Pretty Pics, Ugly 'tics, Crazy Flicks

I woke up this morning surprised to find a few inches of snow on the ground. When I went to bed the weather report was predicting heavy rain, nothing about snow. I think they must have fired the meteorologists and replaced them with AI because the weather has been consistently wrong, and often spectacularly wrong, a lot lately. AI seems like just another sick joke foisted on us by a sick, whimsical creator bent on testing our faith in what we consider reality. It's definitely the opposite of intelligent.

Anyway, as usual on snow days, I went out for a drive and took some pics. You, too, can enjoy my morning, albeit without the cold.

There used to be a great used book store in New Harmony that was run by an elderly couple from Connecticut. I'd go there when I was back visiting the family for Christmas or whatever. They had an amazing collection of old books. Among many other treasures, there were a lot of bound library collections, each book a years worth of magazines. I was amazed to find old Harper's and Atlantic's dating back to the mid-1800s. I bought a few and really enjoyed reading real-time stories from the Civil War era and other times we'd studied in history classes. And some of the writer's were surprising. For example, I read an article by Charles Darwin in one of the Atlantic's.

I've carried on that habit in the internet age, and it's much better now on a computer than it was in those musty old books. I always have a subscription to Harper's and from time to time have subscriptions to other magazines with long histories such as the Atlantic and The New Yorker. I think it's important to read the better writers in the better magazines if one's going to have opinions about politics and, to a lesser extent, culture. It gets you to step outside the constant avalanche of daily news and instant opinion about yesterday's, or even ten minutes ago's, outrage, and consider the bigger issues with quite a bit more distance and perspective. Many of the best writing doesn't address a particular issue directly, like say when a cynical writer goes on a Caribbean cruise or attends a music festival, but greater truths about the current crisis are revealed through regular people doing regular things in somewhat irregular circumstances. And it's nice just to read good writing for its own sake.

As I alluded to above, with the digital subscriptions you can search the entire archive of a magazine. I often search for particular writers. Charles Bowden, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Miller, William Faulkner – just about anyone I think of will turn up something, either an original piece or a review of their work, or maybe their life.

The other night I was thinking of Vietnam for some reason and thought to search Harper's for David Halberstam. Halberstam was one of the greatest non-fiction writers of journalism's golden age. He was deeply involved in reporting on Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. I'd read his "The Best and the Brightest" in J-School and was deeply influenced by it. He documented how all of the architects of the Vietnam War were top students from elite universities, particularly the Ivy League, and how despite that, if not because of it, they consistently made some of the worst decisions in American History. Up to that point anyway. Our current crop of Ivy Leaguers - Trump, Vance, and most all the other worst politicians in both parties – make Camelot's failures seem quaint these days. In a sane universe, attending Harvard or Yale would disqualify people from public office.

Anyway, there was a lot of Halberstam in the Harper's archive. I settled into a long article about Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail in Indiana in 1968. At first I thought it might give me some insight into his idiot son. I was also interested in what it might tell me about Indiana beyond what I already knew, which that it was one of the more racist states with a major Klan presence. It didn't, though. Not for the former, not for the latter.

I took two main things from the article. First, we just don't have any journalists in Halberstam's league these days. None that I'm aware of anyway. If Halberstam is the major league, few if any current journalists are even in Double A.

The second thing I took was an insight about racism in America that is commonplace, but with some additional context supplied by Halberstam that I think applies to our current disaster. It's an insight which my mind has danced around over the years, but never put together succinctly. It's an insight which I haven't come across in my reading of current events, which may be voluminous, but is far from all-encompassing. So I may have missed it, but it's not commonplace for sure.

The commonplace insight is that after the Civil Rights Act organized labor and other blue collar workers feared, and were easily conditioned to hate African Americans, because in a fair labor market African Americans would take a lot of unskilled and skilled labor jobs that had always been an entitlement for whites.

Halberstam then describes how at that time the white professional class had been somewhat freed from economic fear and since it didn't threaten them they could take moral positions on matters such as social justice, the Civil Rights Act, and equal opportunity. He makes the point that unlike their blue collar brethren, there was no danger of blacks competing for their white collar jobs.

Fast forward fifty or so years and here we are. As anyone with a clear mind could predict, given equal opportunity, blacks, not just African Americans but people from Africa and the Caribbean as well, are equally competent and can successfully compete for professional jobs the white upper and upper middle class considered their entitlement. And just like the blue collar folk after the Civil Rights Act, they are now the ones who are ripe and easy victims for racist propaganda. That not only explains idiots like Donald Trump who couldn't compete for a job with a turnip without wealth, power, and cheating, but more importantly the general rightward drift of so many white collar professionals.

Speaking of our descent into Fascism, On my way home from my snow day drive I stopped in a neighborhood grocery to pick up a gallon of milk and was surprised and struck hard by the rampant inflation affecting most Americans. I think that's something people like myself, and probably you, and most urban blue state Democratic voters just don't see very much, and that it contributes to our missing or not understanding much of the anger so many people outside our more cultured, physically fit, and better educated milieu are feeling.

We shop at Costco, Aldi's, or Trader Joe's where food is so much less expensive, and maybe more upscale places like Whole Foods from time to time, but in those instances we know what to expect price wise. And we don't buy junk food like chips or loaves of Wonder Bread and we don't drink six 20 oz sodas a day, so we have very little idea what that crap costs at regular groceries. Well, regular people do consume that crap, and in mass quantities, and they know damn well what that crap costs in regular groceries. And a lot of those regular people are regular voters and they blame people like us, and the Democrats for the price of their crap.

