Fucked Up For Flags, and We're Still in Afghanistan
President-elect Trump on November 29 tweeted, "Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag--if they do there must be consequences--perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"
On June 27, 1989, President Bush said, "...support for the First Amendment need not extend to desecration of the American flag. Flag burning is wrong...As President I will uphold our precious right to dissent, but burning the flag goes too far and I want to see that matter remedied."
Earlier that month, the Supreme Court had decided in a 5-4 decision that flag burning is a form of free speech. Bush couldn't resist the opportunity to seem patriotic. I remember seeing him standing in front of the biggest American flag I'd seen since watching the opening scene in Patton. Using our nation's banner as a prop and a tool to get citizens riled up about something that doesn't matter, a method repeated via Twitter by Trump yesterday, the first President Bush showed he, too, could be an exploiter of basic American feelings: a demagogue.
Trump's tweet had the effect of causing some to burn American flags in a demonstration outside New York's Trump International Hotel. Should Trump lose his citizenship or go to jail for provoking flag desecration?
Burning the American flag is, as of 1989, legal. Like with Bush's effort twenty-seven years ago to change that law, will the Trump administration, backed by a majority of Republican and Democratic natural demagogues in the House of Representatives and Senate, attempt to make it the law of the nation to punish flag desecrators--because, of course, the flammable nature of our nation's prime symbol constitutes one of our big problems?
A revival of flag-burning nerve-tingling as a topic of pundits' and politicians' conversations points out two things:
1) Trump has inspired, journalists and other television and print contributors, with a single cynical tweet, to devote many irrecoverable hours of news time to a subject that is useless as a matter of serious national discourse, at an anxious time of domestic and international situations and crises calling for deep analysis.
2) When the news media waste their time on nonsense (Trump's special language), he benefits (we don't) from their not better using their time (fulfilling the true function of the Fourth Estate). His role (hardly presidential, but inevitable) as our nation's leader, will partly be that of a provider of entertainment, packaged by the news media, by Twitter or some other Internet-based medium, Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats devolved into Trump's brain-turd thoughts via social media, the system already corrupted by the surveillance state developed under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
As the comedian Jimmy Dore said, "If Trump had an extra inch to his penis we wouldn't be in this mess."
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
The Frame Around the World
Norman Mailer directed four films. I watched part of the third one, Maidstone (from 1970) on YouTube several months ago. All I know about this movie comes from the scene I watched, and also a brief description of the premise on IMDB: "Norman T. Kingsley, famous movie director, runs for President."
Given Mailer's rock hard ego, I'm not surprised he put the word King in his character's name, nor that he gave the man his own first name. Kingsley is also Mailer's middle name. By the time he began directing films, Mailer was already a famous novelist. Like James Jones, another U.S. Army World War Two veteran turned writer, Norman Mailer wrote a bestselling novel grounded in his Pacific Theater of War experiences. The edgy rawness of Mailer's writing (I've read Tough Guys Don't Dance, Harlot's Ghost, and his peculiar biography of Marilyn Monroe) makes for thick reading. I admit I've enjoyed his work while simultaneously finding it bizarre and hyper-focused, uncomfortably at times, on his own obsessions with sex, power, and the male psyche. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, for a writer to focus on his or her obsessions (I do that fairly often, so did Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, and Arthur C. Clarke, to name a few among a multitude), but Mailer's obsessions bring us close to a violent core inside himself, maybe in humanity.
In a book about Marilyn Monroe written by someone who claims to have known her for a while (I've forgotten the name and author of the book), the author recommends to Monroe that she read Mailer. He loans her his copy of Mailer's novel, Barbary Shore. The next time they meet, Marilyn Monroe hands the book back to him and remarks, distastefully, "He's obsessed with power."
That could've been a TV show in the 1950's: Four Word Book Reviews With Marilyn Monroe.
Apocryphal or not, this story about Monroe's disdain for at least that one Mailer novel offers a contrast between a man living in and commenting on a male-dominated world, a place where expressions of violence are sought after as ways toward solutions of problems, and a woman living and working within that male world, gaining some power through submitting to the process of objectification, but always needing to strive because she can never wholly satisfy the demands of money and power.
Mailer's later obsession with Marilyn Monroe, expressed in his biography of her, reveals more about himself than it does about the actress. He pines romantically that he never met her; he writes about how their names, Mailer and Marilyn are musically similar. Norman can be spelled from her full name. Kismet operates in Mailer's mind when dealing with his subject. Like many men contemplating Marilyn Monroe after her death, Mailer projects himself into the possibilities of her life, as if he might've "rescued" her, even though he, as part of the power trip complex that ruled Monroe's life, would've probably misunderstood her just as another writer, Arthur Miller (her third husband), did.
The one clip of Maidstone I've seen is thus described in the IMDB "Trivia" section for the film:
"The fight between Norman Mailer and Rip Torn was real. Torn was outraged with Mailer's direction and attacked Mailer with a hammer. Mailer bit Torn's ear during the fight and the blood shed by both is real."
In the midst of the fight, Mailer's then wife enters the "scene," saying frantically to Rip Torn, "What did you do?" The hammer blow to Mailer's head, an actual act of violence caught on film and preserved in the final cut, is painful to hear and watch. I've wanted to see the film from start to finish, but I've held back, the real violence of that scene concentrating for me a film within the film, just as a single scene in a movie, taken out of context, can seem to exist as a separate and fascinating work of art.
That Mailer left the scene in the film fits his character. He got to show himself wrestling with Rip Torn, biting his ear, struggling in real rage, a shock to the audience's nerves preserved on film, on DVD, on YouTube, everyone able to see a terrible dispute between actor and director, naked and free reality.
Vic Neptune
Norman Mailer directed four films. I watched part of the third one, Maidstone (from 1970) on YouTube several months ago. All I know about this movie comes from the scene I watched, and also a brief description of the premise on IMDB: "Norman T. Kingsley, famous movie director, runs for President."
Given Mailer's rock hard ego, I'm not surprised he put the word King in his character's name, nor that he gave the man his own first name. Kingsley is also Mailer's middle name. By the time he began directing films, Mailer was already a famous novelist. Like James Jones, another U.S. Army World War Two veteran turned writer, Norman Mailer wrote a bestselling novel grounded in his Pacific Theater of War experiences. The edgy rawness of Mailer's writing (I've read Tough Guys Don't Dance, Harlot's Ghost, and his peculiar biography of Marilyn Monroe) makes for thick reading. I admit I've enjoyed his work while simultaneously finding it bizarre and hyper-focused, uncomfortably at times, on his own obsessions with sex, power, and the male psyche. It's not a bad thing, necessarily, for a writer to focus on his or her obsessions (I do that fairly often, so did Anne Sexton, Mary Shelley, and Arthur C. Clarke, to name a few among a multitude), but Mailer's obsessions bring us close to a violent core inside himself, maybe in humanity.
In a book about Marilyn Monroe written by someone who claims to have known her for a while (I've forgotten the name and author of the book), the author recommends to Monroe that she read Mailer. He loans her his copy of Mailer's novel, Barbary Shore. The next time they meet, Marilyn Monroe hands the book back to him and remarks, distastefully, "He's obsessed with power."
