"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it."
Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010
LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
I do love the medium of radio drama, or, in these days when it is disappearing from radios in a lot of places, audio drama. In this era of very inexpensive or even free but very sophisticated computer based multi-track recorders and editors and online publishing of audio, writers, actors and producers have a means of getting their work where it can be heard, no matter how sophisticated or how silly, how challenging or how main-stream, how well-done or how thrown-together. The same is, of course, true for musicians who want to expose their work to an audience but who don't have the chance in traditional ways. I wish we'd had these tools and media available to us when I was in my youth, just as I wish I'd had access to word processing and automated search for information. For the life of me, I can't understand why so much of it is used for the stupidest of reasons except that people can be as much jaded by it as enabled by it.
I have read several things about making radio drama online, probably the most interesting of those is the book The Well-Tempered Audio Dramatist by the lateYuri Rasovsky, available for free from The National Audio Theater Festivals - you've got to give them an e-mail and identity to get the download of the book. Yuri Rasovsky was well known for his work in radio drama, beginning about a decade after it pretty much disappeared from radio in the United States, he began two well known companies, The National Radio Theater of Chicago and, later Hollywood Theater of the Ear. As Rasovsky predicted, some of the information about technology in his book might already be a bit old, does anyone still use DATs? But much of it is still useful and instructive. And a lot of the material deals with a professional level of production that you will only be able to approach, but the information is useful. One of the things I liked reading was his praise of the former CBC production assistant Nina Callahan. a name I remember hearing in the credits for a number of things I remember fondly.
There are many other how-to online books and sources. Perhaps fitting, one of the better of those I found does it through audio, The Audio Drama Production Podcast. They run to a nearly a hundred episodes (maybe more by the time you find this post) talking among people with real experience of doing it.
I will say that I find a lot of the new stuff is heavy on the sci-fi and fantasy genres or the far-out or wacky, which isn't my favorite but I've got nothing against it. Radio is, as someone pointed out, the real and infinitely flexible theater of the mind, anything can be made to happen, the imagination of those doing it and their ability to convince you through sound and implication the only limits. I'm just glad people are trying and some of them are trying and even succeeding with coming up with creative pieces. If it will help to revive or inspire better stage drama, I have no idea though I doubt it could hurt. It certainly might be a way for some new talent to get a chance to learn and be heard, it might also give some really good actors who will never look the part a chance to play roles they could never get if people could see them. I like that about audio drama, the listener comes up with the visuals, the actors are relieved from the need to look like what some producer or director thinks they should look like. And the sets and costumes always look right.
And opera, if there is a group of performers who need to get experience which is way, way too expensive to get in a stage production, it's people who want to work in opera. Imagine being freed of the expense, the make-up, the costumes, the sets.... Being able to wear comfortable clothes while you're singing a part. I wish someone would do those operas you read about but which haven't been produced, or which you'll never get to hear. I don't know if it's been done yet but I'd really like to hear George Whitefield Chadwick's The Padrone. Even if they had to use electronics to play the score, or just a piano. The production in your head might be a lot better than the one you'll almost certainly never get a chance to see.
You might have to listen closely, the recording is a bit heavy on the AM ambiance side. Extra Feature: The Mystery Project - Midnight Cab - The Mystery of The Blue Eyed Man by Herbert W. Nichol
The CBC series of radio mysteries, The Mystery Project, makes me feel kind of nostalgic. I used to listen every Saturday night on short-wave, I seldom heard it this clearly. You know you're old when you feel nostalgic for things you listened to when you were middle-aged.
Jules's [Mari Sandoz's father, the subject of her first published book, Old Jules ] location on the river drew many other visitors – old trappers, traders, gold miners from the Black Hills and army men. “Big Bat” Pourier, the scout and interpreter, came, and others with names such as Ecoffey, Provost, and Charbonneau. They would sit around the stove in the smoky kitchen and yarn for hours. Jules let Mari stay up and listen as long as she was quiet, and she often sat in the wood box by the stove, listening to their adventures. Many of their names would be unknown to historians, but occasionally someone famous came by. She first met Buffalo Bill Cody, with his beautiful flowing hair, when he came for a hunting trip with Jules. It was through him that the little girl learned the difference between appearance and reality. Sent to awaken Buffalo Bill the morning of the hunt, she found he had already gone, leaving his beautiful hair – a wig – on the bedpost. She never forgave him for her disillusionment.
Mari Sandoz, Story Catcher of the Plains
By Helen Winter Stauffer
Consider the role that Buffalo Bill, as a phony figure used by hack writers if not the actual early show-biz huckster of the "old west" has played in inventing the pathological fantasies that fuel our present day gun violence, his role as an inventor of that pathology that is so obvious outside of those trained by American entertainment that ISIS counts on it making their job of inspiring mass murder-terror in the United States far easier than it is in countries without our show-biz inspired gun insanity. Hear for yourself from the terrifying interview excerpted on The Rachel Maddow Show the other day.
Update: As an example of the pathological lying that is posted at Duncan's Brain Trust but which I usually won't post here anymore.
And BTW, blaming Bill Cody for ISIS is perhaps the dumbest thing you've ever said, which is really going some.
Steve Simels
You can look at the short paragraph I wrote above to see that either the guy is reading challenged, truth challenged or both. Whatever you choose to believe, I certainly didn't say that.
Though....... since ISIS was pretty much a Bush II-Dick Cheney baby a combination of the forces that put them in office and formed the minds of the phony"brush cutter" W and the duck-hunter-friend's-face shooter Dick Cheney, hailing from those loci of old-west illusion, Texas and Wyoming, John Ford might have had a hand in the whole mess. The Bush II administration is certainly related to that movie-inspired pathology. Anyone who denies that is brain dead. And it is undeniable that the insane gun libertarianism and those who promote that, which ISIS finds so useful, are saturated with cowboy mythology. Such junk is what put ol' Death Valley Days Reagan, and so his Bush v. Gore Supreme Court appointees, into place, it certainly informed Reagan's ersatz historical thinking.
