Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

To Be or Not to Be a Barbarian

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

Just when I think Leftists can’t get any more un-American they say, “Hold my soy latte” and show us just how miserably wretched they truly are.  Up here in New England one of the states (it doesn’t matter which one) is debating a bill to mandate 100% voting turnout for all elections.

Now I don’t know the details.  I don’t know how they’ll guarantee that the dying and the late-stage dementia patients are forced to vote.  I’m guessing if you don’t show up the ballot gets filled out for you by the Secretary of State.  I think they’re calling it the 100% Democracy Bill or something brilliant like that.

This sounds like a joke from our side; just a way to make fun of the leftist tendency to dictate behavior for “people’s own good” but this is actual legislation that’s currently under debate.  Actual politicians in this part of the country think this is consistent with the American constitution.  Well, all I can say is these people are insane.

But they’re also running the show up here.  The insanity is baked deep into everything they think and do.  They don’t realize how this looks to people on the outside.  This is so close to North Korea and Sadaam’s Iraq where “free elections” end up with the dear leaders garnishing >99% of the vote every single time.

Well, that’s enough about that.

I was thinking today about the definition of literary science fiction.  I guess it’s any science fiction that has enough character development and enough verisimilitude to the way real people act and talk and feel to convince “serious” literary critics that your story is literature and not entertainment.  I guess it has to be in some sense “real.”

Unfortunately, I understand that what it’s mostly become is racial and sexual grievance screeds very unconvincingly disguised as science fiction.  So outside of a specific population of people primarily dedicated to reading such stuff it’s not going to very interesting to most of the human race.

But putting this political sub-genre aside what is the difference between genre fiction like science fiction and fantasy and actual literary fiction?

Well, I think that’s still quite subjective but I get the point of some of the criticism of some genre fiction.  The story can be so stereotyped that the action feels cartoonish, the characters are one dimensional and the dialog is completely predictable.  I can think of some pulp stuff that seems that way now.  But by the same token, there are literary “masterpieces” that have long stretches of boring plot where nothing much happens.  And even the most widely hailed protagonists can have whole chapters where the story drags and the dialog is meh.

So, what’s the calculation?  Can a pulp story have 95% of the story composed of space opera and still be “literature” if the author gives the hero a scene full of heartbreaking humanity and emotional conflict?  Sure, we’re not expecting Conan the Barbarian to break into a Shakespearian soliloquy when one of his comrades is skewered by a neolithic monster.  But if you write a story that has an interesting plot surely there is no shame in trying to make, some of the characters at least, recognizably and honestly human.

Now, I’m not thinking about Hamlet showing up in any of my stories.  But Macbeth might as well be a medieval urban fantasy story.  It has witches and magic and ghosts.  Just because it’s in iambic pentameter and has “thou” and “thee” scattered around in it doesn’t make it any less a crime drama.  So, who’s to say that a genre novel can’t be legitimate literature?

Just something I was thinking about.

18MAR2025 – How the Week is Progressing

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews, Trump , , , ,

What’s to say today?  I guess the most interesting news event is Musk’s Space-X stepped in and brought the astronauts stranded on the International Space Station home after Boeing stranded them there six months ago.

There’s something ironic in this situation.  Boeing has been in the news for the last year because of defective aircraft that many have associated with DEI based hiring practices.  And now Space-X; an Elon Musk company that prides itself on merit-based hiring, steps in and solves a frightening situation with a can-do approach to space flight.  It’s like watching the two approaches to hiring compared face to face before our eyes.

I guess the other big story is that lousy judge trying to block the deportation of Central American gang-bangers by the Trump administration.  Afterward Trump said he should be impeached.  And so Chief Justice Roberts opens his big mouth and says that precedent doesn’t call for impeachment on a difference of opinion on a judge’s ruling.

As if that were what is going on.  These slimy leftist judges will stall and block everything the Trump administration wants to get done for the American people.  We will see this for the next four years.  If Roberts wants to be at all useful, he should expedite all requests by Trump’s administration to have these phony judges’ decisions reviewed by the Supreme Court and allow Trump to fix all these problems.  Of course, impeachment will never solve the problem.  We would need a supermajority in the Congress.  What we need is the Supreme Court to provide constitutional review of these awful decisions.

