Alan Arkin Played a Russian
I've noticed a despair in those anti-Trump citizens who had hope in a different outcome last November. The big Hillary Clinton rally planned in New York showed a crowd of quiet, shocked people on the evening of November 8, when their candidate wasn't pulling ahead of the hated opponent. She was like a race car stalling three-fourths of the way through the race; everyone had expected her to win, even those working for the other side. Trump and his close associates, including family members, have admitted they were surprised by the election's results. Now, with great attention in the news media paid to the "Russian hack," Vladimir Putin and his nefarious intelligence machine can be blamed for Trump's victory, for Clinton's humiliation in losing to a sexist pig with no morals.
John Locke, played by Terry O'Quinn in the TV show Lost, says that he doesn't need hope after he and the other survivors of the plane crash have found themselves on a deserted island. Of hope, he says, "I stopped looking for it." Thus, he found himself, by letting the chaos of the situation run his life from then on. Such fatalism can be found in combat soldiers who live day by day, knowing that at any minute they might get killed or maimed, that a situation of health, high or low spirits, of humor with one's comrades, might instantly turn into a time of danger, mindless survival, and blood-shedding. World War Two's most decorated American soldier, Audie Murphy (who became a Hollywood actor), had this fatalistic streak in his character. Arguably, that's what made him do his heroic deeds. He didn't think about what might be, but about what is.
Regardless of the victor of the 2016 presidential election, each American must deal with the consequence. I've heard the phrase, "We're all doomed," as applied to the upcoming Trump administration. I aver that if Clinton had won, wars would have still continued, arms dealers and manufacturers would still be profiting from misery and destruction, the oil-based economy ruining the environment would still be running smoothly under Hillary Clinton. Now, it looks like the Democrats want to exacerbate tensions with Russia, a move coinciding, perhaps, with a desire to shift bad guys from traditional terrorists to Russia. Syria shows that the U.S. and Russia both attack terror groups and also arm them in a bewildering situation neither Trump nor Clinton ever bothered to explain to voters. Obama doesn't attack Assad, Syria's ruler, and neither do the Russians, who directly support him. Assad fights ISIS, that terror group fought by the U.S. and Russia, but supported by Saudi Arabia, itself supported by the U.S. in its depredations against the Yemeni people, a people also attacked intermittently over the years by the U.S. The entire Middle East is a playground where high tech nations make war on low tech groups, using them against each other. When former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was asked on 60 Minutes about how many wars the U.S. is currently engaged in, he laughed, the kind of chuckle that one associates with, "Gee whiz, that's a good question."
Even a top level cabinet position Defense Secretary (albeit a former one) doesn't know what the fuck is going on in the "spheres of interest" concerning U.S. military-industrial powers. From these same kinds of "expert" echelons, we're supposed to accept without question the idea that Hillary Clinton isn't going to be the president because Putin and his computer-wielding employees managed to swing the election with "fake news." Did Putin convince Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin? Did she, in fact, make many stumblebum moves on her own, leading to her defeat? Wasn't her personality a drawback? Trump, odious as he is, didn't have the disadvantage Clinton had: a nation already sick of her, going back to the 1990's. She was nothing new. She was old guard establishment in a year when the populace at large wanted something else. I know that Trump lost the popular vote, but in our system, that doesn't matter, right, President Gore?
I live in the present, I surf this wave. I know there are obstacles in the water, danger spots. I've lived through numerous shitty presidential administrations that have made lying into a nearly enshrined habit in cooperation with the news media that enabled them to lie. This kind of shit will not change, regardless of a Trump or Clinton outcome. Putin wanted Trump as president instead of Clinton. Of course he did. In regard to Putin, Trump is more pliable to Russia's wishes. The United States does the same kind of thing with other countries, influencing elections, conducting cyber-warfare. American politicians and top news media commentators are always shocked and outraged when it's found that others in different countries do the same kinds of shitty things to the U.S. that we do to other countries. It's realpolitik when we do it, evil when they do it.
I say, fuck em all. Power players of the world are shits, operating on the shittiest levels of morality. I don't require their approval or disapproval as I live my life, nor should you. Trump won the race, but so what? You still have to tie your shoes in the morning, go to work, shop for groceries, drive safely, communicate with others, be alert to dangers typical and atypical, and besides, it's often the bastards of the world who inspire ordinary people to find their voices. How often did mild-mannered Obama inspire you to get angry about politics, war, injustice? You had to dig to find stories about the crimes he's committed, the children he's blown to bits with Hellfire missiles, because the major news media (even Fox) sure weren't talking about that. Republicans in Congress got bent out of shape about Hillary Clinton's handling of the Benghazi consulate and the four Americans killed there, but they didn't give a shit about the much more brutal all-out war she fomented in Libya to overthrow Gaddafi.
Goodbye to 2016, a year when two monsters ran for president, the one resembling a Cheeto made of Play-doh winning without the support of the powerless American people. I expect 2017 to be even more absurd, especially given the blending of news media corporations with power, as we'll see even "liberal" outlets suck up to Trump, mainly by giving him the attention he craves. None of this shit is going to have an effect on my self-esteem. I'll continue to live my life, finding my way without worrying about hope, because I stopped looking for that a long time ago.
Vic Neptune
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Only Man At the Orgy
Elvis Presley serenades a woman in the Arizona desert in the film, Tickle Me. His voice resonating with reverb, no microphone or audio effects in sight, he causes the woman to melt against him. In 1965, the year of the movie, the Pill had already become available, yet, at one point, Presley says, going into one of his many passionate embraces with the luscious actress Jocelyn Lane, "If this keeps up, we'll have to get married." The film ends with Presley and Lane, married, driving to their honeymoon, entering the Kingdom of Squaresville, presumably, a pair of young attractive lovers who require the bond of marriage to fuck each other--in 1965, after the Pill, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, after the explosion of Beatlemania, after the explosion of John F. Kennedy's head.
In Hollywood films, the motif of a female and male couple spending the movie flirting, arguing, making up, and finally getting together, is so frequent it amounts to a cultural policy. The way to fucking is through marriage; that's the ideal. Extramarital or premarital sex is not encouraged, and if these taboos are ever violated, the punishments are severe. James Mason, in East Side West Side, a good 1949 drama with excellent performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin, plays a fellow who screws Ava Gardner's character, while Stanwyck, playing Mason's wife, has no idea what's really happening for most of the movie. This is one of the few classic age Hollywood films I've seen that really delves into adultery, but in the end, Mason's character is ruined. It would be interesting to see a film of that period that doesn't present the attitude of harsh judgment towards adulterers. The adulterers have no problem with what they're doing; in the end, they're happy. One of them got out of a bad marriage by screwing someone else.
Barbara Stanwyck walks in on Ava Gardner straddling James Mason, who says, "Oh, hello dear. We've just been rearranging the bed sheets."
Stanwyck drives fast--tears--heavy orchestral swellings--big black 1940s car flies off a pier into the East River--Ava Gardner and James Mason fuck the crap out of each other, then eat poached eggs, toast, and grapefruit.
The problem with depicting reality in a 1965 Elvis Presley film is related to the fact that "the Sixties" hadn't started yet. A year later, Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane, they recorded Surrealistic Pillow, an album far removed from the candy fantasy world of Tickle Me. In seeing documentary footage of the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, I'm struck by how weird young people of that time were, how very different they behaved and appeared compared to their parents' generation. A young woman walking about in a big city wearing an oversized top hat, with a flower design painted on her cheek, was not an unusual sight in those days. Hallucinogens were easily available. People were out in public in droves, fucked up, mentally altered. All this while the Johnson administration was killing thousands of people every month in Southeast Asia, a region heavy in the growth of opium. Heroin became cash for the CIA. The United States government, while it condemned the youth drug revolution, was simultaneously a major world drug trafficker and dealer. What with Afghanistan and opium, how much has that situation changed? Could it be that when a government lashes out at something (drugs, terrorism, etc.), it's actually covering it's own practices in these fields of activity?
The young woman of the example above (top hat, flower painted on cheek) is only two or three years removed from the dozens of wholesome-looking young women, all properly coiffed, dressed, all freshly bathed, in Tickle Me. Elvis in the movie doesn't smoke cigarettes or grass (the term of the day for marijuana), doesn't try Acid, eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, or inject himself with heroin. Such activities would not have fit the film's tone. Instead, he performs spontaneously, even while pitchforking hay for the horses, his golden voice drawing crowds of women who stare at him with an ache on their faces, all of them wet in their panties, sex itself an acceptable drug in 1965 Hollywood as long as it's not mentioned or discussed, after the Pill had become available, after Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, after the hydrogen bomb.