Update 2: Yeah, it's too hot to work in the garden again so I'm amusing myself. Here's the next thing Stupy has come up with.
John Ford directs THE GRAPES OF WRATH = ISIS. Got it.
There really is a Trumpian quality to Simp's um.... thinking, isn't there.
Update 3: Now he's making fun of a little girl who never heard a radio or TV, who at a very young age found out a man who professionally presented himself as a great, heroic myth was a phony. Only she found out and stopped being a chump for celebrities. Simps is still a fame addled dolt, in his senescence during the internet age. Maybe I'll post some of his comments on movie stars. My mocking his recent defense of the suddenly out of style Clint Eastwood set him off. You can add Mick Jagger, the Beatles, Woody Allen,.....
“The problem is that Trump watches TV every minute that he isn’t actually on his phone, either talking or tweeting,” an anonymous advisor told Huffington Post. "He gets angry at what he sees on TV and reacts."
The American composer Kevin Puts is developing a rarely encountered kind of career, that of a successful opera composer. His first opera Silent Night won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 and it is wracking up productions around the world. Last year his opera on The Manchurian Candidate opened and this election season certainly has made it timely and topical. I wish it were possible to post a full video of a production but the Minnesota Opera, which commissioned both of his operas has a Youtube feed of excerpts which has left me extremely enthusiastic about his work. Both of his currently produced operas have librettos by Mark Campbell, I hope they compose many successful operas together. There is a third opera by Campbell and Puts in the works scheduled for premier in November, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia. It is rare for an American opera or a new opera to have such immediate success, especially as the success is based on high quality and inspiration, not on facile and familiar sounds or ties to musical comedy.
Kevin Puts has also composed a lot of concert music for instruments which is more than merely beautiful, it is deep and exhilarating. I will post some of that in the near future.
You can hear Silent Night and see pictures from the Minnesota Opera production here.
steve simelsAugust 5, 2016 at 9:18 PM " I don't much care for most Hollywood movies. They're crap. " Which is the equivalent of saying 'I don't care for most novels in English." Or dissing any other art form. You're a philistine snob asshole. The Thought CriminalAugust 6, 2016 at 6:12 AM Preferring reality to Hollywood lies makes someone a "philistine snob asshole", you've got a lot more in common with the Trump voter than you would ever like anyone to have noticed, but I just did.
“He was always a narcissist, you can see that,” says Bill Pruitt, producer on Seasons 1 and 2 of The Apprentice, and later a producer on the reality shows The Amazing Race and Deadliest Catch. “But on the TV show, what you didn’t see, what we saw, was the evolution of a storyteller. You could see how keenly aware Trump became of the story he was telling as it was shaped by the producers around him—of Omarosa’s decline, or Bill Rancic’s rise to glory. Reality TV is the public pillory now, the grand coliseum where we give the big thumbs up or thumbs down. And it shaped him.” “I’ve been struggling with the whole experience of watching Trump go from punch line to GOP nominee,” Pruitt says, “because of how it reflects on reality TV, which is the work I’ve been dedicating my life to for the last 10 years. The associations are glaring. Those in our business who hadn’t already taken stock of what we wrought, we’re doing it now. I might have signed an NDA back in the day that would allow someone to come after me, but I feel almost a patriotic duty to talk about this. “Those of us involved in the show are proud of our work. But we might have given the guy a platform and created this candidate. It’s guys like him, narcissists with dark Machiavellian traits, who dominate in our culture, on TV, and in the political realm. It can be dangerous when we confuse stories we’re told with reality. We need to wake up—and that’s from someone who helped tell these stories.”
There you have it from one of the biggest producers of entertainment TV's ersatz "reality" and its relationship to the nightmare possibility that we might have a fascist 2-year-old in a 70-year-old with the libidinous imagination of a 12-year-old asshole as president and at least a quarter to a third of the American People mistaking that as a good idea.
The insanity of gun culture in the United States, the political pressure to have the most insane gun laws in the developed world is intimately tied to the lied-up old west of Hollywood Movies. If that bull shit had been limited to those who read dime-store novels instead of the massive movie audience and the even bigger audience for the same crap on American TV, that insanity would almost certainly never have taken hold. Combined with the fascism that has been promoted in the American entertainment industry, it is incredibly dangerous. Those weapons aren't 19th century Colt six-shooters, they're automatics with modern ammunition.
An actual fascist as president - not to mention the many actual fascists already in the Congress, governorships and state legislatures and appointed to the Courts on both the Federal and state levels, devolving down to the quality of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or name your nightmare governor already in the executive, that is too high a price to pay so that TV executives and owners can make money on peddling lies.
Who are you are you going to believe on this, your own eyes or a 12-year-old in a c. 70 year old body or a 90 year old former scribbler for the Village Voice who now does his scribbling for the Koch bros. at the Cato Institute?
I am convinced by observing the decline, especially in the period since Ronald Reagan got so much traction from parroting Dirty Harry that putting the privileges of the media over the exigencies of us having a population able to cast an accurately informed vote WITH GOOD WILL is where this started. You can have the freedom to tell the truth, absolutely while discouraging lies. There is a real, dispositive and inescapably consequential result from enabling lies and the liars who tell them. Even if we dodge the giant bullet from the giant potency aid and ultimate phallic symbol of Hollywood movie illusion, there is no guarantee that another Trump in twelve or twenty-four years won't have 49 or 51 % of the voters "make his day". I doubt anyone is going to learn that real, dispositive and inescapably consequential lesson from this wake up call because the slogans "free speech" "free press" in their heavily promoted absolutist form will prevent them from thinking those thoughts.
