Il Duce Vita Has Arrived

I thought Il Duce Vita had arrived in 2016, but I was premature: his administration was so stupid and inept, and there was so much blowback, that his authoritarian nature was frustrated and aside from an awful budget bill, let’s call it the Small Ugly Bill No. 1, he achievements were limited. Things are different now.

With four years out of power, and once the authors of Project 2025 realized that they could use Trumpy as an unguided missile to demolish obstacles for their plan, he has made tremendous progress in his consolidation of authoritarian power. Consider:

• The GOP is now putty in his hands, and they have been willing to turn the Senate into a rubber stamp body, ceding without protest all Constitutional powers of the purse, oversight, war, etc.
• The Supreme Court is totally behind him. Two justices, Alito and Thomas, are simply the rawest partisans, while the rest of his appointments + Roberts, are willing to travel very far to the right to ensure that their social aims are realized. Perhaps, they hope, in vain, that he just won’t go too far.
• The oligarchs of our media world are quite willing to take orders from Trumpy: they want his approval for their vast consolidation plans. What do they care about free speech? It’s just a commodity to them.
• Trumpy openly calls for the suppression of media that criticize him (too much, according to him.)
• Masked posses under quota for arrests roam the cities identifying suspected undocumented immigrants on the basis of skin color and where they work, arrest them, and detain them in crowded unsanitary conditions, for days or weeks, completely incommunicado, no access to due process, and then deport them to their country of origin…maybe. Or maybe not. Citizens that are caught up in this process are routinely detained for days before being released.
• Our economy is laboring under tariffs higher than any in a hundred years simply because Dear Leader has declared “an emergency,” based on fictitious notions of drug smuggling from Canada, or Mexico, or crazy, ill founded, insupportable claims about other nations’ tariff policies.
• Like the FCC, which is now an enforcement arm of Trumpy’s will, the Department of Justice spends its time digging up alleged misdemeanors to be used as fodder in Trumpy’s attempt smear and remove officials, especially at the Federal Reserve. If he succeeds, and even if he doesn’t, we will eventually have a Central Bank controlled by Trumpy, an ignoramus in all matters economic to put it mildly, which can only lead to bad times.
• Aside from these things, we have the cuts to health care and food assistance to millions of Americans, the colossal crypto grifting, the imposition of evangelical Christianity as an official creed, suppression of unions, nay, the wholesale outlawing of unions in the Federal Government, and oh, I didn’t even get to the horror of what RFK Jr. is doing to public health.

I know I’ve left things out of the list above, but that will do it for now. As with Italy in the 1930s before the war, we are being led by an incompetent, ignorant, narcissistic, vengeful, twisted human being. (He is human after all, all too human.) He doesn’t care about most of the issues involved in the items I have listed above: He cares only about his vanity, his retribution, and his grifting. His minions from Project 2025 will take care of the boring policy stuff.

Doing Politics the Right Way

In the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, we are being treated to a nauseating array of commentary from centrists and liberals about the man, and how committed to debate and free speech he was. Ezra Klein of the NYTimes had a piece denouncing political violence and declaring that Kirk was doing politics the right way. Well, his killing was atrocious, and political violence is too, but “the right way?“

I suppose Larry David could do a riff like the one he did after Bill Maher sat down to dinner with Trumpy. It might go something like this:

Hitler did politics the right way. He was very persuasive and relished debate. He tirelessly visited the beer halls of Bavaria, advocating for his point of view that Jews were vermin, that they controlled the world and stabbed the Kaiser’s army in the back during WWI. He was committed to engaging with his political foes and denouncing them for the enemies of the people he thought they were. And he organized a political party. And he won the election! That’s democracy! And then he did all the things he said he would do the way an honest politician should!!!

