Saturday Night Radio Drama - Suspense - The Well Dressed Corpse

 The Well Dressed Corpse 

Eve Arden makes her only Suspense appearance in a role that is so darkly opposite to the happy but often befuddled high school teacher “Connie Brooks” of the hit radio series Our Miss Brooks. The script is another collaboration of radio scripter E. Jack Neuman and future Hitchcock movie screenwriter John Michael Hayes.

Arden’s character is a moody, narcissistic, business executive. She’s into all the trappings of success (a $40,000 salary is one of them, almost $500,000 in US$2024 value), and the clothes, and every best amenity of daily life. She falls in love with a successful businessman and writer she meets at a luncheon. She is celebrated as one of the nation’s “ten best dressed” women there. He’s handsome and also considered “best dressed” among his peers. . . 

The cast:

EVE ARDEN (Ruth Franklin), Joe Kearns (Signature Voice / Percy Hamilton), Jack Kruschen (Tony the bartender), Charles Calvert (Sergeant Collins), Howard McNear (Apartment neighbor / Policeman at end), Clayton Post (Eddie / Yates), Larry Thor (Lt. Rourke), Lamont Johnson (Roy Mason), Mary Jane Croft (“Petey” Wright), Irene Tedrow (Woman in Alley / Elsie), Peter Virgo (Joe, the cop)

COMMERCIAL: Jerry Hausner (Sam the Autolite dealer), Harlow Wilcox (Announcer), Sylvia Simms (Operator)

Another post for fans of "golden age" radio drama.  I first listened to it because I've always been a big fan of Eve Arden.  I'm pretty stunned to see Sylvia Simms was in the commercial.  

the entire political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded

I SHOULD HAVE given you the next paragraph in that passage from Walter Brueggemann which I excerpted yesterday but I didn't have the time to discuss it.  So here is what he said.

Study of this topic [what happens when nation states exceed the limits of God's tolerance] invites engagement with the prophetic rhetoric of the Old testament that knows that the political enterprise has a theological dimension to it that cannot be disregarded.  Such thinking is reflected in the language of the church that prays regularly, "Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory."  The terms of the prayer, faithful to the Old testament, are political in a way that places all other political claims in question.   Study of this topic must resist "silly supernaturalism," but may nonetheless take seriously the claim of God that renders all other claims as penultimate. 

Of course, in the modern era, in the age of separation of church and state, such a claim would cause scandal on one side and, legitimately, risk all of the dangers of the combination of state and church which comprises the legitimately scandalous history of such quasi or, more often, pseudo-theocratic alliances.  In contemporary secular life you're supposed to entirely discount the theological dimension "that cannot be disregarded" and I think in many ways the sheer materialistic evil of contemporary political-economic activity is a product of that.   The blood drenched history of politically established religion is, if anything, exaggerated beyond legitimate measure while the even more bloody history of modern, secular and, especially materialist-atheist governance is never to be mentioned.   And that's not to mention that other even greater power than mere politics, the economic and financial systems which, like science, by common and foolish consent are exempted from the consideration of the moral consequences of their actions.   Anyone who doubts that the accumulated wealth of the economic and financial elites is not more powerful than political entities (and entirely more powerful than mere religion ever has been) has a completely unrealistic and fantasy view of all of those entities mentioned and the societies in which their existence plays out. 

The requirement of avoiding "silly supernaturalism" is a constraint within the polite realms of academia and the elite, though I don't think anyone who believes in God and the existence of such notions as rights and justice seriously can really do that.  Not without damage to the real life existence of justice and rights.  Our elites have chosen to live with that damage because it largely falls on those beneath them in the class structure. 