What if it turns out that the "free press" industry, the "more speech" line peddlers and the such are wrong and democracy can't survive on the regime of lies they have enabled? If, as I suspect, they are wrong and democracy can't survive when the people are corrupted with ideological lines in popular entertainment and the kind of false history that they get from movies, TV mini-series, alleged TV news and hate-talk radio, the choice between that and democracy is inescapable. We won't be able to have it both ways and anyone who thinks seriously about why the United States, the cradle in which real, egalitarian democracy was being nurtured has given way to producing Trump voters will have to face the fact that it is what informs their minds that has produced their ideas and actions. Those things they saw on TV and in the movies and heard on hate-talk radio really did have a real and deadly effect. Only it's produced a Trump as it had produced a Bush II a Ronald Reagan and a Nixon who went on Laugh-In and said "Sock it to me?" as he won the election.
Yeah, I've read a bit. And I tend to remember what I read. So, sue me.
Simelarky: n. a transparent lie about what someone else has said, told to an audience known to be too lazy and prone to dishonesty, themselves, to risk being called on its falseness.
Oh, I'm really not a big fan of horse opera movies, not even the gay one. Only they weren't cowboys. The only exceptions I'd make to that are Shane and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which aren't cowboy movies. I don't much care for most Hollywood movies. They're crap. Nothing Hollywood produced can compete with the books of Mari Sandoz. I prefer the de-mythified west instead of the B.S. west. "You have no right to falsify life. That's the cardinal sin of the writer." Mari Sandoz
Update: Stupy doesn't know the difference between cowboys and farmers. No surprise there.
Update 2: Just because I'm sure it will piss off Simels the two-bit fame-fucker and because it allows me to mention more about Mari Sandoz.
The Searchers: my most overrated film
Anyone who thinks that everything that John Ford ever did is close to or superior to what Mari Sandoz accomplished in her books is a friggin' idiot.In the one case I know of where Ford impinged on her work, the botch he made of the masterpiece, Cheyenne Autumn, here's what Variety had to say about it:
Cheyenne Autumn is a rambling, episodic account of a reputedly little-known historic Cheyenne Indian migration 1,500 miles through almost unbelievable hardships and dangers to the tribe's home near the Yellowstone in Wyoming. Somewhere in the telling, the original premise of the Mari Sandoz novel is lost sight of in a wholesale insertion of extraneous incidents which bear little or no relation to the subject.
Considering how thoroughly Sandoz researched her writing, sometimes, literally, researching for a decade, perhaps more, before she wrote a book, that treatment of it is an abomination. Ford was a falsifier, I don't really care how pretty he made it while he distorted. I've got no use for that crap. As a contrast to the practice and attitude of Hollywood, especially in the John Ford era, here is what Mary Dixon of Hastings College said about why Sandoz tried so hard to be accurate.
The motive of Mari Sandoz's truth-telling was not limited to setting the record straight; it was more along the lines of producing a faithful account that would illuminate the past in light of the motives of those involved, with a watchful eye directed toward her contemporary culture and the attitudes that tainted it. Dorman comments that in another work, Slogum House, Sandoz was "well on her way to a modernist conceptualization of history . . . in which culture rather than fate, or Providence, or geography, or blind economic force-was the determinative factor in history." In Crazy Horse, she resolutely sought to expose her readers to the culture of the Plains Indians, hoping that somehow through that exposure she could shape their future by educating the Euro-American population to appreciate that culture and not to obliterate it.
Update 3: Dopey is repeating it, he figures everyone in the West was a cowboy when cowboys were those who worked in a particularly awful job, not even the majority of white men who were out there back then. City boys are so ignorant.
Update 4: Oh, I was just amusing myself on a day it was too hot to work outside. I'm done with you again, till I feel like hurting your feelings by not falling into line with your common received POV. What's wrong? You're not automatically rushing to Clint Eastwood's defense this time. Guess I was right about him all along, wasn't I. Only now it's groovy to admit he is and always was a racist, misogynistic a-hole so you've jumped on my bandwagon.
No, you stupid schmuck, I wasn't the one who introduced Nick and Nora into the discussion, Simels, aka "Krut Man" did, when he mis-read-presented an argument I made. As if I'd use that tired old cliche. I posted his comment, something I don't regularly do anymore just because you said I had. That kind of misrepresentation of argument is his basic MO, Eschaton, his favorite place to post his misrepresentation. He's not the only one there who does that, habitually. But, then, I'm not surprised that anyone else who goes there these days is so stupid as to not have not caught on to his act or who, if they have, isn't bothered by that kind of lying. I learned a lot about quasi-intellectual dishonesty on the play-left from having been a regular there. It's that kind of thing that gave Eschaton its "scat".
Update: Uh, dearie, "eschaton" is a real word with a real meaning and that "ch" is a hard one, sounding like "k", thus the pun. How many years have you been going there without realizing that? I swear, they must have stopped teaching children how to use the dictionary at some point.
I am the cleverest member of the cleverest family of the cleverest class of the cleverest race in the world.
Beatrice Webb
The big difference between the Leninist Vanguardists and the Fabians under the likes of Beatrice and Sydney Webb is that the Leninists got to exercise power. The bizarre habit of thought that people who speak English seem to have, being incapable of believing that people who speak English, especially with an upper-class British accent would, given the chance, reproduce every single horror of both Stalinism and Nazism is seen as much in the writings, private and public and many of the public declarations of the Fabians such as the Webbs and its celebrity wing in people like George Bernard Shaw. As Shaw was, in fact, a public advocate of the mass murder of those he saw as unfit decades before the Nazis put that policy into practice, the Webbs were huge fans of the Leninist and, later, Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, going so far as lying about the existence of the programmed mass starving of the Ukranian people in the 1930s as it was going on, after being given a propaganda tour. The Ukranian famine, planned by Stalin and his regime was the most proximate and immediate of the 20th century mass murders preceding the mass murders of the Nazis. The Webbs, like Marxists - minus the rival Trotsyites - in the United States, supported Stalinism through every horror and shame, including the Hitler-Stalin pact.
