Month: June 2021

As I ponder this further–and in some respects I can’t stop it, since images and ideas just come to me–I really do think Lynch intended a commentary on Life writ large.

Peter Gabriel, 1982: Working in gardens, thornless roses, fat men play with their garden hoses

That album, the whole thing, had a big impact on me at the time.  It was both sinister and alluring, both hopeful, and an prophet of despair.

But unmistakably Lynch chose to bookend the movie with the same scenes–the flowers, the firetruck as if on a 4th of July parade on Main Street.

And unmistakably the fat man, when he fell, revealed a dark subterranean terrain of conflict.

Actually, though, now that I think about it, the robin eating the bug could be viewed as Love eating Evil, couldn’t it?  I am so cynical sometimes I miss the good things.

But the whole thing is a circle, or if you will, the Cycle of the Hero.  I looked up the Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell PBS series, and it was slightly after Blue Velvet, but Campbell was, I think, in the air.

What you have throughout this movie is good mixing with evil.  Kyle MacGlachlan “put his poison” into Isabella Rosellini.  He starts with Laura Dern, loses his virginity (presumably) to Isabella, then returns to Laura Dern.  Innocence, violence, then wiser innocence, as mediated by the robin eating the bug.

I will point out the obvious, too, that the scene where MacGlachlan first tells Laura Dern about what he has seen happens in front of a church.  That framing was unmistakable, where they both talk about how life and people are funny.  I forget the exact phrasing, but I remember him asking why there are people like that.  This whole scene happens with lit church windows in the background.

I read some reviews on that movie.  I was curious what other people saw.  Roger Ebert seemed to think it wasn’t kinky enough.  The rest were throwaway.  That movie WAS a long time ago.

To me, the sex was really a symbol for emotional realities.  Sex, in important respects, is ALWAYS a symbol for emotional realities.  It is cold for cold people.  Cruel for cruel people.  Loving for loving people.  Sex is not the most important reality.  Never.

I myself have not been laid in forever, but not because I couldn’t get something basic if I wanted to.  I could.  I am a good talker, not bad looking, and in any event that is about persistence.  There is always some drunk girl at the end of the night, if you are willing to lower your standards and your self respect.

My issue is it would be impossible to have the sort of sex I would want AS I AM NOW.  I am not emotionally available the way I would want to be.  What I truly crave, what would be healthy for me, is precluded.  Not forever, but for right now.  And integrity prohibits pretending otherwise.

No doubt those sex scenes were shocking back in the day.  Now, with the ubiquity of porn all of have seen any sort of scene that interests us.

To my mind, the urge for Isabella Rosselini to be hit was very simply understood: she was severely traumatized.  She was used to being hit.  And until she was hit, she felt the anxiety that she was ABOUT to be hit, which is what created in some part of her a desire not just to get it over with, but an active pleasure in the release of anxiety.

As I have said before, there seem to be two sorts of pleasure in this world: the release of anxiety, and the positive energy of enjoyment.  I think most evil comes from those who can only feel the former, due to trauma and its following emotional handicaps.  They crave power because not being in charge fills them with anxiety.  They crave money, because lacking anything fills them with anxiety.  They become cruel, since, paradoxically, their numbness fills them with anxiety.

And I thought the home where Bennie lived was interesting.  You had the same sorts of babushkas there as MacLachlan had at his home.  But there the “father” was an obvious homosexual (in a time when open homosexuality was very, very uncommon in cinema, to the point that portraying it was almost guaranteed to get you good reviews).  It was sort of visual equivalent, but psychologically and morally inverted picture, and intended, I think, as a sort of picture, a static situation, a fixed reality, since everyone was just sitting there.  You wondered how these matrons participated in this horrific captivity.

This was structurally in the middle, as one commentator noted.  And then, what?  The hero’s journey?  The trip far, far outside the bounds of the normal, where the hero met the monster fully for the first time.

And of course in the climax, the hero kills the monster.  All returns to normal, but the robin shows up, with the insect–symbol of primitive conflict in the beginning–in its mouth.

So I think I am perhaps projecting, now, my own issues onto Lynch’s art.  I think he did intend to create a visceral and unpleasant experience, but anchor it into what in the end amounted to Midwestern values, even after placing one of the Hardy Boys into a porn film.

