Month: September 2024

Leave That to the Dreamers

photog Current Events ,

I could be wrong but I believe that this election represents an end point for a lot of people.  My viewpoint on politics and our society has changed to such an extent that many of the things I thought were real I no longer do.  And one of those things is the outcomes of elections.  2020 proved to me that election outcomes were one of those things that can be fabricated.  So, worrying about them is a foolish preoccupation.  And that goes even if Trump is allowed to win.  To convince me that elections are legitimate again I would first have to see all of those who rigged 2020 indicted, convicted and imprisoned for their crimes.  And we all know that has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever occurring.

And so, when the inevitable 2026 banter begins about saving the House or the Senate from the midterm slump or the even more inevitable panic about preventing Gavin Newsom in 2028, I think I’ll just concentrate on preventing the government from stealing my stuff and harming my grandkids.  We all have plenty to do in our real lives and ranting and raving about imaginary battles that we could win is a serious waste of time and stomach lining.

And honestly, I’m not feeling particularly bitter about all this.  Knowledge is strength.  I blame myself for being as gullible and lazy as to not see how things really were.  As the song says, “I was blind but now I see.”  And that’s not a trivial thing.  I can avoid all kinds of trouble by virtue of not believing in fairy tales.  George Bush and the rest of the establishment Republicans are not on my side and they are not my friends.  They’re just the flipside of the managerial elite who run this country and make sure they always will.  If anyone emerges who claims he wants to change that, he’ll have to do a lot more than make noises about it.  He’ll have to prove he’s stronger than the gang running things now and he’ll have to spell out what’s in it for me.  And that’s a pretty tall order.

So as the next two months play out, I expect all kinds of entertaining hijinks.  This week’s debate has the possibility of being highly entertaining theater.  It’s not guaranteed.  ABC could rig it for Kamala so that Trump doesn’t get to say anything at all.  But it’s just as likely to be a fitting sequel to the Biden meltdown with Kamala screeching and running off stage.  So, there could be all kinds of fun coming up.  But I’m under no illusions about how the extra week of ballot manipulation will end up in Pennsylvania and Arizona.  And I won’t be upset about it either.  It’s as predictable as sunshine in the Sahara.

And come November, I have the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays coming up and every reason to look forward to get-togethers with family and friends.  So, life will go on and new projects will present themselves but worrying about President Harris won’t be among them.  I’ll leave that to the dreamers.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , ,

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to recommendation section at the bottom to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

“Sweet Smell of Success” was produced by Burt Lancaster’s independent production company and starred Lancaster as J.J. Hunsecker a New York City newspaper entertainment columnist whose influence allows him to make and break careers of entertainers, politicians and anyone who displeases him.  Tony Curtis plays Sidney Falco; a cynical and morally bankrupt press agent who depends on Hunsecker’s largesse to survive in the shark infested waters of New York City’s entertainment industry.

Falco is being punished by Hunsecker because he hasn’t been able to break up a love affair between Hunsecker’s sister Susan and a jazz musician named Steve Dallas (played by Martin Milner).  And most of the plot revolves around Falco and Hunsecker’s efforts to smear Dallas’s name and/or have him arrested for marijuana possession.

Hunsecker’s influence with a brutal NYPD police detective named Kello eventually leads to Dallas being arrested on a trumped up marijuana possession charge, assaulted by Kello and hospitalized.  Near the end of the movie Susan rebels at the plot that her brother and Falco concocted against Dallas and she tells Falco that Hunsecker will blame him after she commits suicide by jumping out the window of her Manhattan penthouse.  Falco stops her from jumping but when Hunsecker walks in on them and sees his sister in her underwear with Falco he believes her when she says that Falco had attempted to sexually assault her.  He slaps Falco several times.  At that point Falco reveals to Susan that it was Hunsecker who hired Kello to beat Dallas.  As revenge Hunsecker calls Kello and reports that Falco framed Dallas and he should be arrested for this offense.  But Susan finally rebels against her brother and walks out of their apartment to join Dallas.  When Falco tries to flee the apartment, he is met on the street by Kello who beats him mercilessly and drags him away to jail.

Recommendation

This is one hell of a strange movie.  Lancaster and Curtis spend the whole movie bantering back and forth at each other with a rapid-fire dialog composed of some kind of 1950’s beatnik/hipster patois, or at least what someone in Hollywood thought beatnik/hipster patois should sound like.  It’s truly bizarre.  Such lines as:

”I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“You’re blind, Mr. Magoo. This is the crossroads for me. I won’t get Kello. Not for a lifetime pass to the Polo Grounds. Not if you serve me Cleopatra on a plate.”

“You’re dead son. Get buried.”

“Sidney, this syrup you’re giving out with… you pour over waffles, not J. J. Hunsecker.”

And as you could imagine this is an incredibly downbeat movie.  Almost none of the characters are admirable or even likable.  The ending is something of a redemption for Susan but hardly worth the ordeal of swimming through J.J’s and Falco’s cesspool.  I can’t recommend this movie to most people.

I’ll confess that about once a year I want to watch this movie, sort of as a joke.  Maybe I just kind of like Falco saying, “You’re blind, Mr. Magoo.”  And there are many people who admire this movie for its gritty portrayal of something or other.  I’ll leave it to the individual to decide.