That could've been a TV show in the 1950's: Four Word Book Reviews With Marilyn Monroe.
Apocryphal or not, this story about Monroe's disdain for at least that one Mailer novel offers a contrast between a man living in and commenting on a male-dominated world, a place where expressions of violence are sought after as ways toward solutions of problems, and a woman living and working within that male world, gaining some power through submitting to the process of objectification, but always needing to strive because she can never wholly satisfy the demands of money and power.
Mailer's later obsession with Marilyn Monroe, expressed in his biography of her, reveals more about himself than it does about the actress. He pines romantically that he never met her; he writes about how their names, Mailer and Marilyn are musically similar. Norman can be spelled from her full name. Kismet operates in Mailer's mind when dealing with his subject. Like many men contemplating Marilyn Monroe after her death, Mailer projects himself into the possibilities of her life, as if he might've "rescued" her, even though he, as part of the power trip complex that ruled Monroe's life, would've probably misunderstood her just as another writer, Arthur Miller (her third husband), did.
The one clip of Maidstone I've seen is thus described in the IMDB "Trivia" section for the film:
"The fight between Norman Mailer and Rip Torn was real. Torn was outraged with Mailer's direction and attacked Mailer with a hammer. Mailer bit Torn's ear during the fight and the blood shed by both is real."
In the midst of the fight, Mailer's then wife enters the "scene," saying frantically to Rip Torn, "What did you do?" The hammer blow to Mailer's head, an actual act of violence caught on film and preserved in the final cut, is painful to hear and watch. I've wanted to see the film from start to finish, but I've held back, the real violence of that scene concentrating for me a film within the film, just as a single scene in a movie, taken out of context, can seem to exist as a separate and fascinating work of art.
That Mailer left the scene in the film fits his character. He got to show himself wrestling with Rip Torn, biting his ear, struggling in real rage, a shock to the audience's nerves preserved on film, on DVD, on YouTube, everyone able to see a terrible dispute between actor and director, naked and free reality.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Getting Cozy
Demonization - "portray as wicked and threatening."
On The Rachel Maddow Show last night, the subject of White supremacist support for Donald Trump came up. A speech given by an American Nazi, who referred to himself as "European," was shown at length to prove, I suppose, the danger represented by President-elect Trump's failure to condemn such haters. We've known at least since last year that White-idolizing Whites love Trump. Billions of dollars in free media were also given to the Trump Campaign by Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, and other major outlets. Maddow, turning her attention to obscure homegrown Nazis to warn us about the Trump phenomenon, seems disingenuous to me, considering her lucrative work for a network that helped elevate the son of a bitch to the nation's highest office. Airing the obscure Nazi's "Fuhrer principle" speech on her much lauded show, only gives a platform to some shit-headed racist's views; but then, Maddow's news network spent a year and a half giving a platform to a racist (Trump) for the sake of ratings (money).
Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters in the news media struggle to find a rational reason for their candidate's defeat on November 8. Disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters are blamed; voters supporting third party candidates, like myself, are blamed; lack of voter turnout (a reason cited by President Obama) is blamed. Hillary Clinton's lack of appeal as a candidate is ignored. We're reminded by MSNBC anchors that "she did win the popular vote," but so what? That's not the result that counts in our system.
Trump's unsavory connections with White supremacy, his overall lack of appeal as anything but a troll using Twitter and the news media as a bludgeon, have been obvious to anyone with the honesty to admit the presence of black mold in the house of democracy. Helping flourish that mold has been MSNBC and other news outlets, organizations committed not to genuine impartial journalism, but to access journalism, wherein reporters and anchors cultivate and maintain contact with politicians and other power brokers, even to the point of attending dinner parties with them. Have a drink with Henry Kissinger, I'm sure he tells wonderful stories. Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC is on a first name basis with him--Kissinger, the most prolific living mass murderer.
MSNBC, being a "liberal" news network, continues to do anti-Trump stories, investigating his picks for the upcoming cabinet. Rachel Maddow wants us to be wary of Nazis supporting Trump, finding validation now in the latter's win. This is, no doubt, something to watch out for, but hate groups have always represented various levels of threat to racial and religious minorities in this country. The Native Americans protesting the pipeline being built on their sacred ground in North Dakota have most recently been sprayed with water cannons in cold weather by state police authorities, all heavily militarized in a nation run currently by Barack Obama, who just announced that he won't criticize Trump during the latter's presidency.
Native Americans tear gassed and given hypothermia by the state provoke no outrage from Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Obama. Instead of leading her show last night with the violence against Native Americans using their First Amendment rights, Maddow concentrated on some little known Nazi fuck making a speech skirting the edges of Hitler worship, but transferred to a plutocrat of German descent, Donald Drumpf.
Look out for the Nazis talking their shit, Rachel Maddow seemed to be warning us, while the Democratic administration in power since 2009 has been bombing the Arab world, runs a nation state with the most prisoners per capita in the world, allows itself to be lobbied to death by the National Rifle Association, and lets maniac police authorities violate the civil rights of peaceful protestors.
Look at what power supremacists are able to accomplish, regardless of party affiliation. Obama passes the nightstick to Trump, just as Bush passed it to him. Democratic authorities, in the news media as well, want us to believe that Hillary Clinton was somehow robbed of her inheritance. From a poetic standpoint, the nightstick was actually passed to the right asshole. The powers that be want the exercise of brutality. Trump, vicious idiot that he is, has just what the powers are looking for at this time. Even his monetary policies will probably fit with the sadistic capitalists (including Paul Ryan) who delight in his elevation. The world is getting out of control, it must be controlled. The people need scapegoats.
Rachel Maddow, nice and funny Rachel Maddow, tried last night to give us a demon to worry about: White supremacists who love Trump. She forgot to mention her bosses at MSNBC, who also love him.
Vic Neptune
Demonization - "portray as wicked and threatening."
On The Rachel Maddow Show last night, the subject of White supremacist support for Donald Trump came up. A speech given by an American Nazi, who referred to himself as "European," was shown at length to prove, I suppose, the danger represented by President-elect Trump's failure to condemn such haters. We've known at least since last year that White-idolizing Whites love Trump. Billions of dollars in free media were also given to the Trump Campaign by Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, and other major outlets. Maddow, turning her attention to obscure homegrown Nazis to warn us about the Trump phenomenon, seems disingenuous to me, considering her lucrative work for a network that helped elevate the son of a bitch to the nation's highest office. Airing the obscure Nazi's "Fuhrer principle" speech on her much lauded show, only gives a platform to some shit-headed racist's views; but then, Maddow's news network spent a year and a half giving a platform to a racist (Trump) for the sake of ratings (money).
Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters in the news media struggle to find a rational reason for their candidate's defeat on November 8. Disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters are blamed; voters supporting third party candidates, like myself, are blamed; lack of voter turnout (a reason cited by President Obama) is blamed. Hillary Clinton's lack of appeal as a candidate is ignored. We're reminded by MSNBC anchors that "she did win the popular vote," but so what? That's not the result that counts in our system.
