Here is a photo that I snapped from the passenger seat of our buggy the instant it came to my mind that I was in need of an image to accompany my blog post today.
Seen any good films lately?
Yes!!!!! having recently re-screened Oliver Stone’s masterpiece JFK (1991), I began searching for extra info about it; and I discovered, thru an interview, that one of Stone’s influences, which he held as an exemplar while writing the script and throughout the project, was the Algerian-French film Z (1969), which I myself had neither ever seen nor heard of; so I got myself a copy of Z from the library, and I watched it last night in a state of rapt enthrallment. Its director, Costa-Gavras, is new to me too: I think I’ll try to check out more of his work—I admire his stance and the way he articulates his ideas (the disc that we watched contained additional conversations with the director—I was intrigued enough to follow them all straight thru). Now I’ll steal a couple sentences from an encyclopedia:
Z presents a thinly fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of democratic Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis. With its satirical view of politics, its dark sense of humor, and its downbeat ending, the film captures the outrage about the military dictatorship that ruled Greece at the time of its making.
For the sake of the eternal record, here in these pages of my diary I always preserve the casual remarks that I make on a momently basis to my sweetheart. So, when the movie ended, I turned to her and said, “If I had rented this title from Video Update in the late 1990s, like all the films that I watched when I was a just out of high school, then I’m sure I would’ve loved it as a movie, but I wouldn’t have related at all to the political climate that serves as the backdrop of the film: I would’ve assumed that the events depicted were utterly foreign; yet NOW, a few decades later, in the year 2018, after all the recent electoral snafus (I’m talking about the primary not the general), which led me to research the history of my home country, via Stone’s own Untold History documentary series (and book!), also Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire, and having refreshed my memory of the film JFK, plus considering the crescendo in nightmare that preceded the two World Wars and steeply ramped in their wake, I’m both puzzled and sad to admit that this film Z, in almost every detail, feels exactly like the modern U.S.A. It’s like reading thru a list of symptoms and wincing from the truth that you don’t want to admit: Your country is the reluctant inheritor of an authoritarian military. THIS is why both parties’ conventions were basically war rallies; and it also explains the reason that, no matter what any candidate says on the campaign trail, as soon as they are elected into office, that candidate abandons any peaceful diplomacy and becomes a drone-bombing monster with a kill list.
(Or else they get X’d like Z and JFK.)
I was gonna ask: “What’s the major thrust of this country I live in? What’s its goal, its dream, its aspiration?” but then I thought: It’s impossible to care, because no one can answer for the intentions of something so large and complex; all anyone can comprehend is if their own food dish is empty; plus, how can a whole entire country have a single goal anyway? That’s like a dress stain having a goal. Strange, how big things act like small things: one human is vast compared to a microbe, yet when you cluster humans together into an empire, it acts the same as a bug or amoeba. The goal of bacteria is just to keep growing, consume the environs, conquer and spread… (that’s how it seems to me; but I’m admittedly not an expert on this subject – I’m only an expert on the most distant future and how to make GOD…)
But what if the U.S. really does dream to someday become a pretty woman: Is it going about this correctly? It doesn’t seem so to me; you don’t grow attractive by waving weapons at your next-door neighbors and starving your roommates.
There are four types of political people. Only four, and the boundaries between these categories are firm and bold—none may escape from the label that I stick onto them. Oh yes, and I should specify that I’m talking about my own homeland alone: los Estados Unidos. (Are there any other countries on this game board?) It’s the most secure nation ever to grace the earth, because its foremost aim is national security. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. (Matt. 6:21) —But what was I saying? Oh yes, the four types of political moderns:
First we have people who are super-informed, and who side with ME, on the far left, because they are wise; thus they’re essentially devoid of any home party—we’re party-homeless—as both political parties here in the U.S.A. are pro-war & in cahoots with the big bad banksters, Wall Street & sundry private capital. Yes, this country is like an eagle: very noble in demeanor; but it has two right wings, thus the elegance of its flight is akin to a dancer with...