But me, I look at Isabella Rossellini and I know her struggle is not over.  Her pain is not over.  Nor is that of her son, who would be at considerable risk of becoming another Dennis Hopper, although if Rosselini soldiers on in the immortal feminine way, of enduring the unendurable for love, he will be OK enough.  Today, both would in a perfect world be counseled for  long time for trauma, and in my personal view use things like Neurofeedback, Somatic Experiencing, EMDR and the like.

Here is my last thought: there is a Manichean distinction to be made between Reality and Illusion, between what Bruce Springsteen calls–in lyrics I will always like, even if I can’t figure out why he is so stupid in many ways–between “what’s flesh and what’s fantasy“.

One could argue some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism are in fact Manichean, and rather than Good and Evil, you have Satya and Maya.

As I say, I think in the end Lynch was trying to convey an essentially positive vision.  The monster was vanquished, literally and symbolically.

It was an interesting film, though.  It was unpleasant.  I now have to add those images to my store.

Actually, if I might channel my inner Baptist Preacher, one more thing: I think the use of Dennis Hopper, specifically, in this context is significant.

The 60’s intruded on the 50’s, did they not?  They rode in on motorcycles, and shot the town to pieces.  They created both good and destruction.  They changed our world in ways which we wrestle with daily even now.

As an inverted image, I would offer again Meatloaf intruding into Dr. Frankenfurter’s life in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. He represented the 1950’s and traditional masculinity.  He was hacked to pieces and eaten.

Everywhere in life, true kindness and more importantly understanding are vital.  No political task is ever worth losing your humanity.  No one can EVER accomplish anything lastingly good from a standpoint of hatred, irreconcilable difference, aggression, and lies.

All of these are being removed, allegedly as “spam”, which of course is ludicrous.  What they ARE, is EVIDENCE, that people like me were pointing out the logically and factually obvious in April of 2020.  There are no excuses for the fuck up that we just went through.  None.

And many people out there KNOW THIS.  They knew they were lying and fucking up then, and their main concern NOW is that this more or less open secret does not get out to the useful idiots.  I can only assume that is why they are retroactively deleting comments which were posted 14 months ago or more.

Just watched this for the first time.  That is my third David Lynch movie, along with perhaps the last five episodes of the original Twin Peaks series.  My verdict?  I hate all the violence, but I find him useful.  He is struggling in his own way to make sense of the world.

Note that the robin was eating an insect.  This is the world we live in.  I am very sure he did that very, very consciously, to show that not all the evil in the world had been rectified, even if those watching were too naive to see what was in front of their faces.  This was his point, in my view.

Couple thoughts.

First, it occurred to me early on that much of what we think of when we think of the 1950’s–and by we I mean people born in the mid-60’s and later, who did not touch any part of the 1950’s in America–is black and white shows like Leave it to Beaver, and the Andy Griffith Show, and the Dick van Dyke Show, and I Love Lucy.

And what needs to be said about those shows is they were under tight editorial control.  We have in our own country back then what amounted to social propaganda which was intended to counter and undermine Soviet propaganda, which even then was oozing in through every intellectual pore in our country.

And realistically, how DOES one counter something that so many people agree to willingly?  You can’t tell them “just say no”.  The only way forward is with a better vision, and as Thomas Sowell commented–and keep in mind he was a Marxist until he actually worked for the Federal government–the Left truly has a better vision, a better brochure (to use Sheryl Crow’s phrase) than we do.  We want more of the same.  But the world is filled with flaws, with cracks, with evil, with injustice, with pain.  Why would one embrace that when someone else is hawking a world free of misery, distress, inequality, loneliness, war, poverty, and all other forms of injustice?

As Sowell points out, only with facts.  And facts have short legs.  They can’t fly like disingenuous fairy tales.

But to conclude this point, I don’t think the people who actually lived through the fifties lived in a fairy tale world.  I think they were all very aware of how bad the world can be, and no small number of them contributed to it.

This myth of the happy, carefree, simple world of the 1950’s has all the validity to it that Communist utopias do.  Were we to “return” to that era somehow, we would all be sorely, sorely disappointed.  This form of nostalgia is its own form of Utopianism.