A few years back I wrote about an observation that the great American essayist and novelist Marilynne Robinson had mad about the theological argument that Thomas Jefferson had to make when he asserted that "men" were equally endowed by their Creator with rights, in his famous short list to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  She posed a question as to what a secular assertion of such a thing would be like, no one that I know of has ever tried to come up with a secular explanation of the origin and legitimate existence of rights, of which an egalitarian explanation of which would be far harder to claim except in metaphysical and, in the end, theological terms.  Of course, once their revolution had been fought by the common-folk, a considerable number of them People of Color, the framers of the Constitution wrote a document which excluded mention of the Creator and equal rights as they wrote one that explicitly was anti-egalitarian and which explicitly supported existing financial privilege, the slavery protecting and enhancing measures in it a proven disaster for democracy and domestic tranquility and the other things the framers claimed to be delivering.   Those anti-egalitarian, wealth privileging provisions among the things which the enemies of equality and democracy have, yet again, harnessed to bring us to the crisis we are about to embark on.  

If those of us who acknowledge the problem of regarding that theological dimension to the political enterprise while knowing full well that ignoring it is disastrously consequential have some tough puzzles to solve, those who demand that that be ignored - and that includes the entire legal apparatus, except when they choose to pretend to respect it for political ends - have a far harder task unless, as so often, they cynically and opportunistically are fine with the disastrous consequences.   

I think the mainstream of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc. should start taking the theological dimensions of life in a merely formally politically secular system much more seriously.  The formal separation of church and state is a clerical necessity in a vastly religiously pluralistic country - it is a practical necessity in even a theoretically religiously uniform country to protect religion from the occasions of the corruption of power.   But one of the most obvious lessons of the 20th century (not to mention the other centuries during which liberal democracy has existed) is that secular government is quite capable of doing enormous evil all on its own, largely due to such theological issues as moral absolutes being formally held to not matter in their decisions and actions.  

The corruption of "evangelical" and "Catholic" religion in the United States is intimately tied in with those areas of life in which, by common consent, such theological and moral consideration is banned or it is held to be irrelevant no matter how obviously evil the consequences.   The entire enterprise of "American enterprise" the legal profession that, in its most profitable and even its less profitable sides exists largely to service business, businessmen and the wealthy investor class, the judiciary, the media* and entertainment are all intimately tied in with that corruption.  It is remarkable how much of the professedly pious establishment of politics and religion are so intimately tied up with such formally amoral secular life, especially when wealth accumulation is part of it.   When the Kavanaugh hearings exposed the elite Catholic prep system as largely in service of producing apparatchiks of that elite, it was quite an eye opener to me, from what I see the "Christian school" system is, if anything, even more a part of it.   The Catholic Church, at least much of its hierarchy, has the modern Catholic social teaching to deal with  which, being based on the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets, is as Chomsky said, radical.   Though that doesn't seem to much effect what such Catholics as are a fixture in Republican politics and media say or do.  

I don't have answers to how to solve these puzzles but I felt an obligation to point out the consequences of merely relying on the provisions of the slave-holder framed Constitution (I believe John Adams was about the only framer who never held anyone in slavery) in regard to the separation of church and state as the final word on that because of all the consequences mentioned above and many more beside.  

Miles Okazaki - Black Bolt

 

Miles Okazaki - guitar

Craig Taborn - piano

Anthony Tidd - bass

Sean Rickman - drums

Children Don't Understand How Adults Think - Hate Mail

SIMP'S problem when it comes to imagining my reaction to something like that is that he thinks I have the same emotional make-up that he does, you know, like a seventh-grader.  A very young seventh-grader.   I don't much care if someone intones John Lennon's "Imagine" as long as I don't have to hear the insipid drone.  

Listening to Down Memory Lane on Maine Public Radio this afternoon, things really took a steep fall around 1965.  I had to turn it off once Toby got there.   Before then it was more likely you'd get at least some R&B most weeks. 

Trump Is The Most Mentally Defective

person ever elected to high office in the United States. 

I will remind you that the ass and his ass of a son, Eric, considers himself to be a "builder"  a "builder" who said about imposing tariffs on Canada in face of the stated intent of Canadians to retaliate:

  “There’s nothing they have that we want. There’s nothing they have that we need.”

Among the first consequences of Trump imposing tariffs on Canada would be a steep increase in the cost of Canadian lumber - an enormous percentage of lumber used in the US - and, so, an enormous cost in construction and real estate.   

