Streaming Review: Cat People (1942)

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Producer Val Lewton working for RKO pictures in the 1940s was tasked to create a number of horror films but without the money to hire established stars or productions of any real scale. His solution, turning to psychological horror, relying on what is left unseen but imagined by the audience yielded some fine examples of horror that has influenced filmmaking and the genre to this day. The Body Snatcher, adapted from a Robert Louis Stevenson story gave horror legend Boris Karloff his finest role and performance and launched the directorial career of Robert Wise who directed films in every genre clear into the 1970s. I Walked With a Zombie, blended inspiration from Bronte’s Jane Eyre with Caribbean mysticism, eschewing the cheap laughs or schlocky horror of zombie-centered stories for something with more drama and reigning as the ultimate zombie inspired film until displaced by Romero’s reinvention of the sub-genre in the late 60s. However, it is 1942’s Cat People that is arguably the most influential of these productions responsible for every over-used jump scare and inspiring an R-rated remake in 1982.

Criterion Channel

Helmed by legendary noir director Jacques Tourneur, who also made Night of the Demon, and written by DeWitt Bodeen, Cat People centers on Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) a young artist recently immigrated to the United States from Serbia. Irena labors under the belief that she is descended from wicked, evil witches,  and cursed that when suffering strong passions, such as lust or anger, she will transform into a large and murderous panther. Quite against her plans, Irena falls in love with naval architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and marries him but refuses the marriage bed due to her terror at transforming. The cast is rounded out by Jane Randolph playing Alice, Oliver’s assistant and the third component to the doomed romantic triangle and Tom Conway as Dr. Louis Judd, a psychiatrist friend of Oliver who attempts to help Irena past her ‘delusion.’

Lacking the resources for elaborate transformations Tourneur and Lewton relied upon atmosphere and mood to achieve the desired tension in the audience. One of the most influential sequences is when Alice, walking alone at night, becomes terrified that someone or something is stalking her. She is correct. As the audience, we know that Irena, hot with jealousy, is indeed following her along the dark street where only isolated islands of lights from the streetlamps allow any real visibility. When Alice reaches the bus stop, she and the audience are wound quite tight when the sudden and very loud hiss of the bus’s air brakes shatters that tension in what is widely considered to be cinema’s first ‘jump scare.’ A technique now so widely over-used that is often associated with mediocre directors who are unable to build the requisite tension in their films.

I find the character of Louis Judd the most perplexing member of the cast as I can’t determine he is meant to be seen as tragic or as an evil man. While I understand that code of conduct between doctors and their patients, even informal ones such as Irena, have changed greatly from 40s I find it hard to excuse in any manner Judd’s actions towards the young woman. Certainly by today’s standard and what we know of power dynamics between physicians and people under their care and power his disastrous attempt to seduce Irena is not only unjustifiable but also criminal, but this was hardly the case in 1942. When he released the panther within her, it can be seen as tragic for Doctor Judd or as a case of ‘good for her.’ Frankly, I believe that he got pretty much what he deserved.

Being produced in 1942 Cat People needed to stay firmly within the puritanical guidelines of the Production Code, which was rigidly enforced from 1934 through the middle of the 1960s, and as such the exact nature of Irena’s curse could not be fully and plainly spelled out. Sexual intercourse, beyond any depiction of it ever occurring outside of marriage, could not be directly referenced, only implied, making the details somewhat obscure to a modern audience, an obscurity that filmmaker Paul Schrader did not labor under when he remade Cat People in 1982.

Both versions of these films, the original and the remake are currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.

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A Feat Never Before Achieved — by Me

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After some recent beta read feedback, I decided a few weeks ago to revisit my first horror novel The Wolves of Wallace Point for some minor revisions, edits, and corrections. The beta reader had enjoyed the novel but commented on some aspects that I thought were worth at least considering and since it has been a few years since I wrote the thing the only way to fairly evaluate this feedback was by reading the entire manuscript from front to back.

