Tag: Falling Down

Third World State

photog Current Events , ,

Life is a remarkable experience.  We interact with our “fellow humans” in a myriad of different relationships.  And society tries to regulate the expectations we have for these interactions.  For instance, if we go to a fast-food restaurant and ask for a hamburger we’re expected to react to problems within a prescribed range of actions.  So, if the order taker tells you that they are only serving breakfast at the moment and not burgers, you are supposed to smile and shrug your shoulders or shake your head and walk out the door or even complain bitterly and ask for the “manager.”  What you’re discouraged from doing is pulling out an Uzi and spraying the building with 9mm bullets.  That was the reaction of Michael Douglas’s character in “Falling Down.”  Now, he didn’t actually shoot anyone but he was definitely behaving outside of that range of behavioral expectations.  And similarly, we have societal expectations for most reasonably common scenarios that play out in the big world we live in.  “Falling Down” was a fable to show us how the world can get out of hand.  The protagonist was a law-abiding “good guy” who saw dysfunction all around him and allowed it to infect his mind.

But of late there has been a breakdown in the mechanisms that are supposed to regulate these interactions.  In the “old days” (let’s define that as before Barack Obama became president) people who stepped over the lines into criminal behavior were handled by the police and they were allowed to use lethal force in the case where someone was committing violent crime.  But then we got the federal government stepping in and accusing local law enforcement of racially motivated murder when they dealt with violent sociopaths like Michael Brown.  And this only accelerated after the George Floyd riots in 2020.  And now we’ve reached the point where certain areas of the country no longer have effective policing to deter violent crime on their streets.  Examples would be areas of Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City where prosecutors and judges typically release repeat violent offenders immediately back onto the street after booking them for their crimes.  The people who live in these areas are constantly in fear for their lives in their own neighborthoods.

Alternatively, there are areas of the country where law enforcement is now reversing this trend and bringing order to the streets again.  Florida and Texas are highlighting their efforts to make their streets safe again.  In support of this effort, they are cooperating with ICE agents who are removing illegal aliens from their jurisdictions.  And this is having a very noticeable effect in reducing the kinds of crime associated with gang activity and drug trafficking.  After all many of these illegals are cartel members from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

And it is encouraging to hear about locales that are pushing back against chaos.  But the fact that crime-ridden cities are exposing American citizens to third world criminality is not something that should be tolerated.  Donald Trump has tried to use ICE to infiltrate and clean up sanctuary cities.  But it’s woefully insufficient for the problems being addressed.

We’ve reached a point in our history where we have to admit that we cannot assure the safety of law-abiding citizens.  That makes us a third world state.

Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.

I’m the Bad Guy?  How Did That Happen?

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

In a recent post I said that the current revolt on the Right could be described as the Falling Down Revolt.  This references the 1993 movie, “Falling Down,” that starred Michael Douglas as a divorced, recently laid off defense industry engineer, named William Foster, who, while stopped on the Los Angeles freeway on a sweltering hot day discovers he has reached the end of his rope.  He leaves his car in the middle of traffic and goes on a trek across the mean streets of Los Angeles to see his young daughter on her birthday.  Along the way he runs into all the dysfunctional aspects of modern America.  There is the Korean inconvenience store where the clerk won’t let you have change unless you pay larcenously high prices, the fast food store where a minute after the prescribed time breakfast becomes an impossibility and the food looks nothing like the nice pictures on the wall.  There are the Mexican street gangs holding up a stranger at knifepoint and then peppering a whole sidewalk full of neighbors with automatic weapons fire to revenge themselves on someone who didn’t allow himself to be robbed.  There are construction sites that spring up and leave the drivers stopped in place for hours, not to repair streets but just to maintain the size of the city construction budget.  There are the panhandlers and psychotic hate-mongers and all manner of unhappy people wherever he turns.

At the end of the film the police detective (played by Robert Duvall) following behind Foster’s trail of destruction figures out that Foster’s unconscious plan is to commit a murder suicide against his wife and daughter.  When Duvall tells him he’s under arrest Foster and the detective have this exchange:

  • “I’m the bad guy?” he asks, in a moment of rare clarity.
  • “Yeah,” says Robert Duvall’s police officer evenly, pointing a gun at his chest
  • “How did that happen?”

Now, up until the very end of the film Foster actually seems like a well-meaning guy who’s having a nervous breakdown in the middle of a city that is psychotic.  When he replies to the detective, he tells his side of it.  To paraphrase Foster, “I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  The detective tells him that everyone has been lied to but that what Foster did isn’t justified.

“I always did what they told me was the right thing and now I’ve been thrown away by my job and my family.  I’ve been lied to.”  This is the crux of the analogy.  The regular joes were just doing all the right things we were told we should be doing.  We were being the good guys and bending over backwards to help the other guys out and what is our reward?  We’re told that we’re the bad guys.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.  I guess you could say it’s insult on top of injury.  And if they hadn’t added the insult at the end, when they thought it was already too late for us to do anything, they probably would’ve gotten away with it.  But these folks on the left just have to rub it in.  They not only want to destroy their enemies but they also need them to grovel too.

So that’s how we got here.  We can make a good showing for ourselves now that we know who and what we are up against.  We don’t actually have to help them dig the hole they want to bury us in.  We can stop paying them extortion money as they have no intention of showing gratitude because of it.  In fact, it only makes the Left more self-righteous about their entitlement.  Basically, it’ll be every man for himself, if I may be so bold to use the singular masculine pronoun.  So that’s why I think Falling Down is relevant.  We don’t want to pay for being the good guys if we’re still gonna be called the bad guys anyway.