Vic Neptune
Elvis Presley serenades a woman in the Arizona desert in the film, Tickle Me. His voice resonating with reverb, no microphone or audio effects in sight, he causes the woman to melt against him. In 1965, the year of the movie, the Pill had already become available, yet, at one point, Presley says, going into one of his many passionate embraces with the luscious actress Jocelyn Lane, "If this keeps up, we'll have to get married." The film ends with Presley and Lane, married, driving to their honeymoon, entering the Kingdom of Squaresville, presumably, a pair of young attractive lovers who require the bond of marriage to fuck each other--in 1965, after the Pill, after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, after the explosion of Beatlemania, after the explosion of John F. Kennedy's head.
In Hollywood films, the motif of a female and male couple spending the movie flirting, arguing, making up, and finally getting together, is so frequent it amounts to a cultural policy. The way to fucking is through marriage; that's the ideal. Extramarital or premarital sex is not encouraged, and if these taboos are ever violated, the punishments are severe. James Mason, in East Side West Side, a good 1949 drama with excellent performances by Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin, plays a fellow who screws Ava Gardner's character, while Stanwyck, playing Mason's wife, has no idea what's really happening for most of the movie. This is one of the few classic age Hollywood films I've seen that really delves into adultery, but in the end, Mason's character is ruined. It would be interesting to see a film of that period that doesn't present the attitude of harsh judgment towards adulterers. The adulterers have no problem with what they're doing; in the end, they're happy. One of them got out of a bad marriage by screwing someone else.
Barbara Stanwyck walks in on Ava Gardner straddling James Mason, who says, "Oh, hello dear. We've just been rearranging the bed sheets."
Stanwyck drives fast--tears--heavy orchestral swellings--big black 1940s car flies off a pier into the East River--Ava Gardner and James Mason fuck the crap out of each other, then eat poached eggs, toast, and grapefruit.
The problem with depicting reality in a 1965 Elvis Presley film is related to the fact that "the Sixties" hadn't started yet. A year later, Grace Slick joined Jefferson Airplane, they recorded Surrealistic Pillow, an album far removed from the candy fantasy world of Tickle Me. In seeing documentary footage of the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, I'm struck by how weird young people of that time were, how very different they behaved and appeared compared to their parents' generation. A young woman walking about in a big city wearing an oversized top hat, with a flower design painted on her cheek, was not an unusual sight in those days. Hallucinogens were easily available. People were out in public in droves, fucked up, mentally altered. All this while the Johnson administration was killing thousands of people every month in Southeast Asia, a region heavy in the growth of opium. Heroin became cash for the CIA. The United States government, while it condemned the youth drug revolution, was simultaneously a major world drug trafficker and dealer. What with Afghanistan and opium, how much has that situation changed? Could it be that when a government lashes out at something (drugs, terrorism, etc.), it's actually covering it's own practices in these fields of activity?
The young woman of the example above (top hat, flower painted on cheek) is only two or three years removed from the dozens of wholesome-looking young women, all properly coiffed, dressed, all freshly bathed, in Tickle Me. Elvis in the movie doesn't smoke cigarettes or grass (the term of the day for marijuana), doesn't try Acid, eat hallucinogenic mushrooms, or inject himself with heroin. Such activities would not have fit the film's tone. Instead, he performs spontaneously, even while pitchforking hay for the horses, his golden voice drawing crowds of women who stare at him with an ache on their faces, all of them wet in their panties, sex itself an acceptable drug in 1965 Hollywood as long as it's not mentioned or discussed, after the Pill had become available, after Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, after the hydrogen bomb.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Merry Christmas
Now that it's winter, summer in the Atacama Desert, I feel the familiar sense of seasonal transition, a perception linked to the mathematical portion of my brain, the idea that just because a solstice or equinox occurs at a precise time on the clock, my mood shifts automatically from tired despair associated with the passing season to new awareness of possibilities in the new season, even though this one coming today is winter, the environmental miseries of which make it my least favorite season.
Many centuries ago, Christians, basing their inspiration on a then-popular religion, Mithraism, decided that Jesus was born on December 25, a date close to the Winter Solstice, but also the birthday of Mithra, a deity worshipped extensively by Roman legionnaires. The Winter Solstice represents the moment when light begins to grow, the days lengthening from that point. Jesus, as mythological figure, starts life, then, on a date similar to the concept of the birth of a new star. Appropriation of Mithra's birthday also helped people of the Greco-Roman period associate the new god, Christ, with something familiar. Psychological studies by fast food corporations have shown that the colors red, yellow, and orange promote hunger. No fast food restaurant would be painted wall to wall pink, a color said to inhibit the appetite. Give the new worshippers of Christ something familiar, like Mithra's birthday. It's a way, too, of stealing a familiar idea from another competing religion. Adolf Hitler, when he designed the Nazi Party's flag, chose red on purpose because it's the color associated with Communism.
Much of what happens in the human sphere has less to do with divine intervention and more to do with psychological manipulations and chance. People choose to do much of the activities they do; they also are guided by larger forces in their lives, events beyond the horizons of their perceptions and experiences that nevertheless affect them--call that fate.
If someone is a Christian, that has mostly to do with where that person was born and who they were born to, or raised by. No baby or small child would ever think about Jesus, Muhammad, or Moses, if their parents didn't have them indoctrinated in religions associated with those personages. It's possible that someone growing up in isolation, never hearing of God or other religious ideas, would ever think of anything associated with divinity. Yet, ancestors of current humanity's deep past had thoughts, feelings, visions, associated with divine experience impacting the species. This could come from within, or from without, or both. Modern scientists point to noisy brain activity in schizophrenics, for instance, as being responsible for voices and visions manifesting to the schizophrenic and no one else. Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) alone heard her voices and acted upon what they told her to do, actions that changed the histories of France and England. If her "voices" were the result of mental illness, as some with modern psychiatric viewpoints believe, we nevertheless can't dismiss what that extraordinary teenaged woman accomplished in the fifteenth century. I don't know if God, through saintly intermediaries, talked directly to Jeanne d'Arc, but I know she experienced something significant enough to motivate Charles VII to get off his ass and do something about the English forces marauding across and occupying his country.
The human mind, as we know, changes the world. Inventions, like portable phones linked to a vast information transfer network--something existing only in science fiction as recently as the
1980s--didn't just appear like mushrooms on the dark side of a tree. People dream up and create things, altering the world thereby. Earth has become, like its dominant species, technologized. Floating islands of discarded plastic in the oceans should remind us that we make both wonders and pollutions as the results of our ideas, the "voices" coming to us.
It doesn't matter to me if God exists or not. There have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history; people are creating the conditions for the sixth. In terms of survival--and what else ultimately matters?--it's important to take "the end," not any terminus written about thousands of years ago in prophetic books and taken literally even today, as a real danger that affects all life on the planet. Governments that don't take this seriously are useless to humanity and non-human life forms. Any politician who doesn't take this matter seriously is a fucking idiot.
If God, who's said to have created Earth, shows anything truly revealing about a long-term strategy, it's the allowance of five mass extinctions which should make any religious person pause and wonder. That humanity, God's height of creation according to the Bible, should be responsible for the mass killing of millions of species as well as itself, indicates a deity that doesn't think in terms of humanity as the ultimate jewel of divine contemplation. That would mean a future species, or perhaps a species existing currently in another star system, enjoying God's preeminent favor. These kinds of thoughts might motivate a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, to stop thinking about being so special in God's grand unknowable scheme. Religious systems are a way of getting to enlightenment, not enlightenment itself.
I'm of the opinion that should a humanity-caused mass extinction event occur, there will then be no more Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, or others religiously categorizable, but God, whatever that is, will still be. Any human survivors will then make new religions, and God may wonder why humanity didn't learn from the last catastrophe that religions are a side effect, not the goal, of true visionaries.
Vic Neptune
Now that it's winter, summer in the Atacama Desert, I feel the familiar sense of seasonal transition, a perception linked to the mathematical portion of my brain, the idea that just because a solstice or equinox occurs at a precise time on the clock, my mood shifts automatically from tired despair associated with the passing season to new awareness of possibilities in the new season, even though this one coming today is winter, the environmental miseries of which make it my least favorite season.
Many centuries ago, Christians, basing their inspiration on a then-popular religion, Mithraism, decided that Jesus was born on December 25, a date close to the Winter Solstice, but also the birthday of Mithra, a deity worshipped extensively by Roman legionnaires. The Winter Solstice represents the moment when light begins to grow, the days lengthening from that point. Jesus, as mythological figure, starts life, then, on a date similar to the concept of the birth of a new star. Appropriation of Mithra's birthday also helped people of the Greco-Roman period associate the new god, Christ, with something familiar. Psychological studies by fast food corporations have shown that the colors red, yellow, and orange promote hunger. No fast food restaurant would be painted wall to wall pink, a color said to inhibit the appetite. Give the new worshippers of Christ something familiar, like Mithra's birthday. It's a way, too, of stealing a familiar idea from another competing religion. Adolf Hitler, when he designed the Nazi Party's flag, chose red on purpose because it's the color associated with Communism.
