Is it Time for the First Family to Call the Movers?

The question is, when will Melania and Donald call the movers? A company named Monster Movers specializes in long hauls and with a name like that the foot may just fit the shoe. Now where will the Trumps move? The answer to all those who voted for Biden will be as far away as possible. What’s the closest thing to Siberia? The fact is that there are plenty of towns and villages that would be happy to have the Trumps. Joe Biden may have gotten the largest number of votes in electoral history, but Trump garnered the second highest which is like gold for Republican senators and congressman seeking reelection. Mitch McConnell lives in Louisville. Lindsay Graham is a resident of Central, SC. Surely the lame duck would be welcome in either of those places. Nauru and Manus are two islands where the Australian government dumps asylum seekers. What if it turns out that Trump is not really an American? He who smelt it dealt it is an expression applied to farts. Could the same can be said about Trump’s birther accusations concerning Obama? Could it be that Trump is the one who doesn’t belong here? Maybe he should be extradited by the Australian government and sent to Nauru or Manus. You’ve seen those advertisements on TV about getting out of your timeshare payments? Perhaps Trump will pick up a discounted timeshare, albeit a really nice one with a view of Biscayne Bay. However, the truth is that Monster would probably take most of Don’s stuff to Mar-A-Lago and most of Melania’s to Trump Tower where the ex-president and first lady can respectively golf and shop. Monster would probably send one of its representative to The White House with cardboard boxes. After looking over the premises, Monster would figure out how many were required to get the first family cartoned. As the Trumps pull out, you can be assured there will be no “just married” pendant hanging from the fender of their armored SUV.

All the World's a Stage

Edwin Booth as Iago

Shakespeare is all about politics. And what a cast of political figures: Henry the Fourth and Fifth, Richard the Second and Third, Lear, Julius Caesar, of course, Hamlet. Let’s not forget the rogues like Iago and Antonio and cynics like Jaques. Octave Mannoni’s  Prospero and Caliban is an examination of colonialism. American politics can be dull, particularly since there have been periods when the political sphere has not drawn great or innovative minds--when  no Jeffersons, Madisons, Lincolns, Roosevelts or Obamas walked onto the stage. But the current cast of characters might actually outdo some Shakespeare plays. Biden is one of soft spoken equanimous Shakespearean personalities like Prospero if you listen to his “I will be the president of all Americans.” But where would Donald Trump fall within the pantheon of Shakespearean characters? Though Trump emanates from a less ambitious form of entertainment than Shakespeare ie reality television, he has inadvertently become a character with the bluster of Falstaff, to quote Coleridge the seemingly “motiveless malignity” of Iago, the murderousness of Macbeth and the duplicity of Cassius. Trump is an injustice collector like Richard the Third, blaming the press and the Democrats for all his problems from the very start of his reign. Here is a recent Trump tweet: “STOP THE FRAUD!” Speaking of which, the idea of monarchy and the divine right of kings in which the leader receives unquestioning loyalty from all his courtiers lives on in the Trumpocracy. Will it move to a new capital as the papacy did during the Babylonian Captivity of the 14th century? And then there's the notion that words of a President are true just because he or she says them--without regard to the facts. Will Hamlet’s last lines, “the rest is silence,” end up being the epitaph of Trump's tenure? 

Martin Eden

Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden is based on the autobiographical l909 novel by Jack London. It’s both simple and enormously complex. It deals with the chrysalis of ambition that creates the writer and then produces something which, in this case, is a monstrous mutation. In the beginning the story is a simple bildungsroman. Eden (Luca Marinelli) a sailor comes to the rescue of an aristocratic young man. His bravado is rewarded with entrée to the Orsini family. Elena Orsini  (Jessica Cressy), the sister of the young man who Eden saves, introduces Martin to Baudelaire and fires his interest in becoming a writer. At first his baby steps meet with failure. He’s totally uneducated; his submissions are summarily rejected. Anyone who has been a writer will identify with the manila envelopes returned in the mail. Finally, his first story, The Apostate, is accepted. The title is indicative of Martin’s course which is the act of total renunciation of literally everything, for the sake of the individual. His idol is Herbert Spencer and his beliefs may be summed up as championing the strong over the weak. Ayn Rand navigated a similar territory. There's one scene where Martin is at dinner in the Orsini household. There he rails against liberals with their championing of both the free market and regulation. Actually, the disquisition is both contradictory and confusing. Yet the contrarieties make for Martin’s success. However, there's another side to the movie. Though Martin, now a famous poet and essayist, is a megalomaniacal egotist, he also possesses a complex inner life which Marcello's camera mines. "The writer Martin Eden doesn't exist," Eden intones, "he is a product of your imagination." The viewer is constantly living in a world of sepia shots of the past, gratuitous seeming non sequiturs that can be hard to parse and displacements (at the end of the movie Eden is pictured chasing his youthful self) which fitfully attempt to give access to the writer’s inner world. The virtuosity is often disjointed and can be at odds with the character of Eden itself. However, cinematically, Martin Eden is a bold undertaking which takes liberties with its realistic landscape to create a visual vocabulary that renders its central figure's tortured mind. 