Plot, setting, and the mechanics of a story are pretty much the easiest things for me to craft, I work a little bit more on dialog, though this beta reader had praised that in this novel, and struggle the most with the apparently simple elements of titles and character names. I often joke that there is a blood-stain spot on the wall next to my desk where I routinely bash my head in search of those things. As such none of my novels have ever had titles for the chapters. Coming up with 20 or 30 titles was simply something hardly worth the effort.

While revisiting this book, which is written in the 1st person point of view, the character’s voice in chapter one leapt out with a title for it, A Priest at an Orgy. Once my fevered brain latched onto that concept I couldn’t shake it, but you can’t title only one chapter, either they all have titles or none of them do. So the process began that while I re-read the manuscript, making tiny adjustments here and there to the prose, I tried to keep my senses tuned for sardonic and ironic things that protagonist said or thought, like the orgy commentary, that might serve as a title for the chapters.

And now, 27 chapters later, I have titles for each and every one in the book. Most I am satisfied with, some I think I need to revisit again and see if something better doesn’t hide within the text, and a couple, like Fuck David Lynch and Camp Crystal Lake I am very happy with even if their applicability tickles only me.

Now, I have a new epilog to write, with a new ending sentence and mood that came to me last night and after that some serious thought about self-publishing the thing.

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Widow’s Bay: Season Wrap-Up

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Almost two weeks ago I wrote about the horror/comedy series Widow’s Bay produced by and streaming on AppleTV, at that time I had just about caught up with the episodes in their weekly release schedule. Now the entire season has been released, and I can look upon the whole of its introduction and resolution.

AppleTVWidow’s Bay has been described as what if the mayor of Amity in Jaws was  our principal character and that is a fair point of comparison. Both deal with fictional New England seaside towns, one already a tourist destination but finding its summer bonanza threatened by a Great White shark that just won’t stop eating the swimmers, fishermen, and boaters, the other an isolated economically depressed community seeking to bring in those tourist dollars despite the supernatural curse laid upon the island hundreds of years prior.

Mixing comedy with horror is a tricky business, both styles depend upon the unexpected, the sudden reversal of an expected outcome, making them close siblings but when combined usually one flavor dominates over the other. Disgraced television and film creator Joss Whedon side stepped this trouble by frontloading the comedy in his pieces and draining it away almost entirely in the back half leaving horror to dominate the final acts of his works. This technique would not work for Widow’s Bayand would instead have come off like a switcheroo on the audience if the front half of episode had been mostly or entirely comedic and the back half horrific, Katie Dippold needed to find the balance in each of the 10 episodes. I think, for the most part, she did. While I found the final resolution to the season just a touch unsatisfying it was not so much of a stumble that I did not enjoy the entirety of the season and look forward to the next already ordered season.

Without a doubt my favorite character in the show is the long suffering, socially awkward, and nearly communally invisible aide to the mayor, Patricia, played to perfection by imported performer Kate O’Flynn. Perhaps I, also socially awkward, identify too closely with Patricia but I also think that the writers, who may also be socially awkward it is professional hazard, have a soft spot for her. The pair of episodes that center on her, 4 Beach Reads & 8 Your Baggage, are clearly my favorite. Beach Reads plays along the lines of one of my favorite sub-genres, Folk Horror, and Your Baggage makes my least loved subgenre, the Slasher, into something I actually enjoyed.

Episode 9, Emergency Shelter, in a crafty bit of writing, production design, and acting pulls off one of the most entertaining bits of pure exposition that I have ever witnessed on the screen. In The Terminator James Cameron buried exposition with action, having Reese explain the plot to Sarah Conner and the audience during a heart-pounding car chase, truly hiding your vegetables in your dessert, but Emergency Shelter stops the plot cold, laying on the brakes heavily and yet remains thoroughly fun and funny while it feeds you literally generations of genealogy and history, made possible by the acting talents of Dale Dickey as the town clerk.