Much of what happens in the human sphere has less to do with divine intervention and more to do with psychological manipulations and chance. People choose to do much of the activities they do; they also are guided by larger forces in their lives, events beyond the horizons of their perceptions and experiences that nevertheless affect them--call that fate.
If someone is a Christian, that has mostly to do with where that person was born and who they were born to, or raised by. No baby or small child would ever think about Jesus, Muhammad, or Moses, if their parents didn't have them indoctrinated in religions associated with those personages. It's possible that someone growing up in isolation, never hearing of God or other religious ideas, would ever think of anything associated with divinity. Yet, ancestors of current humanity's deep past had thoughts, feelings, visions, associated with divine experience impacting the species. This could come from within, or from without, or both. Modern scientists point to noisy brain activity in schizophrenics, for instance, as being responsible for voices and visions manifesting to the schizophrenic and no one else. Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) alone heard her voices and acted upon what they told her to do, actions that changed the histories of France and England. If her "voices" were the result of mental illness, as some with modern psychiatric viewpoints believe, we nevertheless can't dismiss what that extraordinary teenaged woman accomplished in the fifteenth century. I don't know if God, through saintly intermediaries, talked directly to Jeanne d'Arc, but I know she experienced something significant enough to motivate Charles VII to get off his ass and do something about the English forces marauding across and occupying his country.
The human mind, as we know, changes the world. Inventions, like portable phones linked to a vast information transfer network--something existing only in science fiction as recently as the
1980s--didn't just appear like mushrooms on the dark side of a tree. People dream up and create things, altering the world thereby. Earth has become, like its dominant species, technologized. Floating islands of discarded plastic in the oceans should remind us that we make both wonders and pollutions as the results of our ideas, the "voices" coming to us.
It doesn't matter to me if God exists or not. There have been five mass extinction events in Earth's history; people are creating the conditions for the sixth. In terms of survival--and what else ultimately matters?--it's important to take "the end," not any terminus written about thousands of years ago in prophetic books and taken literally even today, as a real danger that affects all life on the planet. Governments that don't take this seriously are useless to humanity and non-human life forms. Any politician who doesn't take this matter seriously is a fucking idiot.
If God, who's said to have created Earth, shows anything truly revealing about a long-term strategy, it's the allowance of five mass extinctions which should make any religious person pause and wonder. That humanity, God's height of creation according to the Bible, should be responsible for the mass killing of millions of species as well as itself, indicates a deity that doesn't think in terms of humanity as the ultimate jewel of divine contemplation. That would mean a future species, or perhaps a species existing currently in another star system, enjoying God's preeminent favor. These kinds of thoughts might motivate a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, to stop thinking about being so special in God's grand unknowable scheme. Religious systems are a way of getting to enlightenment, not enlightenment itself.
I'm of the opinion that should a humanity-caused mass extinction event occur, there will then be no more Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, or others religiously categorizable, but God, whatever that is, will still be. Any human survivors will then make new religions, and God may wonder why humanity didn't learn from the last catastrophe that religions are a side effect, not the goal, of true visionaries.
Vic Neptune
Wednesday, December 14, 2016
Vic Neptune Scoffs At a Famous Walter Cronkite Moment
Selective outrage. It could be a class taken by corporate TV news people and by politicians, but it's a form of acting they practice without deformations of their consciences. Not being part of the political, lobbying, or news media groups, I must imagine why Joe Scarborough of MSNBC (to name just one of these dishonest purveyors of cockeyed morality), in ranting about the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, failed to point out the similarity of buildings wrecked in warfare in Syria with those in Gaza City, or Beirut. Thinking he was making an important statement, Scarborough said that "mankind" is to blame for the horrors in Aleppo. "What this says about all of us," he claimed on his show this morning, is something we need to be thinking about. Therefore--I'll finish his thought--I'm to blame, my neighbor's dog is to blame, the college students living down the street from me are to blame, some random breast cancer survivor in Ohio is to blame, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics is to blame....
Scarborough's stupid generalization fails to point at someone who really is to blame for the carnage in Aleppo: Bashar al-Assad. And what about the rebels, armed with First World weaponry, much of it supplied by the United States? They, too, are to blame. I'm not at all to blame for Aleppo's destruction, or for the War on Terror. Nations bombing Syria, including Assad's air force, are to blame, too. The U.S., Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, all of them concerned with oil, influence in the Middle East, and maintaining the struggle for top dog position, are to blame for Syria's chaos and human toll.
Scarborough, typical of viewpoints in establishment U.S. news, didn't find the atrocities committed by the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Forces in their many wars against Palestinians and the Lebanese something to condemn. MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, during the last Israeli assault on Gaza City, often showed lengthy images of that crowded place lit up by bombardments and flares. On the screen, a densely populated city attacked night and day, while news commentators interviewed Israel's "defense" apologists here and abroad. Mass murder happening before their eyes, and they speak as if it's Israel's "right" to defend itself, when all their leaders have been doing is committing an offense against humanity that should be punished with lifelong prison terms.
What's happening in Aleppo, what's been happening in Syria for five years, is atrocious, but when it suits Scarborough and others of his kind, the crimes there become truly horrifying and valid. When Benjamin Netanyahu obliterates Palestinians, Scarborough and others of his kind have nothing to say about the victims.
I don't know how some people compartmentalize outrage. I'm the type of person who condemned the 9/11 attacks, but also condemned the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. All of these aggressions were immoral and led to further immoralities. Most people are not to blame for 9/11, or for the attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq by U.S. forces. Osama bin Laden, the CIA that funded him and his Mujahideen, and shit-on-the-Third-World U.S. foreign policy, are to blame for 9/11. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, their cabinet, the U.S. news media and most American politicians of the early twenty-first century are to blame for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. "Mankind" didn't react brutally to the Arab Spring, but Bashar al-Assad did.
Distorting or lying about reality by news people and politicians suits those interests which don't want consumers of information to know what's going on in the world. It could be that having an ignoramus speak the news or offer opinions about world events works doubly well, for it comes across as sincere, since the ignoramus, Joe Scarborough in today's example, makes lots of money, has his own show, knows where to stop the conversation if it gets too controversial (like admitting that Palestinians are human), and, since he loves himself, his salary, and his own voice, isn't about to do anything drastic, like displease his corporate masters. Walter Cronkite, after all, though he voiced, on air, his opposition to the Vietnam War, waited until he was nearing retirement, and after that war had already claimed millions of lives. That weak condemnation of the Vietnam War by a corporate journalist is still considered a "brave" act.
In America, land of free speech, it's corporate journalists who have very little to say about the truth. This past year it eventually became good ratings for journalists to argue with Trump's mouthpieces, so they got "tough" and went for it once their bosses told them to behave like real journalists (ask follow-up questions).
If you ever watch Morning Joe, look at the "window" behind Scarborough, at the two American flags fluttering in some real or CGI breeze. He's as phony and insecure about his actual regard for his country as is Sean Hannity. Why do "patriots" need props? Would Scarborough love his country if he lost all his money, and would it be Mankind's fault if he went broke?
Vic Neptune
Selective outrage. It could be a class taken by corporate TV news people and by politicians, but it's a form of acting they practice without deformations of their consciences. Not being part of the political, lobbying, or news media groups, I must imagine why Joe Scarborough of MSNBC (to name just one of these dishonest purveyors of cockeyed morality), in ranting about the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Aleppo, failed to point out the similarity of buildings wrecked in warfare in Syria with those in Gaza City, or Beirut. Thinking he was making an important statement, Scarborough said that "mankind" is to blame for the horrors in Aleppo. "What this says about all of us," he claimed on his show this morning, is something we need to be thinking about. Therefore--I'll finish his thought--I'm to blame, my neighbor's dog is to blame, the college students living down the street from me are to blame, some random breast cancer survivor in Ohio is to blame, Stan Lee of Marvel Comics is to blame....
Scarborough's stupid generalization fails to point at someone who really is to blame for the carnage in Aleppo: Bashar al-Assad. And what about the rebels, armed with First World weaponry, much of it supplied by the United States? They, too, are to blame. I'm not at all to blame for Aleppo's destruction, or for the War on Terror. Nations bombing Syria, including Assad's air force, are to blame, too. The U.S., Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, all of them concerned with oil, influence in the Middle East, and maintaining the struggle for top dog position, are to blame for Syria's chaos and human toll.
