The Top 10 Movies of the 2010s

My list:

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Christmas: Bob

Tinsel, snow, eggnog, stockings, ham and Newhart! "No Room at the Inn" from December '82.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVE!

Christmas: AGS

Andy, Barney, Elinor Donahue, Aunt Bee, and the future world's worst movie director celebrate that magical moment, Christmas 1960.

Christmas: Hitch

The Master, and very nasty: "Back for Christmas," 1956.

Christmas: Odd

The best of the two-million sitcom Scrooge rip-offs, December 17, 1970.

Christmas: HGWT

The best western show of all time at its most Christian, directed by the man himself: "Be Not Forgetful of Strangers"

Christmas: Staccato

Over the next few days I'll be putting up some of my favorite Christmas pieces, mostly TV episodes, and hopefully more rare than not. (How many times can you see Rudolph, Home Alone, or Frosty the Snowman?)

Leading off is everyone's favorite beatnik, Johnny Staccato. And a strange series it is. Not sure how much of Staccato is put-on by Cassavetes (since he was quitting the show every other week); or does it just seem like a put-on, because it's so plugged into such a specific atmosphere and moment? (See Kiss Me Deadly.)

This one, from Christmas Eve 1959 (Boog, Shrevie, and Fenwick must've watched it before the Colts / Giants championship game), is called "The Unwise Men" and stars the great Jack Weston. (Best part: JC's cheery closing.)

London Calling

Chris Floyd:

The UK election is over. Now many Britons will have to learn what so many of us Americans learned long ago: you don’t live in the country you thought you lived in. The country you live in is a much colder, meaner, nastier, more bitter, unfeeling and hard-hearted place than you ever imagined. You will also have to learn what many Americans have learned, over many decades: to follow the example of the Soviet dissidents of yore, and become an “internal exile,” fighting to hold on to and, as best you can, to transmit the richer, deeper, more humane values of our common humanity, even as you live in alienation from the unfeeling power structures that surround you. It is a sad lesson to learn, a sad way to live — but in the corrupted currents of this world, it is the only honourable and decent way to conduct your life and preserve your sanity. It’s a hard road, yes, but let us bear the journey together, in solidarity, revelling in every drop of joy and meaning we can find, while we continue to fight the good fight and, in the words of the American bard, “strengthen the things that remain.”

The Most Profound Half-Hour in TV History

Bootlicker

Originally posted on Amazon back in 2010, this review was recently deleted by the Bezos Gestapo. Reason given: anti-semitism.

* 

Some Brit by the name of David Aaronovitch has served up his gimp string to the Masters of the Universe with a book called "Voodoo Histories: The Role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History."

First, Aaronovitch. A well-known Bushist neocon, his past work includes some journalism for the Times of London, a book called "Paddling to Jerusalem: An Aquatic Tour of Our Small Country" (gee David, I thought you lived in the UK), and three documentaries: "No Excuses for Terror" (unless it's inflicted by Israel), "Blaming the Jews" (wherein Aaronovitch posits a media conspiracy against Israel. . . hmmmm, I guess it's only conspiracies against goys he thinks are non-existent), and "God and the Politicians" (oh no -- Muslimism and extremist Christianisty will be the death yet of Jolly Ole England. Isn't that a conspiracy, David?) And how about that title? VOODOO history. Looks like David has some issues with African culture.

But since we're talking here about a mere court jester, and one whose writing style is akin to the boor at the next table who won't shut-up, focusing on Aaronovitch is sort of off the point. Meat. Filet Freddie. Peter Porterhouse. Viola Veal. David Aaronovitch. Oh, the lines are long for those wishing to make their bones by licking the boots of the powerful. . . (One should say it's no surprise in a book dealing with Grand Themes processed through a Politburo prism that there is actually nothing in "Voodoo History" examining the crimes discussed. The book is less than 400 pages long and yet tries its darndest to bluff through Dallas, RFK, MLK, Pearl Harbor, the bombing of the Reichstag, 9/11, Princess Diana, the moon landings, and whatever else Aaronovitch's secretary could come up with.)

