I gotta say, Patrick Stewart and Colbert doing a parody of Waiting For Godot was awfully damn good right up until they tried to make it into a Trek parody.
Godot always struck me as being a bit about being Godless. I wonder if a similar play could be written about being too … Godful.
Great skill!
I’ve been noticing occasional comments in various media about how Steve Bannon, White House senior aide, sees himself as a Leninist out to destroy the (sometimes administrative) state. However, the interest seems to be mostly along the lines of drawing mildly useful parallels with the Bolshevik Revolution, such as Anastasia Edel does here in Quartz.
But is that an end in itself? Certainly, it’s not hard to believe – some do seem to think that all 300 million of us running around without rules can make it fly with no end. But I’m doubtful in the Bannon case. I’m going to spin a little story which, while not backed by irrefutable research, does fit the facts as are currently advertised. Let’s start with beginnings.
Bannon was the Executive Chair of Breitbart, a web site notorious as an “alt-right” site – or, less euphemistically, a site devoted to white nationalism, even white supremacism. We can assume, therefore, that he’s a white nationalist. Now, who lives next door to a white nationalist in the metaphorical neighborhood?
That’s right. The white slaveowner.
And what happened to the American slaveowner? They were deprived of their most important possessions – their slaves, who did much of the work needed in the South – first by law in the North, and then by force in the South, when they attempted to secede from the Union in order to preserve their foul power over people, purely on the basis of skin color. (See here for a meditation on the true soul of the supremacist of any color.)
And what deprived them of their position on the mountain top? The common answer is the North, but I would fine this down a bit. The tool used to spike the cannon of foul oppression was … the Federal Government. It proved to be, once a succession of incompetent generals were finally cleared from the ranks, an efficient tool for coordinating the necessary efforts, and more importantly, to focus the intellectual repudiation of the entire pile of rubbish used to prop up the American White Nationalist movement of the latter half of the 1800s.
If I may speculate, for Bannon, the Federal Government is more than a symbol of the North, it’s the tool used to “oppress” (I can barely type that without laughing at him) Bannon and all of his fellow White Nationalists, all the way to that murderous wretch, Dylann Roof. And now Bannon, ensconced at the heart of the thing he hates, now works to eviscerate it, while keeping his other bugaboo, the Islamic world, at bay. So he suggests a bloated military budget be inflated yet again, while destroying the various departments that might bind his efforts, especially that of Education, and the EPA. The first, because education is his foe, as a white nationalist, while the second is more likely to infringe on his “right” to do anything he so wishes. He even has tentatively assaulted the Judiciary, although that is a bastion difficult to breach; it may yet bring him down.
But he has little to lose in the effort. White nationalists and supremacists are barely on the bottom rung of society, unless they hide their tendencies; and rare is one that achieves conventional success.
So there’s your bed-time speculation for the day. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be proven wrong. But understanding where he may be going with this is as useful, if not more so, than drawing parallels with Lenin’s approach, which worked well in that world – but that world is not this world.
[EDIT: 6/5/2017 fix typo]
General Mattis, Secretary of Defense, is proving to be quite conventional, Lawfare reports:
The White House said on Monday that President Trump will propose a $54 billion increase in military spending, to be financed primarily by cuts in the budgets of other agencies, including the State Department. White House officials said that “foreign aid” will face a significant decrease. Secretary of State Tillerson should strongly and publicly resist cuts to the State Department budget. As the press has reported, Defense Secretary Mattis supported full funding for the State Department when he was in uniform, and it is even more important that he do so now.
In 2013, when he was CENTCOM Commander, Mattis said “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately. So I think it’s a cost benefit ratio. The more that we put into the State Department’s diplomacy, hopefully the less we have to put into a military budget as we deal with the outcome of an apparent American withdrawal from the international scene.”
Based on reports of top White House aide Bannon wanting to destroy the administrative state, this must be a little annoying. After all, you don’t want your foreign enemies clambering over the walls while you’re busy eviscerating your domestic enemies for good, so you increase defense funding, while removing funding for all those other agencies you dislike.
That might get in the way when you try to implement your white nationalist policies.
Mattis remains a reassuring pick.
This is one of those stories that makes you bite your lip. From SFGate:
In a victory for gun advocates, a federal judge said Monday that California appears to have violated freedom of speech with a law allowing public officials — including legislators who voted for gun-control laws — to prevent online posting of their addresses and phone numbers.
The issue arose in July when a pro-gun blogger posted the names, addresses and phone numbers of 40 lawmakers who had supported firearms restrictions that were signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. The restrictions included a ban on possessing guns that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition and a requirement of background checks for buyers of ammunition. The law also required that the buyer’s address and phone number be put into a state database.
The blogger, “Publius,” who obtained the legislators’ information from public records, declared in his posting that “these tyrants are no longer going to be insulated from us.”
After several lawmakers received threatening phone calls and messages, the legislative counsel’s office contacted WordPress, the blog’s online host, and demanded removal of the information within 48 hours. The office cited a state law, passed in its current form in 2005, that allows state officials to have their addresses and phone numbers removed from the Internet if they fear for their safety.
The judge suggests the plaintiffs are likely to win, and I can see why: the author of free speech cannot be held responsible for the actions of others unless the free speech alleges fallacies, such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater that is not afire. Despite the blogger’s unfortunately aggressive turn of phrase, no doubt brought about by decades of anti-government paranoia propaganda from the right-wing, there is little to criticize. Unfortunately, that paranoia has produced a divided citizenry on the subject, and therefore suggesting that the emergence of a leftist authoritarian government that could not be thrown off by an armed citizenry could still be thrown off by a united citizenry would not be an effective argument.
But, certainly, the threats, illegal as they are (and I certainly hope the perpetrators are caught, convicted, and locked up, if only for being idiots who don’t understand how we should be a cordial society), are meant to intimidate our representatives – an attempt to sway them from following their best judgment in making public policy, which is their job.
Their first step should have been to bring suit against the new law. Standing should be no problem, and then a Constitutional question can be plopped into the lap of a judge.
The right question. Not this nightmarish problem.
But they should have taken another path and tried to supply an answer to the problem California is presumably trying to solve – how to stop gun violence. Giving in to their base natures in this manner betrays their side and makes the debate – the search for a proper course – that much more difficult.
NewScientist (11 February 2017) reports on a fascinating new finding with regards to cancer:
When older cells naturally stop dividing, they become “senescent”. These kinds of cells also pump out a slew of chemicals that cause inflammation, which can damage surrounding tissue. Senescent cells have been linked to a growing list of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis and heart failure.
Marco Demaria at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands wondered if senescence might be responsible for the long list of side effects associated with chemotherapy. “Most people have fatigue, and most of the time this becomes chronic,” he says. “Some people have muscle weakness, nausea, dizziness, problems with their bones or heart damage for example.” Such side effects can occur for months after treatment has finished.
To explore the effects of senescent cells, Demaria and his colleagues genetically engineered mice so these cells would fluoresce. They then gave the mice cancer, and one of four common chemotherapy drugs: doxorubicin, cisplatin, paclitaxel and temozolomide.
Chemotherapy increased the number of senescent cells in the mice. “We saw senescence everywhere: in the liver, lung, heart, skin and fat,” says Demaria.
In another trial, they gave the mice a drug known to kill senescent cells, and the mice didn’t show the health problems shown by the first group. Unfortunately …
“If we had a drug that we could use in humans, we could lower the toxicity and improve the efficacy of chemotherapy,” says Demaria. At the moment, there isn’t an appropriate drug that could be trialled in people. The drug given to the mice can cause a fatal shortage of blood platelets in humans.