Scarborough, typical of viewpoints in establishment U.S. news, didn't find the atrocities committed by the Israeli government and Israeli Defense Forces in their many wars against Palestinians and the Lebanese something to condemn. MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, during the last Israeli assault on Gaza City, often showed lengthy images of that crowded place lit up by bombardments and flares. On the screen, a densely populated city attacked night and day, while news commentators interviewed Israel's "defense" apologists here and abroad. Mass murder happening before their eyes, and they speak as if it's Israel's "right" to defend itself, when all their leaders have been doing is committing an offense against humanity that should be punished with lifelong prison terms.
What's happening in Aleppo, what's been happening in Syria for five years, is atrocious, but when it suits Scarborough and others of his kind, the crimes there become truly horrifying and valid. When Benjamin Netanyahu obliterates Palestinians, Scarborough and others of his kind have nothing to say about the victims.
I don't know how some people compartmentalize outrage. I'm the type of person who condemned the 9/11 attacks, but also condemned the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. All of these aggressions were immoral and led to further immoralities. Most people are not to blame for 9/11, or for the attacks against Afghanistan and Iraq by U.S. forces. Osama bin Laden, the CIA that funded him and his Mujahideen, and shit-on-the-Third-World U.S. foreign policy, are to blame for 9/11. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, their cabinet, the U.S. news media and most American politicians of the early twenty-first century are to blame for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. "Mankind" didn't react brutally to the Arab Spring, but Bashar al-Assad did.
Distorting or lying about reality by news people and politicians suits those interests which don't want consumers of information to know what's going on in the world. It could be that having an ignoramus speak the news or offer opinions about world events works doubly well, for it comes across as sincere, since the ignoramus, Joe Scarborough in today's example, makes lots of money, has his own show, knows where to stop the conversation if it gets too controversial (like admitting that Palestinians are human), and, since he loves himself, his salary, and his own voice, isn't about to do anything drastic, like displease his corporate masters. Walter Cronkite, after all, though he voiced, on air, his opposition to the Vietnam War, waited until he was nearing retirement, and after that war had already claimed millions of lives. That weak condemnation of the Vietnam War by a corporate journalist is still considered a "brave" act.
In America, land of free speech, it's corporate journalists who have very little to say about the truth. This past year it eventually became good ratings for journalists to argue with Trump's mouthpieces, so they got "tough" and went for it once their bosses told them to behave like real journalists (ask follow-up questions).
If you ever watch Morning Joe, look at the "window" behind Scarborough, at the two American flags fluttering in some real or CGI breeze. He's as phony and insecure about his actual regard for his country as is Sean Hannity. Why do "patriots" need props? Would Scarborough love his country if he lost all his money, and would it be Mankind's fault if he went broke?
Vic Neptune
Thursday, December 8, 2016
If the Second Coming Has Already Happened, Jesus Has Already Been Killed
Donald Trump's business activities are now being debated about in the news media as probable conflicts of interest in relation to his next job: President of the United States. It would be anti-Constitutional (illegal) for him to receive money from other countries, since he's an international money phenomenon, while he's our leader, meaning that as of his first second as president on January 20, 2017, he'll be a lawbreaker if he's still profiting from his extensive foreign business activities.
That being the law, it makes sense that since we'll know his whereabouts on January 20, and that cops will be abundantly present at the Inauguration, Trump should, if he hasn't completely divested himself from foreign earnings by then, be arrested, read his rights, and taken to jail, with a bail set at an appropriately high level, considering the nature of the crime.
Even if he's in violation of the Constitution on this matter, Trump will not be arrested, will not suffer any uncomfortable consequences. We live in an age of who-cares-about-ethics? Rich people only very rarely get arrested and go to prison (let's call them caged unicorns). Trump's recent choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (the purpose of which is in the name of the organization) is a climate-change denying oil industry-friendly attorney general of Oklahoma, whose anti-regulatory views will undoubtedly result in long-term health problems for countless Americans, killing people, ultimately, for the sake of helping rich polluters get richer. This kind of thing is also not going to result in any perpetrator going to prison. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, a job calling for someone interested in protecting the nation's environment, was James Watt, a Fundamentalist Christian moron who enjoyed shooting buffalo from a great distance. Watt also firmly believed in the imminent End of Days, and apparently wasn't concerned about destroying the environment in favor of energy corporations' profits. Reagan, too, believed in the End of Days, took advice from astrologers consulted by the First Lady, and sent the Ayatollah Khomeini a signed copy of the Bible, hoping, I guess, to convert Iran's leader amidst illegally selling him missiles.
I'm not convinced that people in high office are intelligent.
Trump, intelligent, yes, at making money and swindling people. Trump, not so intelligent when it comes to things like putting his name on a fraud-based "learning institution," Trump University, and then getting sued and investigated in recent months, finally settling for millions of dollars right before the election to get that monkey off his back.
This next thing, put in here for the hell of it--I learned about it today--is from six years ago, and illustrates the perfidy of two Democratic politicians, Barack Obama and Mary Landrieu, former Louisiana Senator. 2010, the year of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, led some to wonder about President Obama's connections to that corporation. Senator Landrieu, too, like Obama, had received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the years from BP. The broken pipe at the bottom of the sea gushed black energy-ejaculate into the water, poisoning the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. In spite of BP's viewing time-consuming volume of happy "we're getting things cleaned up and we're getting back to work!" TV and internet ads, the Gulf Coast hasn't fully recovered. I can't believe that such horrendous abuse for months on end of a coastline and the Gulf itself, by a toxic chemical, along with marine life, isn't felt still as a hurting wound by the land and sea itself.
Landrieu downplayed the spill's impact, though she called for an investigation (she covered her ass). Her press spokesman at the time said that Landrieu was in no way influenced by the money given to her over the years by BP. One of Obama's spokesmen said much the same thing: in other words, the President doesn't react like a normal human being when someone, or some corporate entity, gives him money. He's oblivious, supposedly, to influence, especially from a corporation that fucks up badly, kills some of its employees in the initial explosion that caused the spill. Obama, we're supposed to accept, was so not influenced by the oil industry that, after the 2010 disaster, he expanded offshore drilling. In recent times, his lackluster and spineless response to the North Dakota pipeline situation (remedied somewhat by his refusing the corporation their drilling permit, but only after thousands of military veterans went there to protect the protestors) reveals the god that Obama works for: Big Oil.
The U.S. now gets about 74% of its oil from domestic sources. Do we need Saudi Arabia? Not nearly as much as before. We sell them high tech weapons, though, with which to murder Yemenis. Keeping Yemen poor and brutalized is as much U.S. policy as it is Saudi Arabia's policy. We use Saudi Arabia to maintain the status quo of keeping the Middle East destabilized.
The Arab Spring (I'm speculating) scared American foreign policy planners. Resistance from Arab governments toward their protesting peoples was welcomed by the United States. I base this on the case of Bahrain, the leader of which brutalized and murdered protestors while everything was tranquil at the big U.S. Navy facility there. Obama had nothing condemnatory to say about the mass murderer in charge of Bahrain. Bashar al-Assad's great sin, from a U.S. foreign policy standpoint, was that his oppression of protestors in Syria got out of hand, causing some of his Army to desert, resulting in the civil war still going. Had Assad merely killed a thousand or so protestors and imprisoned thousands more for months or years of ill treatment, Obama would've had no problem with him. Assad "crossed the line" when he allegedly used chemical weapons, but then Obama backed off, not bombing Syria just yet. It took the rise of ISIS (the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil war there) to make Obama attack Syria, staying clear of Assad, who has the deaths of around 400,000 people on his hands, a death count not yet reached by ISIS, which lacks an air force, the type of military unit equivalent to a cockroach exterminator.
Assad's closeness to Putin's Russia, a longstanding arrangement not to be abandoned by the latter, puts the Syrian leader in a safe spot regarding Washington. Trump's admiration for Putin means the former won't menace Assad, anymore than has Obama. John McCain, a few years back, spoke often of the need to make war on Syria, to depose Assad. McCain, burning with unfulfilled dreams of murder and annihilation, won his Senate seat again, making him likely to become senile while holding office. His knuckling under to Trump showed the McCain we all know, if we're honest: the tough guy coward, the one who goes along, the type hanged en masse after Nazi criminal post-war trials, except that here, in one of the nations that defeated Hitler, mass murderers receive money from oil corporations that pollute and poison, in exchange for silence from bribe-taking leaders pretending to be admirable women and men.