Did anyone yet invent banana-peel ballet-slippers?
To review, the first of four political types consists of those who are anti-party (or “Independent”) on account of being well-informed. Now the second type of political creature in the U.S. is like the first, in that they are party-less, but they end up at this place not via wisdom but rather by way of its opposite: Since they are overworked, they have no time to pay attention to the conundrums of political theory, so they do not grasp even the meaning of the terms “right” or “left”, but they intuitively sense a fraudulent manner in either official party—they smell a rat!—moreover, they know that these parties do NOTHING for them, they serve them zero; in fact they make their lives worse; therefore this second cohort takes its place alongside the first, in the party-free void, tho its constituents remain inarticulate.
Then the third and fourth political types in the U.S. are those who, while being half-informed (and thus receptive to the propaganda of the nation’s agencies of so-called intelligence), rigidly side with one party, and cling to that party for dear life, as a sports fan is gung-ho for his team. It’s beautifully tribal: that’s why there’s no arguing with these types of people. Try using algebraic equations to convince a fanatic of the purple-&-gold team henceforth to shift their support to the green-&-gold team: it barely ever works.
I was born in Wisconsin, and we moved to Minnesota just six days before my bar mitzvah. Wisconsin has the Green Bay Packers, and Minnesota has the Vikings (I’m talking about American football) – that’s where I got those colors for the rival teams above.
But since I hate almost everything about the Internet, it’s good for me to pipe up whenever I run into something that I genuinely like. So here goes nothing:
I like the way that regular people (non-professionals) can video themselves interviewing their neighbors and share the result online.
After the latest U.S. school shooting, there was an uptick in the amount of national conversations about gun control, because (SPOILER ALERT) guns played a role in this recent massacre. As I said, I like to listen to the thoughts & views of average folks, as opposed to the talking points of the federal intelligence agency’s stenographers A.K.A. corporate news readers. So I was screening an exchange online: the interviewer was a regular person, as defined above, and the interviewee was likewise a regular person. The former was a self-styled leftist who favors stricter regulations on firearms, such as the prohibition of semiautomatic weapons. The latter described himself as a “dumb redneck who likes to shoot”—I hasten to explain that he said this in self-deprecation, not in a proud way (the remark earned a tension-breaking laugh): this guy was easily likable and truly articulate; not at all blasé about the subject; nonetheless he was pro-gun... (I might add: “whatever that means”, because he didn’t specify whether or not he was in favor of the type of reforms that the leftist was advocating; he only kept reiterating that he didn’t want anyone taking his guns away.)
*
I inserted an asterisk above to indicate that, at this point in the entry, I lost interest. Actually, it was waning long before this point. Outlining political opinions and the relation of tragic events to legislation... I feel so boxed-in, writing about this type of thing – I should have stuck to praising the movie Z. But it’s precisely because I recently made remarks about avoiding current events, hot political topics of the day, that I thought I’d try my hand at it: I’m always eager to see if I’m right or wrong, so that I might change my mind – that’s why I wanted to address this huge national argument about gun control, and I thought it’d be good to start from a human angle…
Ugh, I’m even sick of trying to explain why I’m sick of trying to…
Anyway, the guy in the interview told how he had cameras installed in the yard of his house, & he’d keep an eye on the interior monitor, & whenever deer would walk by, he’d grab his gun & shoot ’em & drag ’em out back & gut ’em. One deer would feed his family for two whole weeks. This made me think of some lines from Kafka:
I was a hunter; was there any sin in that? I followed my calling as a hunter in the Black Forest, where there were still wolves in those days. I lay in ambush, shot, hit my mark, flayed the skins from my victims: was there any sin in that? My labors were blessed. ‘The Great Hunter of the Black Forest’ was the name I was given. Was there any sin in that?
(This is from “The Hunter Gracchus”; one of my favorite scriptures.)
