Gonna talk movies, this time - especially those with dire, chilling warnings about this very moment in time. But first...
...I believe - without any solid basis - that we will someday thank brave and diligent public servants for this relatively peaceful late-April weekend. Thank you, our diligent protectors.*
Meanwhile, we just held here an event honoring one of humanity's greatest visionary minds, the epically creative (and legendarily-nice) master of science fiction (much 'grander' than most recipients of that encomium) Vernor Vinge. We'll post pictures and some video from the event, soon. But here is my earlier tribute to my friend... who beat me out of several past Hugo Awards, with his wondrously good stuff!
And now back to politics in this fraught year... with a list of very disturbing and prophetic movies you ought to rent and watch, if you want to understand the depths of the danger we are in. While some of them suggest under-appreciated, possible outs.
== Films that show how and why it will end in Long Knives ==
I have long recommended certain movies for their plausible relevance to our present day crises. For example, you must watch Costa-Graves’s highly-lauded and super-tense 60s flick about the 1960s Greek military coup, called “Z” – especially for its chilling last 5 minutes. And lately I’ve pushed folks to re-watch the terrific film Network!
Sure, I poke at the whole “I’m as mad as Hell!” riff and the harm it does in stoking masturbatory and unreasoning indignation, at a time when we need calm negotiation. Still, it is one of the greatest of all flicks. And the last 10 minutes of Network is especially pertinent today, as Donald Trump veers from being oligarchy’s greatest asset to embodying their greatest fear.
Trump = the greatest fear of oligarchy? The ones who inflicted this malediction upon us fear his return to power? I see signs that the smartest of their caste are awakening to the danger they are in. Dig it. They lose if he loses… and they lose bigger if he wins!
Say what? Why? What do the struldbrugs have to fear from a looming victory for their raving shill and tool? Well, in order to answer that question, watch the last 10 minutes of another great flick - Cabaret! When Michael York asks a Prussian aristocrat in 1932: "So you still think you can control them?"
Trump is openly declaring that any Trump-II administration will be utterly different than Trump-I, which he filled with Bushite/Republican establishment appointees... most of whom (e.g. his Secretary of State, his Atty General, his Chief of Staff and at least three dozen other folks he called 'great guys!'*** ... later betrayed him, vociferously and even scatalogically.
No, those hundred or two appointment positions at the top tier will be stuffed next time with loyalist fanatics from brownshirt central casting - followed by tens of thousands more, when he cancels (as he intends to do, by fiat) the Civil Service Act. This is all according to the Heritage Foundation's 'Project 2025.' All of which is to say that nothing will "control" him. Not oligarch lucre IOUs, not 'conservatism,' nor the Constitution, nor even Putin's puppet strings of blackmail kompromat. (Keep this in mind, when we get to The Manchurian Candidate!)
Okay now, back to Cabaret and Network. Now combine them! And imagine how a ‘Howard Beale martyrdom’ might solve all of the oligarchs’ problems, by eliminating their no-longer-reliable asset in the 'best' way possible, sweeping into office their chosen next-Bush,**** while also sparking ten thousand McVeighs, leading to the collapse scenario at the end of the 2023 film Leave The World Behind! Or else the newly released film Civil War - by Alex Garland
It won’t come to that of course; they underestimate our professional castes -- those I thanked at the beginning of this missive -- and they always will. Hence, I do not give those nightmares top probability.
But offer me ODDS? Like whether Donald Trump will actually make it to the July GOP Convention? Or to October? (One sign will be if he chooses, as running mate, someone from the Bush-Cheney-Romney wing. Ostensibly as a 'unifying gesture.' I expect he's still smart enough (amid his obvious decay) to realize that doing so almost ensures a Howard Beale exit. Give me odds whether he'll instead pick someone the oligarchs fear, even more than they fear him. It's good life insurance.)
Anyway, God bless the FBI and especially the U.S. Secret Service! Do good work, guys & gals.
== Films that get even-creepier on-target? ==
Now, Trump of course has been just such a Kremlin asset, though more zealous, if perhaps blackmailed. Zealous? Just look at the grins of triumph when he invited Lavrov & Kisliak as his first guests to the Oval Office – long before any ally - in January 2017. Blow up the image and really look at the faces!
Such ecstatic glee! After which he proceeded to smooch and 'fall in love' with Kim Jong Un, held unvetted private meetings with Putin, repeated countless Kremlin talking points verbatim, and started disassembling NATO.
Sure, he was a Manchurian Candidate & president. And Putin is right now desperately eager for Trump Administration II. Only… maybe Vlad shouldn’t be!
In The Manchurian Candidate movie, Lansbury tells her semi-conscious son that she’ll go along with the plot, in order to take power… whereupon she intends to rain fire on all the commie bastards who used her son in this way! Once she no longer needs them, she will escape their control and make them pay. By setting fire to the world.
Sound a little like Cabaret, now? Only with a double-chilling twist.
What does the ending of The Manchurian Candidate have to do with Donald Trump? Well, he’s already making it clear! As already stated, Trump intends - from Day One - to seize all power. To arrest opponents. To end civil service protections and fill all slots in DC with only fervid loyalists, whatever their qualifications. All of that is already openly declared intent, with backing from Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation.
And when that’s done? While we fret, thinking it’s only about power, Trump will likely tell Putin:
“I no longer care about your blackmail files. They can no longer harm me. And now you and your prissy world princes and aristocrats are going to pay for looking down your noses on me, for threatening and controlling me.”
== It's not just in movies that these things happen ==
Other than the end of The Manchurian Candidate, the closest parallel would be Germany in 1934. Look up The Night of the Long Knives -- depicted with horrifying gruesomeness in another flick: The Damned. That's when Hitler (whose birthday stoners stupidly celebrate, every 4/20) purged and killed his rivals for power, both the real National Socialists and any Prussian aristos who still "thought they could control me."
Are these just made-up, concocted fantasies, stringing together Hollywood schlock? Well, the movies I've just listed are among the most serious and soberly thought-provoking films ever made, offering up potential parallels that Americans - especially - really ought to ponder, right about now! And especially those aforementioned heroic civil servants. (Chime into comments with your own suggestions!)
Anyway projecting possibilities (not prediction!) is what I am paid for. (Even as Vernor's passing leaves me the last "Killer B" standing, sigh.)
Plausible-seeming scenarios. Though yeah, sure… again, the ‘evidence’ I’ve offered today – beyond a myriad headlines – consists of a dozen lurid motion pictures. (In all cases, the final 10 minutes!) I talk about maybe fifty others and the influence they had, in Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.
And yet…
… If DT-II does get re-elected and commences with his openly-declared intentions in January 2025 - prescribed by Project 2025's traitor authors - what is to stop him?
Well, we will, of course. And not only all those civil servants. But also tens of millions of skilled folks and most citizens. This is NOT Germany in 1933!
But suppose that we don’t… or can’t?
In that case, I have to wonder (As I write this on the fell date of 4/20) if Putin & co have actually thought things through.
Hey, Vlad! Did you and your fellow anti-enlightenment oligarchs ever hear the story about the marionette with a sharp knife? First it slays the pupeteer's enemies, sure.