And I might even argue that that is another difference in myth between Fascism and Communism.  For Fascists the past is what we need to look to for our myths.  For Communists, the future.  Both lie.  Both terrorize and kill to either recreate or create something which never was, and which never can be following the methods they apply.

Secondly, his intent, obviously, was to point to the awfulness of the world, and specifically to do it within the heart of a “happy town”.  To “deconstruct” Happy Town USA, where there are flowers and birds and bees, and everyone is peaceful and happy.

It is small wonder that this film did so well in the mid-1980’s, among the Leftist intelligentsia, which was only to eager to throw mud and shit at any notions of American purity and innocence.

And to be sure, most of us really don’t know, even now, how much blood our troops have shed overseas, sometimes for very morally ambiguous or arguably even evil reasons.  They are on solid ground pointing all that out.

But they leave solid ground and float back into fairy tales when the ignore other, worse evils in the world, the ubiquity of injustice and violence all over the world for all of human history, and declare the American Project defunct because imperfect.  None of them could survive in their personal lives moral demands of the sort they place on our nation.  None of them could defend the atrocities committed by regimes they supported openly or by proxy.

It was not then and is not now inappropriate to compare evils.  To compare the good in one nation with that of another; and to then compare the evil.  America fares very, very well in that analysis.  No nation with our power has EVER used it with such restraint.  I study history.  This is clearly true.

But I would suggest that for most of these intellectuals “America” was not represented by Kyle MacLachlan, who with his gee-whiz Boy Scoutish vibe might have been one of the Hardy Boys, and who worked with persistence, daring and considerable intelligence to stop a patent evil.

No, I think for the America hating Left Dennis Hopper stood in for our ugly underbelly, for Pinochet helicopter rides, and My Lai, and Savak.  Never mind that Pinochet voluntarily relinquished power and held elections, or that the NVA perpetrated dozens of My Lai’s under orders from Hanoi, or that the Revolutionary Guard was and remains vastly more violent, and in many cases literally repurposed the same torture chambers for their own political opponents.  We are not supposed to add that context.

It is not understating the case, in my view, to see in Dennis Hopper a prototype of the White Supremacist, which haunts us today.  Never mind that literally every act of “racism” I personally have read about was a false flag conducted by an impatient Leftist.

No: he is the simple evil that simple people using grade school emotionality can direct their weak emotional energies on, and make stand in for 90 million Americans.  I really think this is true.

Thirdly, I have to wonder if Lynch was not tempted to make this a de facto horror movie, which I had some anxiety he might.  I thought the guy coming up the stairs was Detective Williams.  What if he had walked in, shot Kyle MacLachlan, and his daughter walked in, and said OH DADDY.  He just then hits her and says, “that’s enough of that.  Now we are going home, and Mike is better for you anyway.”  She then says “Yes, Father”, and follows him out.  Cue the curtain.

It had to have crossed his mind.  Someone who spends as much time in darkness as him obviously has conflicting impulses.  Such an ending would not have SOLD well.  That may be the only thing that restrained him: he needed the money.

But would that not have been a beautiful thing for the anti-American intelligentsia?   They could say SEE WE TOLD YOU SO.  That is the kind of ending these self loathing and hateful people would have celebrated.

Oh, it is tiring being me.  But I had put off watching that movie for a long time.  I can move that over to the Complete pile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UbfsmM8YXI

I’ve shared this often in many places, but can’t remember if I’ve shared this here: https://c19hcq.com/

Imagine a sane world.  No, try.  I know it’s hard.  Would not this sort of thing be the basis for public debate?  Of course it would.

It will be off the paved road.  It will be covered in spider webs and vines.  The neighbors will eye you suspiciously as you wander with trepidation down that gravel path.

It will not feel like home.  You will have to repair it, and only with time learn to live in it.

I can’t remember if I have told this story, but I was sitting in a bar in Greenville, SC last December, roughly, talking to a guy from Ohio who was down there a lot on business.  He told me that on a plane flight he took from Cincinnati or somewhere like that down there last March (2020) there was a sick, scared, and poorly dressed Chinese guy on his flight, who had apparently flown directly from China, and gotten on multiple connecting flights within the United States.  He said that in his view there was NO WAY a guy who looked like that could have afforded a direct flight from China.  He said he literally looked like somebody they had scooped off the street he slept on last night, and put him on a plane, with nothing.

