I don’t want every post to be political but at the moment my brain is working on nothing else.
Riots only appear spontaneous, they are the result of long term pressures and the current one are no different.
Not much else to say this morning.
In his mind Trump never loses. Any loss is always either a secret win that he spins with enormous lies or a result of ‘cheating’ and betrayals. Everyone, including Trump himself, was ready for his endless and utterly false claims of having won the 2016 when it was expected that he could not win. But he did win. A think margin of 70,000 votes in less than a handful of states put him into the presidency and created the conditions of our current chaos.
At moment Trump is running for re-election and in national polls and in the battleground states he is losing to Biden. Moreover, he has never held a lead over Biden during this entire race and with the triple threat of a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and civil unrest the prospect for Trump to take the lead is rather slim. Not impossible mind you but the electoral map does not look good for team Trump.
Given that the map is threatening and Trump’s ego requires that he does not lose I wonder if there is a possibility that he’s going to turn the campaign ship and run it aground.
Not as a ‘quitter’ because that too runs afoul of his over-inflated ego, but could some action, particularly an action taken by the Republican party or elites, such as not having a crowd packed convention, provide him with an excuse that the ‘deep state’ and ‘corrupt elites’ have stabbed him and ‘the country’ in the back and he then drops out of the race?
It was on March 31 when LBJ stood down from his second full term and left the Democratic party in a shambles and Trump has less concern for his party than any party leader in history. He wouldn’t care that a summer declination to run would trash the GOP, all that matters to him is his ego. Before the August Convention the GOP will not have officially nominated anyone as their candidate, leaving open the possibility that it could be someone else.
I am not saying that this is a likely scenario but as we have seen so far in 2020 unlikely is far from impossible.
A friend on Facebook asked how was that conservatives were disgusted and ashamed by this presidency and its horrific actions.
The truth of the matter is that is a very human things to do to turn a blind eye towards one’s tribe and one’s self when looking for flaws and hypocrisy and simultaneously be hyper-aware of the same things in others. Understanding this requires understanding that people rarely go from one extreme to another in a single leap but rather get there by a thousand little steps, justifying, if they think about it at all, as unpleasant actions and compromises taken for a greater good. Think back upon Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, “Our goals need not change only our methods.”
That element of goals is critically important, it is what allows someone to accept the unacceptable because the destination is worth it. Of course, this is the classic ‘the ends justify the means,’ and that so often leads to terrible consequences but it is difficult to see that slow corruption in one’s self and it is equally difficult to admit error particularly for anything of high personal importance. So, when someone of your team acts in a dishonorable manner, cheats, or is abusive it is far easier to excuse it, justify it, or point an accusing finger back at the opponents than face the painful truth of what you have even tacitly supported.
However, this has limits and eventually people either abandon their previously held truths for new ones or they abandon the tribes associated with their previous selves and both are ruptures of identity.
Among conservatives you can watch this process in action. Some have gone silent, simply no longer associating with the tribe as it currently stands, some have abandoned the tribe and formed their own new identity, the ‘never Trumpers,’ and some have adopted the uniform of their new movement, washing away their former ideals. It is wrong to think of conservatives as a single monolithic block and the same is true for any very large ideology. The reactions among conservatives is varied but the political party and its apparatus is firmly in the control of a single faction, Trump’s, and it would be best not to confuse the larger collection with the party.
I don’t have a lot of time and there is prose writing to be done but I have a few thoughts to share.
It is abundantly clear that in the nation we have a police brutality problem. Far too often they act as occupiers with the rest of the population subjugated.
It is also abundantly clear that systemic racism amplifies this brutality and black and brown people suffer disproportionately because of it.
The president in the words of a conservative podcaster ‘fetishizes brutality,’ and his most devoted followers fetishize his illusionary strength.
That which cannot be endured will not be. All people, individually and collectively, have their breaking points and when those are reach chaos predictably follows.
People who so confidently asserted that the GOP 94 victory averted a ‘civil war’ will remain blind to the causes of the current unrest.
And finally;
This is all far from over.
The COVID-19 crisis among other things stopped could the Film Geeks San Diego’s year-long presentation of Italian Genre Films that my sweetie-wife and I were enjoying so much. So, while we wait for the crisis to pass, we have been scrounging streaming services for gems of Italian Genre movie from the 70s and earlier. Last night we watched Caliber 9 1972.
I would classify Caliber 9 as an Italian neo-noir. It stars Gastone Moschin as Ugo Piazza a small time mobbed up crook just released from three years in prison. Unfortunately for Ugo both the police and the local crime boss, Mikado, believe 
that Ugo took part in the theft of 300 hundred thousand American dollars from the mob and that he has the money stashed away. Even Ugo’s girlfriend Nelly, played by Barbara Bouchet, thinks he stole the cash. When Mikado puts a particularly brute thug Rocco on point for finding out where Ugo has hidden the loot, thing begin to spiral out of control leading to murder and Ugo’s quest for revenge.
While the quality of these 70s era Italian exploitative movie can vary a great deal I thoroughly enjoyed Caliber 9. This film has a gritty, realism to it that helped sell the story to betrayal, greed, and fractured loyalties. It is not surprising that there is a re-make currently in post-production slated for a release this year, but between the trouble with foreign producers finding American distribution and the pandemic who knows if we’ll get a chance to see that in theaters at all. It’s a nice tip of the hat to the original that Barbara Bouchet will be appearing in the remake.
Caliber 9 is currently streaming on Amazon as one of the movies available to Prime Members.
Six years ago, after a meeting of the writers’ group I belong to one of the members voiced the opinion that in the3 USA who you voted for did not matter as all the politicians were effectively the same. It was another instance of cynicism masquerading as wisdom. The next presidential election presented the choices between an experienced candidate who had spent their entire life in the arena of publica service and narcissistic game show host with no experience in politics, service, or empathy. Today we are paying the price for selecting the game show host and pretending that the choices were in any way equivalent.
As of this week more than 100,0000 American have died of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis is far from over. When the news began filtering out of China, there were those in the administration that tried to sound alarms, tried to ready the nation and the government for a crisis but their leadership shut their eyes and plugged their ears pretending the crisis did not exist. When the outbreak became undeniable the nation was plunged, state by state, into an economic coma, throwing tens of millions out of work and destroying more than a decade’s growth but that might have been the right choice if the time it purchased had not been wasted. The ‘shut down’ was not the tool that would by itself suppress and mitigate the pandemic it was there to buy time so that the real tools, testing and tracing could be brought to the front and deployed against the enemy.
Again, the leadership failed the public. There was no mass mobilization for either testing or tracing. There wasn’t even coordination of efforts across the federal system but rather the opposite, states were pitted against states and against the Federal government itself. At least one state deploying its guard to protect incoming vital medical supplies not from bandits but from the Federal government coming in and confiscating the supplies for itself.
So now we are beginning to revive the comatose economy and we still do not have adequate levels of testing and we do not have the capacity to contact traces outbreaks. The best we can hope for is that the curve does not go up again but that we can keep the rate of infection and death level. If we do that, forestall any increase as people venture out and are forced back to their employment weather it is safe or not, then we can expect another 100,000 dead Americans by the end of the year. We will be near a quarter of a million dead Americans and for what?
For conservative judges?
For tax breaks on capitol?
What conservative gain is worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of American lives?
(Side note: Sweden did not put its economy into a coma and it is seeing as of this morning the first signs of economic growth, but it has a death rate from COVID-19 of 4.55 per million and the USA’s is 3.55 per million. Had the US followed that course it would have produced another 28,000 corpses.)
This will be quick. My sweetie-wife found a film she wanted to watch during our 30-day free trial of Fandor, The Devil’s Men US Title Land of the Minotaur. Starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance this is a Greek horror film about a minotaur-worshipping cult that abducts college students willy nilly and has a young girl kill them in sacrifices to their half bull half man god. Pleasance is a local Irish priest with an accent that is never very good and often disappears entirely while Cushing is an expat Hungarian noble with a wholly English accent that is the high priest of the murderous cult.
Roger Ebert called this ‘the worst Peter Cushing Film ever,’ but we think both Shockwaves and The Uncanny can give this poorly crafted film a run for that title. I have never seen a movie directed with such a lack of spatial awareness, scenes get turned around, 
characters are unaware of the geography around them and there is nothing in this movie to recommend it. During the climax of the story the priest informs the young heroic man helping him that they must get there before moonrise when their friends will be sacrificed, never mind that there have been loads already without that full moon, now they have a ticking clock. The companion asks how does the priest know this? It’s a good question because absolutely nothing that happened before this clued either the character or the audience to this suddenly critical fact. The priest’s answer? “I just Know.” He might as well have said, “The writer told me!”
Over at The Bulwark, a place for ‘Never Trumpers’ conservative to make their case from the right that Trump is a deranged, unstable, and terrible person to hold the office of the Presidency Charlie Sykes made this observation:
But in this case, the vector of this disease is not Twitter: the root of the malignancy is the president himself. Until we deal with Trump, everything else is just noise, because he is the bully pulpit.
I sympathize with Charlie. A political organization that he had believed in, devoted his adult life to, and fought for is now lead by a narcissistic man-baby throwing tantrums and feces at anything and anyone that displeases him, but Trump is not the root, he is not the cause, he is the end result of decades of ‘red meat’ cultivation by GOP heads that believed that they could always control the monster that they created, the GOP rabid base.
Trump did not, like Athena from Zeus’ forehead, spring fully formed during the Republican Primary but rather he grew in carefully cultivated ground. He grew in soil prepared with decades of racist attacks carefully coded to allow plausible deniability, in soil watered with attacks on expertise, in soil weeded of dissent and inconvenient facts, and in soil that was sheltered with illusionary morality providing its fruit of illegitimate righteousness.
The leaders of the GOP injected their base with steroids of hate, deploying state initiatives banning gay marriage, demonizing undocumented immigrant without ever truly addressing the big businesses that employ them, stood aside while the levers of power were deployed in endless investigations of political enemies, turned blind eyes to overtly racist and baseless attack on politicians of color all while cloaking their supporters with an armor of victimhood, asserting that they were the ‘true victims’ of untampered hate.
No, Trump is not the root cause he is the inevitable metastasized tumor of this untreated cancer.
Surfing through the offerings on The Criterion Channel yesterday I landed on The Big House from 1930 as my evening’s entertainment.
With story and dialog credit to Frances Marion and her second Oscar nomination for writing The Big House is the source for many cinematic tropes found in later prison movies. The story is concerned with three principal characters, Kent, a new arrive at the prison, starting a ten-year sentence for man slaughter after he 
killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, Morgan a forger, and Butch an illiterate thug serving time for murder. While the film makes sociological points about the prison system including having the warden complain that society is happy to throw people into prison but unwilling to pay for it, it avoids pulling out a soap box but instead focuses on the nature of its central characters and how their time in prison reinforces or breaks their character.
Many scenes which would later become clichés in the sub-genre of prison movies are present here in this early ‘talkie.’ The food riot in the massive dinning hall, the full riot with bedding thrown from the upper levels of a massive cell block, the sharp concern among the inmates about ‘squealers,’ and so on though it is far from routine when the climax of a prison movies involves several tanks.
Running just under an hour and a half The Big House doesn’t waste time, there is no preamble and very little fat, something filmmakers today struggle to maintain. With visuals that were sometimes decades ahead of their time this movie remains an important and watchable piece from a time nearly a hundred years ago.
San Diego has two drive-in theaters and both are now operating during the COVID-19 lock-down. Last night I went to the Santee Drive-In and watched the most recent iteration of The Invisible Man.
Universal Studios had planned to make an Invisible Man film as part of the Dark Universe Franchise series but the smoking crater left behand after the release of Tom Cruise’s The Mummy and the disappointing performance a few years earlier of Dracula Untold (2014) destroyed those plans as thoroughly as a snap from Thanos. This movie was produced by horror specialists Blumhouse and is quite the good film.
Written and directed by Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia Kass as a woman who has escaped the physical and mental abuse of her brilliant tech-bro husband Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Following her escape Cecilia grapples with the PTSD from her years in an abusive 
relationship and learns that Adrian has apparently killed himself but soon she becomes convinced that through his technological brilliance Adrian has faked his own death and is now tormenting her with some manner of invisibility. Friends and authorities are naturally quite skeptical of her assertions and dismiss them as stress induced mental illness leaving Cecilia to reclaim her life and her power alone.
The script is tight with nary a wasted beat or moment and the characters presented are smart and capable. Cecelia, though dealing with sever PTSD, keeps her head and shows a level of intelligence and cunning that is often rare for characters of horror cinema. (Though it was left to the teenager in the story to instruct Cecilia that you never use water to fight a grease fire.) Whannell’s direct sure and on target with even the use of jump-scares, where a sudden action or appearance in frame is used to startle the audience, motivated by character and logical plot developments. I can’t honestly judge the cinematography as the outdoor presentation ruined a number of darker sequences but other than that the film had a sharp, cold, modernist look that well suited the story and tone. The score was neither particularly memorable nor intrusive but support the scenes well without drawing excessing attention. The entire cast delivered competent performances but this movie lived or died on Moss as she carried the entire story and appeared in every scene as our sole viewpoint character. I can report that she excelled and gave us a credible, sympathetic, and ultimately strong character worthy of our support.
The Invisible Man (2020) is well worth the time and I look forward to seeing it again at home where I can enjoy the photography under better conditions. The unsuitability of the venue to films with dark sequences forced me to leave after the first feature as The Wretched promised substantial scenes at night or in deep darkness.