This country puts businessmen in a high place of honor. Trump could violate the Constitution--receive profits from foreign holdings while being President--and get away with it, easily. Nothing matters anymore to the powerful except the protection of their interests. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a wealthy man, nevertheless had a heart. His kind wouldn't be welcome at Trump's inauguration ceremony. Plus, as he's demonstrated, Trump doesn't like cripples.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump's business activities are now being debated about in the news media as probable conflicts of interest in relation to his next job: President of the United States. It would be anti-Constitutional (illegal) for him to receive money from other countries, since he's an international money phenomenon, while he's our leader, meaning that as of his first second as president on January 20, 2017, he'll be a lawbreaker if he's still profiting from his extensive foreign business activities.
That being the law, it makes sense that since we'll know his whereabouts on January 20, and that cops will be abundantly present at the Inauguration, Trump should, if he hasn't completely divested himself from foreign earnings by then, be arrested, read his rights, and taken to jail, with a bail set at an appropriately high level, considering the nature of the crime.
Even if he's in violation of the Constitution on this matter, Trump will not be arrested, will not suffer any uncomfortable consequences. We live in an age of who-cares-about-ethics? Rich people only very rarely get arrested and go to prison (let's call them caged unicorns). Trump's recent choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency (the purpose of which is in the name of the organization) is a climate-change denying oil industry-friendly attorney general of Oklahoma, whose anti-regulatory views will undoubtedly result in long-term health problems for countless Americans, killing people, ultimately, for the sake of helping rich polluters get richer. This kind of thing is also not going to result in any perpetrator going to prison. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior, a job calling for someone interested in protecting the nation's environment, was James Watt, a Fundamentalist Christian moron who enjoyed shooting buffalo from a great distance. Watt also firmly believed in the imminent End of Days, and apparently wasn't concerned about destroying the environment in favor of energy corporations' profits. Reagan, too, believed in the End of Days, took advice from astrologers consulted by the First Lady, and sent the Ayatollah Khomeini a signed copy of the Bible, hoping, I guess, to convert Iran's leader amidst illegally selling him missiles.
I'm not convinced that people in high office are intelligent.
Trump, intelligent, yes, at making money and swindling people. Trump, not so intelligent when it comes to things like putting his name on a fraud-based "learning institution," Trump University, and then getting sued and investigated in recent months, finally settling for millions of dollars right before the election to get that monkey off his back.
This next thing, put in here for the hell of it--I learned about it today--is from six years ago, and illustrates the perfidy of two Democratic politicians, Barack Obama and Mary Landrieu, former Louisiana Senator. 2010, the year of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, led some to wonder about President Obama's connections to that corporation. Senator Landrieu, too, like Obama, had received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the years from BP. The broken pipe at the bottom of the sea gushed black energy-ejaculate into the water, poisoning the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. In spite of BP's viewing time-consuming volume of happy "we're getting things cleaned up and we're getting back to work!" TV and internet ads, the Gulf Coast hasn't fully recovered. I can't believe that such horrendous abuse for months on end of a coastline and the Gulf itself, by a toxic chemical, along with marine life, isn't felt still as a hurting wound by the land and sea itself.
Landrieu downplayed the spill's impact, though she called for an investigation (she covered her ass). Her press spokesman at the time said that Landrieu was in no way influenced by the money given to her over the years by BP. One of Obama's spokesmen said much the same thing: in other words, the President doesn't react like a normal human being when someone, or some corporate entity, gives him money. He's oblivious, supposedly, to influence, especially from a corporation that fucks up badly, kills some of its employees in the initial explosion that caused the spill. Obama, we're supposed to accept, was so not influenced by the oil industry that, after the 2010 disaster, he expanded offshore drilling. In recent times, his lackluster and spineless response to the North Dakota pipeline situation (remedied somewhat by his refusing the corporation their drilling permit, but only after thousands of military veterans went there to protect the protestors) reveals the god that Obama works for: Big Oil.
The U.S. now gets about 74% of its oil from domestic sources. Do we need Saudi Arabia? Not nearly as much as before. We sell them high tech weapons, though, with which to murder Yemenis. Keeping Yemen poor and brutalized is as much U.S. policy as it is Saudi Arabia's policy. We use Saudi Arabia to maintain the status quo of keeping the Middle East destabilized.
The Arab Spring (I'm speculating) scared American foreign policy planners. Resistance from Arab governments toward their protesting peoples was welcomed by the United States. I base this on the case of Bahrain, the leader of which brutalized and murdered protestors while everything was tranquil at the big U.S. Navy facility there. Obama had nothing condemnatory to say about the mass murderer in charge of Bahrain. Bashar al-Assad's great sin, from a U.S. foreign policy standpoint, was that his oppression of protestors in Syria got out of hand, causing some of his Army to desert, resulting in the civil war still going. Had Assad merely killed a thousand or so protestors and imprisoned thousands more for months or years of ill treatment, Obama would've had no problem with him. Assad "crossed the line" when he allegedly used chemical weapons, but then Obama backed off, not bombing Syria just yet. It took the rise of ISIS (the result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil war there) to make Obama attack Syria, staying clear of Assad, who has the deaths of around 400,000 people on his hands, a death count not yet reached by ISIS, which lacks an air force, the type of military unit equivalent to a cockroach exterminator.
Assad's closeness to Putin's Russia, a longstanding arrangement not to be abandoned by the latter, puts the Syrian leader in a safe spot regarding Washington. Trump's admiration for Putin means the former won't menace Assad, anymore than has Obama. John McCain, a few years back, spoke often of the need to make war on Syria, to depose Assad. McCain, burning with unfulfilled dreams of murder and annihilation, won his Senate seat again, making him likely to become senile while holding office. His knuckling under to Trump showed the McCain we all know, if we're honest: the tough guy coward, the one who goes along, the type hanged en masse after Nazi criminal post-war trials, except that here, in one of the nations that defeated Hitler, mass murderers receive money from oil corporations that pollute and poison, in exchange for silence from bribe-taking leaders pretending to be admirable women and men.
This country puts businessmen in a high place of honor. Trump could violate the Constitution--receive profits from foreign holdings while being President--and get away with it, easily. Nothing matters anymore to the powerful except the protection of their interests. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a wealthy man, nevertheless had a heart. His kind wouldn't be welcome at Trump's inauguration ceremony. Plus, as he's demonstrated, Trump doesn't like cripples.
Vic Neptune
Monday, December 5, 2016
Diane Baker's World of Entries and Exits
When in 1980 Voyager 1 photographed Saturn's moon Mimas, the small world showed a giant crater, the place resembling the Death Star in Star Wars. In 2015, New Horizons passed Pluto, photographing a large Valentine heart-shaped plain. Florida looks like a long, limp penis. Israel looks like a knife, Wyoming and Colorado like bricks. The universe, filled with natural formations resembling objects or symbols speaking to the human imagination, seemingly creates an endless succession of forms, making it more than likely that extensive exploration of outer space will continue to unveil new structures sparking comments from humans, the species that calls, for instance, an enormous weather system on Jupiter, "the Great Red Spot."
A spot. The gas giant's famous many centuries-old storm is larger than our own planet. A swirling, spectacular vortex that could be used as a hypnosis tool, the Great Red Spot was first seen in 1665 by Giovanni Cassini. It preexisted Cassini's first observation, making it a storm lasting, to date, at least 352 years. Picture a storm on Earth lasting five human lifetimes, a storm smothering the entire planet. Let's call it Spot.
Another understatement describing a natural phenomenon must be the most inadequate name for an event ever coined: The Big Bang. The universe's creation is the biggest thing that's ever happened, a mega-event we all owe our existences to. I'm reminded of Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in a Seinfeld episode, explaining to an obtuse waitress an item that's not on the menu:
"A big salad. You know, it's a salad. It's big, and it's got a lot of stuff in it?"
The creation of the universe was a bang, it was big, and a lot of stuff came from it.
We humans lack the words, at times, to describe things properly. Sometimes emotions act better as indicators of what's going on with someone. This is why an image in a film can, without words, convey something deep and heartfelt, like the silence accompanying Monica Vitti's and Alain Delon's last goodbye in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, their passion visible on their faces, even while they don't acknowledge with words the ending of their relationship. I had a similar experience quite a few years ago. The last time I saw the woman in question (after dating her for three months), we were still, on the surface, visibly, to others who knew us, together; apart from two phone calls in successive weeks, we had no further contact, didn't even officially break up. Technically, we're still together.
