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6/15/2004
FILM FLAM
We caught a sneak preview of Steven Spielberg’s latest Tom Hanks feature, The
Terminal, last week. Very loosely based on a true story, Hanks’ character is
stuck in an airport when his passport is invalidated by a coup in his home
country while he’s in flight.
You might remember Hanks’ pre-Saving Private Ryan days as a very funny guy with
an ability to do physical humor that’s simultaneously entirely believable yet
still pretty damn funny. He lets a lot of that shine through this quiet role. I
laughed a lot, which is pretty much all I ask from a comedy. There is some
awkward romance with the lovely Catherine Zeta Jones that doesn’t spoil the
film, a predictable foil for Hanks in the part of the head of airport security,
and some heavy Spielbergish attempts to pull at the heart strings, but it’s
Hanks’ ability to be the charming everyman that makes this worth seeing.
Now a few degenerates and myself are headed to see Monty Python’s Life of Brian
at Landmark Midtown Art, a film I’ve seen probably a dozen times yet don’t mind
paying to see on the big screen one more time. It’s unfortunate that more people
don’t see this film, especially the non-geek people. But unfortunately for the
rest of the world I ain’t in charge so here’s my effort to get you (yes, you,
sitting there thinking it’s just a typical Monty Python batch of silly
surrealist/toilet humor) to go – this is the most biting satire of the situation
in the Middle East at this very moment that you could ever hope to see. It’s
their best work, dammit, and if you’ve ever rolled your eyes at religion,
authority figures, government, the situation in the Middle East, or God, you
should see this film. If you’ve never rolled your eyes at any of the above, you
should be nailed to a cross and forced to watch this film. GO.
We now return you to your normally scheduled life, already in progress.
BLASPHEMY
Dude,
You're pleased to see someone dead? I thought bed-wetting liberals were supposed
to be warm and fuzzy...
We're the 80's so unlivable? I mean Reagan did stop WWIII (the Cold War),
lowered unemployment, cleaned up Carter's failed attempts at world peace in the
Middle East, lowered the interest rate... blah blah blah.
Degenerate PK
Editor’s response: Holy crap, there’s too much to say, so I’ll let degenerate
RVI handle this one.
Mourning in America, or Republicans Ate My Future
By Degenerate RVI, Special Correspondent to the Degenerate Press
Welcome to the 24th year of the revolution. No, not a Communist revolt, not some
wild product of a Beat Poet’s imagination, not a shattering pipe bomb salute
from The Weathermen or the desperate bark of the rifles of The Symbionese
Liberation Army. My dears, we know all of these came to nothing in the end.
The revolution that succeeded was a comfortable one, the revolt of a people
tired of thinking, tired of hearing the sad truth again and again; it was a
revolution in which the powerful became more powerful and the weak weaker, in
which the gap between those with cash and property and those without it yawned
wider and wider. It was a revolution in which the winners of the world decided
to take all their toys and go home, noses in the air, no longer willing to even
consider that they had any responsibility to the losers, except inasmuch as the
losers could be used to build and amass more toys. It was a revolution that
built a Shining City on a Hill -- for those who could afford the down payment.
The rest of us got invited to live in the sewers and rat holes and catacombs,
Morlochs to run the machinery that keeps the golden city bright and warm.
Yes, the first king of the revolutionary empire is dead; long live the king. Of
course, the living dead can never die, and the virus of neo-conservatism this
man Reagan and his skulking cohorts spread has come to infect the entire
country, even to the point that poor people gladly, desperately even, vote to
make themselves more poor and desperate - all in the name of just being on the
Winning Team. The Reagan phenomenon was, is, and ever shall be about "being a
winner," the definition of winner being cast in the most crass terms, purely
materialistic lead gilded with the cheap golden foil of "traditional morality"
and "patriotic pride" in the form of easily digested platitudes.
Listening to the coverage of the funeral, I could not help but smile at the
choir singing William Blake s "Jerusalem" which contains the disturbing lines
"And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon these clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark, satanic mills?"
