It is
not necessarily true that when you are old you don’t
have time to do much damage; it only took one day for the brain-dead
78-year-old Trump to set this country on a course of self-annihilation, largely
being played like a puppet by henchpersons who wrote those executive orders who have their own evil agendas and
“projects”--and not just the "Project" variety, but a "hunger games" show for would-be immigrants that DHS cooked-up for our "entertainment," or more likely theirs, those sick people.
Even children are not “safe” from the predations of this man; Karoline Leavett did her version of Hitler Youth propagandizing with that “press conference” for children; the only “adult” question she fielded concerned what Trump was going to do about climate change; well, if there were any "adults" in the room (I didn't see any who qualified, except that kid), they would know what the answer to that question is, but Leavitt with that stupid grin of hers declared that Trump likes “clean air and clean water.” Oh he does? He doesn’t “act” like he does, nor does his interior secretary or EPA director.
Sometimes, you just want to hang it all up and say the hell with you ignorant people who voted for all of this, I’m just going to go watch a movie, which I have more in my video disc collection than I will actually bother to watch in whatever remaining time I have left on this godforsaken country and planet. I mean, why do I want to be unhappy all of the time?
OK, so I plopped myself down this past weekend to watch a film that I remembered was once as much an annual television “event” as The Wizard of Oz and those Christmas specials back in the day; the last time I saw it on network television before cable took over was during Army basic training, watching it one night in the break room, where I recall that a female recruit seemed amused by my mushy sentimentality during its dream finale.
But I don't care what people think about the things that make me "happy" these days. Warner Brothers—which controls the rights to the classic MGM catalogue—finally got off its lazy fundament and replaced that awful MOD DVD-R release made from a worn television print, and did a 4k scan of the original Technicolor negatives for its brand new Blu-ray release of the 1953 musical Lili, and frankly it looks as fantastic as could be hoped and just for that reason is back on my list for consideration for that desert island film:
Well, OK, Mel Ferrer plays Paul a little too much like a jerk, but then again the film wouldn’t work as well if Lili was torn between him and the smooth-talking ladies’ man Marc; I mean she had to think about it, which she hadn’t done much of before—or else that dream sequence at the end wouldn’t have a point or the impact that it did have, at least on mushy people like me.
Of course real life isn’t a movie, and when I wanted to review this release I was confronted with this notification:
Note also that while I was banned from reviewing Lili for some reason, I was also invited to join a program for which I would receive “free” new releases for which I would be expected to review. Huh? Maybe they think my reviews of video releases like Joan Baez: I Am A Noise are the kind they want me to do more of, and not about mushy films like Lili that maybe most people in this cynical and narcissistic day and age find, well, mushy:
I'm not one of those people who gush with those five-star reviews unless something is actually that good, and taking the time to actually examine in detail a film whose subject I am only familiar with from what I "heard" about it, and expecting something "important" it was only fair to myself to offer an honest opinion.
Initially when it was
eventually posted it billed as the “top negative review,” meaning it was the
only one that actually broke down the parts of this video that I thought
was good (not enough) and not good (too much). But now it is not only the
“top review,” it is the only U.S.-based review on the title page. I wonder what the subject of this film memoir thinks about that, but perhaps being "honest" is more appreciated than gushing tripe.
But as much as I would like to forget about the world and just spend my time watching all these movies I have stacking in storage (many I will probably never watch and end-up selling when I retire officially, if I’m still alive by then), every time I pick up my phone and punch the Google app, on its news feed there is yet another crime that asshole Trump and his asshole henchpersons are doing that enrages me.
It never fails, not just every bleeping day, but every bleeping hour it seems. Can’t those assholes leave us alone for one minute even? Even when they sleep all they do is dream about new things to do to vent their frustrations on the world, and awake to find new ways to kick the law and the Constitution in the teeth simply because it gives them pleasure to cause as much pain as possible.
I suppose there are “good” and “bad” things about growing old, just as old people like me think that young people today just don’t care or are unmindful of the future of this planet. But you don’t have to be ancient news to realize that what Trump is doing today isn’t "old" news—you go to those “old” news reports during his first term and we are talking about the same damn things: tariffs, mass deportation, whining about the “liberal” press, disrespect of our allies and coddling dictators, making so-called “deals” that never panned out. But four years later, who remembered any of that?
Well, a few of us did. The only difference now is that Trump is completely unrestrained and surrounded not by “professionals” but by sycophants and people even more morally and ethically corrupt than he is; as “bad” as William Barr was, unlike Pam Bondi he had enough respect for his position and responsibilities as attorney general to follow the law, not Trump’s latest social media post demanding retribution against another person who makes his juvenile mind “mad”—although that is more indicative of his mental rather than emotional state.
