Right wingers on the warpath!

I spent some time cruising through the facebook pages of some Tea Pary whack jobs and really these people are insane. One of them, I won't name names, has as his primary focus the salvation and preservation of the "traditional" family and his FB photo is of him, his wife and their brood of six kids. It's quite unsetttling. The whole pack of them has a slightly deranged and very upsetting look of certainty and determination and, I hesitate to say it but, well, stupidity. There I said it. I've looked at enough photos of lower level Nazi functionaries and their families to feel a chill of recognition when I see a picture like this one. That ugly look in the eye of a long held social grudge made triuimphant through some political position which then makes the grudge holder The One Who Now Calls the Shots. This is the Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck bunch full of righteous indignation and savage certainty and they are out to get revenge for all the little slights they have endured and they have blood in the mouth and a hard heart. And they are all getting together to bully their way into power, but whether they will succeed or whether they are the last dying cry of a discredited world view, only time will tell.

The secret of propaganda

Here's a quote from Joseph Goebbels:

"Propaganda is most effective when it is indirect. That is the secret of propaganda: to permeate the person it aims to grasp, without his even noticing that he is being permeated. Of course propaganda has a purpose, but the purpose must be concealed with such cleverness and virtuosity that the person on whom this purpose is to be carried out doesn't notice it at all."

This is what I find so chilling every time I go to see some big ass spectacular movie that everyone is lining up for. Behind all the cleverness and virtuosity is bloodlust and military murder. All the rest is cover for this hardening of our senses to the mayhem and violence our governments inflict on the world day after day. It seems so obvious to me and yet it is never talked about in any review I ever read. Eisenhower called it the Military Industrial Complex decades ago and it has only gotten stronger and more pervasive over time, so that now it's the elephant in the room or on the movie screen. These movies are about NOTHING even when they pretend to have a "message".They are a set up to get the guns out and start firing, and if they pose as being about the Triumph of the Human Spirit they are actually Triumph of the Will, and we know where that ended up going.

In Richard J. Evans's The Third Reich in Power he says "Goebbels's propaganda ministry's job was to coordinate and run the entire public presentation of the regime and its policies. "All that goes on behind the backcloth" Goebbels said "belongs to stage management."

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Blockbusters

Hollywood blockbuster movies are, without exception, military recruitment films. No matter how they begin or how creative and dazzling the special effects (District 9, Avatar) they always end up with military firefights and pandemonium. It's basically the same movie over and over, and we keep paying them to remake it. It's like the little kid who gets picked up by daddy and swung around . "Do it again daddy, do it again." It's infantile and so boring I usually end up fighting sleep in spite of the wall shaking clamour of it. The last Batman for instance, when Heath Ledger wasn't onscreen riveting my attention with his ferocious and delicious performance, the rest of the movie was....things exploding. When I was talking to a psychologist friend about this he said it was all a subsititution for sex and of course he's right, especially since these things are primarily geared towards adolescent boys. All the violence is just sublimated sex gone bad and rancid. And in truth the endless loop of the same violent effect IS like a porn loop but frankly I'd rather they just give us IMAX 3D fucking and sucking and really make us all happy. Well, it would make ME happy, and I'd probably stay awake too.

Thomas Wolfe

I've taken to re-reading books I read decades ago in college, and Look Homeward Angel is one of them. This man writes like an angel himself, with all that sweeping loquaciousness of the Southern writer (and the unfortunate early 20th century racial attitudes of the South), that alcohol fueled self conscious geniusness that's wet with emotion and deep mystery and beautiful scriptural profundity. Sentences that roll down the page like great rivers of human pain and delirium and joy. And honestly, the climactic scene of the brother's death had me sobbing out loud, and no book has done that to me in, well, decades. A really gorgeous and somewhat forgotten book. But Wolfe's day will come again.

Original and nouveau Gaga

Miss Elton is the original Lady Gaga, so last night's pairing at the Grammys was fated. And as much as I originally wanted to dislike Lady G, I saw a clip from Saturday Night Live where, dressed in her usual nutty sci fi foolishness, she sat down at the piano and, oh my god, she riffs on the keys like Nina Simone and I'm suddenly perked up and paying real attention and...I'm loving her! Elton also spent a lot of time sashaying around making a spectacle of himself but underneath all the cheap exhibtionism was real musical talent, and it's looking like we may be seeing this again with Lady Gaga.

Can't help myself

No honestly I have tried to stop myself from adding more blah blah to the overtaxed web but here it is, my own fu#@*king addition to the white noise.

So I'm walking down 24th street, the main shopping street near my house here in San Francisco's Noe Valley and I look down into the eyes of the most adorable, trusting little kid. She's a Chinese baby and I smile automatically and think "every grown up Chinese person who someone is prejudiced against was once that little adora-darling." It was one of those mini epiphanies that lead to other thoughts, like, "Hey I suppose even a horror like Fred Phelps was once cute and huggable." Remember the photo of Adolf Hitlter as a babe in arms? So sweet and wide eyed. What the hell happened? Beaten, abused, sexually repressed, the usual litany of misbegotten parenting tales and voila! The beast walks among us!

Go see The White Ribbon, the new Michael Haneke movie, to see this idea presented beautifully and chillingly.