The ironies are myriad, beginning with the fact that this happens to be my
favorite hymn, the only one I want sung at my own funeral. More importantly,
though, is the fact that if Blake had lived in our time, the Reaganites would
have made certain he would never have scraped up a living as an artist. Cutting
the NEA eventually insured that the chances of getting a grant dwindled to
nothing unless one was well connected and completely harmless - it also began
the erosion of the many arts organizations that helped provide venues for lesser
known artists; and by fostering an atmosphere in which Philistinism is the
required cultural attitude if one is to get ahead, it was insured certain freaks
like Blake spent their days without a broad audience.
Being a visionary, a philosopher, an artist and poet are not marketable skills
here in the City on the Hill. After such a person dies you can buy and sell his
work like really expensive trading cards, but while he’s here - feh.
And then there s the little fact that any recent president, directly or
indirectly, has been more responsible for the construction of "dark, satanic
mills" than Ronald Reagan. Oh no, unlike in Blake's day, capitalism doesn’t
build many smoke belching factories; but what could be more of a grinding
satanic mill than to be stuck working at minimum wage or near minimum yet still
making a sub-poverty level income that barely covers rent and groceries since
Reagan began the compassionate process of abolishing things like subsidized
housing, welfare, and Medicaid?
Blake’s poem ends,
"Nor shall I cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land."
But we quit trying to build Jerusalem a long time ago, if our nation was ever
really interested in that sort of thing to start with. No, we’ve been at
erecting our Puritanically-inspired Shining City on a Hill, Beacon to the World,
Light to the Gentiles, &c. The irony is, the closer you get to it, the less this
city looks like a Jerusalem and the more it appears to be some cheap-jack
imitation of Las Vegas where the Big Boys and Girls watch bad stage shows
straight out of Branson, Missouri while everyone else voluntarily chains to
himself to a slot machine and burns up his hours feeding the thing his blood,
cranking down on the handle, hoping beyond hope that he, too, will one day "make
it" and be allowed to eat a $1000 omelet while watching the Mandrel Sisters in
the company of his betters.
Reagan and his resurrected pack of Nixon-worshipping scum did not, in their
revolution, set about building Jerusalem - no, what their blueprint said was
"Babylon," and Babylon is what we got. Not the Babylon of history, but that
dread, dark, secret Babylon of The Book of Revelations, Mystery Babylon, symbol
of the decaying Roman Empire, the City of Outward Piety but Inward Corruption
where the widow’s and orphan’s cries go unheeded, where the stranger is robbed
and murdered, where the sick and infirm suffer and die while the medical
industry and pharmaceutical companies wallow in ungodly profits, where churches
have to hold bishop s conferences every so many months to debate whether, sort
of, they ought to do something about clergy molesting children, maybe. Where it
is ok for Corporate America to be well-larded with welfare and tax-breaks while
people without more than a box of possessions are required to labor like
convicts to receive even minimal assistance from their government - if that.
No, the countenance divine has not been shining on our clouded hills for the
past 24 years. Not that anyone notices with all this cheap glitz and non-stop
neon and the flashing whirl of the roulette wheels. To hell with Jerusalem, we
re all happy now, right? Mr. Optimism rode into Washington on the White Horse
and made everything right with his homey anecdotes and completely confused
stories that had little to do with reality but which, nevertheless, made
everyone feel good as we shuffled off to bed with our glasses of milk and plates
of warm cookies, giving the executive branch carte blanche to expand and abuse
its power from then on.
We did as we were told and Grandpa Ron took us all to McDonald's for breakfast
the next morning - except for those of us who didn’t get it, who didn’t go along
with the program, who stayed up all night watching the Contras (i.e. right wing
terrorists) be illegally funded under the table while innocent people
disappeared all over the third world because they were "communists." Those of us
who disobeyed and paid more attention to what Ron did than to what he said did
not get to go on the A.M. field trip and we probably didn’t grow up to visit the
executive washroom, except, perhaps, to unclog the toilet.
Thank God we no longer spend so much on our infrastructure, education, health
care, or the needy. Reagan was truly a man of vision. He foresaw that if we were
ever going to scare and bully and cheat the rest of the world into submission,
all that cash would need to go to the military and the multinationals. And, I
think, he knew that we d also need a big chunk eventually to bury him in truly
pharonic fashion. Listening to coverage of the man’s funeral, it made me proud
that I paid my taxes this year and had the return seized to pay on my defaulted
student loans.
Degenerate RVI
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