wondered about what it was like for the inmates at Guantanamo Bay to be in a Category 4 hurricane. An oubliette is "a secret dungeon with a trapdoor in its ceiling." The word comes from French, oublier, "to forget." The forgotten prisoners of Bush and Obama languish in Cuba and elsewhere; Edward Snowden is only steps away from a drone strike. Haiti, a forgotten country, killed and pummeled by nature and human corruption, faces an election on October 9, the outcome of which will sharply affect its people as they struggle to cope with a hurricane that now endangers Florida mansions. Rick Scott, the crazy Christian Governor of Florida and Donald Trump supporter, has "three" words for Florida residents: "Evacuate. Evacuate. Evacuate." That's actually one word that ignores those who don't have the means to do so, as in New Orleans in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina stranded thousands in poor neighborhoods and in a football stadium, all of them left by Bush's administration to a purgatory of waiting for a federal government to act on behalf of Black people.
Apart from the hurricane, the presidential race, and the theft of Kim Kardashian's jewels, the news craze of recent past weeks involves "creepy clowns." In Greenville, South Carolina, a young boy told his mother he was approached in nearby woods by a clown urging him to go with him to a dilapidated house. A similar structure is the setting for some of Stephen King's clown-oriented horror novel, It. That King, as is his talent, created a fearscape involving a clown in that hefty 1986 novel (I've read it, and it weighs, in hardcover, a few pounds), means he helped add to the notion of clowns as creepy, something believed in already by many people. One "creepy clown" in Alabama (this has become a nationwide nocturnal phenomenon) had a Facebook account, posing in a picture with "blood" covering the upper part of his body and the caption, "I kill people for a living." This person was apprehended by the police and found to be a woman, which goes to show there's no telling who's wearing the clown suits. Some communities have banned the wearing of clown suits for the upcoming Halloween, meaning that just as one can't pretend to be a cop, one can't pretend to be a creepy clown.
A real life creepy clown, Donald John Trump, continues to thrive on the fear of the other he's helped stoke. Here is a key, I think, to the creepy clown phenomenon, coming as it does, so far into America's experience of the Global War on Terror (which I regard as World War Three). Three days ago, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, an alleged creepy clown sighting led to a social media-driven panic, causing students to run pellmell from shadows projected from their minds. Is this kind of thing not similar to government and news media authorities stimulating fear in the populace about Islamic terrorists? About Syrian refugees (a frequent Trump bugbear)? About Mexicans breaching an international boundary? During the 2012 election, alleged Black Panthers supposedly intimidating White voters, Fox News Channel showing, seemingly endlessly, a clip of precisely two Black men at a voting location, wearing the traditional Panther garb?
Hurricane Matthew has killed and displaced thousands of Haitians, Bashar al-Assad's war against his countrymen has killed hundreds of thousands, Duterte of the Philippines wages a war on drugs (people, actually), arresting and killing mercilessly, and we have clowns. And, granted, too many trigger-happy cops. And a hopelessly corrupt political system driven by greed and power-mongering.
The fear inspired by the clowns, though, is real, and seems to satirize the Global War on Terror. Senator Joseph McCarthy, Dick Cheney, Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump, and other "respectable" clowns, have worked and currently work the fear message: they're coming to get you. Even though it's really American and other first world powers continually striving to "get" the rest of the world and make it conform to lofty plans concealing that most base political condition going back to prehistoric times: whoever chops off the most heads is chief.
Unlike the Belmont students, we free and democratic peoples don't run from that which legitimately causes fear in this world; we vote, without a wondering thought in our heads, for people who advocate and practice state terrorism.
The people of Haiti this Sunday have to hope their next leader won't be a useless douchebag. Many of them have already given up hope that the first world, particularly its primary representative to the north, will do well by them after natural disasters, incompetence, and cupidity have combined, leaving the nation drowning figuratively and literally.
Vic Neptune
Monday, October 3, 2016
Arena
I've been watching the Spartacus TV series. It's an unapologetic blend of sex and violence; it would be easy to dismiss if it weren't so dramatic and powerful, an epic human story of a fight for liberty against an overwhelming societal force based on conquest and slavery, of people used as household servants but also as entertainers engaged in death sport.
Spartacus, a Thracian (modern Bulgaria), was a real man trained and performing as a gladiator in Capua, a city of the Roman Republic, in the 70s B.C. He led a revolt against his masters, escaping into the land around Mount Vesuvius along with seventy-three other gladiators. Around this fighting core, a following of mostly rural slaves gathered, growing with passing months to a significant force capable of numerous defeats of Roman legions, until finally, in 71, a final battle occurred defeating the runaway slaves, Spartacus dying in the fight. I've not yet watched the show's fourth and final season, so I don't know if the program's makers have Spartacus dying on a cross, as Stanley Kubrick did in his 1960 film, Spartacus. Crassus, the Roman top shit who delivered the final blow to Spartacus in battle, did have the surviving former slaves crucified along one of the Republic's main roads, an image lending itself well to widescreen epic cinema and thus a possible reason Kubrick chose to be ahistorical when depicting Spartacus's death.
One biographical feature not covered in the TV show or in Kubrick's film fills in, at least partially, a gap in Spartacus's life and success as a rebel leader: the religious dimension of his appeal.
He was closely connected to a woman, his wife possibly, living with him as a slave when he was a gladiator. Her name is unknown, but she practiced the mysteries of Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy, a deity known in Thrace as Zagreus. She had a dream in which Spartacus's face was covered by a snake. Interpreting this as her man's need to break out of confinement, the rebellion begun in Capua found divine inspiration, as Spartacus became associated with Dionysos, a god unpopular with Roman officialdom, but worshipped by the downtrodden and powerless.
This dimension of the history of Spartacus may have been seen as too off base from where the TV show's creators wanted to go, concentrating instead on action, intrigue, and premium cable television's titillation (pun intended) factor.
Deeply rooted feelings accompany popular movements. Black Lives Matter has stimulated so much interest and support among African Americans because it speaks in basic and easily understood truths (if you have a heart capable of listening to victims of "justice"). The movement has even inspired a small minority of Black authorities arguing for the other side, telling the Fox News audience that police shootings of Black citizens is "rare," and that the majority of Black shooting victims are killed by Blacks. I heard a Black man say this on Sean Hannity's Fox program earlier tonight. Yes, the killing of Black Americans by police officers is rare, to the extent that in 2015 it happened to young Black Americans 1,134 times.
What I see is the traditional "law and order" structure of our gun-sick racist society justifying itself by fighting against popular opinion. Black Lives Matter has no legitimacy, supposedly, because we all must accept status quo power arrangements existing in various cooperating, and profitable, forms in the Americas since the fifteenth century. Slavery powered this country's economic machine; wage slavery has done the same. Military engagement in other countries helps justify a gigantic war octopus deeply entangled in the nation's economic fortunes, including in establishment news media.
Slaves in the Roman Republic and in the Empire made that civilization function. Spartacus, a slave, inspired disgust in the celebrated orator Cicero when that writer complained of the former gladiator staging his own games on one occasion with captured Roman prisoners. For the formerly used to use others in the same way is repugnant to the oppressor's sense of right and wrong. Black citizens complaining about the police and their well-documented mistreatment of them over centuries challenges the way abusers regard society. They, the abusers, counter with "Blue Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter," the blue referring to cops. As for "All Lives" mattering, clearly they don't believe it, otherwise, the widespread antagonism, expressed by Christians Mike Pence and Scott Walker and at least a dozen other governors, toward Syrian refugees "because terrorists may be posing as refugees," would give way to a more Christlike viewpoint.
Roman hierarchs depicted in the TV series tend towards viciousness and guile. They enjoy watching men die for their amusement. Their comfort and sense of entitlement, accompanied by an utter indifference towards their slaves' considerations, reflect the eons-long habits of rich, disgusting motherfuckers--and here, Spartacus's motives may include the desire to destroy the soft-skinned ones who inflict injury and sorrow on the world's toilers.
