Best Served Up Cold

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“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.”

“from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

“For the love of God, Montresor!”  “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God!”

cask

Revenge is perhaps the strongest vice in my soul.  I come by it honestly.  I think it’s an ingrained family trait.  Revenge and spite are as native to me as breathing.  And I feel the urge for revenge at all levels of existence.  I equally despise the rude coworker and the oligarch who despises and demeans the deplorable masses.  And what my heart craves is revenge.  Not fairness or justice or an apology.  I long for Nemesis to strike down hubris.  And strike it down out of all proportion to the offense.

Of course, the opportunity to indulge such a passion rarely occurs without the necessity of paying a very high price for the privilege of stabbing from hell’s heart.  But the desire is still there even if the intellect steps between the doer and the deed and declares the price too high.

And so, when I think of the contempt that our elites feel for us my instinct is to imagine a way to hit back at them.  So, for instance, when they revel in the pain they inflict by flooding a town in Ohio with twenty thousand Haitians or a suburb in Minnesota with Somalis my sense of outrage wants to see Martha’s Vineyard or Bel Air or Weston Massachusetts suddenly overrun by meth addicts and Congolese.

And not because it would be a teachable moment whereby these people would learn a lesson but rather so they would become the victims of the same dysfunction that they so carelessly wished upon the fellow citizens that they despise so heartily.  But I realize that this is just a fantasy.  The wealth and power these people possess preclude them from suffering the consequences they so richly deserve.  It would take the dissolution of the United States to bring about the “comeuppance” I crave.  And so, I would be wishing for the toppling of the very place that I live in.  It would be like a Roman citizen rooting for Atilla the Hun during the fifth century.

And yet, there are documents that preserve that very sentiment by a character out of history.  That was exactly what the Greek historian Priscus recorded back in 450 A.D.  I guess the question comes down to whether revenge is more important than safety.  Or maybe whether honor is more important than food.

And the funny thing is, I’m beginning to lean toward honor.  Being a despised freak in the Left’s menagerie is getting to be less and less tolerable.  If the Russians and Chinese finished off World War III, would I really be worse off than I am now?  The rational answer is yes.  Even surviving Doomsday in Southern New England is a very doubtful proposition.  Forget about thriving.  Making believe that isn’t true would be delusional.  And yet, a part of me says, “let’s get on with it.”

Well, the dark night of the soul is upon me but don’t worry nobody has shared the codes for the nuclear football with me.  So, sleep deeply oligarchs.  Your time is not yet up.

Dream Big

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Another long day and another late-night post.  I didn’t see anything on the news-side worth discussing.  The pundits are milking the 50/50 presidential race for all it’s worth.  Trump, Harris!  Nobody knows how it will turn out!  Oh, woe is me!

Well, I’ll be busy right through 11/6 so I can wait for the result or the lack of a result on Election Day.

But what I’m waiting to see is who will step forward and provide real-life solutions for thriving in the post-freedom, post-affluence America.

And maybe I’m looking for something that can’t possibly exist.  But it seems to me that there are shards of the glory that was America strewn across the landscape of this country and if some visionary gathers them up and recombines them into something new but based on the old pattern, then he could assemble a foundation for a resurgent American identity.

Maybe one of the southern states can act as the incubator for some kind of resurgence.  DeSantis has Florida showing signs of taking the lead on questions of freedom and cultural sanity.  And economically it is showing strength.  Or maybe Texas will take the lead.

But that is what needs to happen.  We can no longer expect the United States as a whole to move in the right direction.  Powerful forces have decided to destroy the middle class in support of the looting of the stored-up wealth of this country by the elites.  We have to band together under the leadership of some clear-thinking individual who has a plan for saving the middle class and restoring this country to health.  Who knows?  If he is defeated in November maybe Donald Trump will attempt to fill that role.  That is assuming he isn’t tossed in jail by his enemies.  Or maybe it’ll be a group headed up by Elon Musk and others.  There have already been hints at something like this happening.

I’ll admit I have no proof for this idea.  Maybe nothing will happen and we’ll just drift down the wind toward a larger version of the post-WWII Britain where drab socialist ideas were allowed to turn Britain into a shadow of its former self.

But I think there is still an enormous amount of entrepreneurial dynamism diffused in the people who live here and with the right catalyst very great things could still be achieved.  And so, regardless of whether Trump or Harris is declared the winner in Tuesday’s little passion play, I think the next big development in our society will not be authored by the political establishment but rather targeted against that establishment.

Some will say I’m looking for a strongman; a Caesar.  And in a sense, I am.  But not in the way that Caesar ruled.  Rather I am looking for a man to declare war against the oligarchy that seeks to destroy the middle class.  I’m looking for someone who is plotting an American renaissance.  Someone who can harness the energy that still exists in this country and direct it and concentrate it on the problems that we are currently facing.

That’s a big question mark.  But I like to dream big.

October Viewing – 9

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October Viewing – 9

So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year.  A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject.  And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme.  You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.

Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post.  But as in all things I am conservative.  So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor.  Dut, dut, dut daaaah!

Spoiler alert!  If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.

Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other.  Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion.  One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.

So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences.  Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features.  Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features.  And more of these bodies begin appearing.  Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”

And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people.  The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions.  While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.

In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods.  If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him.  Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good.  Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away.  They try to escape from town.  But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns.  They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident.  Women!

The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it.  But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.

Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people.  Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors.  But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER.  And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!

Dunt, dunt daaah!

End of the spoiler alert!

So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true.  They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters.  And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.

And this is the modern horror story.  If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.

But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem.  And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results.  Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario.  It does resemble the current state of our world too.  But I’ll save that for a current events post.