Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Bullshit Detector, Slight Return: Patience and Urgency

The Democrats, slowly but surely, seem to be finally catching on that, per just the unredacted information in the Mueller report, it is clear that both William Barr and Donald Trump have respectively engaged in various tactics to obstruct, impede, and thwart the normal processes of fact-finding and justice. Anyone who insists that these simple observations are in any way untrue or unreasonable has a vested interest in the matter.

As such, since the Republicons have openly admitted they don't give a fuck and plan to do nothing at all, the Democrats find themselves with a moral and legal obligation to pursue this issue as far as it takes them. If that means impeachment, so be it. Presidents have certainly been impeached for far less.

Just as the operational ethos of the GOP exists in an ipse dixit structure of the law means what we say it means, the Democrats have their own articles of faith. Their reluctance to move with any sense of urgency seems to stem from their own teleological notions that, if they could just find a way to oust the bastard, that things will return to "normal" -- that is, to 2016. You can hear it in Pelosi's attempt to keep her cats properly herded, and you can hear it in the "we all gotta get along" bromides of some of the 2020 Dem contenders, such as Mayor Pete and Bernie Sanders.

Does it really need to be pointed out that those days are gone, are not coming back, and the Democratic Party really needs to start learning how to represent their base unapologetically, the way their opponents do routinely? You think Addison McConnell loses a wink of sleep over "incivility" or evangelical fanaticism or burgeoning white nationalism in his party's base (not to mention many of the party's elected politicians)? Hell no. They understand all too well that if they can't stoke enough of these mutant rubes to show up at the ballot box, they're dead in the water.

But like I've been saying, the incompetence and mendacity that oozes from every pore of every scumbag involved in this administration transcends Mueller's investigation and report. Again, even if none of it had ever happened, look at all the other illegality just this week, between the tax returns and the security clearances. They are openly defying congressional orders to produce the tax returns -- Trump is now suing his own accountants to prevent them from handing over the documents.

And he has forbidden the director of the White House Personnel Security Office to obey his congressional subpoena, after it turns out that literally dozens of staff had their security clearance disqualifiers overruled. And they're neglecting cyber-security for the next election, and rigging the census for the next decade (at least) of elections. This is all right out in the open. Totally innocent behavior!

I mean, if you didn't know any better, you might start to suspect that these people think they are above the law, and operate as such. This is unacceptable. The so-called blue wave was mostly a collective insistence on that very point, that the routine abuse of power needs to be checked immediately. I have no idea what makes Democratic politicians think they can "work with" people who are fine with these banana-republic shenanigans. Things are urgent and steadily escalating; anyone operating without a real sense of urgency should find another line of work.

So far, Elizabeth Warren seems to have processed this had enough sentiment the best out of all the Democratic candidates. Trump voters aren't the only people who are angry, you know, but again, the Dems are welded to their outdated notions of comity and civility. Just as I don't know what to make of someone who has read all the evidence and viewed the ongoing behavior of the man and his minions, and concluded that there is nothing amiss, I have no idea what to make of someone who can look around them at the ongoing racketization of the American economy, and not be pissed about it.

Warren's proposal of student-loan forgiveness is not just the morally right thing to do, but it's far and away the most economically sensible. Anyone who cries about how they paid their student loans can fuck right off. For one, the cost of college has steadily escalated, and continues to do so. Someone taking ten years to pay down their package from 1995 or 2000 is in an entirely different boat than some kid going through the meat grinder now, knowing that unless they land a plum job right out of the gate, they're on the hook until they're at least forty years old. Obviously, that has additional impacts on other decisions they might normally make earlier in life, such as getting married, starting a family, or purchasing a car and/or house. We are seeing those economic impacts.

I don't use the word "racketization" lightly. It is a racket, just like the health care system is a racket. The costs are way out of whack with what the services actually cost to provide, because there are parasitic entities and economic externalities that customers are forced to subsidize, above and beyond the services they're actually paying for.

It is naked profiteering and usury, nothing more nor less. I've already resigned to the fact that I will be paying interest on two-hundred-dollar textbooks for the rest of my life. I really don't see any way out of this anymore. I make decent money, but not enough to get ahead or catch up. It took too long to get to this point, and now I have ten years of interest accrued on me. I turn fifty-two next month and have no retirement savings. It is mathematically impossible for me to pay down my student-loan debt, and save anything significant for retirement, before I'm, say, sixty-five or probably even seventy.

Here's a more detailed example:  I have been making payments on two of my "smaller" Sallie Mae loans since day one, which is about ten years now. At about $85.00/month, that comes to about $10k so far paid into these loans over the past decade. Looking at the dashboard of the company that services these loans, the combined principal was about $7k, and after ten years of steady payments, again about $10k total so far, I still owe about $5k on the principal. I've already paid out far more in interest than the principal was in the first place. And even if I win the lottery tomorrow and pay it all down overnight, I will have paid out $15k on a pair of loans totaling $7k to begin with.

And again, those are the two smallest loans, in a portfolio of nine loans. I have no problem with paying down what I borrowed, with reasonable interest, but it took ten years to get a job that still pays a bit less than the average for an MBA degree in California (which means that I didn't get the value that I still have to pay for), and so unless some mystery windfall takes place at some magical point, I'll simply never catch up.

It's not a catastrophe, I'm not out on the street or anything, but one practical outcome of this situation is that I have less disposable income to spread around my local economy. I would take my family out to dinner more often at the local restaurants. I would upgrade my vehicle from the quarter-century-old beater I currently use (thankfully I have a very short work commute), by purchasing a newer vehicle from one of the local dealers. I would take vacations more often. I have some work I would like done on my house and property, that I would hire local contractors for. So there is all this money I could be putting into my local economy, but instead I have to send across the country to some faceless bloodsucker that's just going to put it in a stack.

Now multiply that situation times a million, or several million. This is not just a moral issue, it is an economic one. This is yet another way in which an institutionalized racket hoovers money out of the pockets of working people -- who again, would actually spend that money -- and into the Hamptons homes of wealth hoarders, who will just use it to bribe some university to accept their unqualified fail-children..

This is not by accident, this is by design -- the best way to keep the populace under the collective thumb of the privileged few is to hook them on debt, and never let them off that hook. Our debt, after all, is their equity; they have a vested interest in keeping us hung on that hook in perpetuity, and it has the added benefit of keeping the peons compliant.

Elizabeth Warren appears to understand these things better than the other candidates, or at least she is articulating them more concretely. She is connecting those ideas to actual policy, sometimes in pretty granular detail. If we had a functioning media ecosystem, instead of corporate careerists hosting a fucking beauty pageant, we might get somewhere with that.

Regardless, if you take a step back and look at what's good for the country at this point in time, a few things are inescapable:
  • You can't have a coherent foreign policy without a comprehensive domestic policy. Right now we have neither.
  • You can't have real domestic policy without social justice, in the sense that everyone feels like they have an equal stake in the outcome, can vote without some peckerwood removing all the power cables from the voting machines in the black precincts, etc.
  • You can't have social justice without economic justice. The only people who fall for those "cultural" blut und boden distractions are broke-ass rednecks with too much time on their hands. News flash:  when people have a future worth looking forward to, they don't have the time or inclination to worry about gays marrying or abortion or wedding cakes or whatever.
These things are connected and interdependent. It all starts from the ground up, from real economic justice. De-racketizing the cornerstone pieces, including higher education and health care, are key components of that strategy. Again, only Warren seems to recognize that. Mayor Pete seems nice and all, but I don't really have time for these empty "get along" homilies, which are always aimed only at one side of the coin anyway.