Trump's unsavory connections with White supremacy, his overall lack of appeal as anything but a troll using Twitter and the news media as a bludgeon, have been obvious to anyone with the honesty to admit the presence of black mold in the house of democracy. Helping flourish that mold has been MSNBC and other news outlets, organizations committed not to genuine impartial journalism, but to access journalism, wherein reporters and anchors cultivate and maintain contact with politicians and other power brokers, even to the point of attending dinner parties with them. Have a drink with Henry Kissinger, I'm sure he tells wonderful stories. Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC is on a first name basis with him--Kissinger, the most prolific living mass murderer.
MSNBC, being a "liberal" news network, continues to do anti-Trump stories, investigating his picks for the upcoming cabinet. Rachel Maddow wants us to be wary of Nazis supporting Trump, finding validation now in the latter's win. This is, no doubt, something to watch out for, but hate groups have always represented various levels of threat to racial and religious minorities in this country. The Native Americans protesting the pipeline being built on their sacred ground in North Dakota have most recently been sprayed with water cannons in cold weather by state police authorities, all heavily militarized in a nation run currently by Barack Obama, who just announced that he won't criticize Trump during the latter's presidency.
Native Americans tear gassed and given hypothermia by the state provoke no outrage from Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Obama. Instead of leading her show last night with the violence against Native Americans using their First Amendment rights, Maddow concentrated on some little known Nazi fuck making a speech skirting the edges of Hitler worship, but transferred to a plutocrat of German descent, Donald Drumpf.
Look out for the Nazis talking their shit, Rachel Maddow seemed to be warning us, while the Democratic administration in power since 2009 has been bombing the Arab world, runs a nation state with the most prisoners per capita in the world, allows itself to be lobbied to death by the National Rifle Association, and lets maniac police authorities violate the civil rights of peaceful protestors.
Look at what power supremacists are able to accomplish, regardless of party affiliation. Obama passes the nightstick to Trump, just as Bush passed it to him. Democratic authorities, in the news media as well, want us to believe that Hillary Clinton was somehow robbed of her inheritance. From a poetic standpoint, the nightstick was actually passed to the right asshole. The powers that be want the exercise of brutality. Trump, vicious idiot that he is, has just what the powers are looking for at this time. Even his monetary policies will probably fit with the sadistic capitalists (including Paul Ryan) who delight in his elevation. The world is getting out of control, it must be controlled. The people need scapegoats.
Rachel Maddow, nice and funny Rachel Maddow, tried last night to give us a demon to worry about: White supremacists who love Trump. She forgot to mention her bosses at MSNBC, who also love him.
Vic Neptune
Friday, November 18, 2016
There Was a Time When Getting Access To Hitler Was Good For Your Career
One strange thing these days, post-campaign, post-election, is how news media personalities, government officials, and celebrities, sometimes speak of Donald Trump like he's a normal person.
Comedian Dave Chappelle, hosting Saturday Night Live (an NBC show) on November 12, said during his monologue that he'll give Trump a chance. President Obama and election loser Clinton both urged Americans to keep an open mind about the next president. As Trump has meetings in Trump Tower with a variety of office seekers, one of those summoned is Mitt Romney, past election loser and, last March, deliverer of a speech called by CNN, "a blistering broadside." A broadside consists of a ship firing all of its guns simultaneously. Romney, like Captain Blood, really let Trump have it:
"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat."
That is, if you buy the hat ($9.99 at Walmart, the corporation on whose board of directors Hillary Clinton sat from 1986 to 1992, including a period when Walmart fought labor unions representing its employees--in other words, she doesn't give a shit about workers' rights).
Romney will meet Trump tomorrow in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump has a golf course. The President-elect will conduct meetings, share thoughts on grabbing pussy, and brag about how a monument to his ego, Trump Tower, sitting as it does in the middle of Manhattan, has become the locus of a security problem in America's largest city. Since Trump lives there, streets and traffic must be affected. Mitt Romney must think Trump is a great guy, now, to sit down with him after a round of golf.
Today on MSNBC, Kate Snow was interviewing a man from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups in America. They've found that in the last year, religious- and racist-inspired hate crimes have increased by seven percent. Snow made reference to Trump's glib admonition for people to "stop it." "Was that enough?" Snow asked. The man was polite enough not to say, "Are you insane?" Instead, he said, "It's not enough. He needs to get on this issue forcefully, but unfortunately, as we've seen with his presidential cabinet picks--"
Snow interrupted him, as if something serious were happening somewhere: "I'm sorry, we have to go live to Trump Tower." Cut to a panning shot of large black vehicles on a New York street zooming away, apparently, from the Tower. The caption read, "Donald Trump Heads to N.J. Golf Course."
Snow came back, saying "we're out of time," apologized to her thoughtful guest, who was about to say, "It's unfortunate that Trump has picked Steve Bannon, a hate-mongering racist, as his chief advisor. This sends a mixed signal about the President-elect's true views on the rise of race and religion-inspired hate speech and violence, which the president-elect himself contributed to throughout his campaign."
I assume that's what he was about to say, before we had to see Trump's motorcade heading to the golf course, and Trump's meeting with Romney so that the President-elect can lower his scrotum into the Mormon former presidential candidate's mouth.
The same network, MSNBC, which still criticizes Trump, nevertheless commits the same egregious fault that helped get the fucker elected: they give him expansive unjustified airtime. They even break away from interviews with important and thoughtful guests for the sake of showing big black cars heading to a rich man's pleasure spot across the river. This disgusting activity on the network's part reveals what they've been at all along: sensationalism. Even if some working for MSNBC don't like Trump, they like the ratings, the spectacle, the utter lunacy of the fact of this joke of a human being with no morals becoming president.
Lesley Stahl, veteran journalist on CBS's 60 Minutes, sat down for an interview in the Tower with Trump, his wife, the adult children arrayed behind them. The chairs and love seat, covered in gold framing, resembled props from a set for a movie about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The CBS crew were required to wear booties over their shoes, so as not to track in street smudge. This one detail, pointed out in a story on Inside Edition, reveals what the Trump presidency will be like. A tacky, horrible man with no empathy for the needs of common women and men, removed from reality, putting booties over it to protect his surroundings characterized by bad taste. What's more, a man who continuously lies and fabricates, has no idea what's really going on in the world, or in his own city. The traffic rerouted around "White House North," the inconveniences caused, remind me of Chris Christie's indifference to people using the paralyzed bridge. Trump can get through the obstacles his ego has caused, why should he care about what this does to others? He's going to the Oval Office, sent there largely by poor and middle class people who believed his pitch while ignoring his inconsistencies, not ever thinking his scatterbrained thought process might someday fuck over his supporters.
Barack Obama said he's "cautiously optimistic" about the upcoming Trump presidency. If he's serious about this statement, our current president is truly fucked in the head. Hillary Clinton emerged from hiding a few days ago and gave a speech somewhere, revealing that for a few days she just wanted to "curl up with a good book and never go out again." It's a pity she didn't put that into practice sometime in 2014. When she said, "curl up with a good book," I thought, Can't you at least not use clichés when talking about the worst failure of your life? Maybe you never did have any depth of intellect, and maybe that's why you lost, you corporate big banks-loving piece of crap.
