Monthly Archives: December 2020

Political Legitimacy is a Shared Fantasy

I remember clearly from one of my Political Science courses the professor asking the class, “When is a government Legitimate?” The answer is when people accept it as legitimate. There is no objective test, rule, or criteria that can be applied to determine legitimacy it is something acquired through consensus often an unspoken and intuitive attitude.

Donald Trump and worse yet major elements of the Republican Party have gravely and perhaps irreparably damaged the legitimacy of the U.S. Government.

Andrew Jackson, a president many hold in contempt, still recognized the legitimacy of the government even after losing in what he considered by way of ‘a corrupt bargain,’ in 1824.

Richard Nixon after losing a closely fought campaign in 1960 to Kennedy, a campaign that many felt had been influenced by potential corruption from Chicago, recognized the new Administration’s legitimacy.

Al Gore, after losing critical court battles but winning the nation’s popular vote, conceded the election to Bush and did not challenge the process as illegitimate.

In each of these cases there were some who refused to accept the outcome as legitimate. There always are but critically not the principals involved. Not the candidate themselves and not the leaders of the parties, this is not the case for the 2020 Presidential contest.

Trump is a lying narcissist, a damaged emotional wreck of a human being immature and unable to act in any manner other than greedy self-interest. (An Objectivist hero you might say.) His refusal to accept that he actually lost the election was not only predictable but heavily predicted. Because he occupies the office of POTUS that alone is enough to damage faith in the government’s legitimacy but when his refusal became a litmus test for national Republicans the damage to our nation grew.

Cowed, subjugated, and terrified of the base that they had spent decades cultivating GOP politicians refused to acknowledge the truth that Trump had lost. They filed laughable suits, they implored state government to overturn the election and made motions to disenfranchise millions of voters. And those that did not participate in these direct assaults on the very nature of our government turned a blind eye to the carnage, implored that this was simply ‘the process’ and coddled the mad child-king as he shredded faith in our system, as he destroyed legitimacy.

Foolishly they believe that once the administration has passed, they will be able to return to a pre-Trump state, but time flows in only one direction and it can never be rewound. The bell has been struck, millions of people now believe that this election was illegitimate, and that the new administration is inherently criminal.

I fear that McConnel, Fox News, and all the rest have given birth to many more Cesar Sayocs.

Revisiting: Planet of the Vampires

Italian Director and Cinematographer Mario Bava, best known for giallofilms such as Blood and Black Lace and horror movies like Black Sunday, in 1965 released the stylish is somewhat misnamed science-fiction horror film Planet of the Vampires.

A pair of spaceships, the Argos and the Galliott arrive at the planet Aura investigating signals that may signify intelligent life. When the ships, after being unable to observe the plant’s surface due to a constant impenetrable could layer, attempt to land they are subjected to a mysterious increased in gravity that renders all of the crew except for the Argos’ commander Mark (Barry Sullivan) unconscious. As quickly as it arrived the mysterious forces dissipates the Argos lands perfectly but when the crew awake, they are overtaken by violent impulses and nearly kill each other. With their wits gathered the Commander must locate and rescue the Galliott and discover the terrifying secret of planet Aura before everyone is killed by the planet’s mysterious force.

I first saw Planet of the Vampires, and there are no traditional vampires anywhere in the story, when I was a young teenager. A late night ‘creature feature’ broadcast the film, particularly its ending, stayed with me from the 70s through the 2000s when I obtained first a DVD and then later a Blu-ray release. While the characters are threadbare serving plot rather than dramatic functions the film is immensely stylish and unforgettable in its beautiful cinematography. All the more impressive when it’s known that the entire budget was less than that of two episodes the original Star Trek series. There are very few optical effects in the film with most of the ‘special effects’ captured in-camera and yet quite credible and lovely. Set design, though impractical for an actual starship, is modern, for the mid-60s, and immersive.

It’s difficult to accurately judge the acting of the movie. Planet of the Vampires was produced in the International Style used by many Italian productions of the period where the multinational cast all delivered their lines in their native languages, often without know what the other characters were actually saying, and then the rest of the cast would be dubbed into various language for other markets.

Based on an Italian SF short story One night of 21 hours the movie’s ending, which I will not spoil here, is one of the scenes that managed to stay stuck in my memory over the decades. Even during the years when the film’s title had faded from recall the ending remained.

This film is not to everyone’s taste, you must be able to accept style over plausibility, but if you do you will be rewarded.

Planet of the Vampires is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Twilight Worlds: The best of New Myths Vol 2

One night I watched an episode of the Original Series Star Trek and the Enterprise arrived at a planet that was nearly identical to Earth. Of course, the production’s very limited budget and the period’s limited special effects capability forced the creators to use such gimmicks to meet the demand of a weekly television series, but it sparked a thought What might cause an identical Earth to be discovered?

This moment of inspiration led to my short story A Canvas Dark and Deeppublished in NewMyths.com issue 41 and now re-printed in their collection Twilight Worlds: The Best of New Myths Volume 2.

Available December 15th, today, from Amazon and Barnes and Noble in both eBook and physical editions, Twilight Worlds represents some of the best and most imaginative stories published by NewMyths.com and I am deeply honored to have A Canvas Dark and Deep included in this anthology.

SpaceX — Almost — Did It

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is busily transforming humanity’s access to space. The Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage booster is an achievement of engineering with its fly-back and landing capability that allows its reuse with only limited reservicing between flights.

However, the second stage of the Flacon 9, the bit that accelerates the payload, cargo or manner spacecraft as of 2020, is not recovered and still represents a significant investment in money and resources that is simply thrown away with every flight. The ‘ammunition model’ of spaceflight, a mindset carried over from the development of rockets as weapon systems is unsustainable for affordable, frequent access to orbital space and beyond. The Space Shuttle developed by NASA in the 1970s and utilizing that decade’s peak technology failed to deliver on its overly ambitious dream of weekly flights to orbit and in the end proved to be too expensive in money and lives to continue operation.

In order to advance humanity’s flights into space SpaceX is developing two new rocket systems, a super heavy booster, and a fully reusable vehicle that booster will put into space named Starship (Though it must be noted it is a spaceship and has non capabilities related to stellar travel.)

Starship is massive and its operational plan requires novel flight dynamics, using one entire side as a heatshield as it returns from orbit, and then translating from basically a ‘belly flop’ attitude to nose up engines down to land in the same manner as presented by countless 50s SF movies.

This week a full-scale test version of Starship, Serial Number 8 or SN8, was flown to 12.5 kilometers and then executed the ‘belly flop’ flight plan. Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, gave an estimated of a 1 in 3 chance of success for the test. After all this had never been done before.

After flying and performing the complicated attitude changes nearly flawlessly SN8 just before touching down suffered a failure of some type in the engine systems, note the bright green in the rocket exhaust in the video, landed hard and exploded.

Some have called this a failure as though this was a terribly thing.

Failure is the lesson before success.

Failure is necessary.

Failure is not the end it is the beginning of wisdom, knowledge, and victory.

The Queen’s Gambit and the Peril of Sports Movies

Written and Directed by Scott Frank with luscious cinematography by Steven Meizler The Queen’s Gambit stars the luminous and captivating Anya Taylor-Joy Elizabeth Harmon and follows Beth life from her discovery of chess in the basement of her orphanage through her trials and tribulations with substance abuse, loss, and love as she climbs the ranks of world championship chess in the late 50s and 60s.

Adapted from a 1983 novel of the same name by Walter Tevis The Queen’s Gambit is both a character study and a sports film. Following Beth from age five when she is orphaned after her mother is killed in an automobile crash through her young adulthood in her twenties the story charts the characters growing addiction with prescription medication and alcohol as she develops her skills and talents as a chess prodigy while haunted by the tragedies of her life.

Skillfully directed with the best use of split-screen instead of a montage and deftly written with nary a scene of line of dialog out of place by Scott Frank the limited series immerses the viewer in Beth’s life and challenges with a bold confident style that never shies away from the more troubling aspects of her journey. Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance is masterful with careful control she expresses more with voiceless expressions than many actors ever achieve with speeches full of sound and fury that signify nothing. I have been a fan of Ms. Taylor-Joy’s acting since seeing her in the amazing horror film The Witch, and here she commands every scene and every shot without overwhelming them with ‘star power.’

Steven Meizler’s photography is simply amazing. His use of low-level light while still capturing deeply saturated colors is fantastic, creating scenes with depth, character, packed with emotion and yet never breaking the sense of period. More than once I have watched a period set film orseries and the photography spoiled the suspension of disbelief in subtle way that still proved impossible to ignore, not so here.

The Queen’s Gambit does fall into the category of film that is the ‘sports movie,’ and as such faces the challenges of the genre.

The first is the ‘Big Game’ problem. Usually a sport movie, no matter the sport, turns it emotional ending on the final big game, the championship match that the character of characters has been striving towards the entire story. The problem is that they can only win or lose and with rare exception the popular satisfying ending is winning and with the audience aware of this it tends to drain the drama from the play. A League of Their Own subverted this by having characters the audience identified with and cared for on both teams so someonewas going to lose, and the audience would be torn in their loyalties. The Queen’s Gambit had no such option and was forced to confront the issues head on. The solution Scott Frank found satisfied emotionally.