We live in an age of conquest and slavery. For those who aren't slaves but still suffer from economic imbalance, we watch presidential candidates who promise a good future, but demonstrate, in Hillary Clinton's case, an evasive and wary gaze coming from a patrician visage cursed with eyes that don't match her smiles. In Donald Trump, Roman name Trumpus Donaldus Sickus Fuckus, we're confronted with the more obvious villain, someone wearing his unprincipled black heart on his face. Last weekend he spent the late hours of a night tweeting nastiness about a Venezuelan former Miss Universe, "who gained a lot of weight" after she was crowned twenty years ago, the first year Trump ran that contest. He "fat-shamed" her twenty years ago, leading her to develop an eating disorder. She became a U.S. citizen and has announced she will vote for Clinton. She speaks out against Trump. Sickus Fuckus responds with more sadism, sexism, revealing one of his many obsessions: he doesn't like fat people. He's overweight, and so is a Trump advisor, Newt Gingrich, who complained that a Miss Universe shouldn't "gain sixty pounds."
Does he want to win the election? Is he trying his best to lose? I'm beginning to suspect that he actually hates himself. His real self, the one we don't see in the suit and the too-long necktie. We see his mask, of course, and his public words are part of the mask, a persona he's crafted carefully for forty or so years. His success with this persona is obvious: lots of people are convinced he's a successful businessman (he lost, as has been recently revealed, 916 million dollars in 1995). Lots of people are convinced he's a prolific job creator; true, but he also has a well-documented record of not paying employees, thus, he's a deadbeat and the kind of boss someone like Spartacus would decapitate. Lots of people think he's smart, yet, instead of focusing on policy issues in the weeks leading to the election, he makes fun of Hillary Clinton for being sick with pneumonia a few weeks ago, and attacks a Latina he's already abused in the past, because Sickus Fuckus does not forgive.
Nor does he care about the slaves.
Vic Neptune
I've been watching the Spartacus TV series. It's an unapologetic blend of sex and violence; it would be easy to dismiss if it weren't so dramatic and powerful, an epic human story of a fight for liberty against an overwhelming societal force based on conquest and slavery, of people used as household servants but also as entertainers engaged in death sport.
Spartacus, a Thracian (modern Bulgaria), was a real man trained and performing as a gladiator in Capua, a city of the Roman Republic, in the 70s B.C. He led a revolt against his masters, escaping into the land around Mount Vesuvius along with seventy-three other gladiators. Around this fighting core, a following of mostly rural slaves gathered, growing with passing months to a significant force capable of numerous defeats of Roman legions, until finally, in 71, a final battle occurred defeating the runaway slaves, Spartacus dying in the fight. I've not yet watched the show's fourth and final season, so I don't know if the program's makers have Spartacus dying on a cross, as Stanley Kubrick did in his 1960 film, Spartacus. Crassus, the Roman top shit who delivered the final blow to Spartacus in battle, did have the surviving former slaves crucified along one of the Republic's main roads, an image lending itself well to widescreen epic cinema and thus a possible reason Kubrick chose to be ahistorical when depicting Spartacus's death.
One biographical feature not covered in the TV show or in Kubrick's film fills in, at least partially, a gap in Spartacus's life and success as a rebel leader: the religious dimension of his appeal.
He was closely connected to a woman, his wife possibly, living with him as a slave when he was a gladiator. Her name is unknown, but she practiced the mysteries of Dionysos, god of wine and ecstasy, a deity known in Thrace as Zagreus. She had a dream in which Spartacus's face was covered by a snake. Interpreting this as her man's need to break out of confinement, the rebellion begun in Capua found divine inspiration, as Spartacus became associated with Dionysos, a god unpopular with Roman officialdom, but worshipped by the downtrodden and powerless.
This dimension of the history of Spartacus may have been seen as too off base from where the TV show's creators wanted to go, concentrating instead on action, intrigue, and premium cable television's titillation (pun intended) factor.