The show’s central protagonist, Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) has the thankless position of straight man in the comedic sequences and terrified normie in the horrific ones, I still found his character a bit too bland to fully and emotionally engage with. His relationship with his moody and disobedient teenage son failed to plow new ground and his central goal, bringing tourism and money to the island, with the side effect of hopefully freeing his son from the island’s curse, while understandable never felt more than a rote character motivation.  For too much of the season I think we were not fully privy to motivations and that kept the character at a distance, leaving him feeling more perfunctory than realized. Rhys does an admirable job with the character and keeps him from feeling too bland, giving weight to his terror as he realizes that the island’s curse is quite real. His seemingly impossible choice in the final episode is played quite well and does much to redeem the character’s portrayal from the rest of the series.

While I have noted some of the shortcomings in this series, I want to stress again that I enjoyed it and look forward to the next installment of the trials, tribulations, terrors, and tongue-in-cheek misadventure of this poor cursed community.

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AI and My Latest Novel

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Generative ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or A.I. has been quite the controversy of late rearing its head in everything from environmental issues to space flight and theoretical orbital data centers. For the creative fields the fights and arguments have been very intense centered on the data that had been used, without permission of the owners or creators, to train the machine learning systems. This has led to swaths of ‘novels’ being produced by A.I. and a deep and powerful backlash against any art that has A.I. as part of the process. Like all backlashes, it is far too easy for things to escalate to proportions all out of measure.

Now, I myself have absolutely no interest in any ‘art’ that is A.I.-generated. The entire point of a poem or a story is that you are experiencing another person’s viewpoint, that, for the time you are immersed in that piece of art, you are seeing, however dimly, through another person’s eyes and experiencing the world as they interpret it. This is something that cannot be achieved without self-aware consciousness. It requires the ability to wonder, to dream, to imagine and A.I., outside of science-fiction, cannot do that.

That does not mean that A.I. has no place, it is a tool and a powerful one. Let me show you how I used A.I. to solve a problem I had while drafting the novel that is currently trying to find representation.

After getting some feedback on the book’s opening pages I started revising the first scenes where the reader meets the protagonist. The novel is set in San Diego, 1984, at the start of summer. To show Dave’s nature and to give him an early goal before horror derailed his life I decided that he would have a plan to acquire a second theater, opening it as another art house and as a sanctuary for gay and queer young people.

I have lived in San Diego since 1982, and I wanted the novel to be grounded in the city I knew. I was not interested in inventing businesses or locals that did not exist. The theater that Dave owns in the novel is a real one, and one that was beloved to me, the fiction was that this character owned it, not its existence. So, the second theater would also need to be something that was real in San Diego of 1984.

In the early 80s at the corner of Park Boulevard and University Ave sat an old movie palace that had been converted into an ‘adult’ theater. I visited it while I was still in the U.S. Navy, found the pornographic films not to my taste and did not visit that theater again until the 1990s when Landmark had acquired it and transformed it into an Art House showing foreign and revival films. This would be the perfect acquisition for Dave. He could rescue the theater from its degraded state and make it into something glorious and elevated.

My problem, I could not remember the name of the theater as it operated in the 80s. As an Art House it hadn’t survived past the 90s, home video had killed the revival market in San Diego, and even the building was gone, replaced with mixed use residential and retail spaces. I could simply invent the name of the theater and what it looked like but that flew against the way I wanted this novel to work. Simply ‘googling’ for the movie theater at that location provided very scattered and not at all helpful results.

Here is where A.I., specifically Claude, came in very helpful. I asked Claude to find information on the history of the theater at that location and it returned the name that it had operated under both as a movie palace and as an ‘adult’ theater, The Capri.

Ah, but A.I. can very confidentially give you answers that it has invented out of whole cloth. So you cannot trust its responses alone. But now, armed with the name of the theater, I could make my own much better targeted search for information. That yielded a wonderful KPBS article that not only detailed the history of the place, the names of the people who owned it as an ‘adult’ theater, when Landmark acquired it, but also had photographs that revived my memory, allowing me to picture it in my mind.