Law and Order

If you think this isn’t the America you knew or think you know, then there's a reason for it. Even if Biden prevails and weathers all the legal challenges to the vote, it will have been an incredibly tight election. You may hate Trump, but there wouldn't be a Trump unless there were those willing to vote for him. Those crowds who chanted "lock her up" about the Michigan governor who was the object of a kidnapping plot are not an anomaly, any more than the lumpenproletariat disenfranchised by the Versailles treaty who would eventually become Hitler’s brown shirts. In fact, the whole idea of fascism is to further exacerbate disorder by creating random violence in the streets. Law and order begins to seem appealing even when its right wing groups like the Oath Keepers who will turn out to be your protectors. It’s a version of the Stockholm Syndrome and part of the engine that drives most totalitarian regimes. Make yourself the cure for the unrest that you set out to foment. So regardless of the disposition of the election, the angry crowds who filled those Trump rallies will still be there cheering their exiled leader who will likely preside over a media network that's the equivalent of a government in exile (where QAnon is the operant ideology)--and which Facebook, You Tube, Sinclair Media and Fox News are likely to keep in business. And whatever the final outcome of the election there will likely be areas of the country in which the rule of law will no longer be enforced and no Democrats are welcome.

Powerless Over People, Places and Things

Bill W.

There is a strange contradiction at work in human existence that’s been underscored by the current election. Early voting records have been set in many states. There has been a clarion call for action, particularly amongst the Democrats who have been out to unseat Trump. Of course every little bit helps. Whether it’s a matter of making a donation, getting and mailing an absentee ballot in on time or actually showing up at the polls, the presupposition is that individuals make a difference. The flip side is that many people are taking the election personally under the theory that it's their voice which is being silenced or heard. However, there's another issue. Anyone who thinks that their behavior can have a life-changing effect on something like an election is playing god. "I" gets confused with "we." It’s a huge burden to bear and ultimately a disappointment once you come back down to earth and realize you're just a cog in the wheel. In fact, while it’s important to act, it’s also relieving to know that if there is a God, you’re not it. This last is one of the shibboleths of the recovery movement which sells the notion of powerlessness. So, while it’s crucial to take a moral stance in most instances, it's delusional to believe that you're in control. It’s like the person who watches the television monitor and thinks that the nightly newscaster whether its Anderson Cooper or Chris Wallace is talking to them. You vote, you may even knock on doors, but basically your candidate doesn't and shouldn't know who you are. Otherwise he or she is not doing their job--which is to attend to his or her flock.

The Plot Against America

There are many Twilight Zones in which an individual nightmare becomes a collective experience. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” (March 4, 1960) is just one example. A groundless rumor of an alien invasion becomes an inquisition. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” which appeared in the June 26, 1948 edition of The New Yorker is similar, a writer’s waking nightmare of institutionalized insanity becoming an imaginative reality. Neither Rod Serling nor Shirley Jackson could probably have dreamt up an apocalyptically contentious presidential election amidst a pandemic with trucks full of goons cruising through towns and even going so far as surrounding the opposition’s campaign bus. Call the police? The hijackers may be member of the Oath Keepers, a right wing organization made up of former cops and military. In the case of the town of Northport on Long Island,  a member of a Trump caravan thought nothing of pulling out a gun to subdue a heckler (and it was the heckler who was arrested) The German SS created a similar atmosphere of intimidation. Is this America or some alternate universe where the Axis powers have really been holding sway like say Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America?

Holocaust and Coronavirus Denial

The British author David Irving is one of the best-known Holocaust deniers. Apparently, his views evolved from claiming Hitler didn’t know about the extermination of Jews to the fact that the Holocaust itself never happened. Unfortunately, the president is now waving the banner for another kind of denial, i.e. about the seriousness of the coronavirus and the fact that it’s spreading. “Trump’s Closing Argument on Virus, Clashes With Science and Voters’ Lives," NYT 10/28/20) “With the fake news everything is Covid, Covid, Covid, Covid,” Trump is quoted as saying, “I had it. Here I am, right?” Guess he didn’t get a look at the refrigeration trucks filled with bodies in NYC after the outbreak of a pandemic which if it’s anything like that of 1918 threatens to do more damage in a second surge. There's something about the procrustean denial of an ongoing reality that only heightens the pain for victims. Tell one of the emaciated survivors who were liberated by Allied forces in l945 that there was  no genocide. Never again! A similar language is almost universally employed by deniers. It’s a conspiracy. For instance, back in the spring Eric Trump argued, Democratic governors slow reopening of their states was simply to prevent his father from holding rallies. "Eric Trump’s Wild, Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory," CNN, 5/18/20. CNN went on to quote Eric Trump as saying, "After November 3, coronavirus, will magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen."