Author Archives: Bob Evans

A Strange Theory

Recently I was exposed to the theory that Joe Biden in his presidential ambitions is likely to, after winning the White House and serving a brief portion of his term, resign and turn it over to Vice President Harris.

My writer’s brain tried to sus out the detail of how this occurred to Biden and frankly I don’t have a malleable enough imagination to make it credibly work.

Biden has run for president before and in his previous excursions on the political presidential battlefields has been routed. To quote a jape from The Daily Show ‘You don’t need Ukraine to beat Joe Bide, Joe Biden will beat Joe Biden.’ But as they say in the financial commercials past performance doesn’t assure future performance. A reasonable expectation when Biden entered the race was that he was too centrist for the moment and as before would be beaten in the primary.

Given that it is hard to imagine that he launched a grueling campaign not only expecting to win but plotting to give it all away as well. And even if he had joined the fray with that intention his serious early defeats would have given him credible coverage to drop out and let the left have the field. No, I just can’t see him starting the campaign with the intention of winning it and then giving it away.

So, for this theory to hold water he would need to come to this conclusion after the campaign’s start. After South Carolina Joe’s momentum built and the candidacy that had been on life support became the monster that slew the opponents to its left. Now going from victory to victory Biden suddenly decides that he wants to win but give it to the woman who shived him in the first debate? Joe has wanted to be president for some time, he ran back in 1988 what event or turn of chance would prompt him to suddenly decide he didn’t really want it but wanted to win it for someone else?

No, the idea that he came up with this plot after the contest started doesn’t hold water either. Like the idea of reavers piloting ships from planet to planet in the Firefly universe I simply can’t envision the scene where this happens.

The truth of the matter is that Biden, who isn’t for defunding the police, isn’t for Medicare for All, isn’t for eliminating the filibuster, just isn’t that frightening and that to make him frightening one has to invoke stalking horses, Trojan horses, or Manchurian scenarios otherwise he is a fairly garden variety Democrat and compared to the insanity that is the Trump GOP that’s far from frightening.

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The Stated but Hidden Truth

Ryan Struck of CCN tweeted a quoted from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

“After they change the filibuster, they’re going to admit the District as a state. They’re going to admit Puerto Rico as a state. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity. Once they get a hammerlock on the Senate, they’re going to then pack the Supreme Court.”

There is an interesting and unstated foundational premise in McConnell’s argument about the number of senators, that the Republican Party is incapable of persuasion. The voters it has now, its primarily white Christian voting base, is the only one it is capable of attracting.

This is a truth that is universally known but rarely acknowledged. It is the truth the motivates the voter suppression efforts of the party because this is party incapable of attracting new voters to this side. In 2012 the GOPs presidential candidate lost the electoral college with a popular vote share of 47.2 percent while in 2016 it won with a lower share of the vote a mere 46.1 percept of the popular total.

The foundational idea of democracy, direct or representational, is that it is a marketplace of ideas where political actor present and argue for various causes, policies, and ideals and the voters determine those that are place into office or enacted. In theory a part that loses voters adjusts their policies and positions to attract new voter for victory in future cycles and the only way the new states would be Democratic in perpetuity is if the GOP is incapable of adjusting itself to attract new voters in those new states.

There was a time in presidential contests when California was a solidly Republican state it is no more. Things do change and the idea of the any state belong to one party in perpetuity is false but McConnell is telling a truth.

The Republican Party as is it now standing solidly against democratic ideal and processes and confronted in a contest of ideas will lose for the foreseeable future.

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Some Possible NAZI Shit Right There

This week reports began popping up here and that that women in an ICE detention center, one that is operated by a private contractor, have been subject to unwanted and unnecessary hysterectomies  with some referring to the doctor alleged to have done this as ‘the uterus collector.’ These reports come from a whistleblower from inside the system.

It is important to note that at this time we do not yet know the accuracy, validity, or truth of these reports. Whistleblowers can be wrong, can have incomplete information, or even be untruthful or they can expose gross wrongdoing that authorities want to conceal.  Those of us on the outside need to make sure an honest independent investigation is performed and trust to the results. Congress has started one and we need to keep our eyes on that.