Highest 2 Lowest

It’s been a number of years since I last saw Kurosawa’s film, “High and Low,” but my memory of it is that it was riveting. Not so, this new adaptation of the original novel and Kurosawa’s film by Spike Lee. Denzel Washington is always a pleasure to watch, but aside from a few scenes, I found this movie to be, well, dull and irritating. As in “BlacKKK Klansman,” Lee seems unable to decide whether he wants to make a film that’s sort of interesting or just a routine crowd-pleaser. Why not both? Well, he tries, but it doesn’t work.

Kurosawa’s film was largely about class. Mifune plays a hard driving executive, and his character and setting are portrayed objectively. Such successful businessmen are often not very appealing people, and he is not. The man who drives his car is simply a loyal employee, and their little boys play together as servants’ children sometimes do with their masters’ offspring. When he learns that his son is free and his chaffeur’s son is being held, there is a real question as to whether he will behave morally, like a human being, or simply calculate the cost/benefit return. There is no question about Denzel Washington’s David King; he whines about his money, asks “What would Stevie do?’ but we know he’ll give in. There’s a big group family hug when he reveals he will pay, and his driver is deeply grateful, rather than harboring feelings along the lines of, “Why the fuck did you even have to think about it, you rich fuckin’ pig?” (Wright’s character is discordantly faithful to the Japanese original in which the driver occupies a deeply subservient position in the household – he is constantly bowing deeply to Gondo – and is another element of Kurosawa’s depiction and critique of Japan’s hierarchical/capitalist society.)

Spike Lee is a typical American filmmaker in that he can’t confront issues of class. He’s fabulously rich himself, and he’s clearly loving his depiction of his Black tycoon with a heart of gold. Maybe it’s a self-portrait? The ideal rich guy, loves his family, not all money is good money…yeah, right. Super rich, still in touch with the hood, and somehow short of cash. Am I a cynic?

My irritations:

• The usual perfect, idealized Black professional family, courtesy of The Cosby Show. A beautiful wife who acts like a mannequin – their “close” relationship lacks all credibility – and a perfect son whose main reaction when he learns that his dad won’t ransom his best friend from a demented, murderous kidnapper is, “What will my friends say, social media? What college will accept me?” Is this supposed to be satire? Parody? Just confusion.
• The hopelessly incompetent NYPD: is this satire again? They do an elaborate sting for the money drop but don’t check out the Puerto Rican Day parade? They have ONE car following the perp? No motorcycles, no bikes, just flubbing up all around. And when they are presented with one fantastic clue to the kidnapper’s identity, Kyle’s recollection of the song he heard while he was tied up, they once again go into cliche-cop-buffudlement. “Let’s get it to the AI analysis group!” Deep social satire here again. Utterly lame.
• The ludicrous plot development with King going rogue with his loyal employee to get the money. Wouldn’t they just inform the cops that they’ve found the guy? No, Spike Lee here goes into full-blown please-the-crowd mode, with Denzel doing his stuff, brilliantly, in some very unlikely sequences. And just how was that video of him on the subway dropping the bag captured? Naturally, we get some predictable “satire” of the social media blow out.
• More lame attempts at social commentary on the steps of the court house: a big crowd has assembled to shout “Free Young Felon!” Such irony… Unlikely he’d amass such a following at the same time that his captor is now Supreme Baddass of ‘Da Bronx.
• The music score, swelling and sighing in true Hollywood Epic fashion, to make sure that we get the emotional points Lee is making. Or caricaturing..? Is he aping the the traditional form or parodying it? I don’t think he knows. Artists are supposed to know what their doing: It’s a cheap dodge to say that they are “cultivating ambiguity, and letting the audience decide.”
• The final scene was WAY too long, and what was the point? To show mommy and daddy and baby united in Corporate bliss, plotting their comeback to the charts? All’s well in the world of elite music producers, and unpleasant realities of social life are just a minor bad dream. And did I mention that the singer is gorgeous? Of course, they’re all beautiful, oh, and rich. She will be too. God forbid that she be an ordinary high school girl with a divine artistic talent. Same old, same old…

There were some good things in this flick, aside from the pleasure of watching Washington perform, and hearing the sound of his voice. The scene in jail when victim and perpetrator spar was a clever and effective reworking of the scene in Kurosawa’s original. I also enjoyed the scene in which King avoids confronting the kidnapper’s partner as she gushes about him. And I found it rather sly and amusing the way Lee makes NYC look like it has hardly any white people.