When I started writing this essay, I thought, for an unknown reason, about the actress Diane Baker, who played Joan Crawford's daughter in the great homicidal maniac film, Strait-Jacket; also in the epic, The 300 Spartans, as well as Hitchcock's masterpiece, Marnie. In that film, she plays the sister of Sean Connery's late wife. She's jealous of the new woman in his life, Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a secretary who makes a habit of stealing sizable sums of money from her employers. Connery's character discovers her criminality and uses this over her to make her into his wife, while Lil (Diane Baker) looks on, acting sneaky, spying on conversations, trying to find out the real story behind Marnie, this interloper in her life and disruptor of her plans with Connery's character.
I've seen this film several times. It's always disturbed me. I think it's one of the finest Hitchcock films. It acts on the senses on a painterly level, the images alive and deep with light. The bizarre premise (a compulsive thief who fears the color red) and the psychological underpinnings of the plot, make this, for me, Hitchcock's most hidden movie, in the sense that I don't readily understand it, like I do, for instance, the more straightforward North By Northwest.
Diane Baker's presence in the film--subdued, furtive, mousey, fly on the wall--is that of the observer in a household dominated by dark male--and at times hostile--energy (Connery's character). The film's quiet spaces through which the characters move, acting inside beautiful cinematography and rural northeast America location imagery, make the experience of watching this one of emotional involvement, wherein rational reasons don't readily come to mind to explain what we're feeling. In spite of the psychological explanations (a quest to understand Marnie embarked upon, painfully for her, by her husband) I'm still left feeling lost in terms of understanding the movie in rational terms. I can't say, "It's the Big Red Spot."
Diane Baker's mostly unvoiced concerns about Marnie (but she's consumed with wanting to find out the truth) reflect something like pure intuition, a feeling inside, like a shift in the organs. The first time I saw the film, around 1989, I finished watching it, then had to go to a college class. I sat in the classroom, unable to follow the lecture. I felt sick, displaced. I told a friend from the class about having seen Marnie. She understood my discomfort, having also seen it.
Diane Baker, in that huge country house, watching Marnie and her brother-in-law, suspicious, not quite knowing what to make of her. She can't put her finger on it, because it's not obvious, like a landscape on another world shaped like a heart.
Vic Neptune
When in 1980 Voyager 1 photographed Saturn's moon Mimas, the small world showed a giant crater, the place resembling the Death Star in Star Wars. In 2015, New Horizons passed Pluto, photographing a large Valentine heart-shaped plain. Florida looks like a long, limp penis. Israel looks like a knife, Wyoming and Colorado like bricks. The universe, filled with natural formations resembling objects or symbols speaking to the human imagination, seemingly creates an endless succession of forms, making it more than likely that extensive exploration of outer space will continue to unveil new structures sparking comments from humans, the species that calls, for instance, an enormous weather system on Jupiter, "the Great Red Spot."
A spot. The gas giant's famous many centuries-old storm is larger than our own planet. A swirling, spectacular vortex that could be used as a hypnosis tool, the Great Red Spot was first seen in 1665 by Giovanni Cassini. It preexisted Cassini's first observation, making it a storm lasting, to date, at least 352 years. Picture a storm on Earth lasting five human lifetimes, a storm smothering the entire planet. Let's call it Spot.
Another understatement describing a natural phenomenon must be the most inadequate name for an event ever coined: The Big Bang. The universe's creation is the biggest thing that's ever happened, a mega-event we all owe our existences to. I'm reminded of Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in a Seinfeld episode, explaining to an obtuse waitress an item that's not on the menu:
"A big salad. You know, it's a salad. It's big, and it's got a lot of stuff in it?"
The creation of the universe was a bang, it was big, and a lot of stuff came from it.
We humans lack the words, at times, to describe things properly. Sometimes emotions act better as indicators of what's going on with someone. This is why an image in a film can, without words, convey something deep and heartfelt, like the silence accompanying Monica Vitti's and Alain Delon's last goodbye in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Eclisse, their passion visible on their faces, even while they don't acknowledge with words the ending of their relationship. I had a similar experience quite a few years ago. The last time I saw the woman in question (after dating her for three months), we were still, on the surface, visibly, to others who knew us, together; apart from two phone calls in successive weeks, we had no further contact, didn't even officially break up. Technically, we're still together.
When I started writing this essay, I thought, for an unknown reason, about the actress Diane Baker, who played Joan Crawford's daughter in the great homicidal maniac film, Strait-Jacket; also in the epic, The 300 Spartans, as well as Hitchcock's masterpiece, Marnie. In that film, she plays the sister of Sean Connery's late wife. She's jealous of the new woman in his life, Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a secretary who makes a habit of stealing sizable sums of money from her employers. Connery's character discovers her criminality and uses this over her to make her into his wife, while Lil (Diane Baker) looks on, acting sneaky, spying on conversations, trying to find out the real story behind Marnie, this interloper in her life and disruptor of her plans with Connery's character.
I've seen this film several times. It's always disturbed me. I think it's one of the finest Hitchcock films. It acts on the senses on a painterly level, the images alive and deep with light. The bizarre premise (a compulsive thief who fears the color red) and the psychological underpinnings of the plot, make this, for me, Hitchcock's most hidden movie, in the sense that I don't readily understand it, like I do, for instance, the more straightforward North By Northwest.
Diane Baker's presence in the film--subdued, furtive, mousey, fly on the wall--is that of the observer in a household dominated by dark male--and at times hostile--energy (Connery's character). The film's quiet spaces through which the characters move, acting inside beautiful cinematography and rural northeast America location imagery, make the experience of watching this one of emotional involvement, wherein rational reasons don't readily come to mind to explain what we're feeling. In spite of the psychological explanations (a quest to understand Marnie embarked upon, painfully for her, by her husband) I'm still left feeling lost in terms of understanding the movie in rational terms. I can't say, "It's the Big Red Spot."
Diane Baker's mostly unvoiced concerns about Marnie (but she's consumed with wanting to find out the truth) reflect something like pure intuition, a feeling inside, like a shift in the organs. The first time I saw the film, around 1989, I finished watching it, then had to go to a college class. I sat in the classroom, unable to follow the lecture. I felt sick, displaced. I told a friend from the class about having seen Marnie. She understood my discomfort, having also seen it.
Diane Baker, in that huge country house, watching Marnie and her brother-in-law, suspicious, not quite knowing what to make of her. She can't put her finger on it, because it's not obvious, like a landscape on another world shaped like a heart.
Vic Neptune
Friday, December 2, 2016
Duck Soup
Donald Trump has picked for Secretary of Defense a retired Marine, General James Mad Dog Mattis. The nickname between proper names is usually put in quotation marks by news organizations, but I choose to think of it as his full real name.
Trump claims Mad Dog is "the closest thing to Patton we have." General Patton, however, was a high-ranking U.S. Army officer who worked under higher-ranking officers, Eisenhower included--Patton had to follow orders just like any G.I. under his own command. Secretary of Defense means something more controlling than anything Patton could accomplish.
General Mad Dog (God dam spelled backwards) looks hard, erect, pale. His resume working in the killing business includes the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq (much involvement with Fallujah). He's well-read, owns about three times as many books as I do (I have around 2,500). He has a special fondness for the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I guess he identifies with that Stoic second century A.D. Roman Emperor with the crazy son, Commodus. (Of Commodus, a college history professor of mine said, "He had the physique of Tarzan, and the brains of Cheetah").
Mad Dog Mattis, I'm guessing without any evidence, has the uptight look of someone who hasn't jerked off since the 1960's, but then, I think it's likely that warfare is the porn that makes him come.
The focus on Trump these days, his cabinet picks, his dinner with pathetic Mitt Romney (going to Trump Tower to grovel for a chance at the Secretary of State job), his continuing addiction to tweeting, his loathsomeness as entertainment equaling ratings, keeps our eyes, ears, and hearts away from the murderous policies of the current administration. An article from AlterNet, January 10, 2016, reminds Americans of something they all should think about: in 2015 alone, the United States dropped an estimated 23,144 bombs on predominately Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen).
I did a calculation. That number comes to 63.40821917808219 bombs dropped on Muslim countries per day in 2015. In honor of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, I'll set aside the four-tenths of a bomb per day (still enough of a bomb to obliterate a two-story house) and concentrate on the sixty-three bombs dropped every day on those six cited countries. The Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, set off two bombs in one day, sixty-one less bombs per day than the U.S. military released in 2015, a year characterized, War on Terror-wise, by the concept of "same old shit, different year."
The article cites Foreign Policy magazine, which found that the Taliban control, as of 2015, more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001, when George W. Bush's military, backed by Congress and the will of most Americans (not me), began bombing that country, killing thousands, displacing a million, not killing Osama bin Laden who fled to Pakistan, a country bombed subsequently by Bush and Obama, Obama bombing it even after the man thought by most to be behind the 9/11 attacks was killed.
An Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called the war against ISIS a "thirty year effort," linking it to long-term military activities in Iraq and Syria. When will their parents take away our war planners' game of Risk and tell them to go to bed?
The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has made very low estimates of the numbers of civilian deaths caused by their taxpayer-funded annihilation tactics. They make it seem as if explosions don't go outwards. Admitting to murder is a difficult thing to do, of course, although government representatives always have a free pass when it comes to officially sanctioned violence. They could be honest, like Trump was when he said he wanted to kill terrorists' families. In the news media (not Fox), this was called out as advocating a war crime and rightly condemned, although it didn't end his candidacy, and in fact got him less in trouble than his admission, caught on microphone, that he likes to make sexually aggressive and predatory advances on women. Unlike Obama, he hasn't actually killed any women with bombs, yet, although he will, and, like Obama, he won't give a shit.
Trump and Mattis, I predict, based on extensive past evidence of U.S. involvement in parts of the world it likes to try to control, will simply follow the examples of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, McKinley (when the American Empire began), of using and abusing other nations and peoples for the sake of satisfying American business interests.
2.6 bombs per hour dropped by the United States military in six predominately Muslim countries in 2015. This practice helps no one, it yields no gains. It merely increases the wealth of those who profit from it, and they're already wealthy--doesn't that make them admirable? Terrorism practiced by the rich is a lucrative racket. Somewhere inside the soulless mind of Leon Panetta a calculation sparks the thought, agreed upon by every bloodthirsty power broker running this country:
23,144 bombs dropped per year times thirty years equals 694,320 bombs. Bombs destroy structures. Reconstruction contracts follow. Use bombs, make more bombs, make more bomb delivery platforms. Convince Americans, using fear tactics, that we who are doing this shit aren't the actual enemy.
Vic Neptune
Donald Trump has picked for Secretary of Defense a retired Marine, General James Mad Dog Mattis. The nickname between proper names is usually put in quotation marks by news organizations, but I choose to think of it as his full real name.
Trump claims Mad Dog is "the closest thing to Patton we have." General Patton, however, was a high-ranking U.S. Army officer who worked under higher-ranking officers, Eisenhower included--Patton had to follow orders just like any G.I. under his own command. Secretary of Defense means something more controlling than anything Patton could accomplish.
General Mad Dog (God dam spelled backwards) looks hard, erect, pale. His resume working in the killing business includes the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq (much involvement with Fallujah). He's well-read, owns about three times as many books as I do (I have around 2,500). He has a special fondness for the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I guess he identifies with that Stoic second century A.D. Roman Emperor with the crazy son, Commodus. (Of Commodus, a college history professor of mine said, "He had the physique of Tarzan, and the brains of Cheetah").
Mad Dog Mattis, I'm guessing without any evidence, has the uptight look of someone who hasn't jerked off since the 1960's, but then, I think it's likely that warfare is the porn that makes him come.
The focus on Trump these days, his cabinet picks, his dinner with pathetic Mitt Romney (going to Trump Tower to grovel for a chance at the Secretary of State job), his continuing addiction to tweeting, his loathsomeness as entertainment equaling ratings, keeps our eyes, ears, and hearts away from the murderous policies of the current administration. An article from AlterNet, January 10, 2016, reminds Americans of something they all should think about: in 2015 alone, the United States dropped an estimated 23,144 bombs on predominately Muslim countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen).
I did a calculation. That number comes to 63.40821917808219 bombs dropped on Muslim countries per day in 2015. In honor of President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, I'll set aside the four-tenths of a bomb per day (still enough of a bomb to obliterate a two-story house) and concentrate on the sixty-three bombs dropped every day on those six cited countries. The Boston Marathon bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, set off two bombs in one day, sixty-one less bombs per day than the U.S. military released in 2015, a year characterized, War on Terror-wise, by the concept of "same old shit, different year."
The article cites Foreign Policy magazine, which found that the Taliban control, as of 2015, more territory in Afghanistan than they did in 2001, when George W. Bush's military, backed by Congress and the will of most Americans (not me), began bombing that country, killing thousands, displacing a million, not killing Osama bin Laden who fled to Pakistan, a country bombed subsequently by Bush and Obama, Obama bombing it even after the man thought by most to be behind the 9/11 attacks was killed.
An Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta, has called the war against ISIS a "thirty year effort," linking it to long-term military activities in Iraq and Syria. When will their parents take away our war planners' game of Risk and tell them to go to bed?
The Obama administration, like its predecessor, has made very low estimates of the numbers of civilian deaths caused by their taxpayer-funded annihilation tactics. They make it seem as if explosions don't go outwards. Admitting to murder is a difficult thing to do, of course, although government representatives always have a free pass when it comes to officially sanctioned violence. They could be honest, like Trump was when he said he wanted to kill terrorists' families. In the news media (not Fox), this was called out as advocating a war crime and rightly condemned, although it didn't end his candidacy, and in fact got him less in trouble than his admission, caught on microphone, that he likes to make sexually aggressive and predatory advances on women. Unlike Obama, he hasn't actually killed any women with bombs, yet, although he will, and, like Obama, he won't give a shit.
Trump and Mattis, I predict, based on extensive past evidence of U.S. involvement in parts of the world it likes to try to control, will simply follow the examples of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, Roosevelt, McKinley (when the American Empire began), of using and abusing other nations and peoples for the sake of satisfying American business interests.
2.6 bombs per hour dropped by the United States military in six predominately Muslim countries in 2015. This practice helps no one, it yields no gains. It merely increases the wealth of those who profit from it, and they're already wealthy--doesn't that make them admirable? Terrorism practiced by the rich is a lucrative racket. Somewhere inside the soulless mind of Leon Panetta a calculation sparks the thought, agreed upon by every bloodthirsty power broker running this country:
23,144 bombs dropped per year times thirty years equals 694,320 bombs. Bombs destroy structures. Reconstruction contracts follow. Use bombs, make more bombs, make more bomb delivery platforms. Convince Americans, using fear tactics, that we who are doing this shit aren't the actual enemy.
Vic Neptune
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Shop, Eat, Age, Die
I went to my mother's house this morning; she was looking for chili powder to make some burrito mixture. She couldn't find it, so I looked for a while, located it in the back of an upper cabinet. The bottle looked old. I looked for the expiration date: November 2011. Many of my mother's spices are, since she doesn't cook much anymore, outdated, although she uses them anyway, figuring they're still good, or at least adequate. I told her I'd go to the grocery store and get her some chili powder.
In the checkout lane, two young men, or old boys, were discussing the many different recordings of "Jingle Bells," and the lack of a need for more. I used to work in a grocery store, so I know what it's like to hear Christmas music in the background of a tedious work environment, the songs recycling for a solid month. I guess it's part of a strategy to get people in the Christmas spirit, which in America means making people act as consumers, buyers, economy stimulators, zombies of capitalism.
Psychological manipulation operates in grocery stores. Displays at the "feet" or ends of aisles consist usually of junk food like Doritos or Cheetos, or 12-packs of Pepsi cans. Normal foot traffic in the store leads customers past these aisle-ends so that Pepsi, Doritos, or other chemical substances masquerading as nourishment, are frequently seen in passing and peripheral view, leading to impulse buys.
The checkout lane boys were right: "Jingle Bells" doesn't need to be covered anymore, even by a cute woman like Taylor Swift, who did put out an EP of Christmas-related music in 2007, because Swift and those managing her career probably figured, "People will buy shitloads of copies of a Taylor Swift Christmas album." Such an album, an easy sell, is the musical equivalent of the Pepsi and Fritos at the end of a grocery store aisle; in other words, not Harvest by Neil Young, or Abbey Road. Put a pretty face on an album called Sentimentalism for Slobs, and it might sell a fair portion of the copies sold of Swift's Christmas album.
This uncalled for criticism of Taylor Swift on my part leads into something I've been wondering about myself: my tendency to occasionally be grumpy with people who work in the service industry. Here I am now, picking on Taylor Swift's Christmas EP from 2007, a disc I've never even heard. She has a version of "White Christmas," and something pessimistic in me says that it can't possibly be as memorable or as well sung as Bing Crosby's original version. I tell myself that I know this is true, even while I recognize it's just a grumpy opinion based on a bias centered in the idea that quality often devolves from the original source--the reason a remake of Citizen Kane would likely be a terrible piece of shit.