The publication and mainstream media embrace (what a surprise!) of its ahistorical and shallow argument against conspiracy is, however, an important event. For it underlines just how full-court is the full-court press being played across the Western world by the forces of totalitarian corporatism. For awhile now I've been thinking about the connection between Establishment anti-conspiracy propaganda and the massive increase in both the police state and warfare state aspects of the US. The anti-conspiracy liars are more and more present because they are needed now more than ever, as the United States seethes with plots, devolving into little but dark conspiracies everywhere -- on Wall Street, the set-up of the Tea Party movement, stolen elections, Blackwater, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the "Christmas Bomber," and now the unprecedented Obama-ian attack on entitlements. There is now zero connection between what the national government says it's doing and what it is in fact doing, while all it is doing in every aspect is seeking to strengthen the vampire/warrior class. Conspiracy belief is on the rise because the world is becoming less democratic, less open, a world far less based on action and consequence, and much more on insider knowledge, fixing, and the talent for secrets and intrigue. (And murder.) Privatizing everything automatically necessitates conspiracies.

So this precious Zionist fop is nothing but one more hall monitor, an Elite butt-kisser whose sole function is to spread the belief that all power, and all the people (yes, everyone) who hold it, are LEGITIMATE. Only losers like conspiracy theories, those who have not "made it," those not brilliant and beautiful and witty enough to play by the rules and win by the rules. The world is a level playing field, says the fop, and conspiracy writers exist, basically, as history's version of the Lonely Hearts Club. It lets the Unbeautiful feel better about themselves.

Stop laughing. We all know that the Western world has never been further away than it now is from talent/brains/ability to love/ability to feel compassion/moral sense/love of the earth/a sense of history leading to "achievement" and "power" as defined by the Elites. (The Elite: what an inappropriate word for the subhuman scum which thinks of itself as our Overlords; an Elite which has obviously decided to treat the United States, its own country, as something to be occupied: raped, destroyed, vanquished, stealing everything in sight, burning down the place and then leaving. But to where?)

David Aaronovitch is just an old-fashioned court jester telling the King how great he is and not to worry about all that screaming and smoke from beyond the moat. Aaronovitch's purpose is to widen the moat and build high the walls. And his silly analysis of the actual crimes he writes about -- crimes of which he knows nothing -- is mere bootlicking.

No Way Out

Neither did Abby Martin and Chris Hedges.

(Try not to stare too much at Abby's legs.)

House N*gg*r

Wall Street pimp and droning mass murderer Barry O. has taken time away from surfing and crooning with his billionaire house masters to assure them he will do all he can to stop New Dealer Bernie Sanders from getting the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Good doggie.

The U.S. Left is Alive!

('Though nowhere to be found inside the 21st-century Democratic Party.)

Tuesday night's great event here in NYC, hosted by The Big Apple Coffee Party, starring: Max Blumenthal, Margaret Kimberley, Aaron Maté, and Lee Camp.



Let us give thanks.

Betrayed

A fine documentary on the Coup of '63.

Mad Ave '63

Funny how Don Draper in the dreck known as Mad Men never created anything as sweet, snappy, or sincere as this. That's the 21st-century for ya. . .

The commercials of 1963.

Christ and Anti-Christ

"I am not Christ or a philanthropist. I am all the contrary of a Christ. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place." — Che Guevara

Evo Morales's mistake.



Andre Vltchek:

There is absolutely no way to reason with these people. They cannot be appeased, only crushed; defeated. In Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador or in Bolivia. They are like rats, like disease, proverbial symbols of fascism as in the novel The Plague, written by Albert Camus. They can hide, but they never fully disappear. They are always ready to invade, with zero notice, some happy city.

They are always ready to join forces with the West, because their roots are in the West. They think precisely like the European conquerors, like North American imperialists. They have double nationalities and homes scattered all over the world. Latin America for them is just a place to live, and to plunder natural resources, exploit labor. They rob here, and spend money elsewhere; educate their children elsewhere, get their surgeries done (plastic and real) elsewhere. They go to opera houses in Paris but never mingle with indigenous people at home. Even if, by some miracle, they join the Left, it is the Western, anarcho-syndicalist Left of North America and Europe, never the real, anti-imperialist, revolutionary Left of non-European countries.

They don’t need the success of the nation. They don’t want a great, prosperous Bolivia; Bolivia for all of its citizens.

They only want prosperous corporations. They want money, profit; for themselves, for their families and clans, for their bandit group of people. They want to be revered, considered ‘exceptional’, superior. They cannot live without that gap – the great gap between them and those ‘dirty Indians’, as they call the indigenous people, when no one hears them!

Even the Rain

In honor of the great Evo Morales, a repost.