Presidential transition team spokesman Sean Spicer, talking about Romney's invitation to the presence, said, "I think what that meeting suggests...is the president-elect wants the best and brightest people to put this country forward: people who supported him, people who didn't support him."
Hey Donald, I'll meet with you! I sure as fuck, and never will, support you. But I'll tell you my ideas, just as I'd tell my ideas to Obama. I won't wear booties, though, unless you also wear them, but at least I won't grab your wife by the pussy.
Spicer, like Hillary Clinton, also speaks cliché. "Best and brightest" is from the David Halberstam book about Kennedy's cabinet, the one that evolved into the motherfuckers who gave us the Vietnam War.
One of my many friends, family, and acquaintances, dismayed by the Trump win was despairing about it over the phone with me the day after the election. I told her, finally, "No asshole politician is greater than the U.S. Constitution."
I believe that. Maybe I'm naive, but that's my hope.
Vic Neptune
One strange thing these days, post-campaign, post-election, is how news media personalities, government officials, and celebrities, sometimes speak of Donald Trump like he's a normal person.
Comedian Dave Chappelle, hosting Saturday Night Live (an NBC show) on November 12, said during his monologue that he'll give Trump a chance. President Obama and election loser Clinton both urged Americans to keep an open mind about the next president. As Trump has meetings in Trump Tower with a variety of office seekers, one of those summoned is Mitt Romney, past election loser and, last March, deliverer of a speech called by CNN, "a blistering broadside." A broadside consists of a ship firing all of its guns simultaneously. Romney, like Captain Blood, really let Trump have it:
"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing members of the American public for suckers. He gets a free ride to the White House, and all we get is a lousy hat."
That is, if you buy the hat ($9.99 at Walmart, the corporation on whose board of directors Hillary Clinton sat from 1986 to 1992, including a period when Walmart fought labor unions representing its employees--in other words, she doesn't give a shit about workers' rights).
Romney will meet Trump tomorrow in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump has a golf course. The President-elect will conduct meetings, share thoughts on grabbing pussy, and brag about how a monument to his ego, Trump Tower, sitting as it does in the middle of Manhattan, has become the locus of a security problem in America's largest city. Since Trump lives there, streets and traffic must be affected. Mitt Romney must think Trump is a great guy, now, to sit down with him after a round of golf.
Today on MSNBC, Kate Snow was interviewing a man from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups in America. They've found that in the last year, religious- and racist-inspired hate crimes have increased by seven percent. Snow made reference to Trump's glib admonition for people to "stop it." "Was that enough?" Snow asked. The man was polite enough not to say, "Are you insane?" Instead, he said, "It's not enough. He needs to get on this issue forcefully, but unfortunately, as we've seen with his presidential cabinet picks--"
Snow interrupted him, as if something serious were happening somewhere: "I'm sorry, we have to go live to Trump Tower." Cut to a panning shot of large black vehicles on a New York street zooming away, apparently, from the Tower. The caption read, "Donald Trump Heads to N.J. Golf Course."
Snow came back, saying "we're out of time," apologized to her thoughtful guest, who was about to say, "It's unfortunate that Trump has picked Steve Bannon, a hate-mongering racist, as his chief advisor. This sends a mixed signal about the President-elect's true views on the rise of race and religion-inspired hate speech and violence, which the president-elect himself contributed to throughout his campaign."
I assume that's what he was about to say, before we had to see Trump's motorcade heading to the golf course, and Trump's meeting with Romney so that the President-elect can lower his scrotum into the Mormon former presidential candidate's mouth.
The same network, MSNBC, which still criticizes Trump, nevertheless commits the same egregious fault that helped get the fucker elected: they give him expansive unjustified airtime. They even break away from interviews with important and thoughtful guests for the sake of showing big black cars heading to a rich man's pleasure spot across the river. This disgusting activity on the network's part reveals what they've been at all along: sensationalism. Even if some working for MSNBC don't like Trump, they like the ratings, the spectacle, the utter lunacy of the fact of this joke of a human being with no morals becoming president.
Lesley Stahl, veteran journalist on CBS's 60 Minutes, sat down for an interview in the Tower with Trump, his wife, the adult children arrayed behind them. The chairs and love seat, covered in gold framing, resembled props from a set for a movie about Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The CBS crew were required to wear booties over their shoes, so as not to track in street smudge. This one detail, pointed out in a story on Inside Edition, reveals what the Trump presidency will be like. A tacky, horrible man with no empathy for the needs of common women and men, removed from reality, putting booties over it to protect his surroundings characterized by bad taste. What's more, a man who continuously lies and fabricates, has no idea what's really going on in the world, or in his own city. The traffic rerouted around "White House North," the inconveniences caused, remind me of Chris Christie's indifference to people using the paralyzed bridge. Trump can get through the obstacles his ego has caused, why should he care about what this does to others? He's going to the Oval Office, sent there largely by poor and middle class people who believed his pitch while ignoring his inconsistencies, not ever thinking his scatterbrained thought process might someday fuck over his supporters.
Barack Obama said he's "cautiously optimistic" about the upcoming Trump presidency. If he's serious about this statement, our current president is truly fucked in the head. Hillary Clinton emerged from hiding a few days ago and gave a speech somewhere, revealing that for a few days she just wanted to "curl up with a good book and never go out again." It's a pity she didn't put that into practice sometime in 2014. When she said, "curl up with a good book," I thought, Can't you at least not use clichés when talking about the worst failure of your life? Maybe you never did have any depth of intellect, and maybe that's why you lost, you corporate big banks-loving piece of crap.
Presidential transition team spokesman Sean Spicer, talking about Romney's invitation to the presence, said, "I think what that meeting suggests...is the president-elect wants the best and brightest people to put this country forward: people who supported him, people who didn't support him."
Hey Donald, I'll meet with you! I sure as fuck, and never will, support you. But I'll tell you my ideas, just as I'd tell my ideas to Obama. I won't wear booties, though, unless you also wear them, but at least I won't grab your wife by the pussy.
Spicer, like Hillary Clinton, also speaks cliché. "Best and brightest" is from the David Halberstam book about Kennedy's cabinet, the one that evolved into the motherfuckers who gave us the Vietnam War.
One of my many friends, family, and acquaintances, dismayed by the Trump win was despairing about it over the phone with me the day after the election. I told her, finally, "No asshole politician is greater than the U.S. Constitution."
I believe that. Maybe I'm naive, but that's my hope.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Want a Cookie?
I received a notice on this blog about how the European Union requires me to give EU visitors to this blog information about cookies used on my blog. "In many cases, these laws require you [me] to obtain consent."
I was not aware of cookies being used on my blog. I didn't know I've been inconveniencing the European Union. The appearance of this notice, accompanied by these words, "Your HTTPS settings have changed. All visitors are now able to view your blog over an encrypted connection by visiting https://anotherdamnedthing.blogspot.com."