With all that said if these allegations are accurate or close to accurate this is some NAZI level shit.

I am not one to throw around comparisons to NAZIs or Stalinists. These types of verbal assaults are usually the product of intense partisanship and not a considered judgment based upon historical context but post WWII forced sterilization of black and brown people? That is straight up racist NAZI shit.

It is no revelation that those are those on the right obsessed with birth right citizenship and ‘anchor’ babies. It would not take a stretch of the weakest imagination to contemplate a racist, nationalist, medical professional sterilizing non-white women to eliminate the possibility that they may give birth while on American soil.

That is conjecture. Right now, we do not know the facts, but have an administration that dismisses the deaths of Americans that it does not consider as its supporters. ( The offensive comments from the president that if you take out the deaths from ‘Blue States’ we’re doing well with the pandemic.) And that the head of our government considers people from Mexico to be ‘rapists and murderers.’ Is it really that hard to believe that it may have attracted racists zealots to its border enforcement programs?

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Blu-Ray Review: The White Reindeer

 

A few weeks ago as my sweetie-wife and I relaxed watching Travel Man, an amusing show that spends 48 hours in various cities and well worth a watch on Hulu, I came across a tweet suggesting that people need to watch this older Finnish film about a woman that becomes a were-reindeer luring men to deaths. I shared the information with my sweetie-wife who instantly wanted to see it. (She has a love of things Finnish.) Searching failed to find any site hosting The White Reindeer for streaming and because my own curiosity grew quite elevated and I ordered a Blu-ray of the film from Germany. (It’s a joy owning a region free Blu-ray player and being able to view discs from literally anywhere in the world.)

Several weeks later The White Reindeer arrived in our mailbox.

With a running time just over an hour The White Reindeer fits nicely into the sort of time slot that from the period would have been a ‘B’ picture but its quality is in no way associated with that ter. Starring and co-written by Mirjami Kuosmanen The White Reindeer’s protagonist is Pirita a young woman who find her newly married life to reindeer hunter Aslak more dull than she had expected as he is required to spend significant time on distant expeditions. In desperation she turns to a local wizard for magical help to make her irresistible but due to either the unusual nature of her birth or the malicious actions of the stone god that grants the power Pirita becomes a shapeshifter transforming in a rare white reindeer that no hunter can resist chasing to their doom.

The director Erik Blomberg avoids the typical transformation effects of the age and instead of lapse dissolves uses clever edits and cuts to suggest the change and promotes the fantastic feel of the film far better than if we had watched Pirita become the reindeer.

The White Reindeer won Best Fairy tale Film at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1956.

More closely related to horror cinema that fantasy with clear mirroring of Universal’s The Wolf-Man without being derivative The White Reindeer is essential viewing for lovers of international horror films.

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Outline Draft is Done

As has been very clear for some time on this blog I am a plotter. I can’t even write a short story unless I know how it ends and for longer form fiction such as feature screenplays and novels I must work from an outline.

Sometimes those outlines are highly detailed, one stre3cthed out an enormous 87 pages but usually they are more along the lines of 20 or so pages and that is exactly where my latest outline landed.

To construct my outline, I first break down my story into acts, usually five these days, with an understanding of where each act ends, the dramatic turn that propels the characters onto a new course for each act change.

Then when I wrote out a prose outline populating it with characters and their motivations I discover deeper level to these acts and while the locations of the act breaks occurs they often change from external events, Character A discovers the body of Character B, to decision points Characts A starts investigating Character C after discovering character B has been murdered. It is always better when the dramatic change at the end of an act is propelled by a character choice rather than a stroke of lightening from the author.

The most recent outline for a proposal going to my editor at Flametree has been a lot of fun to craft and the subject matter is exciting me. Here’s hoping my editor feels the same.

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HBO’s Fahrenheit 451

The past Saturday I finally got around to watching HBO’s adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451. written in 1953 the novel is a dystopian tale about a future where books are banned and firemen respond not to structure fires but to discoveries of illegal libraries and destroy them with flame.

