Even before last week’s terrifying and subservient joint press conference it’s been clear that Donald Trump not only admires Vladimir Putin, but also actively defers to the former KGB operative. On the world’s stage his displayed the true colors of his ‘America First’ philosophy, blame America first.
Without any reasonable question it is fact that the Russian government engaged in a wide-ranging, committed, and vigorous operation to influence the 2016 presidential campaign seeking to benefit Donald Trump and deny Hillary Clinton the office of President. Since taking office, with the American Intelligence community in rare unanimity concerning the Russian operation the Trump administration has taken no actions punishing the Russian for their attacks on our democracy, no measure to safeguard future elections, nor utter even a mild condemnation. Why?
Before I explore the theories as to why Trump takes no action and defers to Putin let me set aside, for the moment, the question of collusion. Those charges are being investigated and we should await the information produced before coming to a conclusion.
Theory 1: Putin has something on Trump.
This covers a lot of potential ground, everything from damaging salacious material to financial pressure due to the nature of the Trump Organization’s funding. The opaque natures of the Organization and Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances and tax records keep such suspicions alive.
Theory 2: Trump and Putin are simpatico.
It is possible that Trump and Putin share a worldview and as such come to similar conclusion about the world and what is happening.
Theory 3: Trump’s ego is too fragile.
The crux of this idea is that Trump is incapable of admitting any concept that weakens his electoral victory. His ego demands that his victory be a product of his ‘very stable genius’ and any condemnation or recognition of Russia interceding on his behalf undercuts this and challenges his fragile self-image.
Theory 4: Trump is naive.
This one speaks to the fact that Trump is in experienced as a politician and when confronted with news he dies not like, that the Russian decidedly interceded on his behalf, and a sooth experienced manipulator such as Putin telling him what he wants to hear, Trump is unable to separate what he wants from what is true.
There’s a lot of differences between those four theories, swinging from being in the pocket of a foreign power to simply being thick in the head but here is one thing I think is inescapable no matter which theory turns to to bets fit the facts:
ANY of these means he is incapable of being a proper president. No person cripple by any of these conditions can be trusted with the awesome powers of the US Presidency.
A small digression; Back in the early 80’s a local theater used to have what was called ‘Dollar Night.’ Every Tuesday admission to all movies, all day, all showings, was just one dollar. Dollar Night was very popular and my friends and myself often took bold risks seeing all manner of movies because well, it was only a dollar. Granted there we endured a lot of bad movies, The Perils of Gwendolyn in the Land of the Yik-Yakcertainly comes to mind. However even with such cinema classics scarring us for life seeing the sheer number of movies that Dollar Night allowed was a pleasure. I am reminded of those days because earlier this month I enrolled in the AMC Theaters subscription program AMC’s A-List. For $19.95 per month subscribers can see up to 3 movies per week for no additional charge. Granted, even with inflation that does not reach the level of discounts that Dollar Night achieved but it does open up the doors for more films and more experimentation in which films I am willing to give a chance in the theater versus waiting for eventual home viewing by way of streaming, premium channels, or disc. It was utilizing that subscription and the strength of MovieBob’s review that lead to me going out last night for The First Purge.
The fourth film in the Purgefranchise (With a television series slated for airing this year) The First Purge is a prequel exploring the origins of the first story’s central premise; that for one evening a year all laws are suspended allowing the American people to cathartically expel their personal violence. (A concept Star Trekfans will remember from the TOSepisode Return of the Archons.) Utilizing footage from crises around the world The First Purge establishes the backstory of a grand economic collapse that lead the assent of a new American political party The New Founding Father of America. The NFFA sweeps in election gaining control at local, state, and federal levels. (Showing that the filmmakers of this franchise already understand the American political system better than more ‘serious’ storytellers.) Using the research of psychologist Dr. Updale (Marisa Tomei) they implement the first purge on a small-scale experimental basis, subjecting Staten Island to a twelve-hour period of lawlessness with hopes, if participation is great enough, of rolling it out nationally. Residents of the area are offered $5000 to remain on Staten Island for the experiment and even more to participate in cathartic violence. (A here the filmmakers display a typical Hollywood misunderstanding of the scientific process.) In addition to follow Dr. Updale and the NFFA party members implementing this experiment the film follows two principal groups of characters, the first centered on community activist and Purge opponent Nya as she attempts to keep her people safe and out of the purge, and the Dmitri, Nya’s ex-lover and leader of a local drug gang. Dmitri also does not believe in the purge but has far less concern for the community than the idealistic Nya. All the character, Updale, Nya, and Dmitri find their worldview and assumption challenged as the reality of the ‘experiment’ and it actual aims are discovered.