Being computer illiterate in terms of the technical language, I'm not sure what all of this means. It feels like Google, one of the largest corporations, has put a roadblock in front of me. It seems that I'm responsible for understanding what the fuck this bullshit means. Cookies on my blog? Are they appearing in the EU whenever someone looks at what I've written? Are Europeans getting fucked over by these cookies? If so, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was overstepping my blogging privileges. This is new to me. I'm supposed to read and consent to some Google-provided information. They even have a box at the bottom that says, "Was this helpful to you? Yes. No." I clicked "No." Another box appeared for me to write something about why I didn't have a great time reading their technical bullshit sprung on me after two years of writing this little blog without being fucked with by the Google host. I thought about writing in their suggestion box, "Cut the Orwellian bullshit."
As I write, I'm wondering if this post will be blocked because I didn't go through with the consent stuff asked for. I'm at a point in my life in which I don't feel like acting in the fantasies of the surveillance states running the world. If this blog dies, I'll move on with my life. I won't stop writing; Vic Neptune will still publish in some manner, the world is all connected. I'm probably making a big bother out of nothing, but something in the tone of the message about EU laws concerning cookies reminded me that sometimes governments like to fuck with free speech.
I was thinking a while back about monetizing this blog. I looked into it, found out that I'd have to use some real personal information in doing so. Vic Neptune, surprise surprise, isn't my real name. I decided I don't want to not be Vic Neptune in my published writings. It offends me that the Google blog masters would require that I write under my own name if I want to make a little money in the process. What a bunch of bullshit, as we say in America.
Bob Dylan was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. He will not, I've learned, travel to Sweden to collect his prize. How Bob Dylanish of him. True to himself, what the fuck does he care about receiving the Nobel Prize? The Nobel Peace Prize once went to Henry Kissinger, meaning the Nobel deciders don't always operate with their heads out of their asses.
The lateness of the hour could be a factor in my grumpiness about Google's message about the European Union's cookies law. Sorry, European Union, but I didn't know I was fucking with you. You're much too large an entity to fully understand. I'll look at the required reading again tomorrow, see if it makes more sense, and seems less like I'm getting fucked with.
For non-Americans, I'm sorry about Trump, but if Clinton had won, I'd be apologizing for that one, too.
Vic Neptune
I received a notice on this blog about how the European Union requires me to give EU visitors to this blog information about cookies used on my blog. "In many cases, these laws require you [me] to obtain consent."
I was not aware of cookies being used on my blog. I didn't know I've been inconveniencing the European Union. The appearance of this notice, accompanied by these words, "Your HTTPS settings have changed. All visitors are now able to view your blog over an encrypted connection by visiting https://anotherdamnedthing.blogspot.com."
Being computer illiterate in terms of the technical language, I'm not sure what all of this means. It feels like Google, one of the largest corporations, has put a roadblock in front of me. It seems that I'm responsible for understanding what the fuck this bullshit means. Cookies on my blog? Are they appearing in the EU whenever someone looks at what I've written? Are Europeans getting fucked over by these cookies? If so, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was overstepping my blogging privileges. This is new to me. I'm supposed to read and consent to some Google-provided information. They even have a box at the bottom that says, "Was this helpful to you? Yes. No." I clicked "No." Another box appeared for me to write something about why I didn't have a great time reading their technical bullshit sprung on me after two years of writing this little blog without being fucked with by the Google host. I thought about writing in their suggestion box, "Cut the Orwellian bullshit."
As I write, I'm wondering if this post will be blocked because I didn't go through with the consent stuff asked for. I'm at a point in my life in which I don't feel like acting in the fantasies of the surveillance states running the world. If this blog dies, I'll move on with my life. I won't stop writing; Vic Neptune will still publish in some manner, the world is all connected. I'm probably making a big bother out of nothing, but something in the tone of the message about EU laws concerning cookies reminded me that sometimes governments like to fuck with free speech.
I was thinking a while back about monetizing this blog. I looked into it, found out that I'd have to use some real personal information in doing so. Vic Neptune, surprise surprise, isn't my real name. I decided I don't want to not be Vic Neptune in my published writings. It offends me that the Google blog masters would require that I write under my own name if I want to make a little money in the process. What a bunch of bullshit, as we say in America.
Bob Dylan was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. He will not, I've learned, travel to Sweden to collect his prize. How Bob Dylanish of him. True to himself, what the fuck does he care about receiving the Nobel Prize? The Nobel Peace Prize once went to Henry Kissinger, meaning the Nobel deciders don't always operate with their heads out of their asses.
The lateness of the hour could be a factor in my grumpiness about Google's message about the European Union's cookies law. Sorry, European Union, but I didn't know I was fucking with you. You're much too large an entity to fully understand. I'll look at the required reading again tomorrow, see if it makes more sense, and seems less like I'm getting fucked with.
For non-Americans, I'm sorry about Trump, but if Clinton had won, I'd be apologizing for that one, too.
Vic Neptune
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Global War on Terror, Kardashian Style
The latest issue of Us Weekly has Kim Kardashian on the cover, wearing no jewelry, in mid-stride looking at the camera, a bodyguard protecting her from behind. The caption reads:
LIVING IN FEAR
In smaller letters below, it says, "Daily therapy, intense security, social media silence. Still haunted by flashbacks, a humbled Kim makes drastic changes."
LIVING IN FEAR is written in large yellow letters. Yellow is the traditional color of cowardice, a trait I feel like attributing to the editors of Us Weekly for picking, among all the people on this planet, Kim Kardashian, a rich reality TV star formerly in the habit of flaunting her wealth; bound, gagged, and robbed at gunpoint, her jewels stolen, her life spared, while uncounted millions suffer daily and live in fear, too. Two million, four hundred thousand Syrian children live as refugees in other countries. Eight million, four hundred thousand Syrian children are in need in Syria and in other countries. Of the approximately 100,000 children trapped in Aleppo, does at least one of them deserve to be shown on the cover of Us Weekly with the caption, "LIVING IN FEAR"?
Us Weekly is an entertainment-oriented magazine, dealing with celebrities' lives, or speculations about their lives. It originated as a counter to People magazine, a similar kind of publication, but Us devoted itself far more to imagery, like the magazines Julie Christie peruses in the illiterate society depicted in François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. Sections in Us Weekly have titles like, "Hot Stuff," "Hot Pics," "Fashion Police," "Loose Talk."
I count seventeen appearances of Kim Kardashian on the cover of Us Weekly from just a quick scan of Googled images. There may be more; I don't care to count further because it's obvious she's been on the cover of this one magazine more times than Elizabeth Taylor (who, unlike Kardashian, had talent) appeared on the cover of Life.
A pregnant Kim is shown on one cover: "YOU CALL THIS FAT?" On another: "MY BODY IS BACK!" Then, incredibly, "TORTURED BY HER BODY."
A double image on one cover of Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian features the declaration, "IT'S WAR!" Surely, these two women must have something else to do.