Armed with this, much more than what I required, I crafted the scene, achieving everything I had wanted in it. A.I. made writing the scene as I wanted it to be possible but every sentence, every word came from my brain and my desire to paint a picture for the reader. There is a use for A.I. but it is not to create but to assist in creation.

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Few Weekend Plans as Planned

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It is Monday morning, and this past weekend failed to be executed as I had hoped it might. Still, it was not a disaster of a weekend and there were many fine elements and several routine errands completed so it ranks as a so-so couple of days off.

Saturday, while I took care of getting my car smogged, for those outside of California that means having its emissions checked and verified that it does not overly pollute the atmosphere, and stopped by the pharmacy to pick up more salt-infused drops for my eyes, my sweetie-wife attended the Scottish Highland Games held for the first time in River Park very near our Mission Valley home. It turns out me not attending was a fortunate decision. I have no issues with bagpipe music but multiple pipers playing at the same time, but different tunes would have ignited a migraine. (though one of those was to come soon enough).

In the evening, I ran my table-top role-playing game of Space Opera and managed to get in two and a half hours before my chest signaled that the chronic cough would soon return and my head began feeling peculiar. After a meal of take-out food, I began to suffer a migraine and by the end of the evening it had grown quite intense, forcing me to leave a note for my sweetie-wife that I would not expect to be taking part in our customary 2 mile walk in the morning.

Sure enough, that was the case when I awoke Sunday. I canceled plans for lunch with friends, and to see The Death of Robin Hood in the theaters and stayed home taking my prescription medication and nursing the headache that eventually subsided, but left me without the ability to think clearly forcing me to cancel attending the virtual writers group meeting that evening.

I was recovered enough that in the late evening I made my customary trip to the supermarket to purchase lunches and fruits to take to work and even return a wallet stuffed with cash that had been lost in the parking lot to its owner before retiring for the night.

Hopefully this coming week will be better than its preceding weekend.

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Wakanda and Westeros

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Two of the great cultural fictional kingdoms of recent times, kingdoms that have been taken to heart and have occupied the minds of millions, are Westeros and Wakanda.

Westeros, from the mind of author George R.R. Martin, and thrust into the vast public consciousness by the impressive HBO show Game of Thrones, is the fantasy kingdom where treachery, murder, incest, dragons, and ancient magical powers vie for the throne that ruled over the island continent.

Wakanda, from the pages of Marvel Comics and the hit feature films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is home to the secretive tribes that discovered the rare and fantastical abilities of the fictional metal Vibranium and the super-science that it allowed.

Each fictional setting presented its kingdom in crisis and civil war: Westeros plunged into a long and bloody affair when the succession line became tangled and powerful lords arrayed against one another, while in Wakanda, unpleasant secrets surfaced, bringing a murderous thug to victory in the trial by combat that defined their succession. (Yes, I am aware that by some definitions the trial never finished and as such Killmonger’s ascension was never official, that is not the point here.)

In each case we, the audience, are supposed to believe that the matter has been resolved in a manner where we can rest easy and that the troubles lie in these lands’ pasts. In Westeros, Brandon Stark, gifted with sight beyond time and space and wisdom born of his magical gifts, sits upon the throne with benevolence and good will, to rule justly. While in Wakanda, with the would-be dictator and global threat dead, T’Challa, the Black Panther, sits on the throne undoing the centuries of isolation and bringing his nation and his people into the global community, ruling, presumably, as justly as the fictional king Brandon Stark.

But neither kingdom corrected the actual root cause of their terrible troubles.

In both cases the kingdoms are presided over by absolute monarchs whose powers are unconstrained, with their every whim and proclamation passing instantly into law and action. Brandon may be a good and supernaturally wise man. T’Challa is a good man with a good heart, but they are mere mortal men, doomed to die and pass on these unchecked powers to another. The warning is not that bad men should be kept from the thrones of kingdoms but that the powers of any ruler, king or president, must be checked or eventually they pass to those unworthy, untrustworthy, and whose appetites can never be satisfied.