The First Purge is dystopian science-fiction prompted as an action/horror film and as with all dystopias it is inherently a political story. If you are a Trump supporter or Trump adjacent the political message is not for you. After all look at one of the movie’s official poster and you’ll see that they are not trying for subtlety. And while U can quibble with some of their statements I celebrate a story, a film, or any art having a point of view.
I mentioned MovieBob’s review, he gave The First Purge 3 out of 5 stars and I think perhaps he was a tad generous. There are glaring flaws in the film’s execution but nor are there any real moments that rise to interesting heights. I think The First Purge is a competent film and get in, tells it story, hits its marks and gets out. For a solid but not stellar performance I would give it 2.5 stars, right in the middle.
I started this review mentioning the long dead ‘Dollar Night.’ While I sat through the previews of coming attraction there were a few that I knew I would see now that the AMC A-List removed the ‘Am I $15 interested?’ hurdle for future films.
Over several nights via streaming I have re-watched the film Gone with the Wind.I ended up watching this movie because the other Olivia de Havilland The Adventures of Robin Hood was not available on streaming. I know I had seen Gone With the Wind before but it had been some time, decades, and I thought it useful to view the film and the story through my more experienced eye.
Directed by Victor Fleming with music by Max Steiner, and boasting one of the most colorful pallets ever, this movie stands as an achievement in cinema. Grand in scope and in scale and with a cast that is just terrific it is easy to see why this remained the most popular film for a very long time, but it’s impossible to ignore the propagandistic elements of the piece. The barbarity of slavery is utterly absent from the film. Every black character is actually a stereotype and evil of the plantation system is disregarded for a myth of noble benevolent slavers.
The story is about Scarlett O’Hara and follows her from her teenage years, starting right at the onset of the American Civil War, and though the ruin of her personal life as an adult. Scarlett loves Ashley but Ashley loves Melanie while rakish Brett Butler loves Scarlett. Through the war, reconstruction, and beyond we follow Scarlett as she schemes and uses people, always pining for Ashley who remains faithful to the clueless and naive Melanie. (Truly Melanie is tied right up there with Claudio from Much Ado About Nothing as the most gullible and naive character in western literature.) On this production I think Olivia de Havilland I think had the toughest job as an actor. She had to convince us that Melanie could be a real person and she did it. While Vivien Leigh deserve her accolades as an actor, I think Olivia did a far better job with much more challenging material.
As I mentioned in this space several weeks ago my most recent entry into the Writer of the Future contest had scored a finalist. (At that time I though the finalist were six but it turned out there are eight from which the three winners are chosen.) My entry did not win.
Don’t worry about me; I’m good. Rejection is baked into the cake and its labeled right on the tin. Do not attempt traditional publication if you cannot take rejection for it will stalk you every step of the way and throughout any career. I’m proud and happy to have this odd little story score a spot on the finalist list and the contest may print it as a published finalist in next year’s anthology.
I am reminded of a story I once heard Charlton Heston recount on the Late Show with Johnny Carson. (Kids ask your parent or grandparents.) The great actor Laurence Olivier was in a stage production and the play had already been running for several weeks when one night his performance transcended into something beyond words. His fellow actors noticed the heights he suddenly has reached and were spellbound by the achievement. Afterward Maggie Smith, you kids know here from Harry Potter, came to his dressing room and asked if he knew just how good he had been that evening. Reportedly Olivier answered, “Yes, but I don’t know how.”
This is what separates art from science or engineering. You can learn rules, you can learn theories and in science those are unchanging, always producing the same results from the same inputs but art doesn’t work that way.
Under the current coordinating judge I have submitted a dozen stories to the contest, one made finalist, none have made semi-finalist, one scored an honorable mention, and the rest, ten out of twelve were passed over without comment or placement. Why did this story catch Dave’s attention?
I don’t know. A number of those stories that Dave did not care for have sold to other markets, several have gotten feedback and comments from other editors. This is not science and there are no hard and fast rules that assure consistent outcomes. Dave himself has a number of elements or rules that he thinks makes for good story telling and this story, the one he plucked for finalist, ignored or broke a number of the advisory guidelines.
When I have a new short story I will submit again but past performance is not guarantee of future results.
I have written on this topic before but I think it bears a return engagement. Nearly everyone knows the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. A young boy is giving the vastly important duty of guarding a herd of sheep; twice it shouts false warning about a wolf and laughs at the panicked village when they respond to his alarm. When the wolf actually does appear no one answers his call and depending on the version you hear, the sheep, the boy, or both are eaten by the wolf. The moral of the story is do not lie for when you need to be believed you may not be. And that itself is a good moral, but the concept if false alarms and the deadened of people to those alarms run deeper than deliberate fabrications.