A fixture of the British upper, ruling class Beatrice Webb kept journals all during her life which provide a good window into the internal thinking behind the phenomenon of upper class, elite "radicalism" and its primary concern, the enforcement of hierarchical power, calling it social good. As with Lenin's Vanguardism, it is based on assumed intellectual superiority, presented as them knowing what's best in even the brutal treatment of their lessers, in the most massive violation of their rights. While they might not have openly advocated the proto-Nazi program of mass gassing and cremation that George Bernard Shaw openly advocated as a Fabian celebrity, they never kicked him out of the club for that. I don't see any reason to doubt that there was a good possibility that the Fabians might have put such a policy in place, Shaw was hardly the only alleged lefty in Britain who said things like that, many of the fans of such science and economics as he based his arguments in said the same thing. As Marilynne Robinson pointed out in her book, Mother Country, the habit of meditating on the benefits of genocide were far older in the British upper class, she quotes Thomas Carlyle advocating the extermination of the Irish if they failed to measure up to his standards in 1839, immediately before the potato famine in which the British government exported food out of Ireland as millions were starving. You can hardly say that Americans were much better as they were in the process of the attempted genocide of the inhabitants of North America. All speaking English, not German, not Russian.
Elites, no matter what language they speak or what country they come from, have a strong, perhaps irresistible tendency to come up with lines of assertion, turning their brutality towards those they identify as their lessers into some kind of virtue. Some imaginary future always figures into that, making their sacrifice, their murders or mutilation or oppression, the theft of their work product by the elite into some future benefit bought by the present benefit to that revolutionary or evolutionary elite. That is one of the reasons that economic disparity is a danger to democracy but replacing it with one in which some academic, intellectual elite replaces an alleged superiority of mind for one of superiority of wealth is no less dangerous. The program of mass murder put into effect was simply the most developed stage of the eugenics which the "best minds" of many countries presented as science. I think if the Fabians had ever had the kind of control that Lenin and his successor, Stalin did, they would have started killing people, too. Especially as they found their enlightened rule opposed. They, like so many American intellectuals and artists, weren't much bothered when they found out what Stalin was doing.
As ususal, when it's Noam Chomsky who is reciting history, especially when the results fly in the face of conventional wisdom, he's pretty much got the goods on Lenin. We might part company in that I have become convinced that virtually any sect of Marxism would end up as a pretty grim totalitarian state. I think any political entity aping the scientistic-materialist ideology of late 19th century science probably would have. Materialism is always, at best, inimical to democracy and human good based in the assumption of the endowment by GOD of equal rights and equal moral obligations. I used to think that could happen otherwise, I no longer believe that anything less than that belief, strongly held, will hold human selfishness in check, especially when exercised by those who believe themselves superior and most of all those with the power to enforce their will.
All I can say is that every crappy thing about him I concluded from watching his early movies is on full display in the latest interview in Esquire. The macho posturing (I'm always amused by macho men who made their living putting on costumes and makeup and playing let's pretend), the sense of white male privilege, racism, pooh-poohing the importance of the experience of women and people who aren't white, privileged males. I do find it hilarious that he is worried about listening to a woman's voice for four years as he declares he's going to vote for Trump. who everyone knows has such a rich, pleasing, well used voice. Then there is his oh, so, unconvincing self-criticism over his senile ranting at an empty chair THAT IS SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I suppose it has occurred to Clint that that was a bit too revealing of how he obviously resents a black man being president. I'm surprised he didn't pretend-blow him away with his giant magnum, it would have been along the same lines. Only, he'd have met some real law men when the Secret Service came to talk to him.
What an prick. I've known dozens of jerks like him only they didn't have money and they weren't in the movies and they didn't get written up by movie reviewers in big New York publications so that the kind of people who get every idea they ever spout from those could pretend he was some admirable cultural figure.
So, who's going to be the first big figure in the scribbling class to say it, he's essentially always been what he is in that interview and his movies show it, especially the paranoia concerning women which is so telling in his fear of Hillary Clinton's voice. I mean, Play Misty For Me? The Beguiled? He's afraid of girls.
Update: My, my. 24 hours since I posted this and Clint's biggest fan hasn't come to his defense, it's a record. Clint, that means you're officially not cool anymore with the kewl kids.
WOLF BLITZER (HOST): Should Donald Trump apologize to those parents? BEN CARSON: I think we should clearly move on. I don't think it would be harmful if they apologized to him and he apologized to them. But I don't see that happening. BLITZER: Why should they apologize to him? CARSON: Well, for one thing, if you accuse someone of something that's not true, it usually is a reasonable thing to acknowledge that. BLITZER: So what you would like to see is an apology from those parents? Is that what you're saying? CARSON: I would say rather than make this a one-sided issue, why don't we all just say, "back off a little bit." We have such important issues to deal with, and let's just call a truce. And the best way to call a truce is simply to say, "I'm over that, you're over that, I'm sorry I said this if it offended you." The other side, "I'm sorry if I said that." Because that's not our issue. Our strength as a nation is through unity. It's not through division. Division will destroy us. A house divided against itself cannot stand. That's what we need to be be concentrating on. Not these peripheral issues that don't mean anything. We just seem to be addicted to things that don't mean anything. I think the term "floridly insane" is the opening entry for naming what's wrong with Dr. Carson.
In the post-literate world in which even a semi-literate, semi-scribbler or typeller can have what gets called "a career in journalism", it's no wonder that such a dolt can be considered a member of a "brain trust" Here is what I said, in no way was I then or ever, "blaming the elimination of prayer in schools for the rise of Trump". I'll admit, though not really a subtle point, it was probably too subtle for the post literate snobs of the "Brain Trust".
I do think that an over-reaction to things like the Supreme Court rulings banning prayer in public schools it has led to a near complete reluctance to enforce any moral absolutes or even to instruct and enforce morality among children, and certainly not among adults. The Supreme Court has made even the consideration that children could be damaged by what adults find entertaining an insufficient reason to deprive adults of even the most morally depraved content. Your guide to what I say is a years long serial liar and a dolt, though it's not possible to know at any given time if his misrepresentation is the one or the other. I have said there needed to be a word for someone who makes a habit of telling the kinds of lies he does, they've been common enough in the media, FOX, when it isn't outright lying is telling the same kinds of lies.