Torture, war, fear. Kim Kardashian's struggles, according to Us Weekly, seem to compare to the dramas of one of Napoleon's campaigns. Called "famous for being famous," Kim Kardashian, her siblings, her mother, her step-father/-mother (the former Bruce Jenner), her various boyfriends and husbands, her in-laws, have worked with the E! Channel to create for the past decade a "real" soap opera; a storm of nothing, watched by millions of people somehow finding a tribe of self-obsessed rich fools interesting. I'm guilty of paying occasional casual attention to these assholes, myself. I've seen Kardashian programming, marveled at their unfailing capacity to sit around, complain, and do nothing; watched them drive in Beverly Hills and other rich locations, talking about each other, their occasional alienations from each other either staged, genuine, or a mixture of both, all of it done within the artifice of surrounding camera crews and television contracts. Inside this bubble (Orwellianism with expensive clothes), the Kardashians show what they possess, including some of the hot rocks stolen from Kim Kardashian, the woman living in fear.
"HUSBAND FROM HELL" "KIM DEFENDS HER LOVE" "ENOUGH"
Yes, enough; in Syria.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Donald Trump Ejaculates On America's Face
When it comes to the vote, my conscience is clear: I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party, not for Hillary Clinton, the shittiest Democratic Party candidate since Michael Dukakis twenty-eight years ago. Anyone reading this collection of essays must've realized I would never have voted for Donald Trump; I'm not, for one thing, a spineless piece of shit speaking out against the man and then supporting him, as Republican Party stars Paul Ryan and John McCain have. The Bushes and Mitt Romney, I saw on TV today, have offered Trump "the olive branch." If you believe a man is a destructive, horrible pig, why pretend otherwise, unless you're reacting from the fear of losing status in an ordered system you kiss ass to stay part of? For the sake of the country, for unity, I suppose, it's necessary, as even President Obama and Mrs. Clinton have stated in just the last twelve hours, to have "an open mind" regarding the man self-described as a predatory cunthound who also revealed by his own words his racism, bigotry, and embrace of fascism.
It's necessary, for the sake of healing our divided nation, to forget about the harms inflicted by a man who has contempt for democratic institutions, for veterans, for women, free speech, and, I add pettily, good taste. His golden Trump Tower has now been made special as a national security site, barricades out front to prevent terrorists from driving bomb-filled cars into the lobby. Legal flight routes over Manhattan have been changed. I heard, from the mouth of a news anchor, Trump Tower described as "White House North." Trump should be required to sell the building and all of his other properties. As president, he should not be concerned with his real estate, for that can create future conflicts of interest, but what kind of impractical idealism am I suggesting? His campaign has proved the news media don't care about the American people, as they have elevated the son of a bitch for the sake of ratings and satisfying greed. Trump has the mind of a criminal; he will commit crimes as president. Scandal keeps the news corporations going. The reality TV star has, and will, give us a show; maybe the last we ever watch.
I don't like Hillary Clinton, or her husband. Now, though, she's out of the presidential picture for good, unless she somehow achieves a miraculous comeback in a future election, her spectacular incompetence as a candidate overcome, incredibly, by 2020 or 2024. She's a two-time loser. Obama beat her in 2008, and an immoral sack of spoiled cheese defeated her yesterday. Her own conviction that she'd win the office she feels entitled to, bolstered by millions of deluded supporters who overlooked her unappealing qualities--her past baggage as exemplified by the e-mail controversy, her aloofness stemming from being an extremely wealthy woman with no actual record of really giving a fuck about poor people as evidenced by her closeness to big banks and Wall Street--makes her seem a tragic figure, though one who makes more money in ten minutes than most of us do in ten weeks.
Democratic Party elites forced Hillary Clinton on America in 2015; they singled her out against Senator Bernie Sanders, whose appeal transcended age groups. His ideas and proposals seemed impossible, even offensive ("Free college? Fuck, I didn't get to go to college! Nobody should be able to go for free, and who's gonna pay for it?"). Part of his, and Jill Stein's, affront to the Democratic and Republican powers, lay in their opposition to this country's addiction to throwing money at the Pentagon. Clinton and Trump both bragged about America's hard-on for militaristic greatness. We're number one, we have the greatest military, the same old jazz we've been hearing since Ronald Reagan could still read a sentence. Jingoism. The Democratic National Convention was characterized by warmongering speeches, creating a tone similar to when President George Bush punished thousands of Panamanian civilians in 1989 for the offense of living in Panama City, run at the time by former CIA asset Manuel Noriega. No country can pound the shit out of the Third World like the United States can.
Clinton and Trump both aspire to committing mass murder, taking the baton of slaughter's glories from Barack Obama, who took it from Bush, who took it from Hillary Clinton's husband. Conventional mold presidents are terroristic motherfuckers.
So I voted for Jill Stein.
Vic Neptune
When it comes to the vote, my conscience is clear: I voted for Jill Stein of the Green Party, not for Hillary Clinton, the shittiest Democratic Party candidate since Michael Dukakis twenty-eight years ago. Anyone reading this collection of essays must've realized I would never have voted for Donald Trump; I'm not, for one thing, a spineless piece of shit speaking out against the man and then supporting him, as Republican Party stars Paul Ryan and John McCain have. The Bushes and Mitt Romney, I saw on TV today, have offered Trump "the olive branch." If you believe a man is a destructive, horrible pig, why pretend otherwise, unless you're reacting from the fear of losing status in an ordered system you kiss ass to stay part of? For the sake of the country, for unity, I suppose, it's necessary, as even President Obama and Mrs. Clinton have stated in just the last twelve hours, to have "an open mind" regarding the man self-described as a predatory cunthound who also revealed by his own words his racism, bigotry, and embrace of fascism.
It's necessary, for the sake of healing our divided nation, to forget about the harms inflicted by a man who has contempt for democratic institutions, for veterans, for women, free speech, and, I add pettily, good taste. His golden Trump Tower has now been made special as a national security site, barricades out front to prevent terrorists from driving bomb-filled cars into the lobby. Legal flight routes over Manhattan have been changed. I heard, from the mouth of a news anchor, Trump Tower described as "White House North." Trump should be required to sell the building and all of his other properties. As president, he should not be concerned with his real estate, for that can create future conflicts of interest, but what kind of impractical idealism am I suggesting? His campaign has proved the news media don't care about the American people, as they have elevated the son of a bitch for the sake of ratings and satisfying greed. Trump has the mind of a criminal; he will commit crimes as president. Scandal keeps the news corporations going. The reality TV star has, and will, give us a show; maybe the last we ever watch.
I don't like Hillary Clinton, or her husband. Now, though, she's out of the presidential picture for good, unless she somehow achieves a miraculous comeback in a future election, her spectacular incompetence as a candidate overcome, incredibly, by 2020 or 2024. She's a two-time loser. Obama beat her in 2008, and an immoral sack of spoiled cheese defeated her yesterday. Her own conviction that she'd win the office she feels entitled to, bolstered by millions of deluded supporters who overlooked her unappealing qualities--her past baggage as exemplified by the e-mail controversy, her aloofness stemming from being an extremely wealthy woman with no actual record of really giving a fuck about poor people as evidenced by her closeness to big banks and Wall Street--makes her seem a tragic figure, though one who makes more money in ten minutes than most of us do in ten weeks.