Trump power madness is without limit; today he won't allow himself to be challenged, he's never "wrong" about anything. Even when everyone knows that Putin is a thug and a criminal, or that letters on a hand are photoshopped, Trump cannot be dissuaded from living in a world where anything that calls into question his "very stable genius" is not being "nice" to him, frustrating people who try to fact check him, which only tends to make him more instinctual (like an unthinking feral animal) in his responses.
Politico is reporting 1 that the DOJ is “warning” judges and lawmakers with potential criminal prosecution for making Trump “mad” criticizing his deportation policies. This is why in his recent interview with Trump transcripted here 2 Bret Baier never once brings up the topic of immigration or deportation, only lightly pushing Trump on Putin ignoring his entreaties to make “peace”—in fact Trump appears to believe that Putin is not “wrong” about wanting all of Ukraine.
Baier praised Trump’s “stamina,” which from the many times we’ve seen him slur or mispronounce words like a drunkard, it appears that Trump is either “high” on medication, or as occurs when he is in a "friendly" environment where he is not threatened and is allowed to make the usual hyperbolic claims of “success” that we should know by now we should wait to see how things actually pan out; see North Korea, which Trump seems to have “forgotten,” and nobody asks him what his "plans" are there.
We are told by the Financial Times, for example, that the "big, beautiful" trade "deal" with China is already on "shaky ground," while the EU is uncertain that Trump even wants a trade "deal" that benefits both sides.
In the meantime, these companies announced price increases that Trump is insisting that they "eat" in order not to make him look like the complete incompetent he truly always has been as a "businessman":
Meanwhile, farmers in the state of Washington are being "pushed to the brink" by Trump's tariffs and the foolish decision to exit the TPP trade deal 3 still in effect under a different name, and the current membership is no longer willing to give-in on U.S. demands for "special treatment," especially on agricultural exports. U.S. farmers were to benefit enormously from the TPP, but because it was an Obama initiative, Trump peevishly abandoned it.
There is no rhyme or reason to anything Trump does, from shutting agencies he doesn't like because he has "superior genetics," and people who "don't" do not deserve any "help." Now, according to NPR,
It's yet unclear what farmers stand to gain from the second Trump administration's trade policies. Across the rural Midwest and West, plenty of farmers still fly Trump 2024 flags over their barns, but quietly worry his latest trade war will bankrupt them…In Washington state, Jim Moyer says wheat farmers are still recovering from the trade war in Trump's first term when the popular Trans-Pacific Partnership was torn up. He's worried that irreparable damage has already been done with trade deals that took decades to build.
And yet
Asked if there's a feeling of disconnect right now between the White House and farm country, Moyer replied: "You know, I don't know. I try not to go there; I don't have much control over it."
People here don't want to talk politics much right now with everything so polarized and with tariffs being on, then pulled off, then back on. Washington may be a blue state in national politics, but there is only one county east of the Cascade Mountains that hasn't voted for Trump in three cycles since 2016.
You know, you do have "control" over it, and that is to not vote for
this man who is nothing but personal grievance and convinced he is of
"superior" genes, and so should everyone else. No one should be allowed
to exist save to serve him, and if they don't they should be banished
metaphorically or--his preference--literally.
Still, you would think that keeping farmers afloat is a "bipartisan" issue, but then again, “working” with Trump and Republicans on “bipartisan” projects is always about allowing the “little people” a tiny piece of the “action” that the economic elites (as opposed to “political” elites) are getting, such as eliminating taxes on tips; it's possible to see tips less as "income" than a "reward" for good service, and tips themselves are presumably already taxed income by those who pay it.
Yet it is being played not because it is "good" but because it is "political." Despite what polls show, that the large majority of people disapprove of Trump's economic policies, he is still under the delusion that most people "love" what he is doing. I doubt most people who make regular incomes that are taxed "love" this any more than they "love" health care being cut to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. There is no "intelligent" design in evidence, and one way or another, those who "benefit" from untaxed tips are going to "pay" in ways they hadn't considered, like reduced Social Security benefits.
But naturally Trump returns again and again to racial animus and resentment in order to deflect attention away from the harm he is causing "common" people. The white nationalist in him wants to bring in more white "refugees," and of course with a racist white South African like Elon Musk to provide the "evidence," he is opening the door wide open for them.
Thus he clings to his belief that “genocide” against white farmers is occurring in South Africa, using as evidence “songs” and an image of an alleged mass “grave site,” which as reported by the BBC was actually a memorial to publicize the deaths of several people, and was the cause of racial tensions before the crosses seen along the road were removed. PBS’ fact-checking pointed out that Trump’s claim that “no black farmers” were killed was false, more likely a majority of farmers or small plot-holders killed were black, by people motivated by robbery and not by “genocide.”
The BBC
also quoted South African political columnist Pieter du Toit as saying Trump’s “ambush”
of Cyril Ramaphosa “showed that "months and years of exaggeration,
hyperbole and misinformation fed into the American right-wing ecosystem by a
range of South African activists had hit its mark". I suspect that many people watching Trump's stunt saw similarity to that involving Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and are wondering as to the truth of the matter, since Trump only seems to do this kind of thing to people he doesn't like, especially those who have more moral and ethical stature than he does.
Again, Trump's "fascination" with race is too unpleasantly obvious in almost everything he does. The Guardian points out here 4 that that his “dangerous obsession” with immigration is motivated by white supremacy and re-segregation, and we saw evidence of this as early as 1973 when he and his father were sued by the Nixon Justice Department for racial discrimination in their housing units.
Trump’s view of Hispanic immigrants as all “potential terrorists”, “violent” and “hostile actors with malicious intent” can only come from a racist mind. He doesn't understand that this country needs "Indians" as well as "Chiefs" to survive economically. Instead, what he does is is if he can't get his way with birthright citizenship for another generation of young workers, he'll do an end-around (no doubt Miller's idea) on it by deporting families with US citizen children.
Mass deportation as rapidly as possible won’t “fix” what is “wrong” in the mind of someone like Trump, since what is wrong there is that he clearly enjoys cruelty against innocent human beings just as much as he enjoyed those scenes of insurrectionists wreaking destruction on democracy on that January 6.
A research publication of MIT, Daedalus, published an article 5 on anti-Latino racism in the Trump Era in 2021 which doubly applies today:
Despite research underscoring the fallacies of these claims, studies have demonstrated that Trump’s xenophobic campaign rhetoric was effective in activating many Whites’ demographobia, or feelings that Whites are under siege by growing racial/ethnic diversity, and that racism and anti-immigrant attitudes motivated some Trump voters.9 Indeed, Trump’s nativist nationalism, anti-immigrant policy agenda, and misogyny have allowed him to connect to a sense of White loss after decades of neoliberalism have exacerbated inequality, shifting the blame about the vanishing American Dream from the federal government to women, immigrants, and people of color.
By adding force to already existing draconian anti-Latino policies and using moments of supposed crisis to propose new ones, normalizing nationalist xenophobic rhetoric on the national stage, and inciting violence against Latinos from federal agencies to private citizens, Donald Trump propelled himself into the political arena as the defender of those fearing demographic change and immigration.
The article notes that “the persistent and effective racialization of Latinos for nearly two centuries,” have become “further institutionalized under Trump, who relied on his supporters’ fear of immigration and Latinos. Latino racialization is a product of the homogenization of a diverse population into a single racial category paired with controlling images that cast Latinos and those of Latin American descent in the United States as the subhuman other, which affects how Latinos are viewed by others and how they view themselves and their place in American society.”
Thus it is no surprise that other than the occasional activism against ICE thuggery and Kristi Noem taken to task about her “confusion” about what habeas corpus is, and the knowledge that a white nationalist like Miller is behind every policy to undercut the law and the Constitution just for “fun,” it seems that people feel not only “helpless” to do anything to stop the descent into a hell of our own making for voting for this bargain-basement Hitler, but maybe just don’t really care that much.
Maybe this country deserves where it is going. FBI “director” Kash Patel has no clue of what his job is except to use the FBI to engage in his pet peeves and retaliation against those who abuse his little mind, and Musk and RFK Jr. and his pals are busy eliminating and undercutting the very programs meant to address the problems addressed in the "The MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again.” Unhealthy eating habits are the results of poverty and discrimination, yet this playing politics with the lives of people is the principle agenda of the Trump administration.
So now what? I am getting older, my time is closer to being “up.” Perhaps I should feel “lucky” that I lived at a time when there were people in government who felt responsibility to the people they were supposed to serve as their principle “job.” Today, it seems that in the Trump administration, their “job” is to serve a man who only whose self-worth is not about what he does for others, but to others to serve his own personal darkness—and every day that news feed provides more enraging evidence of that.
Of course I could just shut it all off and watch another movie, but if everyone chose to do just that, then the spiral down into that black hole of complete moral bankruptcy will leave nothing left of what makes humans “human” but the very worst of it. The fact that many younger people refuse to understand that makes that "trip" one that is much more lethal to this country than any amount of fentanyl.
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