I have come to understand that the play-left lies as much as the all too real right, it's just that they tell other lies. There are some sites that I used to frequent, years back, where it has become remarkably common. In that second Chomsky Youtube I posted this morning, you can hear the young Trotskyite wack-job doing something similar.
I will make a prediction, that, unless the unthiknable happens and Donald Trump wins the election, that Republicans will adopt something like super delegates in their nomination process. If Trump does to the Republicans what they fear, they will not be able to tolerate the cost and will take measures to avoid it happening again. I doubt that they will look any more seriously at the fact that Donald Trump is a product of TV able to corrupt us in the most vulgar of ways, most hostile to truth and even thought, I haven't been able to convince many Democrats of that obvious truth, at least not enough for them to see through the slogans that gave TV that power.
While, at their least wise, Democrats have nominated some weak candidates based on their popularity in Iowa or New Hampshire, the Republicans modern strategy of winning through appealing to the worst character flaws we are all subject to. In this election it has reached a new depth of irresponsibility. Trump is already setting up a condition which will incite his gun carrying, paranoid, irrational, racist and bigoted audience will operate on the idea that he was cheated out of the election. That is a hardly tacit call for open insurrection, terrorism and civil war. We have not been so much in danger of something like that in a long time. Even many Republicans are afraid of him, many of them for something of higher importance than their own piddling nomination to another Senate or House run. There are still Republicans with a higher sense of morality than that exhibited by John McCain or Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio.
A corrupted people will be unable to make a choice in an election that is compatible with democracy. That has been seen over and over again, especially in the post-colonial period when, tragically, countries released from British or French or Dutch domination or domination by others have their first and last quasi-democratic election. Generally the issues are ethnic and other identity divisions, ideology, or merely the corruption that comes with holding control of the government without countervailing forces to stop that. In a United States in which anything from a quarter to a third of people can give their support to an explicit fascist like Donald Trump, we are dangerously close to them giving us a fascist government or setting off a civil war. That their belief in Trump is based in non-reality, in TV incited paranoia and fantasy will not be addressed because, "first amendment". In the absence of that, some other means of blunting their power to put someone like Trump in reach of the presidency has to be found. People who, by choice or otherwise make insane choices must be thwarted or the results will be catastrophic.
I think in response to Trump the answer the Republicans come up with will have to be something like super delegates. That it sounds anti-democratic won't change the fact that sometimes democracy fails, sometimes that failure is catastrophic. That we have had 57 presidential elections won't, in the present environment of a degraded, propagandized electorate, save us from the same results that have happened in younger experiments in democracy. It all depends on the collective mind of the electorate and when that fails, the results will be a catastrophe. To ignore that fact because something doesn't sound right to you isn't moral, it's insane abdication of responsibility and facing reality.
And years later, he was still taking flack from the Trotskyite idiots.
His point about the very real big differences that come from small difference in a large, powerful system making real differences for millions of people to those who choose to live in reality instead of "in some seminar" is worth the time of hearing it. I've seen young Trots, they really aren't much more in touch with reality than the glum zombified, much younger Lyndon Larouche cultists who used to annoy poeple at shopping plazas around here. His cult is still going, even though at 93 he's not going through the motions of running for president he's still declaring "I Intend to Shape the Government of the United States". Really, not much of a difference between that and what Jill Stein's cultists in the Green Party fraud pretend to believe. I'm coming to see such "third parties" those that involve getting or making money as being essentially con jobs to bilk suckers into giving money that goes into the hands of "party" officials and feeding the egos of their figure heads. Certainly, by now, the crack pottery of both isn't believed in, even by those high up in the paid staff. As with WikiLeaks, the best way to see them are con jobs and organized criminal enterprises.
Update: No, I don't take any of that Marxist junk seriously, anymore. Looking at the history of Marxist movements, they either produce horrific totalitarian governments, from the worst such as North Korea now, China during the Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union under Stalin to the least bad, such as Cuba under Castro or they produce idiotic splinter cults in the scores and hundreds, the worst of those making total assholes of themselves as they act as useful tools for corporate fascism.
I'm not going to be romantic about Communism, there are too many bodies and skeletons in the way. Would you, living here in the United States, want the government here to adopt the mainstream of policies of any of those? I don't think you'd even, really, like the educational or medical policy under Castro, though that is probably the only real area in which they have much to recommend. The control of information and expression, things that even the worst Stalinists will whine and moan about here, is far more restricted there.
Marxism is dead. I've recommended the book by James Weinstein, The Long Detour, a study of how the American left fell into the pathetic state it has gotten into. Weinstein didn't dare say it but the real problem was Marx, who, as a scientistic materialst, had no belief in or appreciation for what democracy is made of and the possibilities of it. Today, in 2016, even the Communists don't believe in Marx. The Trots are among the most obnoxious and irrational of the current Marxists as the questioner in the second video demonstrates. They, along with other such assholes have their greatest goal in getting attention as the most leftist in any aggregation they inflict themselves on, black block anarchists and the such.
Anyone who might be sympathetic to the real left, those who promote egalitarian democracy, economic democracy, the spirit of democracy in good will and fairness, must think that leftists who tolerate the infliction of Marxists on leftists movements are either stupid or are a fraud. Marxism in reality was and is still being given the test of time and it is not only at least as bad as capitalism, it is, in most ways, far worse. No one in their right mind would want it. Marxists' appropriation of the word "socialism". no less than the Nazi appropriation of the word, has totally discredited it. That is how Americans who, when presented with the ideas of real socialism, will favor those while considering "socialism" as if it were the equivalent of Nazism.
I don't think the highest goal of the left should be the sustenance of the feelings of old or young lefties who really, truly, believed with all of their hearts in their various cults of the dead past. The kinds of elderly Busters as seen in one of the videos I posted the other day are a mild version of that. The ridiculous nostalgia for Marxisms in any or all of their ever warring, ever splitting sects and cults is no less absurd than the nostalgia for some of the most brutal, genocidal dictatorships of the 20th century or what is probably the greatest locus of the most brutal, terror contained slavery today, North Korea (which the Sparticists have a particularly tender regard for).