A Republican would use the "R" word to describe anyone else as massively stupid as Trump or his idiot sons.   I am tempted to use it only in their cases but I will say they are monumentally stupid as fuck.   

America is about to pay an enormous price for electing a TV star after it paid an enormous price for electing the same ass the first time.  If Trump is as stupid as a concussed turnip, a majority of American voters, especially those concentrated in the "red" states, are stupider.  

Brutality Beyond The Limits of God And The Coming Consequences

IN THE PREFACE to his great and unsettling book An Unsettling God, Walter Brueggemann touches on the uniqueness of the God of the Jewish Scriptures:

The God of Israel is confessed to be sovereign over the nations.  This is not an easy case to make in the modern world of autonomous national states.  Much modern thought has solved the problem by leaving God to be engaged by individual persons, and leaving the public sphere of life to be "might makes right."  But of course the Old Testament is unwilling to leave any part of life including international life- outside the scope of God's dialogic engagement. 

The great temptation of modern national states is to imagine independent autonomy without answering to anyone.  There is, moreover, no more blatant example of such arrogant autonomy than the recent unilateralism of the United States that has conducted policy on the assumption that it could do anything it wanted, that it owed nothing to other nations, and that there was no compelling moral limit to aggressive acquisitiveness.  

But arrogant national states, all the way back to ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon, have assumed the same.  The faith of ancient Israel, especially voiced in prophetic oracles, asserts that there are God given, God-enforced limits and lines of accountability that curb and chasten raw power.  A study of this dimension of Old Testament faith poses exceedingly difficult questions about the governing limits of God in internal affairs:

- Could it possibly be that South African apartheid reached its limit because such brutality was beyond the limit of God?

I will, of course, break in here to point out 

a. that, as we have recently been reminded that the late Jimmy Carter pointed out that the modern state of Israel, which in no way should be mistaken as a religiously governed entity, practices an apartheid against Palestinians, both those who live in the occupied territories and those who are held as semi-citizens of Israel, live under an apartheid more severe than South African apartheid.  

b. that the American apartheid which has been brutally powerful from before the Revolutionary war and which the Civil War certainly did not much blunt, is again empowered around the country under Republican-fascism as reimposed in the overturning of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and other such laws which all too temporarily countered that major legal and political force in American life and law.  

I will propose that the impending Roberts Court imposed Trumpian-Vancean despotism may well be just such a fall for the corrupt 18th century style liberal democracy that is crumbling here as in other countries which adopted such notions of non-egalitarian democracy.   We are about to find that many white People who had in previous decades and centuries escaped the worst of American apartheid will now experience more of that than they are accustomed to thinking about.   Though, as in all apartheid systems, it depends on there being a subject population which the class that corresponds to the traditional American "poor whites" were encouraged to look down on, fear and despise.   It will take a severe punishment for the merely relatively less oppressed to learn what's needed in terms of equal justice, including that most necessary form of justice, economic justice.   It has been the genius of American apartheid that the ruling class has always managed the corruption of poor whites to its advantage,  that is the basis of the Goldwater-Nixon "Southern strategy" that has led to our current crisis.  

To complete Brueggemann's list of consequences to contemplate:

- Could it be that the fall of the Soviet Union occurred because the power of the state outran what could be borne in the world of God?

- And if one entertains such thought, then one may ask, What are the limits that are non-negotiable even in terms of US power? 

Of  course, one is not permitted to entertain such thoughts, certainly not about the consequences for the United States - though Lincoln certainly contemplated them as he ruefully wondered if every drop shed by the enslavers whip would have to be matched by blood shed in the Civil War.   If such thoughts had been common during and in the aftermath of the Civil War instead of the dulling stupidity of modern secularism, perhaps the reempowerment of the slave-power (with de facto instead of de jure slavery) wouldn't have happened and the United States would have avoided the massive corruption of the late 19th and 20th centuries, bleeding well into the present day. 

