You kind of wonder how Art Buchwald would characterize the Trump administration if he was still alive; satirizing the insane would seem a lost cause, but as we know, if there is anything that Trump hates, it is being made to look the fool, and being done so in a regular column in major newspaper editorial pages, and subsequently collected in book form for posterity, would seem more appropriate for someone as evil as Trump and his goons than late night commentary that passes in the night.
Meanwhile, the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy tells us that "If the Trump era has taught us anything, it's that things can always get worse." It was referencing the recent New York Times exposure of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's scheme to add on to the $4 trillion in tax cuts that mainly benefit billionaires, by enacting "unlegislated tax breaks" for the richest corporations (that had in the past reported huge profits but paid little or no taxes) by weakening the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax, that was part of Joe Biden's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Not surprisingly, businesses that happen to be in Trump's favor, like oil and cryptocurrency companies, are being singled out for this welfare benefit for the rich that they don't need or deserve.
What Trump claims to be "a lot" for "you" has been nothing more than him claiming numbers that are blatant falsehoods and at odds with the facts; Trump can't read, so likely he is being told what to say, like by Bessent, since its only a "lie" if the truth makes Trump look bad. The fact that Bessent has a "plan" when it comes to providing the rich with government welfare while being completely befuddled when asked about Trump's "plan" to give a $2,000 tariff "rebate" to "all" Americans shows where this administration's "priorities" are.
The bizarro world of this administration doesn't end with just that: it seems likely that Trump hopes that people who receive this $2,000 (they won't of course, but just saying) will spend it on "Trumpcare," which is nothing more than giving people a pittance to put in a health "savings" plan since that won't pay for actual "insurance." With inflation still going up, why would people pay into something they can't use? If Republicans think "Obamacare" is "bad," their own proposals of a "plan" are far worse and useless.
Bessent's seeming confusion on the matter tells us two things: like his Project 2025 compatriot Russell Vought (who ProPublica calls "The Shadow President") he doesn't give a damn about working people--and he doesn't waste his time discussing policy with Trump, and he doesn't give a damn about what the capricious Trump says at all, because he's running his own show, and Trump can say any crazed thing he wants as long as he doesn't interfere with his and Vought's cruel and inhuman policies that benefit only the rich.
But what were we to expect, as what David Frum called an administration full of "crooks, crackpots and cowards" who we see are busy establishing their "cred" with Trump in the hope of receiving an eventual presidential pardon for their crimes. That is why Democrats need to regain the White House and least one house of Congress in 2028, because a pardon will not, for example, protect a former Trump official from perjury charges before a congressional investigation into the crimes of this administration.
Sometimes the truth is staring at you inches from your face but you just don’t “see” until it is almost too late (or just plain too late). In this country (admittedly "relative" compared to other countries), disaster is something people react to, not anticipate, since day-to-day life seems nothing if not redundant if you play by the set "rules." Of course being what it is, human nature quite often interferes with the "rules" and misinterprets what is sees, as some of us may remember from the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979; but not to concern ourselves with that long ago affair: we are told that this nuclear facility will go back on line in the next few years to power Microsoft's environmentally destructive "data centers."
That is not to say that what is produced from those data centers are any safer for human existence. This article 1 reminds us that today's Artificial Intelligence ("AI") can actually be as untrustworthy and dangerous as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Just a slight change in a word or two can give you a completely different response to a query, and some answers seem preprogrammed to protect the people who tech companies hire to do the programming.
But it is one thing to feel your time and needs are being are endangered by some "customer service" bot that has every "answer" save the one you require; quite another problem (besides bad actors doing programming) is "Making sure that AI is fully and completely aligned to human goals." which "is surprisingly difficult and takes careful programming. AI with ambiguous and ambitious goals are worrisome, as we don’t know what path it might decide to take to its given goal."
I sure do miss the "old days" when the only "button" you need worry about was the nuclear one and not someone "accidentally" hitting a "kill switch" on a cloud server...
...which reminds us that we did "see" someone like Trump as president before--Martin Sheen's character, Greg Stillson, in The Dead Zone, where we saw this power-mad bully reveal himself not as a "man of the people" but a self-serving coward who cowered behind an infant when Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) attempted to stop the horrific future he had foreseen.
Yes, those were the "good old days" when filmmakers with a sense of political and social responsibility to their audience put the viewer in the same room with those who perpetrating the evil and those who sought to stop them, and judge for themselves whose company they wanted to be associated with. Admittedly there is a new film out called One Battle After Another that sounds promising, so I'll check it out this weekend. But in this day and age, we are flooded with so many bits of information from those with an agenda for whom "facts" are irrelevant, the truth is often difficult to find in the chafe, and evil is mistaken for "common sense."