=========================================

In Year XXXV (give or take a few) of Hollywood: The Vomit Era, Icíar Bollaín's Spanish masterpiece flows with moments rarely seen in the Marketeer States: rage, dignity, meaning, gesture, fellowship, purpose, self-forgetfulness, moral confusion, heroism -- while telling a great story with great pace. In 2000, a production crew invades Cochabamba, Bolivia to make an anti-Columbus period piece about the Columbian exploitation (and eventual extermination) of the native peoples. While filming, a rebellion breaks out over local water rights, involving many of the extras hired for the movie and led by a locally-hired lead actor. The silly director (Gael García Bernal), deeply in love with his own sensitive creativity (it brings tears to his eyes), tries to hold the project together, but when violence rains down on the village rebels, cast and crew seek to flee for their own safety and, if possible, finish the film.

'Though dedicated to Howard Zinn, Even the Rain's quiet humanity moves it far beyond mere polemic, as director Bollaín suggests, despite the communal nature of the movie-making process itself, movies -- through the demands of isolation and selectivity -- are a deeply private, anti-communal art form.

All performances are perfectly keyed, with Luis Tosar unforgettable as the hard producer turned rebel. Remains the best and most important movie of the 2010s.

How the U.S. Loves Democracy

"All this power. . . is delivered unto me." -- Satan

Murder Inc.

The best essay ever written on "our veterans."

Coming Up for Air

George Galloway and a bunch of smart Londoners tell us all we need to know about Adam Shit and his pathetic Impeachment Show.

Suchmos

A Taste of Honey

Anne Francis. Better yet ~ Anne Francis in a full-body black silk leotard, high-heeled black boots, and black leather gloves, kicking the tar out of all the bad guys; and one of the great erotic experiences of the 1960s. . .

The premiere episode of Honey West from September of '65: "The Swingin' Mrs. Jones"

Valiente

Me Too

C. J. Hopkins:

So, it looks like that’s it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have “hacked,” or “influenced,” or “meddled in” our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up a last-minute military coup, it’s four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death’s heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.

We probably should have seen this coming.

That’s right, as I’m sure you are aware by now, president-in-exile Hillary Clinton has discovered Putin’s diabolical plot to steal the presidency from Elizabeth Warren, or Biden, or whichever establishment puppet makes it out of the Democratic primaries. Speaking to former Obama adviser and erstwhile partner at AKPD Message and Media David Plouffe, Clinton revealed how the godless Rooskies intend to subvert democracy this time:

“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”

She was referring, of course, to Tulsi Gabbard, sitting Democratic Member of Congress, decorated Major in the Army National Guard, and long shot 2020 presidential candidate. Apparently, Gabbard (who reliable anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community have confirmed is a member of some kind of treasonous, Samoan-Hindu, Assad-worshipping cult that wants to force everyone to practice yoga) has been undergoing Russian “grooming” at a compound in an undisclosed location that is probably in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, or on Sublevel 168 of Trump Tower.

In any event, wherever Gabbard is being surreptitiously “groomed” (presumably by someone resembling Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love), the plan (i.e., Putin’s plan) is to have her lose in the Democratic primaries, then run as a third-party “spoiler” candidate, stealing votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also “totally a Russian asset”) stole them from Clinton back in 2016, allowing Putin to install Donald Trump (who, according to Clinton, is still being blackmailed by the FSB with that “kompromat” pee-tape) in the White House, where she so clearly belongs.

Clinton’s comments came on the heels of a preparatory smear-piece in The New York Times, What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?, which reported at length on how Gabbard has been “injecting chaos” into the Democratic primaries. Professional “disinformation experts” supplied The Times with convincing evidence (i.e., unfounded hearsay and innuendo) of “suspicious activity” surrounding Gabbard’s campaign. Former Clinton-aide Laura Rosenberger (who also just happens to be the Director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, “a bipartisan transatlantic national security advocacy group” comprised of former Intelligence Community and U.S. State Department officials, and publisher of the Hamilton 68 dashboard) “sees Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division.”

The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times, and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with. Richard Spencer, David Duke, Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, and so on. Neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer. 4chan, where, according to The New York Times, neo-Nazis like to “call her Mommy.”

In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard’s guilt-by-association with the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed that Gabbard has “the seal of approval” within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an “independent analysis” which confirmed that RT (“the Kremlin-backed news agency”) had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn’t backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that Gabbard’s support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.

“Clearly there’s something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers.”

But it’s not just The New York Times, of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words “Gabbard” and “Russian asset.” I’ve singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton’s calculated smear job on Friday night. No, the old gal hasn’t lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times, as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly “reported” her neo-McCarthyite smears.