The message of the Old Testament Prophets and the historical books is that there are consequences for injustice, for inequality, for brutality most often wielded on behalf of and for the benefit of economic and political and legal elites.   You won't hear many "white evangelicals"  and fewer "trad-Catholics" being willing to acknowledge the obviousness of that.   You certainly won't hear it from secularists or those within atheist-materialist scientism (or academia outside of the theology department, for short).  You certainly won't get it from the legal profession, the judges and especially not the "justices," such ideas being verboten no matter how many times such consequences are experienced.  If there's one thing that I've learned in the past quarter of a century, it is that there are few areas held in intellectual repute more resistant to learning from even the hardest of experience than the legal racket.  See also my many posts pointing out that free speech-press absolutism takes "never again" and turns it into "always again."   And the United States isn't alone,  Israel, backed by the American empire is even more bold in its insistence that its repeated brutality will buy it peace, though I think what its leaders actually want is ever more land cleared of Palestinians.   The consequences will be terrible for us all when they come and I believe they are coming. 

I Really Mean It

LET ME DIRECT you attention to the masthead of my blog,  first the statement by that great painter, my beloved Jack Levine* and then my addition "LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE" 

I subscribe to what Jack Levine said,  I mean what I said about making it impossible for there to be billionaires.   When I said that I really, truly meant it, it is among the soundest bases on which ANY DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT will have to rest, from now on.   Once billionaires and their whores, the lawyers and judges and "justices" and, perhaps most of all, elite law school faculties have created the legal fictions through which such enormous wealth can be concentrated into so few hands, which then go on to further corrupt any legal and political system they can, those fictions stand for all time until they are explicitly abolished.   There will be no going back to the status quo of the Eisenhower years, when the admittedly great financial and political reforms of the Franklin Roosevelt and Truman administrations came to flower and then fruit in LBJ's greater Great Society reforms.   There won't be any going back to those because the Supreme Court, starting with Earl Warren's Court undermined them even as it sought to support them, such is the idiocy of the secular, civic law and, especially, the elite level of that such as staff the Supreme Court.   

I don't think you understand just how radical I am.   How radical that stand that egalitarian democracy is the only legitimate government, anything less than that,  the vaunted "liberal democracy" which is crumbling under the grinding weight of economic and social inequality, helped along by the billionaire and multi-millionaire oligarchs which have corrupted liberal democracy around the world.   The liberal democracy which our free press, the freest press in the history of history, is the overt tool of destruction of that liberal democracy as it has been for most of the history of the United States,  those few exceptions around such issues as the superficial de jure abolition of slavery quickly give way to the bascklash such as in the de facto slavery of American apartheid which has actually been in power in most of the Southern states and, in fact, many of even those states which comprised the Union side during the Civil War.  

I really and truly mean that the First and Second Amendments in the so-called "Bill of Rights" are the tools of our indigenous form of fascism,  white supremacy and the billionaires and multi-millionaires.  That's as obvious as the catalog of liberals in the legal profession and professional journalism who have been bemoaning and wringing their hands at the deadly effectiveness of lying, in the mass media and in the social-disease of social media especially the automated, algorithmicizied direction of lies and the attention of the vulnerable to them by search engines.   What jumped out at me last year was hearing famous civil liberties lawyers seriously say that there is a "right to lie" even as the catastrophic creation of such a "right" by the corrupt civic priesthood of the Supreme Court is among the most glaringly obvious of all obvious lessons of the past three decades.    These lawyers aren't stupid but they are certainly given professional training into being so stupid as to assert that there is such a thing as a "right" TO DO WHAT IS CLEARLY WRONG, AND NOT ONLY WRONG BUT DEADLY TO LEGITIMATE, EGALITARIAN SELF-GOVERNANCE.  

On top of that there is the largely media created "virtue" of stupidity, of ignorance, of gullibility, which is a topic that could take up a years worth of lengthy posts, in itself.    That much of that is peddled through the eroticization of male supremacy could take up a decade of such posts.  

I have not given up,  as Noam Chomsky (who I disagree with about much) rightly said, someone in my position, a working class (and so affluent by world standards) white male, LGBTQ+ as I might be, has no right to give up.   I will only rightly give it up when I am dead or physically unable to continue.   I have no intention of giving up.   And when I say that equality is the basic and most vital foundation of real democracy - not the notion of "freedom" which means affluent people getting what they want to most of those who talk "freedom" -  and that equality means economic equality,  no more ultra-super-rich, no more super-rich, certainly no more rich who are rich enough to corrupt everything through hiring lawyer after lawyer, buying judge after judge, ultimately buying that most elite of legal whore houses, the Supreme Court.   That corruption is as old as the Court itself, certainly dating from the Marshall Court which started the practice of Government by Judiciary (see my many posts on Louis Boudin's great work in that area) which was wielded most effectively for the wealthy planter class of the South and the northern financial interests who made enormous wealth from slavery.   Recent financial analysis has shown that it was the American (and other) slave -holders who were the richest class in the world, something which I would guess continued well past the so-called "Emancipation" as they effectively ruled the United States ever since, a few brief and far too superficial years excepted.   They are who John Roberts and his pack of robed gangsters work for as certainly as the Taney Court and the later Jim Crow Courts did.   

Until the Constitution, including the corrrupt Bill of Rights is explicitly emended, until the Supreme Court's Government by Judiciay is overturned by stripping the Court of its self-created Marbury power and the extensions of that which later corrupt courts instituted, UNTIL "CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERTISE" IS NOT A MERE SECULAR EVANGELICAL STYLE REGURGITATION OF THAT DISEASED VOMITUS BUT GENUINE SERVICE TO EGALITARIAN DEMOCRACY,  America's so-called democracy will be a sham,  brief periods, such as the FDR,  LBJ and Biden presidencies mere punctuations into oligarchic, white-supremacist fascism.   The hopes of such liberal democrats that the overturing of Roe would seal the deal for America's traditional democracy certainly didn't come to fruition.   Under the First Amendement regime of mass media lying, even an effective margin of those who stood to lose the most were gulled by the "legacy media" and the even worse lying machine of social media into voting for a Trump-Vance ticket over one of the best presidential pair in the history of American elections THAT AFTER THE CATASTROPHIC TRUMP I REGIME.   

I can barely stand to listen to even the best of the MSNBC style lawyers and most of the media, these days, because all I hear are the same old promises that the Constitution, the law, the "norms" were going to save us.   That has all been a lie.  As long time readers will know,  I loathe the ACLU because it has been in the forefront of furthering those lies, largely through its "First Amendment" litigation but not only because of that.   I see no rational reason to support such institutions which have played such a role as to give us Sullivan, Buckley v. Valeo and so on to Citizens United and further,  they were the co-creators of the "right to lie" they have repeatedly and proudly sandbagged good government, never mind effective egalitarian democracy over and over and over again.   I once said they were like the little boy who put his finger in the dyke to plug a leak, only one who was drilling even more holes in it with his other hand as he did that.   The "free press" of the anti-Trump side is as bad.   I don't trust any institution, any Constitutional provision, any "Bill of Rights" that undermines egalitarian democracy,  I don't much trust the educational system that credentials such lawyer-liars and "journalist"-liars, dupes, fools and idiots useful to oligarchy.   

I am an egalitarian democrat and a Christian, nothing else.  There is nothing more radical than that combination and it has no room to be a conventional secular, liberal democrat.

* You probably won't find it in a web search,  I transcribed it from one of the segments of the Robert Hughes, PBS series "The Shock Of The New."  I was very careful to get it exactly as Levine said it.  I adored Jack Levine and the other Boston School painters. 

Now Here's Something Worth Listening To

WHILE THE TROLL goes on and on and on saying what he said about the Mop Heads in 1968 (and which other "critics" said about them before he repeated it) here's what Artie Shaw said.

Part 1

Part 2

I always respected Artie Shaw because he didn't choose to repeat the same stuff for decades to make money and because he was always interested in making it new all the time.

You Can't Repeat It Too Often - Howard Thurman's The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among all,

To make music in the heart.