Double Milei

photog Current Events , ,

I read (or heard) that Donald Trump was talking about getting input from Elon Musk on streamlining or pruning the federal government.  Now why Elon Musk would be a qualified individual for such an endeavor is far from clear to me.  It is true that he reduced the headcount at Twitter by something like 70-80% after he bought it but since the social media platform is mostly an automated business, he probably just asked his direct reports to terminate everyone who couldn’t code.  End of story.

But all of this brings up a good point.  Why does the federal government employ millions of people to do clerical work?  Just as banks and insurance companies shed millions of paper-pushing positions when they eliminated the paper, shouldn’t the various departments, bureaus and agencies do the same?  And how about the fact that it seems there are multiple agencies working on the same “problems.”  For instance:

The Administration for Native Americans (ANA)

Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)

Or how about:

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)

And finally:

The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

The Office of Environmental Management (no acronym!)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC)

 

How much you want to bet that you have to get all these agencies placated before you can get anything done that they have staked out as their turf?

I think Donald Trump is absolutely correct that streamlining the federal government (or more felicitously expressed, “taking a chainsaw to it”) is one of the greatest public services that any president could perform for this country.  He has my whole-hearted support in such an endeavor.  But will he be able to do it?  Didn’t the Obama administration distribute tanks and automatic weapons to everybody from the IRS to the post office?  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that some IRS guys would go postal after being fired.  But the real trick will be performing surgery on the FBI and the other intelligence agencies.  Those guys are vicious.  And that’s not mentioning the CIA.  After all most people think they actually did kill Kennedy and all he did was abort the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  Imagine what they’ll do if you try to take the food out of their mouths.  They’d probably break out a suitcase nuke.

But almost as much fun as firing everyone, would be to impose an across the board 25% reduction in pay for the whole federal bureaucracy (except the armed forces).  For the armed forces the trick would be a reduction in the number of generals by a factor of five.  That should keep them out of trouble.

Trump is definitely onto something.  And the idea of enlisting actual businessmen to help identify the dead wood in the federal government is a good idea.  Bloated bureaucracy has been the cause of over taxation and inefficiency since the Han dynasty ruled China.  I would guess that reducing the size of the federal government by 10% would balance the budget immediately.

Now granted these fired individuals would be mostly permanently unemployed.  They would initially cause a burden on our economy.  Basically, they would have no usable skills and no work ethic.  But this would eventually come off the books as they quickly starved to death.  And after all these government departments were neutered the rest of the American workforce would surge forward in productivity, no longer hampered by the stupidity and malevolence of the vast government bureaucracy.

On second thought, Trump should consult with Javier Milei.  If it worked in Argentina, it should work twice as well here.  Just double whatever he did.

May You Live in Interesting Times

photog Current Events ,

Isn’t it the case that the only times we feel incandescently alive is when things go very, very right or very, very wrong.  At other times, even when things are going well, we’re mostly running on autopilot.  Most of our brain is asleep or distracted by all the minutia of modern life; the internet, the office gossip, all the gnawing worries we have about family problems, money, politics, world affairs and health.

But on those days when we meet a stunning woman or get hit by a car or win the lottery or get arrested by the cops our brains are lit up like the Fourth of July.  Every fiber of your being is jazzed.  Even when you’re just thinking to yourself, the voice of your own thoughts is a roar in your head.  You feel almost painfully alive.

Think about what it must be like to be a condemned man on the day of his execution.  Adrenalin is coursing through his veins and the sound of his blood pumping is pounding in his ears.  His muscles are tensed for flight but there’s no way out.  Or think about one of those ancient armies that was in pitched battle when suddenly the enemy line breaks and turns to flee the ground in a rout.  Think of the sense of triumph and relief that death has been avoided and instead the spoils of victory were imminent.  Maybe you’ve saved your native land from rape and plunder by an army of marauders.

When we’re living our normal lives routine and a sense of moderation is the rule.  Don’t eat too much, don’t drink too much, don’t stay up too late, don’t get too excited.  Don’t live too much.  I guess we don’t want to use up whatever we have left until the end.  And that is the sensible way to do things.

But it’s not very Homeric.  If you read Homer or even Tolkien you hear about the joy of battle or the battle frenzy.  And I think it’s this same idea.  It’s a heightened sense of existence.  It’s an adrenalin rush.  In our modern world only soldiers and police and firemen are likely to experience this sense of heightened existence from contact with existential risk.  Maybe add prizefighters and athletes at the very peak of performance.

What about the rest of us?  As I said, when the day is very, very bad or very, very good.  I guess a lot of people might have had some sense of this on September 11th 2001, especially if they knew someone who worked in the Towers.  I did and it was terrifying until I knew that they were safe.  Maybe you can count a sort of minor rush from something like a favorite underdog sports team winning a championship or maybe Trump winning the presidency in 2016.  But these are of course just tinges of exultation.

But the world is becoming a more dangerous and uncertain place.  It’s part of the fundamental change of America that Barack Obama initiated.  And as it becomes more dangerous, we will experience a heightened sense of being alive.  We will live in interesting times.  And we will by default become more interesting ourselves.  And as risk becomes more and more a basic part of our lives, taking bigger risks will become less “unthinkable.”  And then change will come from those who used to be oh so careful.