When someone -- from either party -- has the balls to step up and take on the douchebags with their Fuck Your Feelings tee-shirts, and their incivility, then I'll be impressed. Until then, fuck you and your hippie-punching bullshit. Go sell used cars or something. I have no interest in making nice with people who have been telling me to go fuck myself for years.

I liked Sanders in 2016, but less so now, as he is vague on policy, and seems to have the same issue with making his tax returns public that Agent Orange has. Even if there's nothing incriminating in them, the longer a pol takes to do that simple thing, the more suspicious we should be of their behavior. Bernie Sanders specifically waited until April 15th to release the last ten years of returns, hemming and hawing for weeks on end, which leads reasonable people to conclude that there's something in his 2008 return he doesn't want you to see. Whatever it is, it's almost impossible for it to be as bad as what's in Trump's returns, but it doesn't look good.

I get why some folks have just become too inured or exhausted from the reality-teevee nonsense to bother to tune in anymore. It feels tedious and useless, part of a stupid game you didn't want to play in the first place. Fair enough. But right now, there are children kept in cages like dogs, separated from their parents, terrified and alone, because these fucking monsters decided that the violence and terror they were fleeing wasn't quite bad enough. Maybe it doesn't matter that it's being done in your name too. Each of us has to decide for ourselves what we're willing to live with.

But sticking to the pretense for now, that we still strive to be a nation of laws and accountability, even if that isn't always realistic, we have to acknowledge that if we give up on even trying for those things, even when our collective faces are being rubbed in their wrongdoing every goddamned day, if we give up then we might as well give up for good. Don't bother to vote, don't bother to care. Nothing matters anyway, right? Fuck the kids and the planet they'll inherit. It's all just competing, equivalent forms of corporate cynicism. Is that really the way it is?

You have to decide for yourself if it is or not, and then act -- that is, take action -- accordingly. Even if it's just a letter to a senator, enough of those things make a dent. Or we can just be above it all and let someone else deal with the repercussions of our collective indolence. So far the Dems seem to be bouncing back from their initial abdication of responsibility in these pressing matters.

What Trump and Barr have cooked up here may end up not requiring impeachment (although I believe they already do), but they definitely merit further investigation, and Trump's defiance of that only reinforces the impression that he's waaaayyyyyy more guilty of a lot more shit that we don't even know about yet.

This is where striking that delicate balance between patience and urgency come into play. It's only been a week since the report dropped, but what a week, right? Every week seems faster and worse than the last, like a particle accelerator powered by shit. It only gets worse until enough of the peons decide they've had enough, and remind their employees who really works for whom.

Friday, April 19, 2019

Bullshit Detector

Now that we peons have been permitted by His Travesty and his dogsbody to view the "real" report, I don't feel the need to say too much beyond pointing out that everything I said two weeks ago holds. It's impossible for me to comprehend how anyone can look at the evidence, look at everything that's transpired and is still yet to come -- hell, just look at the behavior -- and not see the clear pattern of criminality.

I mean, seriously -- this report prepared by people who are out to get me totally clears me, but I can't show it to you -- how many fucking clues do doubters need to see that those are not the things an innocent person does and says? It's like watching O.J. Simpson in court a quarter-century ago, stretching his hand so that the glove won't go on. It's so obvious, you kind of feel a bit sheepish even pointing it out. Just like the tax returns. It's one thing to hide behind the "make libturd cry" tactic, but how much of a chump do you have to be to believe the guy?

I honestly don't know what sort of drooling moron can't see Trump for what he is. I wish I had more ruthlessness and time on my hands, because I'd have a hell of a bridge to sell them, and apparently they'd give me every dime they had. I thought most people had figured out these things back in fourth grade or so.

But like everything else about this fucking criminal scumbag, this latest episode says more about everyone else -- the worthless minions he attracts to lie for him; the mediots who disgrace their profession by gaslighting the nation, because they're too fucking lazy to actually do their jobs; the Dummycrats who can't get back into their default circular-firing-squad position quickly enough; the dopes who would still worship him and deep-throat his tiny mushroom even if Trump had flat-out confessed to everything -- than it says about Trump.

There's nothing new to learn about Trump. This is what he's always been -- lazy, stupid, deeply corrupt, and contagious in all those things. He makes the people around him worse people, just by association. One of the salient details from the report is how many instances there were of people in Trump's orbit actively ignoring or circumventing his direct orders. And yet none of them had the nerve to step up and say something.

Look at Rod Rosenstein standing behind that fucking pig Barr, like a good German. Fuck them both. Barr is a known quantity, a lifelong fixer of elite political inconveniences. But Rosenstein strikes this pose of integrity, and he has clearly sacrificed it, but it's unclear for what. That's why he looked like a hostage standing behind Barr, because he knows that his silence is a betrayal of everything he thought he stood for, of every pretense he thought he had of working in his country's best interests. Hope that pension's fat enough to make it worthwhile, kid.

You can see both sides of the Democrats' impeachment dilemma, and neither one is good. Rule of thumb when you only have sub-optimal choices:  Fortune favors the bold. If you're going down, go down swinging hard. They really botched their response to the rollout, gutless and diffident per usual. They need to use their Easter recess to get their ducks in a row, and come back ready to drop the hammer. I actually think they will; they have to see that there's really no other choice for them now. I'm not one to ankle-bite my congressional reps over every little thing, but if they pass on this one, I'm done and I have no trouble calling their offices and telling them so. I have a feeling I'm not alone on this.

I don't know how other people go about assessing people and situations and figuring them out, seeing where things aren't as they seem, spotting the bullshit. To give an innocuous example, I recall back in 1998, being on Slate's original Fray chat forum, arguing with the writer David Ehrenstein over whether Ricky Martin and Kevin Spacey were gay. I was sure that they were (not that I give a shit), and yet Ehrenstein, who not only is gay but wrote a very good book about closeted Hollywood actors back in the day (and so knows well how gay performers who are not ready to go public will try to keep that aspect of their lives hidden), didn't think so.

Recall that at that time, neither Spacey nor Martin were the least bit open about their private lives, so it was pure conjecture on my part. But I have a pretty good bullshit detector, and I think the fifteen years of archived posts on the right sidebar attest to that.

(To give a little more context, Ehrenstein was not shy about calling Ace of Spades, another Fray denizen, a "power bottom." Ace is not gay, nor even homophobic, but Ehrenstein correctly understood this as one way to push Ace's buttons. So there was a lot of back-and-forth on that particular subject, most of it pretty good-natured, certainly none of it hurtful or judgmental. I guess the point is that sometimes things that seem pretty obvious to you, are just no there for someone else. They don't see it. Like that stupid dress where no one could decide what colors it was, or the Laurel/Yanni thing.)

A more recent example would be the Jussie Smollett hoax. I mean, Jesus, right out of the gate, the first few details you heard about it sounded way too on-the-nose. A couple of randos beat him down in a heavily CCTV area of Chicago, using racial and homophobic slurs the entire time, along with some MAGA slogans for good measure, tie a noose around his neck because they just happened to have one handy, and Smollett crawls back to his hotel room leaving the noose on? Come on.

Anyway, the point is that we are in the midst of a very dangerous trend in American politics, one that actually predates Trump, but that he has been able to take great advantage of. The power of the unitary executive has been ramped up steadily since 9/11, while simultaneously the electorate has become much more polarized and cemented in their respective outlooks.