I'd emphasize different things on different days, it's too big an agenda to take on, we're not all Dorothy Day or some other living saint.   

Right now, as things are turning ever darker, I'd encourage everyone to try to make music in the heart, we're going to need that.  I'm seeing more reminders that the Christmas season lasts till February 2nd.  I'd include MLK's Birthday in that, not the official day that's been cheapened in the way that all American holidays get cheapened and co-opted.   Since so many of his most valuable words are still under embargo, not by white supremacists as during his lifetime but by his own family, maybe emphasizing the words of others in that movement here and around the world can make that music, instead.   It's the tragedy of MLK that the false image of him erected in the absence of his real words is a tool of Republican-fascists.

I'm reading Masha Gessen, right now.  Prophesy in our time.  And I'm on about my fourth reading of Jeremiah, prophesy for all time. 

I Doubt Trump Had Anything To Do With Trudeau's Expected Resignation

A NUMBER OF years ago, Margaret Atwood wrote an amusing essay for The Nation in which she said Canadian's looked like Porky Pig with their noses pressed against the glass watching things in their bad neighbor to their South but at least they're looking,  Americans, especially those in states that don't share a border with Canada hardly know it's there. 

I've been seeing online chatter speculating on how Trump made Trudeau resign when it's certain that Trump had nothing to do with it.   If anything Trump attacking Trudeau and Canadian independence would have forestalled the inevitable.   Trudeau has been the leader of the Liberals for more than a decade and the Prime Minister of Canada for nine years,  what's surprising is that he has lasted as long as he has, especially as he is PM through a coalition with parties with importantly different agendas than the Liberals in general - the diversity within the Liberal Party being plenty significant to lead to trouble.   As an American Democrat, I'm certainly used to that dynamic,  conservatives, both American Republican-fascists and the various conservatives elsewhere have the overriding value of greed to unify them.  

The various ministers in his own government who left over corruption (the Lavalin affair, for example) and the recent forcing out of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland last month have entirely more to do with why he needs to step down now to give Liberals any hope in the upcoming election.   

I've never been all that wowed by Justin Trudeau though I acknowledged he was better than the conservative alternatives.  One thing I learned from both the Kennedy and Clinton and other would be dynasties of Democrats and the most corrupt one in modern American history, the Bush crime family,  is that political families should always engender skepticism.   I read that Justin Trudeau says that his failure to institute what would have been a truly great political reform,  ranked-choice-voting, which means that a majority would almost never get their last choice governing them.   That he didn't give such an important democracy enhancing and People empowering provision made law has to mean he was never all that strong on it.   It should have been among the first things he did, not the thing he didn't do.    

I hope that the next chance Canadians get to institute that kind of democracy enhancing reform, they go for it.   Without it, I don't see much hope for the upcoming government which will probably be a particularly corrupt Conservative one.   I don't think Canadians have been as corrupted as Americans have in a majority of the states but there's plenty corruption to be getting on with everywhere.  

In The Mire - Bessie Jones

 

I've been thinking a lot about the radicalism of the Incarnation this Advent and Christmas, how outrageously ennobling it is of our most basic life experience no matter how humble and humiliating   I think we're about to experience lots of that humiliation and I don't think secularism in the context of our experience is going to provide us what we need to deal with that.   I'm taking this kind of human experience ever more seriously as we face ever worse in the future. 

This Spiritual is about how the enslaved and those under the de facto slavery of white supremacy found their connection with the Holy Spirit to continue on, that continuing itself resistance to the attempt to destroy them.  Having the meet in the mire, far into the swampy wilderness to avoid detection and to have their meeting destroyed by their enemies, those who enslaved them and sought to destroy their aspirations.    

The ending in which Bessie Jones described how such spirituals would be repeated (meditated on) is, in fact, an effective method of meditation, one that will leave you with more than the "mindfulness" that is so notably consonant with billionaire-millionaire amorality.   "Spirituality" that is about everything ends up being about nothing.   Though it's far easier if you want to do whatever you want to whoever you want to and take no moral responsiblity.