Random ruminations

In these trying times, to preserve what little is left of my sanity, I do puppet animation. I even have a Vimeo page.

My latest effort is a two-minute recreation of a scene in the original King Kong, in which Kong encounters a nasty elasmosaurus in his cave.

***

Reading a biography of King Herod, I came across this passage involving his stepsons: “The two young men naturally felt bitter towards Herod for killing their mother (and their uncle, as well as their grandmother and their great-grandfather).”

Yeah, I can see how that might cause some awkward silences around the dinner table.

***

After California's much-maligned governor took some unfair criticism for requiring restaurants to keep their TVs off even as the establishments partly reopen, I put together a handy chart to explain the logic behind the move.

 

***

Coming late to the party, I've started watching The Mandalorian on Disney+. The show's creator, Jon Favreau (who gave us Iron Man), has a real understanding of the appeal of Star Wars. It's not all about light sabers and cool tech, much less political relevance. It's a broad canvas that allows a creative filmmaker to combine motifs from a variety of genres — sci-fi and fantasy, of course, but also Westerns, gangster pix, samurai flicks, espionage movies, you name it.

The Mandalorian uses a simple but effective framing story as an excuse to riff on Seven Samurai, prison-break pictures, spaghetti Westerns, and film noir. The title character is straight out of Sergio Leone, a Man with No Name (and no face) who speaks in a raspy whisper and has a whistling theme song. He's saddled with a kid (shades of Three Godfathers), briefly reunites with his old gang for one more job (The Asphalt Jungle et al.), and speaking of saving villages, he's recruited to save one, a la Yul Brynner or Takashi Shimura.

There are many more references, not to mention a pleasing sense of not taking int all too seriously — in one throwaway scene, two stormtroopers engage in some impromptu target practice, missing the target every time. 

 

***

They laughed when I sat down to play the piano. They were right to laugh, as I can't play a note.

But they also laughed when I said the election was rigged, and now Time magazine admits it. Of course, they spin it as a heroic endeavor to "save democracy."

Time explains: 

That's why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

"Fortifying it." That's the spin. "Well-funded cabal." That's the reality. "Paranoid fever dream." That's what I was told. "Rigging the election." Um, yeah. 

"It was all very, very strange," Trump said on Dec. 2. "Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted."

In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.

But ... but ... but I was told conspiracies on this scale are impossible. Bad epistemology. Crazy talk. Embarrassing. Like believing in magical fairies. 

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears ...

After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.

"Fended off voter-suppression lawsuits" = fought efforts to prevent mail-in ballot fraud. "Take a harder line against disinformation" = cancel anyone who questioned the election process or result. "Fight viral smears" = suppress stories damaging to Democrats (I'm lookin' at you, Hunter). 

Remember all those folks who said, "If Trump's objections have merit, why won't the courts listen?" Now we know why. The cabal was monitoring "every pressure point."  

In the Vietnam War, an unnamed Army officer allegedly said we had to destroy a village in order to save it. That's how the cabal "saved" democracy. 

Post-republican Rome endured for a long time, and even flourished, as an oligarchy. I'm skeptical that we'll do the same. Biden is no Augustus, and today's American decadence makes even late-stage Rome look like a model of courage and probity.

But who knows? Maybe we can Make Oligarchy Great Again. 

Comments

[Matt Rouge]

:)

I loved the Kong animation, Michael! Very well done and 10x more entertaining the typical CGI of our day.

Bad epistemology! Oh, I haven't endured such a slam on this site since that "minions" comment by, um, oh I forget who.

:)

[Eric Newhill]

Yeah, the marvels of mass communication and social media - lots of people we'll never meet, who think they're our superiors, making up nonsense, insisting to us it's real and of highest importance, and then telling us what to think about it - and that only dangerously subversive, evil Nazi scum have a different opinion about the fake world they have created. God forbid some tinfoil hat crank conspiracy theorist call BS on it all. Why, such a person might suffer the fate of being banished from Fake World.

If only the people making making the laws that we must follow and taking our hard earned money were among the master of Fake World, it would all be very funny to observe. I like King Kong, though.

[Saj Patel]

Ah I think that Time story is just stupidly told, not even sure what the point of calling it a "conspiracy theory" is.

Though for anyone excited about Biden-Harris, I'd say the same thing I did to Trump voters in 2016 - the best thing to expect from a politician is disappointment, so that you might be pleasantly surprised.

Really the Time story is part of the endless click bait from Big Tech down to those bizarre patronage supported "journalists"/Youtubers who apparently insist I should care about Star Wars in some form as if civilization depends on it.

As Deleuze uncannily said decades ago ->

“The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves.

What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

[Saj Patel]

Ah apologies Michael was a bit brainless of me to use Star Wars as an example - was not meant to be a dig at your rec'ing of Mandalorian in anyway.

[Michael Prescott]

No problems, Saj. I’m not a big Star Wars fan anyway. But I liked season1 of The Mandalorian enough to recommend it to the handful of Johnny-come-latelys like me who haven’t seen it.

Season 2 starts off strong, but so far I’m not as jazzed by it overall as I was by season 1 (haven’t seen it all, though).

[Saj Patel]

Michael - "I’m not a big Star Wars fan anyway"

In that case, purely for humor's sake, you might like this clip from The Thick of It ->

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg-pnGFbwMQ