Dump the Marxists, there will be no progress towards egalitarian democracy with that gargantuan burden on us, they deserve no more consideration than the Nazis do, they really aren't much different from them. The Sparticists are some of the stupidest, most ridiculous and most obnoxious of them all. Trots, here and elsewhere, are and have been some of the worst assholes that afflict the left.
I have had a really rough several days and am just catching up with things like Samantha Bee Youtubes, I saw the one I'm going to post about twenty minutes ago. This phenomenon of "Bernie" or Busters, the "Bernie" Delegates Network and the Green Party dupes should be giving everyone on the left a wake up call. Bernie Sanders has admitted that in this election the most important thing is to make sure that Donald Trump is not president in January but there are still large numbers of those who supported his candidacy and, allegedly, his policies are quite prepared to see Donald Trump become president. Some of them do so on the absurd theory that when you have a horrific, crypto-fascist or, in his case, an explicit fascist in charge of the government it will hasten the revolution. If that idiocy began in Marx and Engel's lunatic adoption of the imaginary Hegelian dialectic, I don't know. I do know that I've been hearing it from mostly white, mostly affluent, mostly academic lefties since the 1950s and, let me clue you in, kids, it ain't never happened, not since that crap started. If it were going to then your dream revolution would have happened during the terrible 19th century or, really, whenever in history you want to locate the horrific government that would have sparked it. The reality is that a Republican-fascist president cements fascism into place, it doesn't hasten the day when it falls. I mean, Hegel died in 1831, when's that ol' dialectic going to shift?
These idiots never gain power because they are nutcases who couldn't mount a local campaign to do anything but get attention for themselves. They are a burden and millstone around the neck of the left, they are the assholes at meetings who screw things up, they are the John Reed faction of the play-left who destroyed the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs as it was actually doing what the Greens haven't done, win major elections on a national level as well as those controlling local governments.
The left has got to dump these guys. The Tea Party style of lunacy works for fascists because fascism is all about exploiting peoples' weakness and bad points. It doesn't work for democracy because democracy is made of the best in people. Childishness, egocentricity and attention getting have been a curse for the left. As a long time observer of the left, I could go on and on about why these idiots have to be dumped, shoved aside, overridden and distanced from the real left. In looking around at the leftist media online, the magazines, the webazines, I'm still reading stuff supporting this lunacy, now, on the second of August, less than a hundred days left in the only chance we have to avoid having Donald Trump as president.
This campaign has opened my eyes into the reasons the left has failed, so completely, in the past half century in ways that I've never seen before. Even with the experience of the Bush II regime, with the irresponsibility of the likes of Condi Rice and George W. Bush in sleeping as warnings of an attack were ignored, the criminal enterprise that Dick Cheney oversaw as his self-appointed regent, the worst foreign policy and military crime in our history resulting in a blown-up Middle East, etc. and that hasn't been enough experience to educate these prattling children, not the real children who might have an excuse or those entering into their seventh and even eighth decade of their extended childhood. The kind of thing that you can only do if it is other people who will pay the price of your self-indulgent let's play revolutionaries game. It's no wonder they're willing to see Trump as president, they are as unattached to reality as he is.
If you want to see what has discredited the left, here it is.
As is said, they should stop pretending they represent anything to do with Bernie Sanders, at the very least. They're Jill Stein's stooges and they were from the start.
Update: I agree with what Phyllis Jacobson said about the real damage that the guys who wanted to be considered the most leftist in the room did to socialism.
[Lillian] Hellman said that "radicals" like herself had done no harm. She was mistaken. By promoting a totalitarian movement in the name of socialism, she and they had done enormous harm. They had impeded the development of an authentic socialist movement by distorting the basic concepts of socialism, promulgating the idea that a society based on the destruction of working class independence, on terror and the liquidation of millions was socialist. They not only distorted history but made a mockery of the American radical tradition.
I don't, though, think that the Trotskyites of the SWP were much better. Marx and Engels, the Fabians and others are the ones who damaged the radically leveling, democratic concept of socialism to the point of its entire discrediting. It was in the period before Lenin's hijacking of the Russian Revolution that socialism reached its high point in voter acceptability in the United States, when it was, truly, seen as an expression of economic democracy, before it became associated with the mass murders, the oppression, the entire violation of the anti-democracies that arose in various places after 1917. It was, in fact, at the command of those like Lenin and Trotsky that the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Victor Berger was wrecked by the Leninist faction, just as the SDS was later destroyed by the "Progressive Labor" Maoists. Though I think that the Marxists among the Socialists would have become a problem for democratic socialism in the United States. By the 1930s even Victor Berger's widow, Meta Berger. was signing onto statements defending Stalin's show trials and his dictatorship, such as that mentioned in Jacobson's review.
I think that the word "socialism" has been so damaged, the concept so damaged, that it is no longer useful or wisely used. We need to replace it with something that gets back to its original ideals and protect it from being appropriated by those who don't begin in egalitarian democracy.
Oh, so I was right, Krut Man and Scat Girl* really do think that being able to show Nick and Nora in a double bed is more important than the Voting Rights Act. How very ... um, white of you. Is it any wonder that the Republican-fascists have been able to destroy it with so many idiots like you on the alleged left having the priorities that a particularly stupid 12-year-old might. There was a time I'd have expected someone at Baby Blue to have been able to at least consider the idea that one was definitely of more importance than the other. Though Duncan's media libertarianism was the thing that gave me my first doubts about him, doubts that are coming true in his increasingly cynical, sour, indifference in this election. It seemed remarkable to me considering he was the protogee of the woman who ran Media Whores Online. I have to say that someone who came to prominence defending Bill Clinton against the likes of Christopher Hitchens well after Bill Clinton was out of office, it's remarkable that he can't now rouse himself to defend Hillary Clinton when the alternative is Donald Trump. He's been remarkably muted on that danger as opposed to his paramount concern these days, his ability to navigate around Philly in ease and comfort. I have to wonder, is it because Hillary is a girl and Bill was a boy? She's certainly a better candidate than her husband was with far more of a sense of personal responsibility and what's important. * I'm not the one who named herself after the shit-eating goddess or who is so stupid as to retain the name after it was pointed out to her that she'd done that. Though since that's what comes out of her, it's no wonder that's what went into her. Hate Update: Krut Man just confirmed his sidekick isn't the only one full of shit. There is no relatively simple idea too clear for him to not distort to mean what it doesn't. Oh, and, you can tell your other buddy that you're the troll here, it's my blog. Or is that too complex a concept for the Brain Trusters these days.