The two grocery store workers, like these thoughts about the Taylor Swift Christmas album, inspired my curmudgeonly tendency today. I put the chili powder, a six pack of beer, and a container of sour cream on the black rolling tongue that brings products close to the cashier. I showed my driver's license, because it's general policy in stores that when a customer buys alcohol, he or she must prove validity of age; must be at least twenty-one years old. I'm fifty-two. The last time I looked like I might be twenty was when I was twenty-six or so. I made small talk with the young cashier, who opened our transaction by not calling me "Sir," but by calling me "Buddy." By customer service workers of this cashier's generation I sometimes also get called "Dude," or "Man." "Sir," as a form of common address, is, I guess, not regarded by youth as something to take seriously anymore.
I said, as he rang me up, "Wouldn't it be weird if I were under twenty-one and I looked like this?"
He said, "I carded a woman yesterday and she was a hundred and two! I've never seen anybody that old before."
I realized he hadn't asked to see my savings card, a little plastic rectangle attached to the other set of car keys I didn't have with me. He'd already finished the transaction and said he couldn't do anything about it. The boy who'd loaded the bag asked me if any of the items I'd bought were on sale. I was pretty sure the chili powder fit that condition. The bag boy, who was more on the ball than his coworker, knew how to check for the discount and found that I had a dollar and twelve cents coming to me.
"Do you want the refund?" the cashier asked.
Do I want the money the store owes me? Yes!
"Well, yeah," I said, looking at them as they looked blankly at someone who gave a shit about a dollar and change.
The bag boy went to the information/refund/postal counter without a word. The cashier looked at me confusedly, and said, "I think he wants you to follow him."
"He should've said something, then," I replied, thinking, without any evidence, but I couldn't help remembering it, the line uttered by Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino's Jackie Brown: "I get high after work."
I followed the bag boy and he quickly gave me a dollar-twelve out of the cash drawer, apologizing about the misunderstanding. He, at least, had some skill with customers, seeming more experienced in the store than his coworker. I thanked the cashier as I left. He just looked at me, thinking, perhaps, What an asshole.
For a little while I did feel like an asshole. I became irritated with a cashier for calling me "Buddy," and then for not asking me for my savings card, as cashiers in that store almost always do before they're done with the transaction. Without the card on me, I could've recited my phone number, he could've typed it in, and the savings would've kicked in automatically.
A dollar-twelve. I could almost buy a candy bar with that, but that wasn't the problem, really. The lack of competence on the cashier's part, mixed with his blasé demeanor, pissed me off. That store, in the past few months, underwent a major overhaul, bought by a different corporation. With the overhaul came new procedures, rearrangements of products, a slicker looking interior, and training of the staff to ideally make them uniformly helpful, friendly, and generally good at their jobs. Such a program of change can sometimes amount to a mere cosmetic alteration, with some employees not able to cheerfully conform to the philosophies of the "the new boss."
I sympathize with grocery store workers, with library workers, with restaurant and hotel workers; I've worked in those businesses. It's unsettling how much bullshit these workers take from employers and distant corporate bosses; how little regarded they are as human beings, their intelligences not respected, many employees supervised by idiots who make more money than they do.
I got some enjoyment out of the experience, at least, by handing over to my mother her sour cream and a fresh little bottle of chili powder at a dollar and twelve cents below normal price.
Vic Neptune
I went to my mother's house this morning; she was looking for chili powder to make some burrito mixture. She couldn't find it, so I looked for a while, located it in the back of an upper cabinet. The bottle looked old. I looked for the expiration date: November 2011. Many of my mother's spices are, since she doesn't cook much anymore, outdated, although she uses them anyway, figuring they're still good, or at least adequate. I told her I'd go to the grocery store and get her some chili powder.
In the checkout lane, two young men, or old boys, were discussing the many different recordings of "Jingle Bells," and the lack of a need for more. I used to work in a grocery store, so I know what it's like to hear Christmas music in the background of a tedious work environment, the songs recycling for a solid month. I guess it's part of a strategy to get people in the Christmas spirit, which in America means making people act as consumers, buyers, economy stimulators, zombies of capitalism.
Psychological manipulation operates in grocery stores. Displays at the "feet" or ends of aisles consist usually of junk food like Doritos or Cheetos, or 12-packs of Pepsi cans. Normal foot traffic in the store leads customers past these aisle-ends so that Pepsi, Doritos, or other chemical substances masquerading as nourishment, are frequently seen in passing and peripheral view, leading to impulse buys.
The checkout lane boys were right: "Jingle Bells" doesn't need to be covered anymore, even by a cute woman like Taylor Swift, who did put out an EP of Christmas-related music in 2007, because Swift and those managing her career probably figured, "People will buy shitloads of copies of a Taylor Swift Christmas album." Such an album, an easy sell, is the musical equivalent of the Pepsi and Fritos at the end of a grocery store aisle; in other words, not Harvest by Neil Young, or Abbey Road. Put a pretty face on an album called Sentimentalism for Slobs, and it might sell a fair portion of the copies sold of Swift's Christmas album.
This uncalled for criticism of Taylor Swift on my part leads into something I've been wondering about myself: my tendency to occasionally be grumpy with people who work in the service industry. Here I am now, picking on Taylor Swift's Christmas EP from 2007, a disc I've never even heard. She has a version of "White Christmas," and something pessimistic in me says that it can't possibly be as memorable or as well sung as Bing Crosby's original version. I tell myself that I know this is true, even while I recognize it's just a grumpy opinion based on a bias centered in the idea that quality often devolves from the original source--the reason a remake of Citizen Kane would likely be a terrible piece of shit.
The two grocery store workers, like these thoughts about the Taylor Swift Christmas album, inspired my curmudgeonly tendency today. I put the chili powder, a six pack of beer, and a container of sour cream on the black rolling tongue that brings products close to the cashier. I showed my driver's license, because it's general policy in stores that when a customer buys alcohol, he or she must prove validity of age; must be at least twenty-one years old. I'm fifty-two. The last time I looked like I might be twenty was when I was twenty-six or so. I made small talk with the young cashier, who opened our transaction by not calling me "Sir," but by calling me "Buddy." By customer service workers of this cashier's generation I sometimes also get called "Dude," or "Man." "Sir," as a form of common address, is, I guess, not regarded by youth as something to take seriously anymore.
I said, as he rang me up, "Wouldn't it be weird if I were under twenty-one and I looked like this?"
He said, "I carded a woman yesterday and she was a hundred and two! I've never seen anybody that old before."
I realized he hadn't asked to see my savings card, a little plastic rectangle attached to the other set of car keys I didn't have with me. He'd already finished the transaction and said he couldn't do anything about it. The boy who'd loaded the bag asked me if any of the items I'd bought were on sale. I was pretty sure the chili powder fit that condition. The bag boy, who was more on the ball than his coworker, knew how to check for the discount and found that I had a dollar and twelve cents coming to me.
"Do you want the refund?" the cashier asked.
Do I want the money the store owes me? Yes!
"Well, yeah," I said, looking at them as they looked blankly at someone who gave a shit about a dollar and change.
The bag boy went to the information/refund/postal counter without a word. The cashier looked at me confusedly, and said, "I think he wants you to follow him."
"He should've said something, then," I replied, thinking, without any evidence, but I couldn't help remembering it, the line uttered by Samuel L. Jackson in Tarantino's Jackie Brown: "I get high after work."
I followed the bag boy and he quickly gave me a dollar-twelve out of the cash drawer, apologizing about the misunderstanding. He, at least, had some skill with customers, seeming more experienced in the store than his coworker. I thanked the cashier as I left. He just looked at me, thinking, perhaps, What an asshole.
For a little while I did feel like an asshole. I became irritated with a cashier for calling me "Buddy," and then for not asking me for my savings card, as cashiers in that store almost always do before they're done with the transaction. Without the card on me, I could've recited my phone number, he could've typed it in, and the savings would've kicked in automatically.
A dollar-twelve. I could almost buy a candy bar with that, but that wasn't the problem, really. The lack of competence on the cashier's part, mixed with his blasé demeanor, pissed me off. That store, in the past few months, underwent a major overhaul, bought by a different corporation. With the overhaul came new procedures, rearrangements of products, a slicker looking interior, and training of the staff to ideally make them uniformly helpful, friendly, and generally good at their jobs. Such a program of change can sometimes amount to a mere cosmetic alteration, with some employees not able to cheerfully conform to the philosophies of the "the new boss."
I sympathize with grocery store workers, with library workers, with restaurant and hotel workers; I've worked in those businesses. It's unsettling how much bullshit these workers take from employers and distant corporate bosses; how little regarded they are as human beings, their intelligences not respected, many employees supervised by idiots who make more money than they do.
I got some enjoyment out of the experience, at least, by handing over to my mother her sour cream and a fresh little bottle of chili powder at a dollar and twelve cents below normal price.
Vic Neptune
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