Trump did not invent this scenario, but he has figured out how to weaponize it, and he understands intrinsically that no one -- not his party, not the media, not anyone -- has the balls to challenge him on it. Everyone still thinks the "institutions will hold" or some shit like that, and that's simply not true, whether or not Trump gets re-elected. This is important to understand. Things are about to get worse either way.

Let's look at it in strictly binary terms -- he gets re-elected or he doesn't. Can you imagine if this asshole wins again? At least two more SCOTUS appointments, probably three (in addition to Ginsburg and Breyer, Thomas is also apparently on the verge of retirement), and an undeniable legitimization of the damage he's already done. He'd be off the fucking chain, with a whole new roster of fresh scumbags to do his bidding, and he'd double or triple down on everything he's already been doing. You think it's a box of turds now, you wait and see what it's like if he wins again.

But even if he gets thrown out of office, it won't mean much if there's not a real landslide at the congressional and even state levels. These people are bad losers, they obviously have no scruples, and the psychotic billionaires who really own this country and all the propaganda networks will shift into overdrive. Without an overwhelming win and majority, it will just be like the last six years of Obama -- gridlock and bullshit and conspiracy theories and legislative inertia, only this time you'll have King Shitposter and his cult of sociopathic halfwits full steam ahead with him, ankle-biting full-tilt all the fucking time. It will be nothing but hate and retribution.

People need to have their bullshit detectors on all the time with everyone. When a career turd like Steny Hoyer gets in front of the cameras and punts on first down, just a couple hours after Bill Barr harrumphs and tells everyone to go fuck themselves, Democratic voters have to call bullshit. Maryland voters need to tell that tired cocksucker to get with it or get gone. Fuck or walk, pops. There is no room for maybe on this train anymore, it left the station two years ago.

That's not to say that ultimately, impeachment might not be a viable option. But only a fucking moron makes that call a couple hours after the report is released, before you've even had time to review the fucking thing. Say what you want about the cultists, they at least know that their boy is going to make a show of fighting. Fucking Steny Hoyer doesn't even want to try. Who wants to break it to him that people don't usually vote for someone they can't even respect?

It's true that the Democrats have to focus on a lot of other issues as well, but one assumes they can multitask. The fact of the matter is that this transcends the Mueller Report that everyone puts their eggs into.

Let's say for the sake of argument that Trump had never fired Comey, that there was no action for which to appoint a special counsel -- in short, that the investigation had never taken place, and Robert Mueller was not a household name, none of it had ever happened. Trump has still shown conclusively, many times and in many ways, that he is manifestly unfit for any office, much less the office he has.

In terms of intelligence, ability, temperament, discretion, all those qualities people across the spectrum tend to value in a chief executive, he has none of those things. His incompetence, laziness, and behavior would have gotten him fired from stocking shelves at Wal-Mart within the first six weeks.

Think about all the various things he promised to fix, from immigration to opioids to foreign policy to trade policy. Every one of them is measurably worse:  trade deficits are at record highs; the immigration crisis has been exacerbated by his actions toward the "three Mexican countries"; infrastructure still decaying; wages still stagnant despite very low unemployment levels; North Korea is right where it's always been; our allies are sick of our shit and are not going to be there when we need another favor from them; and the worst problems facing this country -- wealth inequality and climate change -- are completely ignored and have gotten steadily worse.

Forget the Mueller report, and what you think you know or think about it:  this guy sucks, and he's a fucking asshole to boot. Bring that into the mix with all the lying and corruption, and you have a had enough? argument that should win.

And if not? Well, again, whichever way this shakes out, we will get the government we deserve.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Perhaps Flying Water Tankers

I know that I push the theme of His Travesty's innate stupidity so frequently, it probably seems like schtick after a while, or at least an exaggeration borne of loathing for the man.

No, dear reader, I assure you:  he really is a fucking moron. You would have thought that at some point in his too-long and utterly pointless existence on this here material plane, Trump would have had some sort of conversation with some sort of representative from the FDNY. Even if it was just to find out which palm to grease in order to circumvent fire safety requirements for his inherited portfolio of fleabags and ratholes, Trump must have had at least a surface discussion, somewhere along the line, about how building fires are extinguished.

You don't have to be a civil engineer to figure out the ramifications of dumping hundreds of gallons of water -- that is to say, tons of water -- onto a thousand-year-old structure in the midst of renovations in the middle of a huge city, as if it was an uninhabited stand of pine trees out in the middle of BFE.

Of all the annoying traits that seep out of this geriatric idiot, this may be the most annoying and perplexing, the need to two-cents issues that not only don't concern him and don't need for him to weigh in on, but that also reveal his complete ignorance on the subject -- every subject -- in the first place.

Hell, out here in Cali, most of us are old enough to recall when Agent Orange insisted that the forests needed to be "raked" in the name of responsible fire prevention. Welp, more than half of our forests are federally managed, and I'll be damned if there's been any indication of hiring said yard implements. Another promise kept!

As with everything else that manages to escape his ridiculous, puckered burger-hole, this is simply the usual blowhard "man of action" rhetoric for the rubes, like the Frenchies want or need anything from us. If anything, it takes one back to a simpler time, when he was merely an ankle-biting pervert who used his pageant as an excuse to check out young "talent" (in the skeevy perv-bro sense), and his Twitter account to give dating advice to Twilight actors.

In a week where we are seriously relitigating 9/11, it's useful to note another clear and obvious contrast:  French billionaires have already stepped up to pledge hundreds of millions of euros each to contribute to Notre Dame's repairs, even though the Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest organizations on the planet, doesn't pay taxes, and can easily afford to foot the bill on its own. Trump after 9/11, on the other hand, crowed that he now had the tallest building in the city, claimed to have gone to dozens of funerals that he never attended, and chiseled money out a fund that was set up to help small businesses in the wake of the nation's worst terrorist attack. Fucking scumbag.

They keep imploring us to Never Forget. Don't worry, we haven't forgotten.

Seriously, there is nothing in this world that can't be made just a little bit worse by this doddering piece of shit picking at it like a scab under his hairpiece.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

Here Comes Your Man

The legends foretold
The prophecy fulfilled
Three hundred pounds
   in an empty suit
Bought with the sweat and trust of others

The electricity of the arena
Dust cleared from last week's
   monster-truck rally
The smells of diesel and adrenaline

We came to sing the hymns in unison
We came to receive The Word
   and bear witness
      and tell our grandkids
         if they ever visit or call again

He preens and slouches
   with swag-bellied rhythms
      and the certainty of the blank slate

I am Truckasaurus! he roars and cackles
I will build a wall of cactus
   and Kid Rock CDs
      right up their asses
They will pay for that wall, all of them will pay

I have landed a man on the moon
   and shot a fifty-two at Pebble Beach
      and knocked down the Berlin Wall
         with my enormous cock
They don't want you to know the truth
They can't love you like Ike loves you, baby

Load up on avocados on your way out
   and pelt a lib-fag or three
It's the best way to show them
   that you are the most real
      of all people
No one has ever been more real or more pure

Don't forget to buy some swag
 

Friday, April 12, 2019

Petty Vacant

There is never a "slow news day" anymore, as the twenty-four-hour cycle burns ever hotter and faster, and thus needs more and more fuel. So it is that Bret Easton Ellis, the original Milo Y. for the lit-crit jet-set, finds his turn in the proverbial barrel, on the pointy end of one of Isaac Chotiner's Socratic-dialogue interviews. Hilarity ensues.

Chotiner has made a recent career/bloodsport of finding moral cretins within or adjacent to His Travesty's smear of influence, as it were, and gradually hoisting the subject on a petard of their own devising. It's a neat trick, and certainly one worth repeating endlessly on these fuckers, but what is most revealing about these interviews, whether it's with some toad directly barnacled to the fleshy hull of the USS Fatboy, or merely a smarmy meta-commenter like Ellis, is that none of these people are prone to sudden epiphanies, nor even flashes of self-awareness. It is essentially the same result as watching yet another CNN lackey jabber at Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Ghouliani.

But it's still interesting to watch Ellis' particular pathology at work here, as he repeatedly insists that he's not interested in politics or policy much at all, but rather that his recent book of essays lambasting "liberals" and "progressives" for their "overreactions" to Trump is about coverage of the spectacle that he, Ellis, considers hysterical and heavy-handed.

Ellis is not wrong when he says that the best solution is for people to focus on voting Trump and his crew out next year. Aside from that, he seems completely oblivious as to why anyone might be anxious in the meantime. We're eight-hundred-and-some days into this shitshow, and virtually every single one of those days has featured some bit of insanity or incompetence or outright illegality on the part of Trump and his coterie of losers and hangers-on.

Ellis seems content to lob smug meta-commentary about Chicken Little libturds overreacting to -- I don't know, let's pick a couple at random:  the chief executive routinely threatening and harassing political opponents and pesky mediots; the Attorney General (of the United States -- as in, the public's ranking legal advocate) literally functioning as the personal lawyer for the chief executive; the failson-in-law on a hotline with a Saudi prince who kidnapped an American resident, strapped him to a table and dismembered him alive; a dozen or so lies every day on average; long-term American interests being undermined by reckless foreign policy blunders, not to mention demagoguing the most serious issue facing all of us, regardless of political stance or income level -- climate change.

Right now, and for the past couple years, it has been this nation's policy to separate refugee children from their parents, purely as a punitive measure to discourage others. These people are fleeing conditions of violence that even the poorest, most miserable American would be hard-pressed to imagine (outside of the Alabama penitentiary system, anyway). Nonetheless, there are kids, young kids, who have died in custody, or been raped or molested in custody, or who haven't seen their parents in months, or two or all three of those things.

But as far as Bret Ellis is concerned -- and he's certainly not the only one, just the most recent; there's a spate of these fucking assholes as of late -- the real problem, you see, is the claque of hysterical libturds who just won't stop complaining about this doddering, soup-brained cockroach pitting the nation against itself while he and scummy family pocket everything that isn't nailed down.

One of the more hilarious asides in the interview is where Ellis lamely tries to defend Roseanne Barr:
You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.
Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?

You say it in the book.
Yeah, right, I quoted her.

It seems like you want to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but not others. Would that be fair?
I would like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

So when she tweets about Valerie Jarrett being the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes”?
Yeah, that’s a tweet. I don’t know. It’s whatever. It’s whatever you think it is and whatever she says she meant by it. It is her word against ours.
There's nothing evil or sinister in play here; the real crime is that someone who's living is geared around the usage and meaning of words, and getting to the core of what people mean when they say something, is completely useless at that pursuit here.

Think of that:  Ellis has written a book that, if not about politics, at least purports to provide some trenchant observations about political activity and thought. In the case of Roseanne's infamous, career-killing tweet about Valerie Jarrett, here is an opportunity to provide some observation. It beggars the imagination to figure plausibly how Roseanne didn't know Jarrett was black, yet plucked a Planet of the Apes reference from out of nowhere as a "joke" or an insult.

Ellis doesn't even have the energy or commitment to try to bullshit his way out of it, or even come up with a lame defense of Roseanne. It's whatever. Boy, does he have a fuckin' way with words or what?

Again, this is not Ellis' fault or creation. We are a decadent, lazy, spoiled society, and so sloppy thinkers and spoiled assholes like Ellis are given unfortunate stature, based on his string of modest successes back when Reagan was watching nuns get raped and murdered in El Salvador. There is no rigor in Ellis' analysis because he has already admitted multiple times that he doesn't really give a shit.

Hell, at the end of the interview, he kinda lets the whole thing slip:  It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.

Great. So White is really just a compilation of podcast greatest hits, indifferently packaged under a single cover for seventeen bucks or so. Cool grift, broham.

The problem here is not that Ellis is an idiot, nor even an asshole, it's that he's so willfully lazy in his observations, bringing nothing new or fresh to the conversation. He can't even defend his own points that he's asking people to shell out good money for, he just lamely defaults to anecdotal conversations he had with female friends who were okay with Trump bragging about his pussy-grabbing prowess.

For the record, I have female acquaintances who were fine with Trump's "locker-room talk" too. The fact that they have pussies doesn't mean they can't still be wrong about this, and about him. It's the faux-feminist (fauxminist?) version of saying you have a black friend that doesn't mind when people use the n-word, as if that absolved anyone from personal responsibility.

Bret Easton Ellis is comfortably insulated from the consequences of this clusterfuck of an administration. He doesn't have kids, so he likely just assumes that the shit won't really come down until after he's gone, so he's not too worried about it. I actually get that reasoning -- I have a kid and I still sometimes get in that "fuck it" mood and decide it really just doesn't matter, none of it, that it's a prolonged exercise in futility and not worth the effort, that if enough idiots want to let it burn, then maybe we just fucking let it burn and live what's left of our lives while we can.

But I think one of the things that makes us human is that each of us has something that we feel is worth fighting for. It's going to be different things for different individuals, and there will also be lots of overlap, but there's something, big or small, the planet or your country or your family, that you care enough about to put your foot down and say decisively, Fuck you. Enough.

I think that one unstated component in the "outrage" and "overreaction" one sees covered in the media is this:  the 2016 election forced liberals and progressives in particular to confront the question of how Trump won -- that either the nation was becoming something they no longer recognized, or that it was like this all along, and the "right" set of conditions came along to clarify that situation.

And it is, by any objective assessment, a serious problem. It's bad enough that Trump is a gaping asshole, and a miserable fucking facsimile of a functioning human being. the real problem is that he's a jabbering moron, a clear fucking dunce who has made the world a worse place. That's really the way it is, and the fact that somewhere between one-third and one-half of this country loves it is an even worse problem.

It is no exaggeration to say that that last one will be the singular challenge for the next generation, and may never get resolved. I don't mean in the ideological sense, so much as just the functional sense, the basic mechanics of governance. This country is run by psychotic billionaires who would literally rather burn up the planet than pay a single percentage point more in taxes, and they own all the propaganda outlets. And they have just enough rubes on the hook to live out Jay Gould's fondest wish.

And so what happens, per Bret Ellis' prescription of voting the Shitbird-In-Thief out of office next year, is that whatever Republicons remain in government will simply revert to an even more toxic version of the rear-guard faction that hamstrung Obama for most of his tenure. The US and the world face some very serious challenges in the near future, most of them driven either by accelerating climate change or increased wealth disparity, and a paralyzed government coupled with propagandized media stoking a seething populace makes for a very dangerous combination.

But, you know, liberals just need to stop whining and accept that assholes run the world, right? Just bend over and take it, again and again for the rest of your lives.