With his latest attack on Hillary Clinton's campaign, and so American democracy, in favor of the fascist strong-man, Donald Trump, I'm willing to now say that Julian Assange and his organization are organized criminals. I think it's high time for the Ecuadorian government to expel him from its embassy or to risk being considered complicit in his espionage against American democracy. Though you have to wonder what kind of blackmail he would practice against the Ecuadorians - what he's doing now is certainly blackmail.
I think it is time for the FBI to give us more details about its investigation into the hack against the Democratic National Committee and to verify if Hillary Clinton, herself or if other people or entities associated with her have been hacked. If the Putin government or some other entities are involved, it's important to know who they are. It's one thing for domestic billionaires to be trying to ratfuck American elections, if an Aussie punk like Assange can - perhaps at the behest or or in the interest of foreign governments or other agencies - that is as serious a crime against democracy as voter suppression, intimidation or rigging the election.
I think there should be a category of both domestic and international crime called crime against democracy, against the right of a free, fair and honest election being held in any given place and it should be considered one of the most serious of crimes, investigated and prosecuted with full vigor. This is far more serious than whether or not the sleaze went back on his agreement to use a condom or broke one on purpose, this is him screwing us into a fascist as president of the United States.
After having written against his arrest on what he was accused of in Sweden, I would now support both the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and his prosecution. I would support any group of hackers who he was associated with being investigated and prosecuted for any crimes that could be proven in court. With what they've done in the past month, I have no problem with anyone considering Wikileaks to be a criminal organization with an obvious political agenda that is hostile to American democracy.
There is a real danger to democracy from groups like this, depending on how they act. Hacking isn't some moral good, in itself. Julian Assange obviously thinks there's something in it for him to have a fascist strongman, idiot like Donald Trump as president of the United States, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't think he could get a pardon out of it. Perhaps he believes that in doing a service to the Putin regime he could get them to influence a President Trump who owes hundreds of millions to their crime family . Or maybe it's one egomaniacal egotist seeing someone like him in Donald Trump. Or maybe he just wants to cause the United States to be weakened through having an ignorant, amoral lunatic as president. I don't much care what his motives are, none of them could possibly be good.
I think with this it is high time for the Democratic Party to find other ways of communicating than online media. It can't be considered secure. I also think it's way past time that people realize that unless all communication is encrypted at the highest possible level, they should expect to get hacked. I've heard that people and media organizations are antsy about criticizing Assange or Wikileaks because they fear having their e-mails or other online communications hacked by them. That's a rational fear but it is no reason to allow them to wreck one of the most crucial elections in American history on behalf of the worst candidate a major party has nominated in our lifetime. I would put Trump as more dangerous than George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Thomas Dewey on that list. He is a total catastrophe, so dangerous that he even scares some of those who participated in past horrific Republican administrations. I think it's becoming clearer that he is a real Manchurian Candidate. Only they wouldn't have to use more than the delicate cycle to brainwash Trump. We need to figure out what his presidency would get for Julian Assange.
Ah, yes, the ultimate good of the media isn't something like the promotion of egalitarian democracy and the prevention of fascism, it is that they could remake The Thin Man and have Nick and Nora in a double bed. That's what's important. Is it any shock that the American entertainment industry has given us Reagan and now might seal the deal with Trump when the idiots who play the left really do believe things like that? Me, I'd rather have the production code AND THE VOTER RIGHTS ACT than the media we have now and a Supreme Court which has gutted the Voter Rights Act. Is it any surprise that a man who made his fortune putting topless photos of women on page 3 has driven the United States into the depravity of having a real possibility that Donald Trump could be its president? No. It's no surprise, that's what a rational person would expect of a country in the hands of a soft-core porn merchant.
As Donald Trump again exposes the sheer awfulness of his personality, his total amorality in attacks against the father and mother of a soldier killed in service to his country, you have to wonder how anyone could possibly stick with him in this election. Yet the polls are reported give him a chance of becoming "commander in chief" of the military with the very real ability to get more soldiers killed. And, since practically no one in the media can be counted on to mention it, even more of an ability to kill people who a president will not be held responsible for getting killed.
You can blame the ignorance of some of Trump's supporters, their continued support makes you wonder what percentage of them will have heard of the incident that is all over the news. But any who have heard of his massive and grotesque disrespect of a Gold Star Mother or any of the myriad of other self-disqualifying things he has said in any given week of this campaign and who still intend to vote for him are clearly not only ignorant but as morally deficient as he has so massively shown himself to be.
How did the United States fail in the moral education of so many of its voters that they could have selected Donald Trump to be a presidential nominee? Certainly his selection as a candidate isn't merely a matter of ignorance - a lot of his supporters, many of the most vehement supporters of Donald Trump are not ignorant of the catalog of moral depravity that constitutes his public utterances, his history in the civil and divorce courts, his crass self-indulgence and massive egotism. Many of those who have supported him do so while claiming moral superiority, the often cited "evangelical" Trump supporters some of them excusing his obvious sins against their own morality, the sex scandals (you have to ask why his infidelities count as nothing as compared with the ones of Bill Clinton) the serial polygamy of trading in wives for younger models, the profiteering from gambling and other vices, the open and blatant theft of conning and cheating robbing even quite vulnerable people?