Mostly, them blaming us is due to propaganda, but to be fair, there is a sliver of truth in there. If everyone who ate healthy and saved money by shopping at Aldi's and Costco ate shit and shopped at the regular grocery, the price of chips might go down a bit based on the economics of mass quantities. And if the Democratic Party leadership didn't have its tongue so far up the ass of corporate donors, they might actually do something about the problems associated with corporate food. Also, I think the new drugs like Ozemspic and Zepbound may have something to do with the rise in junk food prices. The people who eat the most crap are the ones most likely to get a prescription, which results in them eating a lot less crap, again resulting in price rises. And that's just going to get worse as more and more people get access to the drugs. Unless of course Big Food convinces Kennedy that they cause Autism or Pedophilia or something and they get banned, or at least much harder to come by. If not Kennedy and the anti-vax morons, then maybe the Democrats protecting their corporate masters. Or both. It could well be a bi-partisan issue to keep people buying crap and using medical services. Otherwise, it could crater the economy (the insanity of our economics is another topic I'll get to some day).

Anyhow, there are obvious solutions to that particular problem that, like most obvious solutions to the major problems facing humanity these days, are never gonna happen. We're doomed. Future generations for sure.

I saw three movies recently that surprised me either by the cast or who made them, or both. Two were considered among the worst films of all time when they were made.

"Eureka" was certainly considered by me to be one of the worst films of all time, certainly the worst I'd seen. I saw it in Nicaragua not long after the Revolution. The Contra War was gearing up. Reagan and the U.S. were officially denying involvement but everybody knew. The Nicauraguans certainly knew. And the American press. There was a press conference where Reagan said the U.S. had nothing to do with the Contras and then he and the entire press corp cracked up laughing. Perhaps seeing "Eureka" in that context had something to do with my hating it so much. It was a story about the richest man in the world cavorting around in a Caribbean mansion and I was watching it with a small crowd of poor people in a war and earthquake ravaged city that could barely qualified as a city at all. I'm sure that wan't all of it. I wasn't at all visually sophisticated back then and had no acquaintance with avant guarde cinema so I'm sure I hated the Nicolas Roeg style as well, even though I'd never heard of Nicolas Roeg. That was the first surprise when I looked up Gene Hackman's filmography to figure out what movie I had seen back then. I had no idea it was made by a famous director.

I can't say I like the Nicolas Roeg style all that much now, but I do appreciate it. The film has a few fantastic compositions and the editing is intriguing, if sometimes a little too obvious about what point it's trying to make. But Eureka wasn't anywhere near as bad as I remember it. I liked it okay on re-watch.

The cast was what really surprised me. Of course I knew who Gene Hackman was back then – Popeye Doyle, "The Poseidon Adventure" – but it also starred Theresa Russell and Rutgar Hauer, and Mickey Roarke and Joe Pesci had supporting roles (Pesci played a Jew and Roarke played an Italian, wtf). In the end, I found it watchable, and interesting for the people who made it, but not great.

I read a review/reappraisal of "Breakfast of Champions" by Richard Brody in The New Yorker that argued it's a great movie, or at least very good. I think I had seen it back when it came out, or more likely when it came to home video, and didn't like it, perhaps because it starred Bruce Willis, who I didn't like as an actor back then. Apparently most people liked it less than I did, or more likely never saw it at all due to bad word of mouth. It got a significantly worse score than "Eureka" at Rotten Tomatoes.

Like "Eureka," I was surprised by the cast. In addition to Willis, it starred Albert Finney as Kilgore Trout, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Omar Epps and Glenn Headley. Owen Wilson showed up in a bit part. Like many back in the eighties, I was a big Kurt Vonnegut fan in college, but 'Breakfast' wasn't one of my favorites. Unfortunately, despite Brody's glowing review, it's not one of my favorite movies now either.

It was interesting for me on another level though. The Plot, such as it is, involves a guy going crazy and then he meets Kilgore Trout drives him over the edge when he gives him a book telling him he's the only sentient being on the planet, that he was put there as a test by a capricious God, and everyone else is a robot.

That's fascinating to me because I half-believe something similar. But instead of reading it in a science fiction story, I read that roughly half of the quantum physicists believe we're living in a computer simulation. So my half-belief is science based. Still, it sounds crazy, but it makes sense when you think about the arc of history during our lifetimes. The idea that some bored alien kid is fucking with us, much like the kid in Toy Story who torments his toys, and constantly changing the rules of the game, making it ever more absurd, fits the facts and certainly explains Donald Trump becoming president (twice!).

Since hearing of that theory, I often wonder if I'm the only quasi-sentient person in the game or if the people I interact with most are quasi-sentient as well. Don't worry, I think you are as real as me, so that's a difference between me and the crazy guy in the book. The other difference is that I don't really care if it's true or not. There's nothing I can do about it. It just doesn't matter either way if we're all real or not. It seems like we are, and that's enough.

The third film was "Black Widow" with Debra Winger and Theresa Russell. It also bombed with the public, at least according to Rotten Tomatoes, though not as badly as the other two, but did well with the critics. And unlike the other two, I always liked "Black Widow." This time I was surprised to find that Bob Rafelson directed it. And it's unfortunate that both Debra Winger and Theresa Russell more or less disappeared. I thought they were two of the best female actors of their era.