It is a lesson that extends far beyond the borders of fantasies and comic books.

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A Time of Sorrow

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I am the youngest of ten children and for a good deal of my life I knew four brothers and four sisters, one sister died in infancy long before I was born. Now the time draws near when I shall have no living brothers at all.

There is a fairly decent number of years that separate my youngest brother from myself and as such my childhood is not one where I spent hours with them in roughhousing, or anything approximating sports. Perhaps that is why sports of any kind never really appealed to me. They were, for the most part, already teenagers when I was still very much a child. I am told that two of them used to, when I was something like 4 or 5, take me along so my then exuberant personality could be used to break the ice with girls that they wanted to meet. This I have no memory of; what I do have memory of is drive-in horror movies.

They would want to go to the drive-in and were forced to take me along while promising to see something that was suitable for a young child, a promise that they apparently broke quite often, hence one of my earliest memories is of a Hammer Frankenstein movie in all its glorious color. I don’t recall ever having nightmares about the movies and they did kindle a life-long love of the genre.

It was the summer of 1980 when my first brother died, a victim of being the wrong place at the wrong time and shot to death because someone wanted to kill another person at that poolside table.

The next, after conquering his own alcohol-fueled demons, died from cancer. Another, who never found a way to overcome his substance issues, died from a body that eventually could no longer suffer that treatment.

This week I learned my oldest brother is being released from the hospital into hospice. The end may come in days, weeks, or I am told even possibly months as his aged physique surrenders to the accumulated damage of the years.

I fancy myself a writer, but I have no words that accurately convey the turbulent emotions of this time, yet I am not the first nor the last to suffer them. This is life as much as the happy times and all of it is to be known.

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Beware Poorly Transferred Films

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Last week my sweetie-wife and I watched a Giallo that we streamed on the ad-supported service Tubi; the film in question was titled Ring of Death, a 1969 Italian crime/thriller, and not to be confused with the early 80s martial arts movie. The film can be found on IMDb as Detective Belli. But Tubi, in addition to frequent breaks for up to 5 commercials in a row, hid another reason why budget streaming isn’t always the best option.

Belli (Franco Nero) is a corrupt senior police officer in Rome who is drawn into a web of blackmail, extortion, infidelity, and murder when he takes on investigating a rich man’s son who has begun associating with people of low character. As is typical of the giallo genre this movie is lurid and darker than the American genre of film noir with few if any admirable or moral characters. Everyone has a secret, and everyone is willing to do terrible things to keep their secrets concealed.

We, my sweetie-wife and I, prefer whenever possible, to watch these films with the original Italian language track but Tubi, being an ad-supported service, caters to the lowest common denominator and nearly always only has the English language dub for their foreign films, particularly with the older ones. Still, Ring of Death Detective Belli boasted a dubbed track where most of the actors provided their own English language dialog and as such was far superior to the vast majority of dubbed versions.

That is until the particular failings of this apparently hastily assembled version made themselves plain.

Random scenes, for no discernable reason, suddenly presented themselves with the Italian language soundtrack but without any accompanying subtitling. These instances where we were subjected to Italian never lasted more than scene or two, and never as long of a reel, before just as randomly switching back to the English dub.

For the most part this was tolerable, the context of the scenes usually provided enough that we could guess as to what transpired but this all fell apart with the final, and most ironic, sequence for this fault to reveal itself. As with most mysteries and thrillers there comes to scene where the detective, having finally worked out all the twists and turns of the plot, lays it all out for the other characters and the audience in a lengthy spot of exposition and Ring of Death/Detective Belli was no different in this respect, just for us, it was presented in Italian without subtitles. While the solution was plain, in this case Belli was explaining to the culprit just how he worked it all out, all of the nuances were lost in a language neither of us spoke. I could recognize names of characters as they flew by the explanation but nothing more than that.

My sweetie-wife searched the county and city libraries for the film on disc so we might check it out but that proved fruitless.