I do think that in the over-reaction to things like the Supreme Court rulings banning prayer in public schools has led to a near complete reluctance to enforce any moral absolutes or even to instruct and enforce morality among children, and certainly not among adults. The Supreme Court has made even the consideration that children could be damaged by what adults find entertaining an insufficient reason to deprive adults of even the most morally depraved content.
When I was growing up, back in the days of bible readings in public schools and production codes on TV, at least those moral messages important to civic good were absolute, you didn't cheat, you didn't attack the vulnerable, you didn't disrespect other people, especially those in mourning, and most of all, you would never think to attack a Gold Star Mother for personal gain. And, most of all, you were to do to other people what you would have done to you, equality was actually considered the common morality that everyone was expected to abide by. Of course few of us achieved a 100% grade in following that moral ideal but we were taught that it was, in fact, what we were expected to do. The extent to which you did practice them was the measure of your entitlement to respect and public trust. Those are, in fact, the very basis of democracy so that any assertion of the equality of both rights and the moral obligation to observe those equal rights were the ABCs of civic education. Replacing them with even the First Amendment of the Constitution as if it could substitute for it may have been the beginning of the descent.
Ultimately, democracy depends on equality of rights and moral obligations, not merely on freedom to say whatever you want to to advocate or promote whatever you find most profitable to you. You can't short that circuit or make a substitution and expect that democracy will be achieved or endure. You won't have democracy without moral restraints on behavior, it can't be done. Liberty, in the absence of equality and moral restraint, produces fascism where the least moral and most able crush the rights of those weaker than they are, the losers of libertarianism.
There has always been a strain of amorality, of cynical use and enjoyment of inequality as a means of getting ahead taught and promoted by libertarians, "right and left". Quite often the fans of cruel comedy, of what they will insist on calling "satire" when it's just cynical and cruel and an expression of amorality are, in fact, expressing the amorality of Donald Trump. Think of how many times you've seen a person expressing his style of cynical self-centered greed, either mildly or quite over the top, presented as comic and as a character for emulation.
Since Donald Trump, The Public Persona, is a product of entertainment TV, it is important to understand how it fits into the very limited range of stock personality types that American TV is filled with. Which are, in turn, constructed out of a crude pallet of tones and hues and forms. And, it is as important to see how the part of the public so trained by what it sees on TV so they would buy Donald Trump as they would any other poisonous or dangerous product they see advertised was sold that substitute for equal moral obligations without which the United States will not achieve or maintain democracy. It was through the same amorality which the most appalling of current capitalist economics has become the real religion of the United States, even among those who insist on calling it by the name of its exact opposite, "Christianity". Such people not only claim they are serving both GOD and Mammon, they are calling the service of Mammon, serving GOD*.
This perversion of the civic morality which is, in fact, the basis of democracy into the ammorality of personal gain and indifference to morality and other people and living beings is the basic danger we live under. Until it is understood how the amorality of the media, its cynical profit-driven substitutions of the components of Donald Trump's persona as a desirable goal - his wealth at all cost to others - is seen to be, in fact, as dangerous as fascism or Stalinism or Maoism or the perverted morality of ISIS or Vladimir Putin we will be in danger from a Trump or someone like him being the choice for president expressed in the votes of morally degraded voters. And being a domestic product sold to them by the same media that created the Donald Trump they bought, being the creation of the same media that is the thing that informs and eats up their attention, it is far more dangerous. And it is certainly nothing that the alleged "left" can preen in superiority about, it had a strong role in both permitting and insisting on "moral neutrality" in public life through its hostility to religion or religious expression just at the time when what religion has, moral instruction in that morality was the only real hope of countering the broadcast morals of Mammonism.
Any ACLU style liberal who bought that their government would become more Democratic. more equal by giving equal time or, in fact, all of the time, to commercial greed over the Golden Rule, were as much chumps for them as anyone. There is no law of nature that means that, treated equally, with judicial disinterest, the moral basis of democracy will win out over the amoral basis of fascism. It doesn't happen automatically like balancing a scientific formula. It has to struggle against the fact of selfishness and self-satisfaction served by inequality. The moral basis of democracy has to be promoted, to be given every possible advantage, every benefit even of any doubt in order to overcome the attractions of selfishness and the self-aggrandizement that cruelty affords. That the morality that is essential for the foundation of democracy is contained in the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other forms of religion, makes it no surprise that democracy arose where it has. The idea that you can abandon its promotion in the name of non-establishment of religion without the kind of adverse consequences we've seen in the past fifty years is undergoing a particularly dangerous test of time.
You cannot have Democracy without that moral absolute being the agreed to and enforced ideal we are taught along with the counting numbers and the alphabet and the bottom line of mass media. And that won't happen without them being forced to do it. There is no accident that it was when TV, radio and the movies in the United States were under production codes and rules of content that we were able to have the Civil Rights Movement resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It is also no accident that it was when those codes didn't exist that Birth of a Nation spawned a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan and lynching. In the muddle of thinking that is the mind of the Trump Voter, you will hear the echoing slogans of the "free speech-free press" industry and the moral positions of the entertainment industry.
It's no accident, it's the product of American entertainment media, brought to you by those who allowed the media to lie and promote what they think is most profitable to them. If you think they're intellectually incoherent, it's no more incoherent than denying that they are influenced by what they see and hear on TV, the radio and in the movies. Their intellects are no more sharpened by their viewing than their sense of doing to others what they would have done to them. Their moral ideal is to be able to express their angry hatred in a libertarian outburst of uninhibited free speech, free press, not checked by that competing morality. The Trump campaign is what American media has sown because it was allowed to.
* An Atheist got fussy with me about capitalizing the G in GOD so I have decided to capitalize all the letters, when I'm talking about GOD.
There is no greater clarinet player than Anthony McGill, now or ever in the past. Here he plays one of the greatest pieces in the repertoire. The kids in the audience clap between movements but it hardly detracts from the greatness of the playing.
