MOVIEGOING

Wife and I went to see “The Aviator” this afternoon and thought it was dynamite performances all the way around. Then came home to watch a rental film, “The Door In the Floor”, with Jeff Bridges. I think I saw two Oscar performances in one day. Jeff Bridges was fantastic, but the film seemed a couple of times to be what I call workshop stuff. That’s when the writing tricks show through, where a trick stands out from the rest of the story line, and the old mind goes, “I see what you’re doing!”

But pardon me, the liberal, my arrogance, when I say I can always tell just how sophisticated the audience is by how they react to the simplistic comedy of the commercials which now precede the previews and feature film. Those commercials are the worst sort of asshole thing to do to an audience. I’ve said it before, but we ought to demand to be paid for having to pay to be advertised to. Whoever came up with such a ploy has absolutely no respect for the audiences which put up with such a thing. That’s why us old-timers say that too many Americans are just so many consumers, ad cattle, to be fed slops like the SUV, the Xmas “light up my house and waste power” crowd, the real friends of the Iraqi terrorist crowd.


NOW HERE’S ANOTHER FOR YOU FROM MY MOVIE GOING!

Can you imagine crediting the endorsement of a guy so stupid that he brags about all the bones he’s broken in his reckless life? Yeah, baby, that’s the guy I’d trust for financial advice! The guy who brags about the stupidity he exhibits by breaking all the bones in his body. But, you know what? I think that American Express, the card which uses the stupid dude to endorse their credit card does know exactly the kind of market they want for their cards. Of course they want a stupid, reckless person to use their card. How else can they wrap them up and screw them with debt? A wise person is just not going to make credit card companies very rich.


POOR OLD BAUDELAIRE AND YOU AND ME

Sometimes as I wade through the columns of words in my local paper or, specially, watch daytime or morning TV, I get so I can understand Baudelaire’s sentiments in his preface to “Flowers of Evil”. “... this morning I was so rash as to read some of the public newspapers; suddenly, an indolence weighing twenty atmospheres fell upon me, and I stopped, faced by the appalling uselessness of explaining anything whatever to anyone whatever.”


THE BEER HALL CROWD

When I look and listen to Rummy and Kerik and the religious crowd which surrounds and supports Bush, I’m reminded of the beer hall crowd that Hitler gathered around him. Kerik could easily be another Himmler or Goering. This thuglike crook who Bush admires for his toughness—the same kind of spirit of camaraderie surrounded Hitler and crowd and the religious sensibilities of the German people who worshipped men like Hitler and his followers. It’s a good thing that America has strong democratic roots, unlike Germany in the 1930s. Can fundamentalist Christians really undermine democracy? The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, isn’t it?


MYTHS TO DIE BY

In Joseph Campbell’s MYTHS TO LIVE BY (p.15), I came across this shiver-causing passage: “...then, alas!, the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to ‘loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator’. And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead; and with that, Islam itself went dead.”

Do I exaggerate, then, when I point out the similar beliefs in fundamental Christianity which are exposed when Bush surrounds himself with advisers who debate such a stupid and unprovable point as to when the collection of cells which develop into human life achieve “ensoulment”, or sends emissaries to Baptist priests in the ignorant Southland to assure them that nothing Bush is doing in the Middle East will endanger the Second Coming? Since when should religious considerations have anything to do with American foreign policy? Is that separation of church and state? Does Bush really consult his religious mythology in order to make important decisions? It’s one thing to say that one prays to one’s gods for guidance, hope and help, but it’s quite another to form your foreign policy to make the Bible superstitions come out right.
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“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Conte Vitorrio Alfieri