Is this implausible?  I don’t think so.  The Chinese routinely use people’s families as leverage, as hostages, to force behavior they want.  This guy easily could have been a farmer from some province you have not heard of, who was infected with COVID-19, and told to fly to America, and if he said a fucking thing, his family would be raped and murdered.

They do stuff like that there.

And we have seen Chinese people talk about how this whole disease has been a “victory” in an undeclared war with America.  The specific lecture I had in mind I am not putting my fingers on–I should have posted it–but here is a former virologist from Wuhan saying OF COURSE this thing was created and released intentionally: https://www.foxnews.com/media/chinese-virologist-government-intentionally-coronavirus

Here is my question: if true, IS THIS NOT AN ACT OF WAR?  Is the concept of “biowarfare” not a recognized thing?  And if it was an act of war, does that not make supporters of this war in the United States traitors and war criminals who have murdered hundreds of thousands of American civilians?  Yes, I think it does.  This is new territory and a new concept.  Nothing like it has happened before, but I think the logic is there.

Could the United States military not, perhaps, convene tribunals to examine the evidence of war crimes?  I don’t know.  I will simply suggest it is possible.

Further: when the CIA in the past has interfered with other nations elections, when we have supported coups, when we have directly opposed the will of the electorate, were these not in some respects acts of war?  What is the purpose of a war?  To control another nation.  To install your people.  When the Soviets invaded Hungary–certainly an act of war by any standard–what was their aim?  To put their people back in power.  When the Nazis invaded France, what did they do?  They put their people in charge.

Logically, if you could so abuse and manipulate another nations election system that you could get your people in charge WITHOUT AN INVASION, would that not still be an act of war?  Of aggressive hegemonic intent?  Of course it would.  That is my view.

Thus, if it can be shown that our election was corrupted by foreign influences–either directly or acting through American traitors–then that too would be properly a military affair.  Election fraud is an act of war.

Now, my view of the military is that as they progress up the chain of command most of them lose any common sense they might once have had.  They become political.  As a friend of mine once put it, they become assholes.

I will bookend this with another story that begins “I was drinking in a bar once”, and talked with a retired Army Colonel.  I may have shared this story, but can’t remember.  He told me he voted for Biden because as much as he disliked Biden, he hated Trump even more.  Now, I’m thinking “how can anyone be that fucking stupid.”  Everything Biden has in fact DONE was predicted by me and a host of other people like me, because IT WAS FUCKING OBVIOUS.  They were not going to cheat like motherfuckers then govern from the middle.  How could anyone be that naive?

Well, this guy was.  And as it happens, his second career was that of a school teacher.  I think he taught middle school. And he said that his kids were traumatized by Jan. 6th, that it “felt like another 9/11”, and he apparently did nothing to dissuade them, and seems instead to if anything have encouraged this, to me, grotesque distortion of the reality. (and if you read www.thegatewaypundit.com they continue to come out with more and more mitigating–and to be sure incriminating, on the part of Capital Police–stories).

And, now that I get to this part, I DID mention at least part of this story.  His mentioning of 9/11 got me talking about the OBVIOUS fact, if you evaluate the evidence, that 9/11 was a much bigger conspiracy, and that this fact was suppressed by our government.  And he got, honestly, a bit womanish–if I might be indulged in using that term.  He got offended.  He didn’t want to hear it.  He called me a Tinfoil Hate conspiracist.  I offered my evidence, and he admitted it sounded reasonable, but I had no doubt whatsoever that he was going to dismiss it all, and hope never to see me again.  I have not in fact seen him since.

He said “I have had men die in my arms.  How can any such thing be true?”.  Now, I will not claim to have ANY true understanding either of what it feels like to 1) command men in battle; 2) get shot at, and in turn to kill enemy combatants; or 3) watch friends die at close range.  I admit that.