Sometimes with the free streaming services you get exactly what you pay for.

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Obsession, Backrooms, and The Mandalorian

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It is a strange time when one of the, if not the most, popular film series of all time, Star Wars, generates such lackluster interest that a pair of low-budget, non-Intellectual Property driven horror films perform better than the most recent entry in the long-loved franchise.

As with most things in life I believe that there is no simple single answer to as to why Obsessionand Backrooms pulled into such audience number while The Mandalorian and Grogu suffered middling success.

Certainly, the fact that three years passed between the last season of the once hit show, The Mandalorian and the release of the feature film it inspired dulled general interest. It today’s fast moving short attention span driven culture to paraphrase an extra in Jaws, ‘Three years is like three decades!’ It is also not helpful that the third season of that show proved to be the most lackluster one offered, splitting up the dynamic pairing that had driven viewer interest and delving into ‘lore’ of the Star Wars universe that interested the most die-hard fans but for everyone else came off as impenetrable and uninteresting.

When the trailers for The Mandalorian and Grogu finally appeared, promising the return of that pairing they seemed to rely entirely on the affection people once had for the pairing, offering nothing of the plot or story. The studio’s only pitched seemed to be, here are the characters you loved, come see them, and nothing more. In a time of already declining theater attendance, shortening windows between theatrical release and streaming availability, offering up nothing more than television characters on a theatrical screen is not enough to coax people out of their homes for an expensive trip to the local multiplex. The ones who did go reported that the film had no real story to it, it was a very expensive collection of action scenes and references to other programs that the creators of already shown on television. the script was so flabby and pointless that the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film could be edited out and absolutely nothing would change.

The tired and reheated offering from a franchise nearly 50 years old cannot explain why a pair of horror films exploded with financial and cultural success.

The horror movie genre mirrored the Star Wars franchise in the manner that 2026 with yet another entry in a horror series that had grown quite long in the tooth with the release of Scream 7 the latest addition in that 30-years-old franchise. Now, my opinion on this may be somewhat prejudiced as I have never loved or even enjoyed the original Scream when so many people found the movie so perfectly suited to their tastes. That said I find it hard to imagine how a script can breathe new life into a slasher that has continued for seven feature films without becoming a parody of itself. I will confess that ‘slashers’ are my least favorite sub-genre of horror with very, very few holding my interest. While other people adored Ti West’s X, I could only groan as the characters throughout the movie runtime veered further and further from anything I could believe as genuine human action and reaction.  What Obsession and Backrooms offered were fresh interesting horror stories that were either a series of ‘kills’ displaying technical expertise in the effects nor yet another exploration of grief using horror as a metaphor. Instead, each film spoke to a relevant cultural moment that resonated with people, particularly younger adults, and not the grey-haired fans of quite old franchises.

Obsession speaks to entitlement and consent with Nikki being stripped of agency over her body and her mind being the real horror of the tale. This is a subject that is very real to nearly all, if not all, women today. Between rights being stripped away by their government and the need to exercise vigilance over ever drink in public it is hardly surprising that film like Obsession strikes such a powerful emotional chord. Some have suggested the film would be more powerful if it presented the story from Nikki’s point of view however I think that is a challenge that would be nearly insurmountable in a cinematic form. A character without the ability to influence the events around her or even her own actions is one that would not thrive in a visual medium, that would work in prose, I can see a terrific novel with that approach but not a movie. I found the true horror of Obsession to be NIkki’s enslavement and not her outbursts of violent possessiveness. This movie is very much one of its time as is Backrooms.

Backrooms, inspired and adapted from the directors short projects on YouTube is a movie that, while set in the dreary 1990s, speaks to the young adult suffering the early 21st century. In addition to coming from a medium with which they are very familiar, the internet, its visual presentation, an empty, haunted, and ultimately incomprehensible world. Strip malls were not dead and empty spaces in the 90s but they are today and the vast lonely volumes present in Backrooms is an apt metaphor for the lives of young adults today, a cohort of people who suffered the pandemic for their teenage years, and emerged from college burden with debt and few if any prospect to have even the same lives much less better ones of their parents. A seemingly endless world that lacks maps or any other method of navigating is the world that they are attempting to build lives in. Is it any surprise that this is also a horror that touches their souls?