Consider if the boy had thought that there might be a wolf and he raised the alarm without taking stock of the situation and verifying that the flock was in danger. The result of the story remains unchanged. Twice the village runs to the flock only to discover that there is no wolf and when the boy raises a legitimate alarm they are unlikely to respond quickly or with any conviction. The moral does not need to be about lying but about making sure you are right before you sound that alarm. There needs to be a fire before you pull the fire alarm lever.
This lesson applies to politics as well as other areas of life. One the conservative side of the aisle anything that increases regulation, no mater how rationally or required is met with calls of ‘Socialism!’ Obama was not a center-left politician but a man out to destroy the American way of life and who plotted to institute ‘hard socialism.’ So far we have not been treated to a firebrand eat the rich socialist who has the potential to gain real power but should it happen the right will learn that they have devalued their alarm call into meaningless noise.
Fascist has also become meaningless. The term has been bandied about so often as to be devoid of definition. I can remember people on the left constructing careful arguments that Reagan was a fascist, as was George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. It seemed that everyone to their right was automatically a fascist. Is it any surprise that now with a Republican politician who openly admires dictators, jokes about violating the constitution and remaining in power beyond two terms, applauds the slaughter of peaceful protesters, and sided with our geo-political foes over our own intelligence community that the charge of fascist still lacks punch?
The misuse and abuse of such charges, turning them into mere insults has robbed us of a vital tool of information and alarm. There is a wolf about but few are willing to listen and more than ever we must be vigilant.
First off let me split the hair between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. Clearly people do conspire and that process is a conspiracy. People conspire to smuggled drugs, contraband, and people across boarders, they conspired to evade their taxation debt, they conspire to conceal evidence of guilt and all manner of things. The real difference is the scale by which real world conspiracies operate and the vast global coordination required for many popular conspiracy theories. A few conspiracy theories that serve as example to me of this deluded impossible thinking:
AIDS was a created disease to eliminate certain racial groups.
The Moon landing was faked.
The US Government has possession of alien technology.
Marxists, after their ideology was discredited, disguised it as post-modernism to infiltrate it into popular culture.
Vaccines cause Autism or mental defects.
International ‘globalist’ (and we all know what that’s code for) control world events. (That one gets tied to Marxists as well.)
9/11 was an act of the US Government.
I admonish everyone to demand proof, not conjecture, not assumption, but evidence before believing vast glob spanning causes for events.
It must have been about 1983 or early 1984 when this started. I was in the apartment of a friend and some movie was playing on HBO. From the dialogue track someone referred to a character named Mr. Devereux. Unrelated to the film playing on the television my memory pulled up a scarp of dialog from another film:
“My Name is Estan Devereux.“
In my memory I could hear the voice quite clearly but I could not visualize the scene. I could not call up the line right before or the one that followed only that fragment of a conversation.
My Name is Estan Devereux.“
For the rest of the day it haunted me. I know it was a minor character and I knew it came from some film I like but I simply could not remember the scene, the characters, or the movie.
It continued into the next day. It was definitely an old man, his voice weakened with age, a horse whisper, but I simply could not remember the movie. Not the genre, not the style, nothing but that annoying voice repeating the fragmentary line.
My Name is Estan Devereux.“
Eventually it faded from my mind and I went on with my life. But a few weeks later something triggered my memory and the line played again, still without identifying context. I struggled, trying to force the epiphany that would answer this mystery but it would not happen. This became a familiar and frustrating cycle. Something triggered the memory and I’d spend hours or even days with it echoing through my mind but unable to resolve the mystery of the movie’s title.
Some may be wondering why not go to the Internet, or Google to find the title and kill the torturous puzzle? Take a look at those date my friends, this is long before any Internet. A few years later I would have my first personal computer and my online interactions would be with early chat rooms on a local Bulletin Board System, but there was no global repository of geeky and obscure knowledge.
This played out over a decade. I did not keep a record but it feels like the line resurfaced perhaps as often as once a month, never bringing with it more information or any sort of context always leaving me frustrated and without an answer.
In the early 90s I acquired my first DVD player and slowly began building my home library of beloved movies. I never had a great collection on VHS, and had possessed a decent collection on Laserdisc, but it was the DVDs where my home collection really took off. Bit by bit I picked up discs, eagerly playing them when I got home. Then one night with a new disc, after so many years, the mystery was solved.