But that is STILL A NON SEQUITUR.  To my mind, an adult mind is capable of admitting that things may be vastly worse than I fear, and certainly that I hoped and assumed.

Look at John Kerry.  He has had a durable political career after assassinating the characters of our Vietnam warriors, using lies he offered opportunistically.

Look at the Vietnam War generally: it was pointless.  At the end of the day NONE of those men needed to die.  Not one of them.  Why?  Because politicians in Washington pissed away all of their blood, sweat and tears in an orgy of sanctimonious lies, and Satanic treachery.  This is the reality.

And we nearly pissed away Iraq, too,  Certainly much of the bloodletting after what I will term our first victory happened ONLY because Barack Hussein Obama armed and trained what became ISIS.  He not only CREATED them, but did little to oppose them.  On the contrary, until his last day in office, his goal remained using those sociopathic serial killers to overthrow Assad.  Why?  I don’t really know.  Best guess is that he was bought by the Gulf States to put in a Syrian regime that would allow a gas pipeline across Syria.

And it remains true that the pipeline across Afghanistan was halted by the Taliban, and renewed by their replacements after we took control.  Cause and effect?  I can’t say.  But I am more inclined to lend credence to such assertions now than I once was.  Tower 7 was brought down by explosives.  That much is more or less scientific fact now that Leroy Hulsey completed his analysis.

How much does our military recognize and value freedom?  Sanity?  A government of the people, by the people, for the people?  If that  colonel was any indication, not much.  They are not different in kind than the executives at Coke and Nike.

But I always like to suggest possibilities here.  So called “creativity”, as I have said often, is really just unpeeling latent realities which were always there.  Everything you could ever think and know is already there.  You are just too small to see much of it.  We all are.

Edit: I am perhaps being too harsh on this Army Colonel.  I really don’t know what it feels like to have the lifeblood of a friend splashed on me.  I want to be clear that I understand–without really understanding–this large gap in my experience.

My comments come from a conviction that starts under my feet and goes through the top of my head that we OWE it to those who died to 1) Tell the Truth; 2) Learn.  If it can happen once, it can happen again.

The lesson of Vietnam is that much of our intelligentsia hates this country, and sides willingly and easily with our enemies, which amounts to an alliance with violence, authoritarian rule, the suppression of human rights, willful deceptiveness, and the continual sabotaging of stable culture wherever they find it.  One could easily argue that Islam, itself, has been perverted by these people into embracing a terroristic ethos in many quarters, and a ruthlessness and nastiness otherwise foreign to it.  Middle Eastern terrorism was concocted in the Kremlin, as a way of pushing Arab nations away from the United States and towards their brand of Fascism, all in pursuit of what amounted to a goal of global conquest.

We do not honor those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan by LYING about the complicity of our own government in 9/11.  On the contrary, we ENABLE these aspiring authoritarians by doing so, and in fact make the long term stable freedom most of them thought they were fighting for LESS LIKELY.

Life hurts.  And no matter how much it hurts now, it can always get worse.  For me, I would rather die painfully than develop the habit of lying about important things.  As I have said often, that is a choice between a relatively easy death, and one made much harder by losing your soul, your integrity, and all self respect and the possibility of earned love in this world.

For obvious reasons, I am a fan of Rand Paul. I actually have in my book collection a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”–which in my view should be required reading at least at the college level, and optimally that of high school–that was given to me as a gift by the founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman, and which I later got Senator Paul to sign at a book signing.

Since I really think that specific book is what began the process of turning me from a generic college Democrat into a passionate conservative, it is significant for three reason. If you have not read it, I would encourage you to do so.  It is not polemical in the slightest, in my view.  It merely makes clear the assumptions upon which leftwing economics are based, and their logical consequences, which are less liberty, less wealth, and greater inequality.

Be all that as it may, Senator Paul has done by far the best job of anyone in our “System”, writ large, in asking Anthony Fauci obvious questions, and pointing out his inconsistencies, dissimulations, and outright lies.

The specific scientific question of the moment, which translates to a political question, is how much immunity having had the illness provides.

Now, as I pointed out multiple times over the past year, starting last spring or summer, “vaccines”, so called, work on the immune system.  If no lasting immune response can be achieved, then no vaccine can work.  Conversely, IF a vaccine, in the proper sense of the word, CAN work, then having had the illness will convey the same or better level of immunity.