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

At the Movies

More movies, some spoilers.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? -- I was skeptical of this one going into it, but the outstanding performances across the board won me over. By now you probably know the premise -- bestselling biographer falls on hard times, can't crack the changing marketplace, not getting any help from her agent or publisher, and so turns to the rather esoteric niche market of forging art collectibles.

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant do most of the heavy lifting as Lee Israel and, um, Jack Hock, respectively. I strongly believe that comedians and comic actors tend to make excellent dramatic actors, and McCarthy reinforces that theory with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of Israel, who wore an unpleasant, almost hermit-like demeanor as a defense mechanism, both from the world at large and from herself. Jane Curtin(!) is a nice surprise as Israel's agent, and the rest of the small supporting cast are wonderful as well.

The subject and scope of the story are indeed very niche-oriented, and might not hold everyone for the full stretch, but again this is a finely-tuned portrayal of the artist's contentious relationship with the world of commerce, and the fleeting caprices of talent and love.

Grade:  A-



The Sisters Brothers -- The western genre hasn't traditionally lent itself to much introspection, but it seems that that has changed at least since The Unforgiven or perhaps Tombstone. Still, the western mostly depends on some sort of ending climax of saving the town from the bad guys or what-have-you. The Sisters Brothers takes these reliable plot devices and tweaks or ignores them altogether, preferring to concentrate on the inner motivations of its anti-heroes.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix portray the titular brothers with the unusual surname, contract killers who have never really done anything else. Reilly, as elder brother Eli, muses about their future after time eventually catches up with them, while Phoenix (Charlie), the more impulsive of the pair, lives in the here and now, moving across a violent landscape with nothing more on his mind than booze and whatever task his paymaster (Rutger Hauer, unfortunately unseen until the very end, and then as a corpse in a coffin) has set before him.

The brothers' mission this time is to track down a chemist who may have discovered a formula for finding surface and river gold, without having to pan or mine for it. As they near closer to their quarry, tracking through Oregon and California gold country, they begin questioning their purposes and motives, and what kind of men they want to be, and be remembered as. When it all goes bad, as these things inevitably do, the brothers come full circle to confront the origins of their violent lives.

Reilly and Phoenix are both quirky but versatile actors; here they play it straight, and it pays off with strong performances for both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are also strong in key supporting roles. An interesting side note (for me, as a lifelong Californian who has been to every part of the state many times) is that the exterior location shooting was done primarily in Spain and France, and it sure as hell looked like California gold country to me. This is a terrific movie, directed with care and patience, belying the violent narrative throughout.

Grade:  A



Bohemian Rhapsody -- This is a movie where you simply have to manage your expectations going into it. For one thing, it had been in various stages up production since 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen originally cast to play Freddie Mercury, and ultimately departing the project for a variety of reasons. Several screenwriters and directors later, and recasting Mr. Robot star Rami Malek as Mercury, this is what you have -- a well-meaning but ultimately muddled Star Is Born template of excess, redemption, and tragedy.

Growing up in the late 1970s with parents that mostly listened to country or AM pop, bands like Queen helped me make a critical jump outside those relatively narrow parameters. There was especially heavy airplay around the Jazz and News of the World albums, culminating in The Game's smash hit success across the board. Just in those three albums, you can hear them successfully experimenting in multiple genres -- hard rock, arena anthems, cheeky pop confections like Bicycle Race, disco, and even rockabilly gems like Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But of course they had much more to offer throughout their career.

If you eschew the usual path of listening to one of the greatest-hit collections, and just go back through the catalog, you can hear and appreciate how truly fearless they were musically. Naturally the movie makes a huge deal of that with the conception and production of the title track, but A Night at the Opera was their fifth album, and they had been doing adventurous outings similar to Bohemian Rhapsody all along.

Hell, check out side two of Queen II, and imagine the guts it took to get something as intricately crafted and flat-out weird as The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke onto vinyl. And then to have that song segue into Nevermore, a schmaltzy ballad which packs more passion and sorrow into seventy-eight seconds than you'll find in the entire catalogs of your Mariah Carey and Celine Dion types.

Most people have never heard either of those songs; most Queen fans are unfamiliar with them. They were never played in concert or on the radio. Sheer Heart Attack has a bunch of hidden gems as well; Flick of the Wrist and Stone Cold Crazy are much better than Killer Queen, which is pretty damned good to begin with. The radio hits were just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.

What Queen really did was take the chamber-pop aspirations of late-period Brian Wilson and Beatles, and put them in a prog-rock context, and then turned around and made those orchestrations accessible across a wide variety of musical genres. That's way more interesting (to me, anyway) than Freddie Mercury's conflicted personal life, although seeing Queen drove the point home much more than hearing them did, and it should be appreciated as well, Mercury unabashedly strutting and preening in unitards in giant arenas in front of traditionally homophobic hard rock fans, defying them to make the connection of people they were conditioned to hate making music that they loved.

Anyway, the movie and its expectations. If you watch it as a straight-up biopic, you'll be disappointed, not only because the musical chronography is botched (to cite just one example, Fat Bottomed Girls was released in 1978 and was a concert staple for years after; there is no way they could have toured with that song in 1973-74), but because it eschews real introspection for cliché.

There's an interesting situation with Mercury, clearly in love with his girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), not sexually attracted to her but wanting "everything else," and so keeping her in the mansion next door to his own. It's a dilemma of generosity and selfishness that is never adequately explored, just accepted after a while, as Mary gets a boyfriend and starts her own family, all while still inhabiting the house that Freddie bought. She clearly cares about him as well, but there is always that impasse, and she never fully moves on from being his muse/curator in the gilded cage.

One minor humorous note in the first half of the movie is the cameo appearance of a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers as EMI Records exec Ray Foster, shit-talking Bohemian Rhapsody when the band presented it to him, and thereby turning the scene into an extended Wayne's World meta-reference. It's an interesting move, but again brushes over what, considering the band's earlier output, had to have been a much more complex discussion between the band and the record company. But we need the simplified Hero's Journey trope of Standing Up For Exalted Principles And Integrity, so that's where it lands here.

The rest of the band, played by unknowns, fall into the usual trite templates:  Brian May is the brainy astrophysicist who occasionally takes his head out of the stars to write some songs and play some solos; Roger Taylor is the pussyhound drummer who wanted to be a dentist; John Deacon is the quiet one, as all bassists other than Paul McCartney are. Who knew that Deacon was actually an electrical engineer who designed and built a custom amplifier for May's idiosyncratic guitar orchestrations? It's all second fiddle to whatever drama Freddie's cooking up at the moment.

The movie does succeed on its own terms in the final act, as Live Aid becomes the focal point of the band reuniting for Freddie's triumphant return, before becoming too ill to perform anymore. They did manage to record another studio album (Innuendo), and a very good one at that, but that's never even mentioned. (Although The Show Must Go On, from that album, does play over the final credits.) Basically they perform at Live Aid, and six years later Freddie dies, the end.

However. Malek is outstanding in his performance (especially the Live Aid performance at the end), despite the distracting prosthetic teeth, and the music....well, it's Queen. They could have just run two straight hours of music and that would have been great. This one gets two grades, one for the music and one for the movie.

Grades:  A+ (music); C (movie)



Triple Frontier -- Another project that had been in the works for years, going through rounds of scripts and writers and directors and recasting, finally landing on Netflix and premiering last month. As action/heist movies go, the premise isn't half bad:  former black-op mercs, left high and dry by the gubmints they quietly did wetwork for, decide to rob a narco chieftain deep in the jungle near the convergence of the Amazon headwaters of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia (not to be confused with the Iguacu Falls intersection of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay).

The casting is solid enough, featuring Charlie Hunnam as the ringleader, and Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, and Ben Affleck accompanying him on the heist. (Affleck pulled out of the project for a year to hit rehab, then returning for what seems like a fairly subdued performance, considering the premise.) And there are some nice action set pieces here and there, particularly in the opening scenes, but it ends strong as well.

The plot does make some use of the remoteness and lawlessness of the locale (although the movie was filmed in Oahu), but in the end, this sort of thing has been explored in movies ranging from A Simple Plan to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the theme of greed getting the better of people.

Still, it's well-made and the cast is very good. It's an old theme but a good one, and the action moves along fairly tightly. There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours.

Grade:  B+

Monday, April 08, 2019

Here's How You Get the Tax Returns

Scene from a plausible near-future:

[INT.:  Set of Sunday morning circle-jerk Meet the Press.]

CHUCK TODD:  Good morning, I'm Chuck Todd, and welcome to Meet the Press. Our first guest this morning is Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Welcome, Madam Speaker.

NANCY PELOSI:  Good morning, Chuck, thanks for having me on the show.

TODD:  The Democratic House has demanded that the Internal Revenue Service release the last six years of Donald Trump's tax returns. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney recently indicated that that would quote "never" end-quote happen.

PELOSI:  Well, that's his job, isn't it, Chuck? [Pauses a beat] Such as it is.

TODD:  Trump has indicated that since he is still under audit, it would be impractical for him to release the returns.

PELOSI [smiles]:  Yes, he's indicated that.

TODD:  Richard Nixon released his tax returns while under audit. What would you ascribe Trump's reluctance to?

PELOSI:  First of all, Chuck, he's not under audit.

TODD:  How do you know that, Madam Speaker?

PELOSI: Well, I could give you the old "how do you know a lawyer is lying" joke, Chuck, but the obvious fact is that Trump has literally been clocked at lying an average of roughly twelve times every day he's been in office. This is clearly just another in an impossibly long list.

TODD: Do you have any actual evidence of that?

PELOSI: Look. The IRS rarely audits anyone in the first place, because they're chronically understaffed. And they almost never audit wealthy people, because people who are actually wealthy hire competent professionals and companies with liability insurance to do their taxes. I'm wealthy too, and I've never been audited. Why? Because I hire a CPA/EA to do my taxes for me. If he messes up and gets me audited, his company's reputation takes a serious hit. Donald Trump counts on people to seriously believe he sits there at his Louis the Nineteenth dining-room table on April 14th every year, sorting out his receipts, trying to stay one step ahead of The Man. I mean, Jesus Christ.

Finally, Chuck, Trump has been claiming to be under audit since at least 2014. I seriously doubt anyone has ever been audited for five years straight without either ending up in prison, or having to hock their house and possessions to pay back taxes, like Willie Nelson. So Trump has either done something seriously wrong and illegal, or he's, you know, lying. I'm actually giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and saying it's more likely that he's just lying.

Although there's probably some illegal stuff going on as well.

TODD: Why would he lie for so long about something like that?

PELOSI [smiles again]: Why does any man lie, Chuck? More to the point, what does every man lie about?

TODD [starting to blush]: I don't know what you mean, Madam Speaker.

PELOSI [smirking]: Of course you don't. Let me be more clear -- he's lying because, since he under-reports his taxable income and assets, because he's a chiseling scumbag, the returns will show that he's not worth anything near what he's always claimed. Not only would that be embarrassing for him, but he would then be placed in the position of not being able to amend that embarrassing low total, without then exposing himself to charges of defrauding the federal government. Which is still a crime, even for someone occupying the office of chief executive.

TODD: Oh. I was thinking you were referring to somethi....never mind.

PELOSI: Money, height, sexual prowess -- men always exaggerate, Chuck. Whether it's the size of their wallet or the size of their....equipment, they can't help themselves. But in this case, it's Trump's selling himself as a super-successful gazillionaire for decades that is his main vulnerability. For him to have to publicly admit that he's merely a cash-poor hectomillionaire, with nearly all his assets tied up in the real estate portfolio he inherited from dear ol' dad....well, that would be equivalent to dropping his pants on Fox and Friends and showing his tiny, tiny wiener.

TODD: Madam Speaker, I....

PELOSI: Look, Chuck, we come on these shows, in an endless rotation, and we pretend to say something to the people of America, but we're all just really talking to each other, right? That's how the game has always been played. I don't have an opinion on whether that's "right" or "wrong," it's just how it is. It's part of my job, and as my political career winds down and I have no aspirations to higher office, I want my current tenure as House Speaker to have a more meaningful legacy to it.

Part of that legacy is getting to the truth, and getting some sunlight on the facts. In the 2016 election, both candidates promised to release their tax returns. Hillary Clinton released thirty-three years' worth of returns. Donald Trump dodged and hedged, and ultimately reneged on that promise. He keeps saying "promises made, promises kept," and that's simply not true. The only promise he's actually kept is giving billionaires another tax cut.

Rather than get bogged down into another pedantic panel argument about truth and promises and whether they're really important or not, I think we have a responsibility -- as a co-equal branch of the US government, mind you -- to get to the bottom of why that is. There's a reason he's reneged on that promise, and there's a reason that he lies about why he "can't" release the returns.

Put it this way, Chuck -- he currently seems more concerned about keeping his tax returns from ever seeing the light of day, than he is about hiding the Mueller Report that supposedly exonerates him. Though he won't release that either, after previously promising he would, because it totally clears him.

Why do you suppose that might be, Chuck?

TODD: Well, Madam Speaker, it would be irresponsible of me as a journalist to speculate on the possible....

PELOSI: Oh, please. Cut the Walter Cronkite pose for a second and be honest -- with me, with your audience, with yourself. I didn't ask you for objective empirical fact. I asked you for your opinion, based on the things you do know have transpired these past few years, the things you have observed and mentally collected, and perhaps formed a pattern of informational reference.

Chuck, you're an adult, gainfully employed, you have a wife and kids, right?

TODD [bemused, hesitant]: Riiight....

PELOSI: You have a house or maybe a couple, you have a vehicle or maybe a couple, you had to do some adulting over the years and purchase those things. You've held a job that requires you to talk on a daily basis with people in my line of work.

TODD [still slow on the uptake]: Okay.

PELOSI: Well, we all know that politicians, at best, are a breed of, let's say, truth-stretchers. We tend to BS and finesse things a bit, sometimes things that are important, sometimes not. But someone in your line of work needs to have something of a BS detector to spot us and call us out. Wouldn't you say that's true?

TODD [puffing self-importantly a bit]: Well, yes, we pride ourselves at cutting through the usual Washington-speak and getting to the heart of the matter. I take my job seriously, and I know my colleagues do as well.

PELOSI: Well, okay then. So what does your highly-refined-from-decades-of-experience BS detector tell you, when someone -- anyone, whether it's Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or some hedge-fund twerp who makes a living robbing banks from the inside -- what does your "journalist's intuition" tell you when some rich guy tells you that he'd love to show you his tax returns, but gee, the IRS has been auditing him for nearly a decade, and gosh, his massive, throbbing portfolio of real estate is just too complex for mere mortals to comprehend? Does that ping your detector just a little bit?

TODD: I suppose, but I --

PELOSI: Chuck, if Donald Trump had been the salesman for your wife's Audi XUV or your Hamptons vacation house, would you have bought from him?