This adaptation seems to take inspiration from the original novel and the 1966 film adaptation while inserting new elements from the filmmakers. The final product comes off as clumsy and inconsistent. The novel’s growing threat of war and commentary that an illiterate citizenry has been dropped in favor of the much more generalized idea of a population made docile with social media and entertainment. While the social medical aspects are a clever way of updating the themes of the novel removing the external threat of war steals away the purpose of the critique.

Montag’s family life and comfortable lifestyle have been removed stealing away the concept that rebellion and free thought are not without their costs. A loner loses nothing going out on his own and I believe Bradbury was very well aware of this.

The surveillance state of this adaptation is a bungled plot device as are the use of drugs to pacify the population undercutting the social media commentary that in the original work had been fulfilled by comic books and pornographic magazines.

Perhaps the greatest failure of HBO’s film is the insertion of a McGuffin devices to try and create an action adventure third act. A single strand of DNA containing all of the world’s surviving literature becomes a motivating prop that thematically is loose and disconnected from the rest of the work and only serves to provide a ‘heroic’ victory.

All in all, this adaptation is not worth the less than two hours it takes to watch it.

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My 9-11 Memories

While 2020 seems an endless treadmill of terror the 19 years between today and 2001 seem like a flash that passed with the swiftness of a hummingbird’s dive.

September 2001, I worked the overnight  as a specimen processor at Quest Diagnostics. I ran a machine that took very little active thought and throughout the night usually listened to a ‘boom box’ tuned to a local radio station. One the morning of September 11th, as often happened, the radio’s reception turned spotty and the station alternated between clear signal and migraine inducing static. Just before reception failed entirely, I heard a breaking news report that an aircraft had apparently collided into the World Trade Center.

My first thoughts were that some light general aviation aircraft had lost its way and slammed into the building much like in 1949 when a B-25 Mitchell had struck the Empire State Building. Tragic, people had died, but not a monumental news story.

Unable to get any further news I completed my shift and left for home. At the bus stop, in those years I was bound by mass transit, a young man listening to a handheld transistor radio with a single earpiece pushed into his ear said that one of the towers had fallen.

I did not believe him but kept quiet. So often in the immediate moments after something breaks on national news there are rumors and exaggerations and still with no knowledge of what exactly had happened, I was disinclined to believe the most sensationalist version of events.

Disembarking from my bus I stopped off at a 7-11 on the way back to my apartment and on the televisions playing in the store saw the horrible truth. In that moment it changed from being a ‘news story’ to history we were living through. I called friends and woke them up and as the day passed dread for our future grew.

Since that day, September 11th, 2001, we have been in constant war. Thousands lost their lives and it’s difficult to assess that we have made any meaningful progress since then. The culprits directly responsible have mostly been dealt with but the underlying conditions have scarcely changed and the toll it has taken on our national character, it opened the door for American to be known as a nation that tortures prisoners, it incalculable.

It is no test to be moral when times are good the test is when anger burns the blood, when vengeance enflames the mind, that is when the test truly comes and people discover who you really are.

It is up to us to change the tense of that verb, from who we are to who we were.

 

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The GOP’s History of Bleeding Black Votes

Listening to a historian the other day I learned that the GOP’s bleeding of Black votes has been going on for much longer than I had expected. My thoughts were that the GOP had once been the home of the Black vote because of the warm feeling for Lincoln, the End of Slavery, and an aversion to the Democratic Party due to its explicit support of Jim Crow segregationist laws. And that this rough alignment began unraveling with the 1960s and the Civil rights legislation pushed by President Johnson, but this view is only partially correct.

The GOP was the home to the Black vote but the bleeding of that support began with the 1936 election as the Black vote started departing for Roosevelt despite that fact that at that time the Democratic party was strongly associated with southern segregationists. In 1939 the GOP commissioned a report investigation why they were losing the Black vote and what measure were required to regain it. The author, Ralph Bunche, reported that while the Black vote had no illusions about the stronger support with the Democratic party for racist policies the economic benefits of the New Deal were tangible gains for the community and to win the vote back the GOP would need to enact policies that produced tangible benefits and not simply rely on good will and historical associations.  The GOP rejected the findings and continued to lose the Black vote.