But at least there’s a target. Chemo-fatigue is a fairly awful side effect.
Misophonia:
Misophonia, literally “hatred of sound,” was proposed in 2000 as a condition in which negative emotions, thoughts, and physical reactions are triggered by specific sounds. It is also called “select sound sensitivity syndrome” and “sound-rage.” [Wikipedia]
Seen in “Why the sound of noisy eating fills some people with rage“, Tiffany O’Callaghan, NewScientist (11 February 2017):
Olana Tansley-Hancock knows misophonia’s symptoms only too well. From the age of about 7 or 8, she experienced feelings of rage and discomfort whenever she heard the sound of other people eating. By adolescence, she was eating many of her meals alone. As time wore on, many more sounds would trigger her misophonia. Rustling papers and tapping toes on train journeys constantly forced her to change seats and carriages. Clacking keyboards in the office meant she was always making excuses to leave the room.
I hope he has nothing in his teeth.
The Robe (1953) is the predecessor to the previously reviewed Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and dramatizes the plight of the Roman tribune responsible for executing Jesus, the fictional Marcellus Gallio (Richard Burton). Troubled by the unexpected guilt caused by the crucifixion, he suffers a breakdown. His emperor, Tiberius, chooses to send him in search of the robe of Jesus, to destroy it and thus his guilt. Instead of destroying it, it cleanses him of his guilt, and he transitions to Christianity, a choice which has its own price.
The decision to follow Marcellus is a smart choice, as it permits insight into the Roman court, which begins with the Emperor Tiberius and later transitions to the terrible Caligula. The primary lesson we learn is the preoccupation with personal advancement and catering to one’s personal desires will lead to strife as no one is considering how to really preserve the State, not least this nasty bit of work, Caligula. Marcellus himself is a sot and a gambler with little regard for anyone besides his future wife, Diana.
In contrast, the Christian sect comes across as humble. No one is scrambling for power, glory, or even wine. Marcellus impulsively gives a little boy his donkey; the little boy then gives the donkey to a crippled boy, no prompting needed. A crippled woman glows with happiness, despite her condition, at the word of Jesus. A reprimand of the villagers by the leader for taking advantage of Marcellus for his ignorance concerning the price of cloth is not delivered with a whip or even a raised voice, but simply a reminder of how their teacher, Jesus, would have requested merely a fair price for any clothe he would have sold. Thus we gain a vivid lesson in how the film makers (or, more likely, the author of the novel on which this is based, Lloyd C. Douglas) see the advantages of the philosophy espoused by Jesus, and the self-destructiveness of the Roman state.
In mitigation of the above, the fact that the Christian village must rely on the sword of Marcellus himself when the Romans unexpectedly attack is a suggestion, specious as it might be in a movie, that the philosophy of Jesus may be lacking in the all-important department of self-sustainment. But is it fair to criticize a philosophy based on the message of a fictional story that’s been run through the Holllywood ringer?
Probably not.
OK, for all that, this flick is a bit of a clunker. Burton’s performance is a trifle brittle. If it had changed as he converted to Christianity, it might have been more convincing, but the changes were … minor. I was unconvinced. Then the use of violence to rescue Demetrius from the torture chamber of Caligula once again throws doubt upon the philosophy of Christianity. It’s a long movie, 135 minutes in an era that didn’t make long movies. Most of the other acting performances are highly competent, but not particularly moving, with the exception of Jay Robinson, whose Caligula is madcap genius. I can still hear his shrill, evil voice in my head.
Is this a movie to be Recommended? No, for it didn’t pick me up and swirl me about. The story is truly predictable, and it drags on and on. But there are plenty of facets to enjoy, from the vistas (I would have liked to see this on the big screen) to Michael Rennie as Peter (perfect casting) to Caligula to the actual crucifixion scene, when the Romans are playing dice as the men on their crosses are dying. If you have some time to burn and don’t mind a predictable story, then this may be worth your attention.