I wish I could say that I got there simply by looking at the title. That picking up the case in the store prompted the floor of memory unlocking the resolution but that did not happen. I got the movie home, peeled off the wrapper and stuck it into the player. As the hero is penetrating the villain’s castle, seeking to rescue a trapped, noble, and foolish hero, he releases a number of prisoners from the evil King’s dungeon. An old man begins to speak and before the words tumble out of his mouth the memory floods my thoughts and the answer is playing on my television.
My Name is Estan Devereux. I was the King’s architect.“
I give you The Sword and Sorcerer the fun, silly, cheesy fantasy film that tormented me for over a decade.
Having been a tabletop role-play gamer since 1979 I have seen my fair share of cheaters. People who produced character with fantastic statistics, math errors that always break in the players favor, and fudged die roll. One thing that seems to exist as a common trait among these varied cheaters over the decades is that the invested considerably in the game as part of their identity. Doing well at the game was not simply fun for them but a validation of their self-worth and confirmation of their superiority. Of course the fact that had to cheat to achieve these aims undercuts the effect. For everyone who was aware of the cheater the effect was quite the opposite and it is only with a heaping serving of denial and delusion can that ultimately weak faced me erected and maintained.
What does this have to do with Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
People invest more than just games with a sense of their identity. People do it with spectator sports, it’s part of why rioting occurs both for victories and defeats, they do it with religion, they do it with their artistic creations. And of course people take popular culture and make it part of their identity.
Several years a national news story centered on a woman who had arrived for her Jury duty wearing a starfleet costume from the Star Trek franchise. She insisted it was not a costume but a uniform and that it represented the high ideals and morality of the United Federation of Planets. She had taken the themes of Star Trek and incorporated them into her identity, binding them so tightly to her sense of self that she simply could not envision performing her civic duty in any other mode than the one she had adopted from the fictional Star Trek setting. Star Wars too has themes and ideals that it presents as a moral good, all fiction does this, and there are fans that take those ideal and meld them into their identity.
Let’s return to gaming for a moment. A strange thing often occurs when you confront someone who has been cheating, they get angry, really really angry. They’ll wail that it has been themselves who have been wronged, they’ll try to divert attention to the misdeeds of others, they’ll lash out at their accusers and not at all uncommon they’ll make it impossible for the game to continue, destroying the enjoyment for everyone. Attacks on the cheating are in effect attacks on their identity and this provokes powerful overreactions. It is far easier to displace that anger than to confront the awful truth of why it mattered so much to the cheater.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
It’s clear to me that there are a sizable number of Star Wars fans that have built a significant amount of the self-identity from the fantasy franchise. It’s perfectly okay to dislike a movie, to me disappointed in a franchise, Alien 3, and Star Trek V both leap to mind, but this sort of anger, vitriol, and poison indicates an unhealthy attachment to the fictional characters. There is something about the character Rey, Poe, Finn, and Kylo that strikes these fans right at their cores and is irreconcilable with their self-image.
If you were political knowledgeable during the 1980s you may know what it meant when an environmental activist group was called a watermelon. This charge implied that while the group may have appeared Green from the outside inside with was Red, as in Communist. Usually this charge was hurled with circumstantial evidence that Soviet Intelligence, the KGB and the like, either created the group or had seriously penetrated it, turning it into another arm of the Soviet’s attack on the West. During the Cold War this was a charge had to prove but once the Soviet Union collapsed and secrets spilled out many of the charges were substantiated.
Any good intelligence officer will tell you that you cannot create division in a nation or culture but you can exploit naturally occurring ones. The general members of these environmental and anti-nuclear groups were not the Kremlin’s puppets. These people sincerely believed in their cause, they were concerned about environmental degradation, nuclear waste, and the terrorized by the concept of nuclear war. Their fears and concern were hijacked by a hostile foreign power that did not share their concerns but rather used them as a tool to advance selfish self-interests and authoritarian rule around the globe. The fall of the Wall and the ending of the Cold War consigned calling a group a ‘watermelon’ to the ash heap of history.
America’s culture wars, xenophobia, and sharp political partisanship have created fresh societal fractures for the Kremlin, now under the control of oligarchs instead of communists, to use to divide and weaken the West. Master of human based intelligence the Kremlin’s agents moved against the western democracies and from Brexit to the 2016 American Presidential election they scored hits, wounding, us, their global adversaries. The full extent of their political interference in the US elections is still unknown, the investigations are ongoing though domestic political actors, knowingly or unknowingly, aid the Kremlin’s objective with obstruction, returning us to the 80s where activist political organizations, with resources and aid from our geo-political rivals, undercut our democracy and threaten freedom around the globe. China, even as it retreats further in despotism, is rising, launching ambitious projects for global economic dominance with the decade, Russia invades her neighbors and drives wedges between NATO’s member and her allies, never this century has American leadership been more vital and more absent.