The process repeated in the 1960s where one party produced real world change that could be seen and felt and again there was a report and again the action required were rejected. Instead Nixon and GOP sought the vote of the disaffected Democratic whites that opposed the new round of civil right legislation in the ‘Southern Strategy,’ over any meaningful actions and the Black Votes continued to bleed.

2012 the GOP lost to Obama and commissioned a new report, a report that advised actual actions and again the results were rejected and the party embraced an openly racist candidate with Trump. Trump gathered a vote total that was actually less than the 2012’s losing total for the GOP but due to third party defections and strategic fluctuations in voter turnout managed his Electoral College victory.

Three times the GOP has been told by people it has hired what it needs to do to reach out and win more support from Black and other ethnic communities. Three times is had rejected the answers preferring platitudes to actions, messages to meanings, and now it has abandoned all sense of honor, morality, and ethics is it quest for electoral victory.

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Horrible Imaginings Review #6

Because of the way the online nature of this year’s Horrible Imaginings Film Festival worked once you started a feature or a block of shorts the user then had six days to complete viewing the material before the access closed. That means though I had been unable to complete all the blocks during the official run of the festival I still have several days to finish up blocks of short films before I lose the capability.

Last night after my sweetie-wife retired for the evening I watched the block of short films centered on the theme ‘We’re All in This Together.”

Perhaps the weakest block thematically as nearly every film could easily be placed into blocks such as ‘Blood is Thicker Than Water’ or “People Behaving Badly,’ this selection of film still managed to produce a few standouts.

Hammer follows a man, played by Eric Roberts, who comes home to find his wife engaged physically with another man. While a hammer seems to provide a solution, the final reveal is quite a commentary of jumping to conclusions.

House Hunting explored a possible internet craze that lay just beyond possible but not so far that it could be safely ignored.

But perhaps my favorite of this block is Make A Wish centered on a wife’s surprising and frighteningly violent but loving gift to her husband on his birthday.

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Horrible Imaginings: Reviews 4&5

I missed yesterday so this will be a double review but not doubled sized.

Sunday, we kicked off with the feature Diablo Rojo from Panama. The story concerns an owner/operator of a transit bus, his young co-worker, and witched and demons that pursue them over a dark secret from years earlier. Lost in the jungle area of the countryside with the addition of a pair of traffic cops and a priest they must unravel the mystery and put things right. Competently made Diablo Rojo was perfectly serviceable but did not manage to elevate itself above that. Too many elements were crammed into the same plot and convenient exposition fell from characters that had no justification for that information just because the story required. However, these are issues common to horror and non-horror film and this one was still fun to watch and possessed the most badass priest in a long time.

The blocks for Sunday were on the themes of Isolation and People Behaving Badly. Isolation in general did not work as well as the other block, perhaps because with often only a single character it’s more difficult to craft a good story. People Behaving Badly offered up killers and slasher and gave us more shorts that exceeded our expectations. The standouts from this block were Overkill a farce of the slasher genre, and Waffle and its disturbing take on when the gig economy invades the real of friendship.

Monday my sweetie-wife and I enjoyed the feature documentary Hail to the Deadites about the growth and power of the fandom community surrounding the Evil Dead film series.

I closed out Monday evening with the feature Repossession from Singapore. Jim is a 50-year-old engineer suddenly laid off from his employment and too proud to admit it to his family or to lose his status symbols descends into deceit and desperation to maintain his lifestyle as an evil from his past creeps back into his life bringing horror and helplessness. Repossession is an excellent example of slow burn horror. The first hour of the feature plays as a drama with only hints at something unnatural afoot and the last 30 spirals into deep supernatural terror. Hands down of the feature films this year Repossessionperfectly blending character and monsters is my favorite.

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