Deeply rooted feelings accompany popular movements. Black Lives Matter has stimulated so much interest and support among African Americans because it speaks in basic and easily understood truths (if you have a heart capable of listening to victims of "justice"). The movement has even inspired a small minority of Black authorities arguing for the other side, telling the Fox News audience that police shootings of Black citizens is "rare," and that the majority of Black shooting victims are killed by Blacks. I heard a Black man say this on Sean Hannity's Fox program earlier tonight. Yes, the killing of Black Americans by police officers is rare, to the extent that in 2015 it happened to young Black Americans 1,134 times.
What I see is the traditional "law and order" structure of our gun-sick racist society justifying itself by fighting against popular opinion. Black Lives Matter has no legitimacy, supposedly, because we all must accept status quo power arrangements existing in various cooperating, and profitable, forms in the Americas since the fifteenth century. Slavery powered this country's economic machine; wage slavery has done the same. Military engagement in other countries helps justify a gigantic war octopus deeply entangled in the nation's economic fortunes, including in establishment news media.
Slaves in the Roman Republic and in the Empire made that civilization function. Spartacus, a slave, inspired disgust in the celebrated orator Cicero when that writer complained of the former gladiator staging his own games on one occasion with captured Roman prisoners. For the formerly used to use others in the same way is repugnant to the oppressor's sense of right and wrong. Black citizens complaining about the police and their well-documented mistreatment of them over centuries challenges the way abusers regard society. They, the abusers, counter with "Blue Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter," the blue referring to cops. As for "All Lives" mattering, clearly they don't believe it, otherwise, the widespread antagonism, expressed by Christians Mike Pence and Scott Walker and at least a dozen other governors, toward Syrian refugees "because terrorists may be posing as refugees," would give way to a more Christlike viewpoint.
Roman hierarchs depicted in the TV series tend towards viciousness and guile. They enjoy watching men die for their amusement. Their comfort and sense of entitlement, accompanied by an utter indifference towards their slaves' considerations, reflect the eons-long habits of rich, disgusting motherfuckers--and here, Spartacus's motives may include the desire to destroy the soft-skinned ones who inflict injury and sorrow on the world's toilers.
We live in an age of conquest and slavery. For those who aren't slaves but still suffer from economic imbalance, we watch presidential candidates who promise a good future, but demonstrate, in Hillary Clinton's case, an evasive and wary gaze coming from a patrician visage cursed with eyes that don't match her smiles. In Donald Trump, Roman name Trumpus Donaldus Sickus Fuckus, we're confronted with the more obvious villain, someone wearing his unprincipled black heart on his face. Last weekend he spent the late hours of a night tweeting nastiness about a Venezuelan former Miss Universe, "who gained a lot of weight" after she was crowned twenty years ago, the first year Trump ran that contest. He "fat-shamed" her twenty years ago, leading her to develop an eating disorder. She became a U.S. citizen and has announced she will vote for Clinton. She speaks out against Trump. Sickus Fuckus responds with more sadism, sexism, revealing one of his many obsessions: he doesn't like fat people. He's overweight, and so is a Trump advisor, Newt Gingrich, who complained that a Miss Universe shouldn't "gain sixty pounds."
Does he want to win the election? Is he trying his best to lose? I'm beginning to suspect that he actually hates himself. His real self, the one we don't see in the suit and the too-long necktie. We see his mask, of course, and his public words are part of the mask, a persona he's crafted carefully for forty or so years. His success with this persona is obvious: lots of people are convinced he's a successful businessman (he lost, as has been recently revealed, 916 million dollars in 1995). Lots of people are convinced he's a prolific job creator; true, but he also has a well-documented record of not paying employees, thus, he's a deadbeat and the kind of boss someone like Spartacus would decapitate. Lots of people think he's smart, yet, instead of focusing on policy issues in the weeks leading to the election, he makes fun of Hillary Clinton for being sick with pneumonia a few weeks ago, and attacks a Latina he's already abused in the past, because Sickus Fuckus does not forgive.
Nor does he care about the slaves.
Vic Neptune
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