The second major problem facing sports movies is the requirement to understand the play involved. One reason the vast majority of sport movies fail to work for me is that I do not watch sports as a pastime and so the players’ great plays and terrible plays are not self-evident to me. The Queen’s Gambithas the issue multiplied as there are few people who could grasp and the dynamics of master level chess. Here Scott Frank used primarily play-by-play commenters to illuminate the games being played and avoided the trap of letting the audience ‘hear’ Beth’s thoughts as she played. During one critical match I knew that dramatically Beth’s opponent needed to perform a move she wasn’t expecting and yet I also knew I had no hopes of seeing and understanding if his move was the expected or surprising one. Frank solved this dilemma by having an observer mutter ‘He wasn’t supposed to do that,’ the dialog, though a tad clunky, worked.

Overall, The Queens Gambit is a masterful piece of television and the story fit the limited series format. It is doubtful that it could have been as thoroughly satisfying had someone tried to compress it into a single feature film.

The Queens Gambit is currently streaming on Netflix.

Steady Progress

So, even though this annual Medicare enrollment is the busiest I have seen in six years and that is creating tons of overtime work at my day-job I continue to make progress on my next novel.

This week, since the overtime is optional and the stress of it has cause my psoriasis to flare, I have reduced my hours back to the standard 40-hour week. I am quite happy that when I laid out my plan for this novel, I made my daily word count goal a mere 1000 words per day. Many days I surpass that target and since October when I started there have been just three or four days when I failed to meet it. This demonstrates the importance of modest goals.

When your goal is modest you will achieve it more often providing a psychological boost and a sense of well-being while if you make your objective too ambitious then frequent failure can provoke despair and senses of failure which hamper meeting the goal again and creating a feedback cycle that ends in nothing being achieved.

I could have easily set my goal at 1500 words per day. That’s a level I have consistently achieved before but knowing that the busy season was barreling down upon me I went with a more modest target and because I did, I feel good about my achievement and the work in progress is actually ahead of schedule.

My calendar shows my plan was to hit 46,000 words out of an estimate 80,000 by this Friday and as of this morning I am currently at 45,000 words.

My method may not be for you and your writing style but I find an outline, a sensible goal, and a reasonable amount of butt in chair and fingers to keyboard yields consistent results.

Reagan’s Party is Dead

Love him, loath Him, or be utterly indifferent to him there’s no denying that Ronald Reagan stood at the head of a massive movement in American Politics. Where Goldwater failed Reagan succeeded at seizing the Republican from the ‘Rockefellers’ and made it into the American Conservative Party. Ever since his victory over Carter in 1980 and his follow-up unprecedented 49 state crushing of Mondale in 84 Reagan has been the standard and the platonic ideal for every GOP national candidate until Trump.

The horrid truth, I think it is horrid no matter from where you approach it on the political spectrum except as a Trumpist is that Trump now commands the GOP more than Reagan.

In 1980 Reagan won nearly 44 million votes, about 19% of the entire American population supported him. 1984’s titanic victory came with Reagan winning 54.5 million votes and increasing the percentage of the population that supported him to 23%. (These percentage are of all people in the United States not just those eligible or just those who bothered to vote.)

With the 2016 election while losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college Trump gathers 62.9 Million votes, about 19% of the total population, comparable to Reagan’s popularity with more raw votes.

This year’s election the results are looking like Trump increased his vote total to 74.1 million votes representing a popular support of about 22% very nearly the same as Reagan’s but with a fanatical base of support willing to discount actual facts about the election outcome and equally willing to jettison decades of conservative positions for personal loyalty to Trump.

It has been 32 years since the GOP’s idol occupied the White House and with Trump his ghost has been exorcised from the party. The first real test of Trump command of the party and its candidates will come next month when we see how many national Republicans are willing the incur the child-king’s by attending the Inauguration of the new president.

Series Review: Jordskott

Jordskott is a police/thriller/horror series from Sweden with two seasons currently streaming on the service Shudder.

The show follows Eva Thornblad a police officer returning home after her father death in a fire. Johan Thornblad led the family business in lumber and mineral extraction and with his death the fate of the company the heart of community’s economy is in doubt as environmentalists pressure for the local virgin forest to be kept pristine. Eva is haunted by the disappearance of her daughter seven years earlier and when local children began vanishing in similar manners she’s drawn by the local police force into the investigation. What she uncovers are dark family secrets, horrors in the forest, and a noirish plot to steal the company her family founded.

Jordskott, which means ‘soil shoot’ in Swedish, practices what is rare today the slow build-up and reveal of supernatural horror. While I watched the series, I was reminded of Twin Peaks and how what started as a hunt for a serial killer twisted into a tale of ancient evil and the corruption just under the surface of a small American town. Jordskott while having the same gradual reveal of supernatural forces and evil that lurks inside of people’s souls, takes its own approach and should not be considered as a ‘knock off’ production. Its similarity lies in tone not plot.

We have not yet started on Season 2, but I am very pleased with season one, which did not end in a cliff-hanger but rather presented a complete and satisfying story. If you have Shudder, and given its slim pricing it’s really one of the best deals out there for commercial-free streaming, this is something to give a spin.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur