JUNE 27, 2017
Lust for Art: Artists Versus Apparatchiks Filmmaker Andrzej Wajda was to Poland what Sergei Eisenstein was to the USSR - and, arguably, what Carl Yastrzemski was to the Boston Red Sox. Along with Roman Polanski’s early work, Wajda’s famed 1950s World War II-era trilogy about Polish partisans battling the Nazis - A Generation, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds - put Poland on the world cinema map. He won an Honorary Oscar in 2000 and died last Continue Reading...
It is not that the trickle of news leaks staining Donald Trump's shiny black Guccis from the outset of his presidency have become a flood. Nor that this flood has been a counterbalance to Trump's outrages, deceits and extraconstitutional forays since congressional Republicans have taken to the fainting couch en masse as evidence of his collusion with Russia in its effort to influence the 2016 presidential election has piled up. It is that the Continue Reading...
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I hope Roger Ailes died screaming. I hope he felt every sensation of pain from the subdural hematoma he suffered; I hope that the shocks wracked his worn-out sack of a body. I hope that, in the throes of that pain, he realized he was dying and he cried out that he wanted to come back, that he didn’t want his last act on earth to have been his dismissal as a lecher and a rapist. I hope he died screaming. Continue Reading...
Donald Trump is most probably not a Russian spy. He may have unusual connections to Russian businessmen (that isn’t clear), and seems to have made $100 million off Russia since 2008 (not that huge a sum for a multi-billionaire). Donald Trump is a braggart. He grabs a piece of information the way a crow grabs paste jewelry. Unlike the crow who will likely hoard it, Trump passes it around for all to see. Continue Reading...
Republicans are proposing a huge, huge cut in corporate tax rates. They are also proposing to let giant, multinational corporations keep much of the taxes they already owe on profits they are keeping in “offshore” tax havens. Lower tax rates mean higher after-tax profits, which increases the value of stock holdings. Continue Reading...
Ivanka Trump did not, of course, get to choose her father. And as a rule, the children of presidents should be off limits from media scrutiny, or at least have a modicum of privacy away from the harsh glare of the 24/7 world in which celebrities live. But Ivanka is not just any president's kid. She is the First Daughter of a man whose vileness is without bounds, and her choreographed effort to portray herself as a president whisper whose voice Continue Reading...
SEEFest 2017: Cross-Dressing, Cruelty to Critters and Constitutional Rights in Croatia The 12th annual South East European Film Festival kicked off with a gala screening at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills of writer/director Rajko Grlić’s The Constitution, a stellar must-see movie full of humor and humanity that set the tone for this filmfest. I say that because sometimes cinefiles “suffer” through specialty cinema (especially those Continue Reading...
At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it. GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused. The evidence just wasn’t there. But it was. And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton’s perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI. So much for love of country.
Liberal democracy faces grave dangers, most significantly, perhaps, from rapacious capitalism that unremittingly concentrates wealth. Putin is another threat. After consolidating his own power in Russia, he has stepped up a campaign against liberalism abroad, first in Russia’s “near abroad” in Eastern Europe, and now the US. Is Trump his latest trophy?
For eight years, the GOP employed strategic obstructionism to stymie Obama’s mildly progressive agenda, even when his proposals, such as the Affordable Care Act or the stimulus, closely aligned with their own. Putting country first? Nope. This was pure partisanship in the service of partisanship. And it worked!
Is the so-called “liberal,” “elite” media really as cosseted and cloistered as its critics suggest? Actually, yes. Like the Democracy Party, the media – defined here as the mainstream variety – largely comprises well-educated, coastal types who have little in common (and often disdain) middle-America, working class whites. Little wonder it has earned the latter’s ire.
What happens when the purported party of the working class abandons its proletarian roots, while the other major party pushes crazed conspiracy theories, paranoia, and racism as an obfuscatory tactic to conceal its plutocratic agenda? A virulent populism that threatens the republic. Whose to blame for Trump? We all are.
How did a clownish buffoon rise from obscurity to lead one of the world’s great civilizations that produced soaring art and culture? Historians have been asking the question since the demise of the Third Reich. Hitler confounds. Here are some clues: cunning exploitation of nativist fears, exploitation of irresistible propaganda, and “bottomless mendacity.” Found familiar. It should.