This is more or less saying that if X=Y, then Y=X.  It is common sense.  It is obvious.

Politically, though, the whole of the lockdowns and coercive panic depended on the notion that Herd Immunity could not be achieved without “vaccines” (since I’ve discussed mRNA often and recently, I won’t here).  The WHO in fact found itself compelled, for patently political reasons, to modify their definition of Herd Immunity–which was at that point scientific, historically based, and obviously accurate–from a condition where enough people had gotten the illness and recovered with immunity that the disease stopped spreading, to a condition in which engineered immunity through vaccination (sterilization?  We don’t know yet, but they did that in Africa) was the prerequisite.

Before, it was “either recovered or vaccinated”.  The new version was “vaccinated only”.

Why?  Because WE COULD AND SHOULD HAVE ACHIEVED HERD IMMUNITY SIX MONTHS TO A YEAR AGO, if we had followed the “Focused Protection” articulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, and most likely far fewer people would have died, far fewer lives would have been ruined, much less economic destruction would have happened, and the collective trauma would be much less.

So vaccinations and the abusive public policies of most of the worlds governments go hand in hand.  If having had the illness conveys the same or better immunity, then that means the policies of the last year were pointless.  It also puts back into play all of the better treatments which were NOT USED.  We have to wonder why vitamins and mineral supplementation to eliminate Nutritional Immunodeficiency were not recommended.  Why HCQ and Ivermectin were sidelined as “dangerous and unproven” while injections barely six months old using a technology new to the purpose were pushed as “absolutely safe”.

Science is politics, now.  To argue the “science” is to dissent with the Church, and its priests.  And to be branded a heretic is to risk political, personal and economic consequences.  They cannot, yet, burn people at the stake, but they can engage in “high tech auto-da-fe‘s”, if I might offer a nod to Clarence Thomas (one of only two honest Supreme Court Justices).

So when Rand Paul and Fauci argue particularly about this topic, they are offering two solutions; two visions of the role of government; and effectively, between the Enlightenment, and the medieval Catholic Church; between actual science and reason, and purchased indulgences and all the corruption they imply.

I have not had to modify any of my views in the last year.  That is saying that all the data needed was available last March.  In point of fact, I proposed something like the Great Barrington Declaration last April or May or June. It was a logical deduction from really indisputable premises.

Millions of people will die unnecessarily from this massive crime.  People will starve to death in the Poor World (I have been struggling for words to replace the Third World, and perhaps that is it) and die of diseases they would have survived had they not been chronically hungry and stressed.

They will die of cancers that would have been caught in time.

They will die deaths of despair over the next decade or two.  Children, who were in 6th grade, will develop depressions in their twenties that lead to drug overdoses in their thirties, all because of this traumatic period.

They will die of stress and alcoholism brought on by being unemployed for two years, or forced to work a much worse job.  Yes, there are plenty of jobs in the service industries, but they do not pay well.  Middle aged men and women who lost good jobs in this thing may never get them back.

And as Martin Kulldorff particularly has pointed out, the blow struck to public faith in our systems–in the NIH and WHO and CDC particularly–is substantial and extremely damaging.  I don’t trust those motherfuckers.  No one who GETS what just happens does, or will for a very, very long time, at least, if they do not publicly engage in some Glasnost and purge their ranks of political pukes.

In nearly all ways, the past year has made most of our lives darker (I may be an exception, but I was ready for this), more fearful, less certain, less trusting, and less free.

All of this is pure evil.  Almost none of this was ever necessary.  As I put it to a guy in the front of this battle, we lost the war for the Present Narrative, but the battle for the future of the past is beginning now, and there is every chance that if we retain a critical mass of decent human beings in our government, universities, press corps, and citizenry generally, we might prevent the bastards from filling the history books with a bunch of fucking lies.

Over the past week or so, I keep getting notices on my Facebook page that “your comments have been deleted as they go against our Community Standards [what a fucking joke both words are in this context] on spam.

I can’t see most of them.  A circle with a line across it shows when I try and click on most of them, but here is one example, which I have just cut and pasted: