APRIL 22, 2018
The 1999 film “The Matrix,” written by Lana Wachowski (formerly Laurence “Larry” Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski (formerly Andrew Paul “Andy” Wachowski), depicts a future in which human beings have been imprisoned by machines in capsules that siphon off their heat and energy and which create the illusion of everyday life to fool them into thinking they are at liberty. Continue Reading...
On this International Women's Day, let us remember that in too many places in the United States, kids under 18 are allowed to get married to adults. Sometimes there is an age limit. Sometimes it requires a parent's approval. Sometimes it requires a judge. But, in almost every case, it's an underage girl and a grown man. It's sexual exploitation with the imprimatur of the government behind it. It's beyond fucked up that anywhere in the world in Continue Reading...
Just when you thought the Russia scandal -- you know, the one that eventually will take down the Donald Trump presidency -- couldn't get any more surreal, it just got more surreal. The main characters in this real-life version of Pulp Fiction include Anastasia Vashukevich, Oleg Deripaska and Sergei Prikhodko. Among the secondary characters, and there are a slew, is Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort. Vashukevich, who as a high-end Continue Reading...
Moviegoers of the World Unite!: A Rabblerousing Biopic for the Ages Haitian director/co-writer Raoul Peck’s well-made The Young Karl Marx is one of the most significant biopics in cinema history and arguably among the genre’s best. As the 200th anniversary of the birth of communism’s co-founder approaches, Peck has beautifully dramatized Marx’s life during the 1840s as a 20-something lover, writer, husband, philosopher, father, journalist, Continue Reading...
Driving up deficits and then using deficit fear to stop spending on things that We the People want and need has been open Republican strategy since Reagan. Google “strategic deficits.” Tom Wicker explained in the NY Times in 1985, in IN THE NATION; A Deliberate Deficit, To hear Larry Speakes tell it, President Reagan emerged from anesthesia righteously demanding action on the budget deficit ”this week.” That sounds fine – except that it now Continue Reading...
The confident pronouncements by pundits and politicians that the Nunes memo is a dud, dead on arrival, neglect to consider the main tactic of the Republican right wing for some time now. It is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories carried Trump to the White House and many Republicans into Congress or state legislatures. Nunes cherry-picked intelligence reports to arrive at a narrative whereby the Obama FBI bamboozled FISA judges into Continue Reading...
It's not even surprising anymore when President Donald Trump, an angry pumpkin on top of a very large pumpkin on top of a smaller pumpkin, says or does something racist. He is a fucking racist. If you're a fucking racist, you do fucking racist shit all the time because that's who you are. If he didn't say or do a racist thing, we might say, "Oh, look, he wasn't racist in that moment." But just because a rat in your house didn't shit all over the Continue Reading...
The scabrous underbelly of American society was on full display during the year just passed, and no aspect of it is more repulsive as we slink into 2018 than the reality that the president of the United States is an unapologetic racist and bigot, the very embodiment of white power and white privilege. And that an appalling number of us -- beginning with the timorous congressional majority, denizens of the fever swamp formerly known as the Party 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.