TODD [perplexed]: Uh, no, I guess I wouldn --

PELOSI: No one in their right mind would, Chuck. And that's all Jerry Nadler and Richard Neal and the rest of us are trying to do here, is get an inspection on the house. Unfortunately, we've already bought the house, but there's an opportunity next year to back out of a bad deal, and we feel that if enough people got a look at that inspection report, they might not like what they see. Maybe they see that the house is built on a sinkhole and infested with termites.

Chuck, would you have signed on the line which is dotted if the salesman who sold you that vacation house told you that he couldn't let you and your lovely wife see that home inspection report because....well because reasons? That the house was a hundred kinds of awesome and perfect, but you were just going to have to take his word for all that?

TODD: Ummm....

PELOSI: Look, you asked why Trump would lie about being under audit, and I'll repeat my answer -- because the returns show him to be not nearly as wealthy as he claims. There's also all that undeclared bratva money he's been laundering for years, but the thing we'll see right away is how....small it all really is. So small. Like a frightened baby mouse hiding in an unkempt tuft of grass.

TODD [regaining his composure]: Thank you for your time, Madam Speaker.

PELOSI [smiling like the cat that got the cream]: Pleasure as always, Chuck.

TODD: Up next, we'll have Rudy Giuliani and Kellyanne Conway explain why we should totally believe everything that comes out of the White House. Stay tuned.

{END SCENE]

Sunday, April 07, 2019

Mueller Time, Slight Return: Collusion Delusions

Tempting as it was to join the rest of Hot-Take Nation and insert my two-and-a-half-cents on the Barr Summary (as opposed to, you know, what has been mischaracterized as the "Mueller Report") into the ether, it just seemed unnecessary and pointless. Still does, really, though there are slightly more positive signs now, two weeks after Bill Barr's forty-eight-hour whitewash.

But the main takeaway is that -- get this -- laws, like taxes, don't apply to the rich and powerful. They always find a way to escape accountability, because there's always some rented scumbag willing to shovel their shit. Prove me wrong.

That said, I can still stand by my observations from the evening Mueller delivered the report, but before Barr's bullshit summary. Farming out the white-collar cases to SDNY and EDNY and EDVA, while strategically smart, are not a magic bullet -- after all, if Barr is corrupt enough to do what he's already done, right out in the open, it's not much of a stretch to imagine him either assigning fixers to those fed divisions before the cases reach trial, or just assert exec privilege and kill them outright.

It sounds like schtick, but I promise you, it's dead serious:  when I say that these fuckers' slogan is what are you gonna do about it?, that's really the way it is. Everything is an act of defiance with these people, and so far, they've been right. There has been no disincentive, and certainly no real accountability, for criminal and unethical actions, for lying outright, for taking bribes out in the open. The Saudis might as well back a fucking Brinks truck right up to the White House and have done with it. What are you gonna do about it?

There's still a very real non-zero chance that those district cases proceed and succeed, though, so it's worth holding out some hope for that. In the meantime, the first couple days after Barr's summary dropped told you everything you needed to confirm about the spinelessness and sheer idiocy of some key media players.

There are plenty of suspects to choose from, but the one I'm most disappointed and annoyed with would have to be Matt Taibbi, who seems content to sit pat on his "the Russians are too inept to have pulled something like that off" defense. The thing is, Taibbi has made a respectable career built on rigorous skepticism applied to the most toxic bastards in this country, from Wall Street banksters to evangelical hucksters. He knows firsthand that the current crew would be more than amenable to that sort of foreign assistance, just as he knows that Trump has been laundering bratva and oligarch money for at least a decade.

I have no earthly idea as to what accounts for Taibbi's inexplicable refusal to see the preponderance of circumstantial evidence, not to mention the guilty pleas and prison sentences that have already taken place, as well as the testimony and trials of key players still to come. Michael Flynn still has to allocate. Roger Stone is going on trial later this year. This thing is far from over, and it sure as fuck ain't over because a reliable stooge like Barr was brought in for the express purpose of sweeping this thing under.

It's not just Taibbi, of course; no shortage of useful idiots have come scuttling out the woodwork in recent days. Look, if you really can't see the cognitive disconnect of the refusal to release a report that supposedly clears you 100%, then I don't know what to tell you. I think there's actually even a good chance that Barr told Mueller to wrap things up and close the investigation prematurely. It's at least worth checking into, if one of the columnists and/or panelists can make that extra crucial step to being journalists. The Democrats need to get Mueller in front of them and grill him like a rotisserie chicken, because there is fuckery afoot, and we all know it.

Again, I don't know what to make of people who can't see the obvious, and I don't know what to make of people who just shrug their shoulders and don't give a shit, even if it's all true. I think that's actually a bigger problem than the crimes that Mueller was investigating. People are content to live in their own epistemological bubbles, and the mediots are more than happy to spoon-feed them clickbait and cash the checks.

I don't mean that we must all be outraged every minute of every day; being stoked into constant outrage is a big part of how we ended up here, and there is more to life than watching this doddering asshole decompensate daily before our eyes. It's why I check in once every week or two these days. There's certainly enough to be angered about constantly, but you just drive yourself nuts doing that.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be pissed about what's going on. These things are unprecedented and unacceptable, and it's important that we all recognize that there is nothing special about Fuckface Von Clownstick, and therefore he needs to be held to the same standards of accountability as every other mortal. If we stop doing that, if we just let him get away with everything, then we're no longer captives, but accomplices.

Another huge part of the problem is that Mueller ran right away into the proverbial "mission creep" -- he found loose threads right away when he started investigating the key players behind Comey's firing, and Flynn's discussions with the Russians (and Saudis), and when he pulled on those loose threads, a whole bunch of interesting things started unraveling.

But by definition, that makes it much more difficult to package the whole story into a straightforward narrative that the average 'murkin can follow. It is a sprawling narrative with plenty of characters and seemingly dissociated events that only form a pattern when you step back a bit. But so is Game of Thrones, so is The Wire.

There's a lot of illicit cash and undue influence being peddled here, and I would literally bet my next paycheck that if we were permitted by the Grand Vizier to read this report that supposedly totally clears His Travesty of all wrongdoing, we would quickly find an unprecedented web of corruption. We would find that our foreign policy is literally being sold to the Saudis and Russians and Emiratis and Israelis, for starters -- not even "traded" for some vague general benefit of the US, but for the specific monetary benefit of the Trump/Kushner crime family.

These people are fucking criminals, full stop, and by going down the rathole of toxic people that were magnetized to this boiler room pump-and-dump scam, Mueller was starting to unearth some of the more direct connections when Barr was installed to pull the plug.

There probably was never a direct Boris-Badenov-handing-sack-of-cash-with-dollar-sign-to-Donald-Trump scenario that would inculpate him in court, anyway. This is all done with cutouts and third parties and sleazy intermediaries that wouldn't have passed muster in a Robert Ludlum potboiler. And no one has to make a request from an inherently corrupt person who has already been on the take for a decade before he took office; both parties already know what needs to be done. So there's no crime to witness and adjudicate, even though crimes most certainly took place.

But again, this whole impossibly baroque, sprawling narrative is really about us in the end, what we're willing to accept and put up with. And clearly we're fine with it all, or enough of us are that the needle doesn't budge. So maybe we're getting what we deserve.

Thursday, April 04, 2019

At the Movies

Some recent viewings of note, in the order I saw them over the last month or so. There are spoilers here and there, but they're at a minimum.