Today I finally got a handle on the impasse I’ve been wrestling with in finishing my book.  What I need is a good crisis/resolution to reach the endpoint.  So here is a situation where you know where you want to end up but there needs to be a struggle to make it feel satisfying.  But I don’t need another physical battle.  I need a popular revolt.  And I think I’ve figured out an angle.  I think I’ll withdraw the consent of the governed.  I’ll have a national guard unit revolt and then let it cascade across a state and then across the country.  Now I have to figure out the dramatic details.  I’ll have the national guard unit refuse to hand over my protagonist then when the Army wants to send in regulars, I’ll have the governors of the four states where Connors people are located close ranks with all of their national guard troops to deny the arrest.  And then I’ll let it swell from there.  That seems pretty good.  After that I’ll let the newly appointed president convene a Constitutional Convention to begin cleaning up the mess that the Deep State has caused.  And that will give me a nice breakpoint to allow my protagonist to be pardoned by the president.  And more than pardoned, exonerated.  And then I can allow him to ride off into the sunset which is something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

So that’s what I was doing today.  Thursday will be a long day when I’ll be working on stuff I hate.  But that’s life.  I have one of the grandsons coming over Saturday.  That should be fun.  Apparently, he’s voted for spaghetti and meatballs and mint chocolate chip ice cream.  So, I’d better do some extra time on the rowing machine this week.  But maybe I’ll burn some of that off with a baseball catch.  I hope my shoulder is still functional after a winter of chopping ice.  I wonder what movie he wants to watch?  I hope it’s “The Return of the King.”  I haven’t seen that one in a while.  I think the “Ride of the Rohirrim” is about due.

Well, that should be enough for now.

Critical Drinker Discovers Firefly

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, TV Reviews , , , , ,

It’s been over twenty years since Firefly was even a distant memory of a television show.  That excellent sci-fi series that struck a decidedly anti-elitist, pro-freedom, anti-“surveillance state” chord with its rag tag crew of space smugglers and other nonconformists in their chronically malfunctioning space ship Serenity.

I’m glad to see that the next generation is coming to recognize what a great show it was and just how much better it was than the current crop of fantasy and science fiction shows that have not a hundredth of its creativity and heart.  Kudos to the Crtical Drinker for saying so.

The 400 Blows (1959) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, photog's Corner, Reviews , , ,

The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.  I beg to differ.

I won’t give a spoiler alert because there’s nothing to spoil.  Nothing happens.  This was François Truffaut’s directorial debut.  I don’t know.  If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody’s sake.  Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its “Thirty Days of Oscar” celebration of Academy Award winning movies.  Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.

Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made.  Well, that’s too bad.

A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father’s office.  At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy.  The End.

When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, “That’s it?  What the hell kind of a movie is that?”  I said, “It’s abstract!”  She was not happy.  That will probably be the last French film she will be watching.  I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie.  I think I’ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn’t warn her off.

While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard.  So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives.  But that was the only violence in the film.  The real violence is against the audience.  After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back.  It should be called the “The Ninety-Nine Blows.”

I know I’m just a philistine and I don’t understand art for art’s sake.  But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way.  It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state.  But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears.  That’s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience.  That’s the one unforgiveable sin.  The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, “What the hell was that?”  That unfortunately was our reaction.  If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager’s office and demanded our money back.  That’s how bad it was.

Maybe it’s the French.  Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls.  Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually.  If that is the case, then I think they went overboard.  No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film.  There are limits to revenge.

What Have They Done to Tim Allen?

photog Current Events, Reviews, TV Reviews , , ,

I used to enjoy Tim Allen’s show, “Home Improvement” on ABC back in the 1990’s.  Then in the twenty-teens he had another show on ABC called, “Last Man Standing.”  It was a funny show.  He played a conservative guy who lived in Colorado and he railed against his liberal daughter and her hippy-dippy Canadian husband.  But then in 2016 he made a few jokes against Hillary Clinton and for Donald Trump and they cancelled the show.  Eventually, Fox TV decided to bring the show back but it never recovered.

Now Allen is back on ABC with a show called “Shifting Gears.”  He’s the owner of a high-end auto shop with a divorced daughter with two kids.  It’s incredibly bad.  It’s full of stereotypes.  He even has a black paraplegic mechanic who “keeps it real.”  All the dialog is awful and the characters are predictable and inane.  From time-to-time Tim gets off a funny line or bit.  Who knows maybe they’re adlibbed.  You can tell he’s still as funny as he ever was.  They just don’t give him anything at all to work with.

So Hollywood is dead.  There’s just nothing left.  The studios have a racial and sexual quota system for almost every function in the industry.  I can’t even imagine how stupid and programmed the writers must be.  What I saw tonight looked like a parody of what a sit-com would be if woke writers followed the dictates of the DEI mandates.  It was unimaginably bad.

But I’m going to take this as good news.  ABC is owned by Disney.  And Disney has produced a string of bombs over the last couple of years that can’t have escaped the notice of Wall Street.  There will be a reckoning one way or the other.  Either they will course correct and produce entertainment that people want to pay to see or they will lose money and the stock holders will sell and they will lose many billions of dollars in equity and the Board of directors will bounce Bob Iger out on his ear.

Iger was brought out of retirement when the former CEO got in a pissing contest with Ron DeSantis in Florida over the rainbow people that Disney has adopted as their most important constituency.  Since then, they’ve doubled down on gayness and it’s had a very serious negative effect on their business.  It’s made their latest Star Wars television production, “The Acolyte” so unwatchable that they had to pull the plug on it after the first season.  And now their latest live-action remake of the classic cartoons of the 1930’s, “Snow White” is predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think 2025 may be the year that Disney has their epiphany.  They destroyed Star Wars.  They chloroformed the, “Indiana Jones” franchise and now even their Marvel movies have been infected with boring woke characters like, “The Marvels” and are losing money.  If they can’t even make a decent princess movie for little girls they’re cooked.  I’ve been following the reviews and the industry gossips and it seems like everyone thinks the reckoning is imminent.  We’ll see.

So, farewell Tim Allen.  “Home Improvement” and “Last Man Standing” were funny and sometimes heartwarming too.  But you’re not going to get anything worth doing at ABC until they really do switch gears at Disney.

Bad News – Good News

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Something Revolutionary and Unprecedented; Storytelling

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

Today I had one of my grandsons over for a visit and after lunch Camera Girl asked if he wanted to watch the movie, “Catch Me if You Can.”  And he said sure, so I went looking for it in the DVDs.  But mysteriously it was missing.  So, she gave me a lot of grief because she said if I had said we didn’t have it she would have rented it at the library.  So blah, blah, blah … I said okay let’s watch “Captain America – Civil War.”  And he said sure.  Well aside from the commercials (I recorded it a couple of days ago) that I had to annoyingly fast forward through it was the typical Marvel Universe CGI extravaganza.  Well, mostly.  Since it wasn’t billed as an “Avengers” movie it didn’t have the full ensemble; Hulk and Thor were missing.  But with all of the minor heroes and the addition of Bucky (aka the Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Ant Man and Spiderman it was pretty damn crowded.

And because the title included the words civil war, what most of the action scenes consisted of was the heroes divided into two opposing factions battling each other.  So, Iron Man and his crew were battling Captain America and his backers.  Now it’s not a hundred percent clear whether they meant to kill each other.  I guess we’re supposed to assume not.

But here’s the thing.  The offensive and defensive capabilities of these various characters are woefully mismatched.  Even without Thor and Hulk who are basically unkillable, the abilities of the minor characters who are basically normal human beings without any special armor or weapons, are laughably insufficient to either harm the stronger characters or even survive a serious fight with them.  Take one obvious feature.  How does someone who can’t fly fight with someone who can?  And there are plenty of other problems like that.  It leads to an absurdity where the weaker characters are just dancing around trying to avoid being squashed flat by the heavy hitters.  And this looks ridiculous.  It looks like a jar full of hornets buzzing around in a jar, to no particular result.  And this is especially egregious with the female characters.  Even though somehow Black Widow (basically Scarlett Johansson in tight leather pants) is able to easily fight and kill a half dozen much larger men without effort, it defies all the laws of physics that she can attack a man in an armored suit that’s so heavily built that it allows him to survive anything short of an artillery shell going off in his lap.  He shouldn’t even notice her attack and she should basically break every bone in her hands punching him.

Now of course superhero movies are based on the idea of fantasy.  So sure, let the girl fight her way through the bad guys.  That’s what we expect.  But in general, the mixing of unkillable and highly lethal characters with humans whose only superpower is wearing a spandex costume, just doesn’t make very entertaining cinema.  The only time these movies make good watching is when two powerful and very evenly matched characters are set against one another.  So, in the original Iron Man movie Tony Stark and his former partner; Obadiah Stane have powered suits that at least are in the same ballpark of capability.  This allows brains and experience to allow the fight to resolve itself in an interesting way.  In the original Captain America film Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt are both super soldiers (biologically enhanced) and therefore on a relatively level playing field.  In the original Thor movie, the antagonists are both immortal Norse gods.  This level playing field in each movie makes the conflict less improbable and more interesting as theater.

So, I am not surprised that stacking more and more heroes and villains of completely unequal and confusing capabilities just makes the action scenes an unholy mess with very little tension or enjoyment.  And now it seems the audience has grown tired of all this crowded hyperactive choreography.  It’s grown stale and annoying.  And the numbers are going down at the box office.  Maybe it’s time for the Marvel Universe to try something revolutionary and unprecedented; storytelling.

Maybe They Can Work for Tyson Chicken

photog Camera Reviews, Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Music Reviews, Photography Reviews, Trump ,

Donald Trump is a very old man.  He’s seventy-eight or thereabouts.  And, sure, he’s wealthy so he doesn’t have to worry about his kids or grandkids starving.  So why is he doing all this?  Some people say it’s for pride.  He wants to be remembered as a great man.  Maybe.  But would he be going through everything he’s been through for the last ten years just for pride?  I tend to doubt it.  Now, I don’t doubt that part of it is associated with pride.  I think he felt disrespected by the Democratic elite that mocked at the idea of him running for president.  And I’m sure he wants revenge on the people who have made his life miserable since he became president in 2017.  I think he’d love to punish as many of them, as severely as he possibly can, for all the dirty tricks and harm they’ve caused him and his friends and family.

But I still don’t think that’s the whole reason.  I think it’s because he’s an American and it angers him to see this country lose the characteristics that made it a great country.  He doesn’t want his descendants to live in a banana republic.  He doesn’t want them to live in fear of the secret police.  Basically, he wants them to be free.

And I believe this because that’s the same thing that motivates me to rail against the Deep State and the Fake News and root for Donald Trump and his insane crusade to “Make America Great Again.”  I’m not blind.  I know Trump is a huckster.  He runs casinos, sells steaks or bibles or golden sneakers or whatever the rubes will buy.  He’s PT Barnum with a hair transplant and a permanent tan.  But I believe down to my feet that he is just as angry about what the people in charge have done to this country as I am.  I know that he sells snake oil to the suckers but I think it angers him to see these regular people getting shafted by the likes of Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney.  Maybe he feels that these people are his marks and he has the right to cheat them a little bit but in return they shouldn’t be impoverished, dispossessed and replaced by whoever can be loaded on a boat, marched across the border and put to work in a Tyson chicken processing plant.  In other words, he thinks the American dirt people are still Americans and deserve at least the right to exist.

Of course I can’t prove any of this.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe he’s just crazy and he’s just doing this to satisfy some megalomaniacal craving for the spotlight.

But it doesn’t matter.  Because for whatever reason Donald Trump is fulfilling the wishes of me and about a hundred million other Americans who’ve watched this country systematically degraded and reduced to an anarcho-tyrannical police state where criminals run amok and law-abiding people have to keep their mouths shut to avoid being sent to a gulag.  He’s figured out how the system works and he’s single-mindedly taking it apart piece by bloody piece.  And it’s beautiful.

So, I can’t prove what I think about Trump but along with everyone else on my side we’re watching this spectacle in the way I imagine the fundamentalist brethren would feel if the rapture suddenly came upon them; shocked but ecstatic.  When all of the things you’ve been hoping for years would happen suddenly do, it makes you giddy.  And that’s how it’s been since January 20th.  And if he can keep this up for a few more months I’m starting to believe he can actually beat the Deep State and fix this country permanently (or at least for the foreseeable future).  So, keep breaking stuff Mr. Trump.  Reduce Washington DC to rubble and send the managerial state to the unemployment line.  Maybe they can work for Tyson Chicken.

Gene Hackman – A Film Career Retrospective

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , , , , , , , ,

I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious” circumstances.  The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition.  The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation.  Well, we’ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.

I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman’s career under happier circumstances.  But better late than never.  I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.

1969 Marooned
1971 The French Connection
1974 The Conversation
1974 Young Frankenstein
1978 Superman
1886 Hoosiers
1992 Unforgiven
1994 Wyatt Earp
1995 Get Shorty
1998 Enemy of the State
2001 The Royal Tenenbaums

 

It’s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres.  He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles.  What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable.  You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he’s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he’s on the screen.

My favorite of his films was “The French Connection.”  I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip.  We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality.  Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie.  And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle.  Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It didn’t get better than that.  I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived.  If he had, he would’ve been the only white man living there at the time.  It was a very tough place.

I enjoyed Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the first Superman movie.  It might have been the only discernible acting talent in the series but he managed to make it fun.  He was good in Unforgiven.  He was pretty over the top in the techno-thriller Enemy of the State alongside Will Smith but he gave it his all.  I’ve been told by film aficionados that “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a very good movie.  Well, I saw it but didn’t really “get it.”  But I’m unsophisticated.  That was the last movie I saw with Hackman.

Based on his versatility and skill I would say Hackman is one of the best acting talents I ever watched.  Maybe Brando or Pacino played more dramatic parts.  Robin Williams was a funnier clown.  Maybe Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis blew up more stuff than Popeye Doyle.  But on balance Gene Hackman was the consummate professional.  He made the character real and he always stole the show for me.

Well done, Mr. Hackman.

The Trump Bump is Real

photog Camera Reviews, Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Music Reviews, Photography Reviews, Trump ,

So today was my scheduled zoom call with the guys.  It’s a group of eight former employees of the old firm who formerly used to take the (very) long walk every morning (and sometimes afternoon) down to the cafeteria and back to talk about “work.”  None of us was truly Left and most of was were decidedly Right but we tolerated a certain amount of centrism on some topics.  During the early years of the millennium, we were mostly hawkish and after Obama got in, we became increasingly angry over social issues like race and sexuality.

But one thing always seemed true.  We were disgruntled.  Now back in 2016 I famously championed Donald Trump and took a lot of grief because of this.  I made a small bet with one of my fellow coffee-walkers and when he had to pay up, he magnanimously framed the bill and hanged it on my wall for all to see.  Out of fear of the cleaning staff stealing the cash I replaced it with a Donald Trump million-dollar bill.  But the victory was very sweet.

Over the four years of Trump’s first presidency the tenor of our discussions varied but until 2020 they were generally on the optimistic side.  But once George Floyd and then COVID laid waste to the country we slid into disgust and the November fake election was the last straw.  Now whenever we got together (and after COVID it had to be remote) we uniformly despaired for the future of the country.  I guess you could say the Biden presidency was the term of our “resistance.”  Personally, we had our good and bad days.  And also, we one by one left the old firm.  But we valued the Wednesday zoom call and the solidarity it provided.  Interestingly the most left-winged of our number had a quasi-conversion and in 2024 voted for Trump!  Which we all considered a minor miracle.

But over the course of 2024 it was easy to see that our optimism for the political future was increasing drastically.  After the debate it was almost comical how excited everyone had become.  And after the election it was something like the scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when all the munchkins are dancing around singing about how “the wicked old witch at last is dead.”  And so as with everyone else on the Right we’re almost ecstatic with the activity and results we’re seeing in Washington as Trump and his merry band rip up all the floor boards in the deep state’s hideout and dig up the pots of gold they’ve stolen from the American people.

And now it’s gotten to the point where we’re so jaded that even revolutionary change is not enough and instead, we’re talking about ludicrous phantasmagorical things like eliminating the IRS and making the income tax a middle school math calculation like everyone pays 8% of their income or making it just a sales tax.  Next, we’ll be expecting Trump to announce that dunk tank with Democrats like Pelosi, Schumer and AOC in it that we can all get a chance at dunking.

So, yeah, it’s getting out of hand and that means we’re about to hit a wall and will have to come back down to Earth.  And that’s fine.  Life is mostly a serious matter and we shouldn’t be walking around laughing like idiots for more than a few weeks anyway.

But even if we calm down, let’s look at what we’ve gotten.  We’ve gotten back our hopes.  We’re looking at actual good news.  There is a way to course-correct and shrink down the federal bureaucracy and eliminate the deficit and defang the security state.  These are all wonderful things and way beyond what we expected from Trump just a scant few weeks ago.  Trump has gotten the upper hand on the establishment uni-party.  McConnell is a ghost of his former self and the Democrats have become a laughing stock without a path forward or a strategy for dealing with Trump other than hoping for some disaster to strike.  They’re probably praying to Gaia for COVID25 or something equally injurious.

So, at the call today we all acknowledged that the morale boost from all this winning is an enormous positive result above and beyond any and all of the actual policy changes that we enjoy.  Joy has a value.  Emotionally, psychologically and maybe even spiritually it enhances our lives and makes every part of our lives better.  I go to sleep easier.  I wake up more rested and I look at the world as a much better place.  Even the bad things are better because I feel more in control of the world and more confident that I can repair whatever needs fixing.

The Trump bump is real.