In the meantime, I added a "new" film to my collection, Deep Red, which according to Rotten Tomatoes is Dario Argento's “masterpiece.” In this film we see that even when "honest" mistakes are made when trying to discern the truth, other people usually pay for it, sometimes with their lives.
In this film, David Hemmings reprises the amateur sleuth he played in Blow-Up. His character, Marcus, witnesses a murder from outside an apartment. He rushes inside and down a hallway lined with paintings, as we (via the camera) follow him down the hall; with him we notice for a fraction of a second this seemingly innocuous painting…
…before Marcus finds the mutilated body of the murder victim. After police arrive he believes that one of the paintings must have been stolen, but he can’t figure out which one. Soon more murders that are just as grisly and seemingly connected to each other occur. After first suspecting his drunkard friend Carlo as the murderer, he realizes after further reflection on the evidence that he was wrong, and Marcus returns to the apartment to see if he missed a piece of evidence, and discovers that the painting that we saw with him at the beginning of the film was not a painting (the one he believed was "missing") at all, but a mirror…
…and that we had seen in it the face of the murderer, Carlo’s mad mother, who was busy killing people who she now feared would expose her murder of her husband 20 years earlier, his decayed corpse walled-up in a room in an abandoned house before it was it set afire after Marcus discovered it. Suddenly she appears in the apartment having followed him there with the intent of killing him, which Marcus barely escapes when she meets her own grisly death when her necklace is caught in an elevator.
Another film I've looked at here before 1, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, is one where we find that power (such as a teacher has over impressionable students) can be misused, and that the inability or refusal to understand the perspectives of others can destroy relationships. We find that people who live in a glorified fantasy world of their own creation may for a time persuade those “who don’t have a mind of their own” to follow their path, until they discover that where that leads can be the needless death of an innocent.
We see in the beginning that Miss Brodie seems to have “everything,” the supposed loyalty of her students, and two lovers, one who lives in a grand estate and who wishes to marry her. Although she is clearly getting older, in her own mind she is still in her “prime.” In the end, having used-up both her students "loyalty" and her lovers' devotion for her own self-aggrandizement, she is yet still too narcissistic to understand that not only has she lost everything, but why she did.
In the pivotal sequence at the end of the film, after Miss Brodie has been informed that the long threatened dismissal as a teacher at the all-girls school is now a reality, and being implied that one of her "girls" was responsible, she enters her empty classroom for the last time, where she finds her most trusted student, Sandy, waiting for her in the dark.
To Miss Brodie's surprise, Sandy isn't there to offer her condolences, but to confront her on the pointless death of the foolish Mary. Miss Brodie, we have learned, idolizes Mussolini, whether she understands the evil of fascism or not is unclear, but she does see him as a natural successor to the Roman emperors. Thus when she learned that Mary's brother had run away to fight in the Spanish Civil War, even Mary assumed because of Miss Brodie's support of fascist leaders implied that there was something "noble" about fascism, so she "naturally" assumed her brother must be fighting for the "right" side, and not only did Miss Brodie encourage this belief, but practically ordered Mary to join her brother to fight for the "cause."
While Miss Brodie bemoans her dismissal and fact that she will be a spinster rather than continue in her “prime” to the age of 50, having lost her married “lover” and the older man with a large estate who wanted to marry her but now is marrying another woman, she becomes further dispirited by the realization that she doesn’t necessarily have the absolute “loyalty” of her girls either. But she doesn't understand why, having tried to put "old heads" on young bodies with romanticized stories of an "adult" nature.
Miss Brody was a person whose principles had nothing to do with morality or ethics, but "power" and "glory." She seems shocked and unable to comprehend why Sandy is accusing her of the death of Mary, because her hold on the foolish girl’s mind was the least matter on her mind. Asked point blank if she felt responsible for Mary’s death, her answer was simply “No.”
Sandy pointed out that being killed for “nothing” was not a “privilege,” but Brodie still could not comprehend what her meaning was. Sandy now saw her as “dangerous” and “unwholesome” and that “young children should not be exposed” to her. Miss Brodie was discovering that one of her students did in fact have a "mind of her own," and not susceptible to being “suggestible” like Mary; to Miss Brodie’s shock, she realized that her “trusted” Sandy was not "loyal," and had seen what she could not see, that she was only using “her girls” to appeal to her vanity. Miss Brodie accuses her of "assassinating" her, which Sandy responds to by twisting the blade in further, calling her a "ridiculous woman."
It should be noted, however, that the film takes care never to mention that other fascist regime in Germany or have Miss Brodie glorify Hitler, since it likely would have undermined any possible viewer sympathy for her. Thus much of the truth is only seen in hindsight; foresight is often only apparent in hindsight.