Democratic Party elites forced Hillary Clinton on America in 2015; they singled her out against Senator Bernie Sanders, whose appeal transcended age groups. His ideas and proposals seemed impossible, even offensive ("Free college? Fuck, I didn't get to go to college! Nobody should be able to go for free, and who's gonna pay for it?"). Part of his, and Jill Stein's, affront to the Democratic and Republican powers, lay in their opposition to this country's addiction to throwing money at the Pentagon. Clinton and Trump both bragged about America's hard-on for militaristic greatness. We're number one, we have the greatest military, the same old jazz we've been hearing since Ronald Reagan could still read a sentence. Jingoism. The Democratic National Convention was characterized by warmongering speeches, creating a tone similar to when President George Bush punished thousands of Panamanian civilians in 1989 for the offense of living in Panama City, run at the time by former CIA asset Manuel Noriega. No country can pound the shit out of the Third World like the United States can.
Clinton and Trump both aspire to committing mass murder, taking the baton of slaughter's glories from Barack Obama, who took it from Bush, who took it from Hillary Clinton's husband. Conventional mold presidents are terroristic motherfuckers.
So I voted for Jill Stein.
Vic Neptune
Monday, November 7, 2016
Exit Stage Right
Melania Trump worked as a model in the United States illegally in the 1990s. Ironija means ironic in Slovenian, yet it seems appropriate that the wife of America's leading anti-illegal immigration advocate has this nugget in her past. Mrs. Trump's plagiarizing of Michelle Obama's speech last summer at the Republican National Convention gives further cause for me to regard her as a phony, lacking the will to be a real person in the public eye, but pretending to be genuine, just as her husband acts like his sincerity is real.
Still, regarding the couple side by side on a couch facing a TV interviewer, I felt some compassion for Mrs. Trump when she said her priority is staying home and taking care of her young son Barron, rather than traveling and making speeches for her husband's campaign. Donald Trump butted in, saying, "She's going to make some speeches. She's a wonderful speaker." She looked at him, face frozen in the usual Melania mask, but something in her eyes said, "Shut the fuck up! Don't commit me to speaking engagements during a televised interview!"
That's Donald's way. Shoot from the hip, except that Charles Bronson's character in Once Upon a Time in the West would put him on the ground.
A strange thing happened in Reno, Nevada, over the weekend. Probably many strange things happened there, but this one occurred at a Trump rally. A protestor holding a sign reading "Republicans Against Trump" was assaulted by several Trump supporters. Someone, in the middle of this, shouted "Gun!" Trump was fast-walked out by two Secret Service agents. The assaulted protestor didn't shout "Gun!" He was removed, handcuffed, by several police officers, who, upon questioning him outside, determined that he wasn't the source of the problem. It turns out that some of Donald Trump's supporters are violent white men with bigoted and racist tendencies; the kind of people who don't like foreigners, "illegals," the news media, the First Amendment, outspoken women, anyone who disagrees with the shifting viewpoints of Donald Trump.
The sign-carrier and assault victim was given permission by the cops to reenter the venue. Bear in mind, this is not yet Trump's America, but Obama's America where a citizen holding a sign saying simply, "Republicans Against Trump," a political view lacking profanity (although it could be turned into an acronym, R.A.T.), gets assaulted by other citizens, then removed in handcuffs by cops and questioned as if he's the perpetrator of a dangerous situation involving the presence of a gun, which failed to manifest. The actual menace consists of Trump's violent supporters, not those protesting him, yet, the police, in numerous cases over the past year and a half, have punished the victims, overlooking crimes carried out in front of their brutality-approving cop eyes.
What made the video from this incident all the more strange, was the way Trump looked when the agents hustled him from the podium to backstage. He shielded his gaze to see what was going on in the audience when the assault was occurring, and then felt the Secret Service muscle tightening on his arms as they moved him quickly, making him resemble a hog that hasn't moved in five years, suddenly having to relocate hastily. We don't often see Trump moving fast. He told Dr. Oz (a popular daytime TV medical professional whose personality and viewpoints have infected much of American health-based culture) that he gets exercise by gesticulating while he talks. One can expend calories by tapping one's foot to music, too, but one is still fat.
Melania Trump's immobile face betrayed an emotion to me when her husband volunteered her to give speeches, indicating he doesn't really give a shit about what she wants. This makes him typical of politicians. I mean, when politicians describe to interviewers their decision-making process in running for office, they often say they had a family meeting. Dad wants to be Senator for the great state of Ohio. Fine, but what does his fifteen year old son, who depends on his father's wealth for college and also a later career, have to say about that? Do the wishes of his six year old daughter actually matter, when it comes to issues involving her father's political ambitions? If a dad is overbearing, like Trump, does anyone in the family dare speak their actual thoughts? Or have they been brainwashed by Father's bullshit all their lives?
Donald Trump, Jr.: "My dad's gonna be president! And then you're gonna pay!"
Grab America by the pussy, Donald, but when your Secret Service guards led you out of that room in Reno, you looked like an out of shape old man who had to think, for a few seconds, that someone might shoot him. Your tough guy rhetoric didn't match the image, at all.
Vic Neptune
Melania Trump worked as a model in the United States illegally in the 1990s. Ironija means ironic in Slovenian, yet it seems appropriate that the wife of America's leading anti-illegal immigration advocate has this nugget in her past. Mrs. Trump's plagiarizing of Michelle Obama's speech last summer at the Republican National Convention gives further cause for me to regard her as a phony, lacking the will to be a real person in the public eye, but pretending to be genuine, just as her husband acts like his sincerity is real.
Still, regarding the couple side by side on a couch facing a TV interviewer, I felt some compassion for Mrs. Trump when she said her priority is staying home and taking care of her young son Barron, rather than traveling and making speeches for her husband's campaign. Donald Trump butted in, saying, "She's going to make some speeches. She's a wonderful speaker." She looked at him, face frozen in the usual Melania mask, but something in her eyes said, "Shut the fuck up! Don't commit me to speaking engagements during a televised interview!"
That's Donald's way. Shoot from the hip, except that Charles Bronson's character in Once Upon a Time in the West would put him on the ground.
A strange thing happened in Reno, Nevada, over the weekend. Probably many strange things happened there, but this one occurred at a Trump rally. A protestor holding a sign reading "Republicans Against Trump" was assaulted by several Trump supporters. Someone, in the middle of this, shouted "Gun!" Trump was fast-walked out by two Secret Service agents. The assaulted protestor didn't shout "Gun!" He was removed, handcuffed, by several police officers, who, upon questioning him outside, determined that he wasn't the source of the problem. It turns out that some of Donald Trump's supporters are violent white men with bigoted and racist tendencies; the kind of people who don't like foreigners, "illegals," the news media, the First Amendment, outspoken women, anyone who disagrees with the shifting viewpoints of Donald Trump.
The sign-carrier and assault victim was given permission by the cops to reenter the venue. Bear in mind, this is not yet Trump's America, but Obama's America where a citizen holding a sign saying simply, "Republicans Against Trump," a political view lacking profanity (although it could be turned into an acronym, R.A.T.), gets assaulted by other citizens, then removed in handcuffs by cops and questioned as if he's the perpetrator of a dangerous situation involving the presence of a gun, which failed to manifest. The actual menace consists of Trump's violent supporters, not those protesting him, yet, the police, in numerous cases over the past year and a half, have punished the victims, overlooking crimes carried out in front of their brutality-approving cop eyes.