Juliet, Naked -- Based on Nick Hornby's novel, this is a bright, small story about a reclusive rocker (Ethan Hawke) whose long-lost acoustic demo gets on the radar of an obsessive fan (Chris O'Dowd), who in turn pays far more attention to his fan board than to his long-suffering wife (Rose Byrne).

The cast is pitch-perfect, bringing the material into focus, and the writing is subtle but sharp, weaving solid observations about obsessives and self-appointed curators into the familiar tropes about lost connections and second chances. Bonus points for Hawke's rendition of Waterloo Sunset.

Grade:  A



Landline -- This looked good on paper -- solid cast (Edie Falco, John Turturro, Jenny Slate) and a proven director (Gillian Robespierre) with a touch for comedy (Robespierre directed several excellent episodes of HBO's sorely underrated Crashing this season). And yet....

Two sisters (Slate and Abby Quinn) suspect that their father (Turturro) is cheating on their mother (Falco). And yet Slate is cheating on her own fiancé (Jay Duplass), so, go figure. Naturally, hijinks ensue. The younger sister is a bratty teen, who seems to delight mostly in being a disagreeable pain-in-the-ass.

Pretty much everyone in this movie is a spoiled, insufferable asshole. At the risk of stating the obvious, every story needs a protagonist -- that is, someone you can root for. But there's no one to root for here, really. They're all fucking jerky and unpleasant, except Duplass, who's just a pussy. Not to approach it from an academic Marxist (class-based) perspective, but after about an hour of listening to these privileged assholes bray at each other over their first-world problems, you kind of wish one of them would get mugged or beaten up, burglarized, something like that. Anything but listen to spoiled people whine for an hour and a half.

Grade:  D+



Hereditary -- After the previous decade's spate of wretched torture porn, the horror genre has been enjoying something of a rejuvenation the last half-decade or so. The focus right now is on Jordan Peele, who with Get Out and now Us has managed to create entertaining pieces that have canny social observations baked into them. But Robert Eggers' The Witch was another terrific -- and sorely underrated -- addition to the canon, using flawless pacing and fantastic exterior shots to build real suspense, without a bunch of gratuitous blood and goo.

Hereditary lands closer to that latter category, starting with a well-used premise -- Grandma's dead, and the family starts finding out about the real Grandma. Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne lead a strong cast of mostly newer actors. It's a great ensemble and they thrive under Ari Aster's writing and directing. The movie probably could have been 10-15 minutes shorter in the first two acts, but it's not a major complaint.

It's hard to get into depth with this movie without giving too much away, but suffice to say that the suspense builds well and doesn't let up, there are a couple of gory shots but nothing unnecessarily graphic or overdone, and the powerful ending will have you recalling classics like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, the way the tension gets ratcheted up effectively, without letting go.

Grade:  A-



Black Panther -- I mostly don't bother with superhero movies, as they are essentially the same Hero's Journey template iterated with slight variations. It's like hearing the same song played in all twelve musical keys, maybe replacing major chords with minor or altered dominant chords, maybe a tempo change, but still essentially the same deal.

That's not a value judgment; the movies are well-made and generally have solid casts. But you have to be invested in the characters to really get anything from these movies, and it's mostly just not in my wheelhouse. Also, they tend to run about 20-30 minutes too long. Seems like 100-110 minutes should be enough to paint the numbers and tack on the franchise teaser after the credits.

So my main requirement from action or blockbuster movies is that the characters are engaging and the plot moves along, and Black Panther fits that bill. Like Wonder Woman before it, there is a certain aura of wokeness coming with this one, but it's not overdone. It takes some suspension of disbelief to buy that an isolated nation could use an essentially magical element (that only exists in one place) to build a technologically advanced civilization with no outside contact or trade. But as with all of these types of movies, the borders of verisimilitude tend to be blurry and selective, and are not meant to be scrutinized closely. It is, after all, a comic book.

The main thing is that the cast is strong, the story solid, the pacing steady, and the visuals interesting and innovative. Like Wonder Woman, it's woke, but in a good way.

Grade:  B+



First Reformed -- Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It's not an exaggeration to say that if he had done nothing else at all, he's still a legend. But of course he's written and/or directed many other projects over the years, with varying levels of success. Last year's First Reformed belongs among his greatest works. It's a small, intimate film that poses large questions.

Ethan Hawke (once again) plays Rev. Ernst Toller, a former military chaplain who, after losing his son in Iraq and subsequently his marriage, finds himself ministering to a historic church in upstate New York that is more of a tourist destination than a true congregation. Toller drinks and writes, vainly attempting to crib together some sort of penance or redemption for himself.

An environmentalist couple enters his church, the pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asking for his counseling for her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a climate-change obsessive who wants to abort the fetus rather than bring it into an already doomed world. A terrific one-on-one scene between Toller and Michael sets the trajectory for the rest of the movie, as Michael lays out his case in detail, and Toller convinces him to meet again for further counseling. When Mary finds Michael's suicide vest and informs Toller, Michael shoots himself, propelling Toller's soul-searching into new territory.

As Toller begins digging into the heart of Michael's environmental concerns, he begins putting them into a higher spiritual context:  Will God forgive us? (for destroying His creation). This leads him into direct conflict with the industrialist (Michael Gaston) who bankrolls the church as a token measure of green-washing, as well as the megachurch pastor (Cedric "the Entertainer" Kyles, in a terrifically subtle performance) who eschews Toller's introspective spiritualism for the more worldly concerns of "outreach" marketing.

The third act wobbles a touch, as Toller goes Travis Bickle on us rather abruptly, but pulls itself together for a strong (if jarring) finish. If you've read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (and if you haven't you should) then you know Schrader's personal history, raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist home where movies were forbidden. Schrader also at one point considered joining the clergy (as did his frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese), and these characteristics imbue the story as a deeply personal effort from Schrader. The close, innovative camerawork complements the nature of the story perfectly.

There are a couple of moments here and there that feel, well, preachy, and again the ending could have been a bit tighter, but these are minor quibbles. It's a real shame this movie didn't get more (or any) attention. It's an outstanding work from a true master.

Grade:  A-

Do It Already

The idle threats of frazzled moms
Flutter and dissipate
Forgotten before they're heard
Again and again

So follow through at long last

Beat the brat's ass
Max the credit cards
Don't pay the bills
Cheat on your spouse

Bury the report that clears your name
Close the border
Stoke the mob
Lead the chant

Break away from Brussels like you promised

Tell Europe to go fuck themselves
Tell Canada to go fuck Europe
Tell murderers you love them
Tell everyone else you hate them

Poison the well and the water table
Fly from the bridge into a dead river of ash and feces and aphasia
Kill your own chickens
Pick your own fruit
Repeal Roe and shut down the clinics
Reap the whirlwind in your dust bowl brain

Watch the levees break
Steal your neighbor's boat
Row for higher ground
Pretend it never happened

Flex nuts and fake tough
Wrap up in flags of ancient traitors
Have a criminal fix your health care
Roll clean coal in your living room
Pwn faggot libturd snowflakes

You showed 'em alright
Showed 'em reeeeeal good

Taste the barrel, clattered against teeth
Crush fentanyl on corn flakes
Windmills cause cancer
Corporations are friends
Ignorance is strength
Freedom is relative
Resistance is futile
Facts are useless
Tucker's got a point

Don't feel bad
You gave up a long time ago
They'll forget you soon enough