Russia pours money and resources into America sharpening our divisions, turning us on each other and today the political ‘watermelons’ are Facebook groups and memes, partisanship over patriotism, and the destructive pursuit of power absent principles. This may very well be an infliction point in history and what we do and how we do it will shape the future.
One of the great mistakes people make when taking advice or information is the make the assumption expertise in one field confers some sort of basic level of competence in another. Because someone is a talent astronomer does not mean that understand the dynamic of nuclear war, because someone is a gifted businessperson does not mean that understand the complexities of governance, and yet this sort of transference of expertise happens again and again.
Recently I came across a YouTube video explaining that Dr. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian Academic with advanced degrees in psychology did not understand Nazism. Watching the video, which utilized clips from Peterson 2017 lecture series Maps of Meaning, specifically, lecture 11The Flood and The Tower, I suspected that the clips had been taken out of context. The sheer level of error in the statements by Dr. Peterson seemed beyond belief for a person with a university education.
They were not out of context.
Here is the section of the lecture, just over five minutes, where Peterson diverts from the subject of the lecture to speak about Nazi Germany.
Here are my major objections to Peterson’s opinions.
1) ‘Hitler should have enslaved…’
The Nazis most certainly enslaved their ‘undesirable’ (Jews, Homosexuals, Roma, etc.) Even knowledge gleaned from popular culture such as Schindler’s List should be enough to make this basic knowledge. For those with just a little more understanding of history there is also the famous legend above the gate to history’s most infamous of death camps, Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Sets You Free.’ The Nazis worked to death the people in the camps and those that could not work they murdered. The V2 factories in addition to raining death on London and other allied cities also boasted one of the most lethal areas in the concentration camp system. It is shocking that a university professor is ignorant to all of this.
2) ‘… Win the war and then…’
Peterson’s argument that the Nazi’s should have won the war and then turn to murder ignores several critical factors. First and foremost is that the Nazi’s anti-Semitism was centered to their political and cultural worldview. The elimination of all Jewish people and influence from German culture, German Life, and German lands had been a stated goal for some time. Quite simply for the Nazis murdering of the Jewish population was a victory condition. It has also been argued and with some validity I think that the Nazi accelerated the mass murder as a way to keep the German’s population food rations higher. The lesson of the First World War where Germany was effectively starved into submission was one ruthless applied to the Second World War.
3) ‘… Significant military resources…’
The military resources diverted to the Nazis campaign of mass murder had no material effect on the war’s outcome. German intelligence seriously underestimated Soviet military strength and with the manufacturing base moved east beyond the war’s destruction, coupled with American entry into the war, doomed German to defeat.
4) ‘ … Fascistic societies are Fascistic at every level…’
Peterson referred to Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary German and the Holocaust. I have not read this book but there are a number of good reviews and takes on this work. What is clear is that Goldhagen’s thesis is that Germany held a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism that primed the German population to be turned easily murderous. That’s an interesting and not undisputed hypothesis but it is not the same things as declaring a society, much less the German society, as Fascistic at every level.
As a political philosophy Fascism was founded in1915 and I am not sure how you replace an entire culture in just a dew short decades. I think it’s much more reasonable to think the Peterson is misrepresenting Godlhagen’s work. The poison of Anti-Semitism is far older than either Fascists or Nazis and it was merely a tool, a lever, by which the Nazi managed their murders and they found more than enough willing help far beyond Germany’s borders.
5) ‘ … Why do we assume that? …’
Perhaps the most stunning assertion in the entire digression is that possibility that Hitler never planned to win the war and that he actual aim, whether he was aware of it himself or not, was chaos and mass destruction. Certainly, in some case, on individual actions it may be best to determine actual motive from repeated outcomes, but applying this framework to single outcome events such as winning or losing a war strikes me as quite a stretch.
I do not think it was the Kaiser’s intent to destroy the German Empire but that was the outcome of World War I.
I do not think it was the intent of the Japanese government to subject their home islands to destruction and occupations but that was the outcome of World War II when they brought America into the conflict.
I do not think it was the intent of the rebellious Confederacy to end slavery but that was the outcome when they started the American Civil War.
I do not think it was Gorbachev’s intent to dissolve the Soviet Union but that was the outcome of his Glasnost policies.
It’s perfectly reasonable to accept that Hitler and the Nazis wanted to win the war and carry their murderous prejudices across all of Europe and beyond.
Expertise is not transferable and when someone moves beyond their field of training and specialization it is wise to subject their opinions and ‘facts’ to scrutiny.