Star Wars emerged in the late 70s, a time of deep cynicism when heroes were often depicted as doomed their values a futile expression. Lucas painted a simpler time with simpler morality, one where it was easy to know right from wrong, that life had a light side and dark side and that resonated with the next several generations but this generation cannot believe in such a world. They have suffered too much to adopt a pollyannish view of reality; the dark, haunted, and manipulative horrors of Backrooms and Obsession mirrors the world that they know far more than a bounty hunter bound by some honorable code.

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Dementia Donny

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To be honest I do not know if the president is suffering from any form of age-related dementia; that man has always possessed a quite limited intellect and what people are interpreting as signs of dementia may simply be the effect of surrounding the man with nothing but lickspittles, yes men, and sycophants.

That said, I believe that it is obvious that either due to age or the shielding of his very fragile ego, Donny is not well and not capable, nor has he ever been, of properly exercising the terrible office of President of the United States. He has always been a vainglorious buffoon incapable of admitting error or fault and resistant to correction or even able to tolerate the slightest contradiction. He combines the very worst traits for a person in any leadership position, ignorance, unwillingness to acknowledge his ignorance, an unmitigated temper, and utterly lacking the capacity to see anything at anytime in terms other than how it affects him or beyond his own selfish wants and gluttony.

If we possessed a functioning political system Donny would be removed by his own party. While I have no love at all for the Vance, a political weathervane changing his positions apparently on the same schedule with which he changes his appearance, his characters flaws are far less dangerous to the nation and our systems than Donny’s. Invoking the 25th amendment and replacing the narcissistic and decompensating Donny with Vance would be an act of patriotism not treason but this version of the Republican party, having cultivated hate and anger as their base, cannot enflame that anger against itself, trapping the rest of us with their shortsighted choices of the 1990s.

Of course, blame for our current situation here in 2026 does not fall solely on Donny, his bootlickers, and the spineless GOP, it is also a burden carried by the arrogance of Biden and his team that refused to see the facts as they laid so plainly before them.

It was clear in 2022 that the electorate, and not just the Democratic Party, had no appetite for an aged president and that the economic strain and tribulations of the global pandemic had wreaked enough turmoil that re-election for Biden would be at best challenging. However, his close advisers did not bring this news to then-President Biden, spinning fairy tales to themselves and to their boss that re-election was indeed achievable. Perhaps another man might have seen past the bluster and happy-talk to the unrest and unhappiness in the electorate, but while anyone who advances to the office of President of the United States possesses a larger-than-normal amount of self-importance Biden’s ego has always been his greatest character flaw; these unrealistic projections played directly into it. I recall a moment in Biden’s flamed-out run for the office in the distant time of 1988 when he was confronted by a voter at some event and angrily challenged the man to compare IQs with him. It is a moment that stayed with me over the years and in almost every other election I would vote for someone other than Biden only the unique, and not obviously true, dangers of another Trump term, compelled me to mark him as my selection in 2020.  Had he stuck to his implied promise in that election and not run for a second term our current multiple crises could have been avoided.

That said the ultimate blame and responsibility still lies with Donny himself. He is one that laid illegal tariffs, choking our supply chain and enhancing what had been shrinking inflation, it was he that unleashed violent masked officers of the state to terrorize and kill, it was he that looted the treasury and invited bribes from domestic and foreign sources, it was he that demolished and degraded our national malls and monuments, and it was he that hurled the US into an unprovoked and ill-conceived war that has no end in sight.

Remember, if you find all of this unacceptable, the graft, the corruption, the illegal actions, the economic damage, and the foreign wars, according to the GOP it is you who is deranged and not the people who witness this and proclaim that it is all ‘fine.’

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