Anyway, after I watched the video interview, I went to bed. Then in the morning I woke and lay there thinking about what that sportsman had said, about having the cameras on his house and shooting the deer. If I were a Burgomaster tasked with responding to these assertions, I would not say that I found any sin in them at all. But it’s also hard not to dream of the pre-firearm world, where, if you wanted to slay another creature, you’d have to throw a rock with precision, or carve a bow from homegrown bamboo, and string it with hemp twine (or catgut?) and craft an arrow from a fragment of obsidian that you obtained from the local volcano, and crouch and aim and hit your mark. Even bow-and-arrows seem like cheating, tho, in a way. So utilizing cameras and bullets and gunpowder – it takes a lot of the dignity out of the hunt. Nonetheless, the modern hunter still has to grope about inside the dead animal’s body, and jostle its slimy organs, when he skins it and prepares its flesh for his family’s consumption. (But wouldn’t you need to store the meat in salt, to preserve it, if you live in an age before freezers?)
So, to review, it’s now the morning after I watched that video chat with the pro-gun sportsman; and I’m sitting here in bed, trying to enjoy my wandering thoughts. But there are stupid birds outside that keep singing the same stupid song: these birds think they’re the first to notice that winter is ending, so they have this song that they sing, on instinct, very repetitively, with two stupid notes, over and over. I don’t know this bird’s official species, but since all words, let alone stupid bird names, are just random noises affixed to things haphazardly, and their suitability is wholly intuitive—beyond proof—I will christen my avian rival “the blotto bird”. So I woke to all these blotto birds irking the atmosphere; and I thought to myself: What if I were to take that hunter’s advice and install cameras outside of my apartment? Then, on waking, I could simply grab my shotgun and mute this nuisance.
You’re right, tho: This plan would never work, because there are many other complexes of apartments surrounding my own building – in front, behind, and on either side of my abode, less than half a verst away; thus if I casually go out to shoot at birds in the morning, there’s too much of a chance that the neighbors’ bedroom windows would get shattered. Imagine if you woke to the sound of crashing glass, and you go outside and see your neighbor standing on his deck with a smoking shotgun, and he says: “Sorry – I was just trying to take care of these birds.” This is probably how the idea of feuding got born. So you grab your own shotgun and shoot your neighbor’s window out, because two wrongs make a right. But now, despite justice having been served, you remain suspicious of each other. That’s the nature of feuds. Yes, henceforward you must accept the fact that your children’s children will never be able to fall in love with your nemesis-neighbor’s grandchildren. Or, to be accurate, they’ll be able to fall in love, no problem—in fact, they’re practically guaranteed to yearn to possess each another, body & soul, on account of the way that pornography and social networking will have merged in the future—but they’ll be barred from making their bond of true love official: that is, since their families are feuding, they cannot intermarry. Unless they elope. But to wed someone without their parents’ permission goes against God’s holy commandment: “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” (Exodus 20:12) So if you fall in love with a member of the enemy’s forces, and you elope with them and have a traditional white wedding, out in the forest, during springtime, then, by dishonoring your progenitors, you’re practically guaranteeing yourself a short life; as Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, writes (6:2) to the saints which are at Ephesus:
“Honour thy father and mother” is the first commandment with a promise attached to it:—“that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.”
Note that phrase “on the earth” – not “in heaven”; for heaven is reserved for the blotto birds, both literally & figuratively: they fill the sky, the heavens, when alive and annoying; then, once obliterated, they infest the entire afterlife (heaven as trope) now immortal and unimaginably annoyinger.
Sorry; I’m in too flip of a mood to end this right.
P.S.
Here are the next tracks from the mini-demo that I made as a test just to learn how to use my new-old computer. I explained this a little better in yesterday’s postscript. The full album has ten raps about bowls (no reason)—below is the third. Every track follows the same simple template: one verse apiece; and I used the sound-editing program’s synthesized child-voice for each non-chorus.
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