But in the film Pressure Point which I talked about here 2 there should be no question of guilt or innocence; it is a matter of if we choose to confront evil or not, especially if it is not recognized as such by those who embody it because they are psychologically damaged and choose to see themselves as "victims" despite belonging to the privileged social class: instead of recognizing their own failures, they choose to find scapegoats.
In this film, fascism isn't "idealized" like it is by Miss Brodie, but is revealed to be the evil it is in practice. Sidney Poitier’s psychiatrist, “Doctor,” is reluctantly assigned to American Nazi “Patient” played by Bobby Darin (better known for his singing career). Doctor discovers that Patient has deep psychological issues that can be traced to an abusive father, but this is mostly subsumed by his desire to take out retribution and vengeance on any vulnerable target he needs to feel superior to. Sound "familiar"?
Patient explains to Doctor that he is not ashamed to be a Nazi, and that he insists that “I've only done what I believe was right. And that, in my book, can't be called subversive.” People like himself only need a “leader” who will give them an “excuse” and a “cause” to “fight for.” It doesn’t matter who their hatred is directed at, just as long as it is a group that is vulnerable to the predations of a majority of the people:
That's where you come in. No offense intended. You see, we need you. Where there's no definite enemy, why, we create one. People need one to blame things on. So, you see, you're the secret weapon. You're the cause to unite against. And, you and the Jews, more than anybody else, will be responsible for our triumph.
You can fill in the "blank" who serves as that "secret weapon" for the current administration.
Patient reveals that it isn’t just “average” people who joined the cause; with the aid of certain segments of the media, the "hidden" fascists came out of the woodwork, including industrialists who donated money for the “cause” for their own purposes, and even “movie people from Hollywood.” Doctor insists that he and his movement will be stopped because everything he believes in is “founded on a lie.” But Patient explains that it doesn’t matter if his “cause” is supported by conspiracies and lies:
A lie? Now look, doc, can you be objective for a minute? I know you're handicapped but are you capable of being really objective? Good, cause I wanna tell you something. No, in fact, I'm gonna show you something. Alright, you say we won't get anywhere because what we're doing is founded on a lie. Now, everybody talks about Hitler and the big lies as if it were a brand new invention. Now, tell me something. Where are you gonna find a bigger lie than the one this country is founded on? All men are created equal. Everything this country's supposed to live by, right? You personally. As far as you're concerned, Joe Miller could've written the bill of rights.
You think Trump believes anyone is "equal" to himself?
At that point Doctor knew that fanatics like this were the ones to fear, the ones who believed that their “cause” could only be won by convincing other fanatics that the violent overthrow of the United States government is the "only" way (like the mob thought on January 6?). The film ends when the Doctor’s colleagues decide to believe the Patient’s lies about being “cured” over the objections of the Doctor who says he is lying, he hasn’t changed and he is still dangerous. The Doctor decides to leave his position because the colleagues who claimed to treat him as their “equal” chose to believe a white racist over him.
But, admittedly, life is not a movie, and "reality" is how the "brain" interprets what the "eye" sees. I ask myself "What do these people see when I walk past that they feel they must 'beep' their cars multiple times, then go back to check if they left anything 'stealable' inside, and then beep it again?" They certainly don't see a university graduate who was a sergeant in the U.S. Army. They are sending a message: You are not one of us, and I believe what "they" say you are, "they" meaning Trump and his racist goons.
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust wasn't a "movie" either, but it might as well have been since they seem mere words from a distant past that have lost most of their meaning, not as a way of reminding people that human nature doesn't really change; MAGA as a concept has always been with us, just under different guises like the "Tea Party," and it is only because Trump is someone who Jeffrey Epstein called a man who "doesn't have a decent cell in his body" that the worst this country has seen has been borne of it. When Trump is gone or no longer useful (as arguably he is now), the "movement" will continue if not with another name, but with a new leader, with JD Vance auditioning for the role of new crazy.
During the Nuremberg trial, chief prosecutor and Supreme Court justice-on-leave Robert Jackson had this to say about Hitler: "He started a war without cause and prolonged it without reason. If he could not rule, he cared not what happened to Germany." This seems to be true of his doppelganger, Trump, who has engaged in a program of destruction out of malice, vengeance and greed, and has continued destructive policies for the same reason despite polls showing ever increasing opposition to his policies. He doesn't care that the majority of people in this country think he is on destructive path; only power animates him.
Again, this isn't a "movie," but we can ask ourselves in light of this whether or not Epstein, who in those latest email releases quote him as saying "I am the one able to take him down" actually did commit suicide (with its many lingering questions) rather than face his crimes, but then again, who really had the most to gain from his death? Dario Argento probably could have made an interesting giallo out of this.