I spend a lot of time in Manhattan, all over it. I ride the subways. I know what the people look like, and it seemed to me that Lee carefully selected the extras in his scenes to reduce the number of white people to a minimum, unrealistically so in many cases. That’s a clever bit, since you could say that many films, thinking of Woody Allen, do the opposite. And it’s part of his program of putting Black culture at the forefront of his work – so I say, well done there.

Autocrats Love Selfies

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But most of them don’t select portraits that bring “Big Brother is watching you!” from 1984 to mind.

Sewing the Emperor’s New Clothes

The wannabe emperor is naked, but he has assembled a brilliant group of tailors to tell him that his raiment is splendid. At a “cabinet meeting” yesterday (WHAT was on the agenda?,) the three hours of duration were mostly spent as one by one, around the big table, the flunkys spoke out about how great is Dear Leader, how he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ending six? seven? ten? wars. How he is uplifting the American worker, saving the Nation, creating a brilliant and productive economy. Nothing in USA history even comes close to what Great Leader has done in seven months!

Through it all, he nods, true, so true, and whenamIgonnagettherespectIdeserve? He grins sheepishly, makes lame jokes, aims a few passive-aggressive barbs at this crew just to keep them on their toes, and marvels at how “transparent” his government is. He was in his element, pretending to govern, just as on The Apprentice he pretended to be a successful and ruthless businessman. His performance matches what I have seen of the late Hugo Chavez’s televised monologues to the captive masses of Venezuela.

The video of the meeting is available in clips – maybe in its entirety somewhere, if you think you could bear it – and it is a priceless document for future historians. What could show more clearly the classic idiotic tyranny that is running our democracy, what’s left of it, into the ground.

One Cartoon Says It All

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pirro-announces-felony-charge-after-sandwich-hits-officer/ar-AA1KtDXz

Never Gets Old

POTUS Flashback

Trumpy justified his federal takeover of the Washington D.C. law enforcement by saying,

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth…”

I think he was confused about what year it is, and he was thinking of January 6th, 2021. (He pardoned all those hoodlums.) After all, he’s not too clear about time and space. He keeps saying he’s meeting Putin in Russia, when the get together is scheduled for Alaska.

Urban Hellscapes in D.C. and Beyond!

It’s obvious that Trumpy lives in the past, a past of his own creation, and nobody quite knows when or where it was. That is, make America great again…as it was when? 1950? 1960? Don’t ask.

When it comes to American cities, of which Trumpy is totally ignorant since he spends all his time in his Florida retreat and in the White House, he clearly only imagines NYC in the 1970s. That was a bad time for NYC for sure, and images such as the one above are all too sharp a reminder of how it was. Emphasis on the WAS, because now, NYC is something else, and has been for a long time. It’s because of scenes like the one below that millions of tourists come to NYC every year, and they return home in one piece and quite happy with the experience.

So, in his latest executive tantrum, Trumpy has decided to Federalize the law enforcement in Washington D.C., prompted by the violent carjacking of a young DOGE engineer. Of course he is white, or the event would not even have registered on Trumpy’s mental landscape. In his remarks, he spoke of D.C. as something out of Dante’s Inferno, where you cannot go onto the sidewalk without being mugged, assaulted, raped, or terrorized. Need I mention that crime in D.C. is at a thirty-year low?

Trumpy likes to talk about the hellscapes in America’s cities, and it’s all the fault of the Democrats of course. He has places he likes to mention as he intones on the blood curdling conditions there: Oakland, CA, Los Angeles, Chicago, and so on. Somehow, he never mentions the MUCH higher crime rates in a lot of Red State cities. Here’s some data from Wikipedia.