What made the video from this incident all the more strange, was the way Trump looked when the agents hustled him from the podium to backstage. He shielded his gaze to see what was going on in the audience when the assault was occurring, and then felt the Secret Service muscle tightening on his arms as they moved him quickly, making him resemble a hog that hasn't moved in five years, suddenly having to relocate hastily. We don't often see Trump moving fast. He told Dr. Oz (a popular daytime TV medical professional whose personality and viewpoints have infected much of American health-based culture) that he gets exercise by gesticulating while he talks. One can expend calories by tapping one's foot to music, too, but one is still fat.
Melania Trump's immobile face betrayed an emotion to me when her husband volunteered her to give speeches, indicating he doesn't really give a shit about what she wants. This makes him typical of politicians. I mean, when politicians describe to interviewers their decision-making process in running for office, they often say they had a family meeting. Dad wants to be Senator for the great state of Ohio. Fine, but what does his fifteen year old son, who depends on his father's wealth for college and also a later career, have to say about that? Do the wishes of his six year old daughter actually matter, when it comes to issues involving her father's political ambitions? If a dad is overbearing, like Trump, does anyone in the family dare speak their actual thoughts? Or have they been brainwashed by Father's bullshit all their lives?
Donald Trump, Jr.: "My dad's gonna be president! And then you're gonna pay!"
Grab America by the pussy, Donald, but when your Secret Service guards led you out of that room in Reno, you looked like an out of shape old man who had to think, for a few seconds, that someone might shoot him. Your tough guy rhetoric didn't match the image, at all.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
Dorothy Doesn't Make It to the Storm Cellar
Michael Jackson, in John Landis's epic 1983 "Thriller" music video, transmogrifies into a werecat. Such alteration from pop singer to beast mirrors Jackson's changing face as he welcomed plastic surgery, a process coinciding with his withdrawal from the public gaze, making him a reclusive legend, his attempt at a comeback in his final year a guaranteed moneymaker.
In 1981, 1982, and most of 1983, MTV's music videos were mostly three to five minute presentations. "Michael Jackson's Thriller," at thirteen minutes and forty-one seconds, was a short film budgeted at half a million dollars, roughly 1.2 million today. For a music video to cost so much money seemed typical of the excess already displayed by the video's director, John Landis. In 1982, he directed his segment of the anthology film, Twilight Zone: The Movie. Actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed in a spectacular scene lacking proper safety measures and characterized by poor communications between director and crew. Taking place in Vietnam, the scene, like that war, was too real. In 1983, Landis brought out a clever and funny comedy, Trading Places, the "Thriller" video, and the sour-tasting Twilight Zone, minus the death scene featuring Morrow and the two children, aged six and seven, working in violation of the law prohibiting child actors from working at night, and also in the proximity of explosions.
Exploitation of children to make films was not new in 1982. Judy Garland, when a minor, was the victim of child abuse by studio head Louis B. Mayer. He didn't hit her or sexually molest her, but he did have her on a cruel diet to keep her weight where he wanted it. When the other members of cast and crew got to have lunch, Garland didn't. The phrase "sing for your supper" literally fit Judy Garland's adolescence as she worked for MGM studios, making lots of money for them.
Like the tyrant Mayer, Michael Jackson's father, Joe, also abused Michael, whipping him, subjecting him to verbal abuse, telling him he had a fat nose. Was Michael's nose, diminishing over the years, the result of his father's opinion of its natural size? Was there truly anything wrong with the appearance of his nose when he was a child and young man? Was young Judy Garland fat? Do parents often tell youthful people with naturally impressionable minds things that just aren't true, but that sink into psyches not yet strong enough to weigh evidence logically?
Landis and his pyrotechnics crew thought they knew what they were doing, and they didn't. Vic Morrow was a hero; he tried to save the lives of those kids as the "make-believe" explosions made the set verge towards lethality, followed by the helicopter finally coming down on them.
The mistreatment of child actors in Golden Age Hollywood led to laws like requiring filmmakers not to make minors work at night, but even in 1982 that wasn't followed by Landis, one of America's most popular, at the time, directors. The following year, we saw Twilight Zone: The Movie, the real carnage cut out, and got thrilled by the groundbreaking music video starring the abused child of one of the world's famous stage dads. Bury the children, the show must go on.
Vic Neptune
Michael Jackson, in John Landis's epic 1983 "Thriller" music video, transmogrifies into a werecat. Such alteration from pop singer to beast mirrors Jackson's changing face as he welcomed plastic surgery, a process coinciding with his withdrawal from the public gaze, making him a reclusive legend, his attempt at a comeback in his final year a guaranteed moneymaker.
In 1981, 1982, and most of 1983, MTV's music videos were mostly three to five minute presentations. "Michael Jackson's Thriller," at thirteen minutes and forty-one seconds, was a short film budgeted at half a million dollars, roughly 1.2 million today. For a music video to cost so much money seemed typical of the excess already displayed by the video's director, John Landis. In 1982, he directed his segment of the anthology film, Twilight Zone: The Movie. Actor Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed in a spectacular scene lacking proper safety measures and characterized by poor communications between director and crew. Taking place in Vietnam, the scene, like that war, was too real. In 1983, Landis brought out a clever and funny comedy, Trading Places, the "Thriller" video, and the sour-tasting Twilight Zone, minus the death scene featuring Morrow and the two children, aged six and seven, working in violation of the law prohibiting child actors from working at night, and also in the proximity of explosions.
Exploitation of children to make films was not new in 1982. Judy Garland, when a minor, was the victim of child abuse by studio head Louis B. Mayer. He didn't hit her or sexually molest her, but he did have her on a cruel diet to keep her weight where he wanted it. When the other members of cast and crew got to have lunch, Garland didn't. The phrase "sing for your supper" literally fit Judy Garland's adolescence as she worked for MGM studios, making lots of money for them.
Like the tyrant Mayer, Michael Jackson's father, Joe, also abused Michael, whipping him, subjecting him to verbal abuse, telling him he had a fat nose. Was Michael's nose, diminishing over the years, the result of his father's opinion of its natural size? Was there truly anything wrong with the appearance of his nose when he was a child and young man? Was young Judy Garland fat? Do parents often tell youthful people with naturally impressionable minds things that just aren't true, but that sink into psyches not yet strong enough to weigh evidence logically?
Landis and his pyrotechnics crew thought they knew what they were doing, and they didn't. Vic Morrow was a hero; he tried to save the lives of those kids as the "make-believe" explosions made the set verge towards lethality, followed by the helicopter finally coming down on them.
The mistreatment of child actors in Golden Age Hollywood led to laws like requiring filmmakers not to make minors work at night, but even in 1982 that wasn't followed by Landis, one of America's most popular, at the time, directors. The following year, we saw Twilight Zone: The Movie, the real carnage cut out, and got thrilled by the groundbreaking music video starring the abused child of one of the world's famous stage dads. Bury the children, the show must go on.
Vic Neptune
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