As I noted in my previous essay, 2020 is for all the marbles, and it’s not just about who wins the election. No, it’s mostly about crushing the “populist” backlash against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn … and any other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.

In Trump’s case, it’s his neo-nationalism. In Sanders and Corbyn’s, it’s socialism (or at least some semblance of social democracy). In Gabbard’s, it’s her opposition to the Corporatocracy’s ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the Middle East (and the rest of the entire planet), and their using the U.S. military to do it.

Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it’s not their Putin-Nazism … it’s the challenge they represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as “Russian assets,” “anti-Semites,” “traitors,” “white supremacists,” “fascists,” “communists,” or some other type of “extremists.”

Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is focusing attention on the motives and tactics of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in an essay last year, “the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible.” This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.

Oh, and if you’re contemplating sending me an email explaining how these smear campaigns don’t work (or you spent the weekend laughing about how Hillary Clinton lost her mind and made an utter jackass of herself), maybe check in with Julian Assange, who is about to be extradited to America, tried for exposing U.S. war crimes, and then imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life. If you can’t get through to Julian at Belmarsh, you could ring up Katharine Viner at The Guardian, which has ruthlessly smeared Assange for years, and published outright lies about him, and is apparently doing very well financially.

And, if Katharine is on holiday in Antigua or somewhere, or having tea with Hillary in the rooftop bar of the Hay-Adams Hotel, you could try Luke Harding (who not only writes and publishes propaganda for The Guardian, but who wrote a whole New York Times best-seller based on nothing but lies and smears). Or try Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Paul Krugman, or even Rachel Maddow, or any of the other editors and journalists who have been covering the Putin-Nazi “Attack on America,” and keeping us apprised of who is and isn’t a Hitler-loving “Russian asset.”

Ask them whether their smear machine is working … if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating their summer places in the Hamptons or out on Martha’s Vineyard.

Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax based on absolutely nothing, parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people “Russian assets” on Twitter. Or never mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of ridiculous official propaganda, spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it’s going to make the last three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.

Terminate with Extreme Prejudice

Renée Parsons:

Even before Rep. Tulsi Gabbard threatened to boycott the October 15th Dem debate as the DNC usurps the role of voters in the Democratic primacy 2020 election and with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump on the table, the Swamp was stirred and its slimy muck may be about to come to the surface as never before.

If so, those revelations are long overdue.

It is no secret to the observant that since the 2016 election, the Democratic Party has been in a state of near-collapse, the victim of its own hubris, having lost their moral compass with unsubstantiated Russisgate allegations; those accusations continue as a futile exercise of domestic regime change.

Today’s Dems are less than a bona fide opposition party offering zero policy solutions, unrecognizable from past glories and not the same political party many of us signed up for many years ago. Instead, the American public is witnessing a frenzied, unscrupulous strategy.

Desperate in the denial of its demise, confronting its own shadow of corruption as the Dems have morphed into a branch of the CIA – not unlike origins of the East German Stasi government.

It should not be necessary to say but in today’s hyper volatile political climate it is: No American should be labelled as anything other than a loyal American to be deeply disturbed by the Democrat/CIA collusion that is currently operating an unprecedented Kangaroo Court in secret, behind closed doors; thus posing an ominous provocation to what remains of our Constitutional Republic.

As any politically savvy, independent thinking American might grasp, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and their entire coterie of sycophants always knew that Russiagate was a crock of lies.

They lied to their willing Democratic rank n file, they lied to American public and they continue to lie about their bogus Impeachment campaign.

It may be that whistleblower Ed Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance state was the first inkling for many Americans that there is a Big Problem with an out-of-control intelligence community until Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that Trump was being ‘really dumb” in daring to question Intel’s faulty conclusion that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

“Let me tell you. You take on the intelligence community = they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Inescapably, Schumer was suggesting  that the Congress has no oversight, that there is no accountability and that the US has lost its democratic roots when a newly elected President does not have the authority to question or publicly disagree with any of the Intel agencies.

Since the 2016 election, there has been a steady drumbeat of the US Intel’s unabashed efforts to undermine and otherwise prevent a newly elected President from governing – which sounds like a clear case of insubordination or some might call it treasonous.

The Intel antipathy does not appear to be rooted in cuts to a favorite social services program but rather protecting a power, financial and influence agenda that goes far deeper and more profound than most Americans care to contemplate.

Among a plethora of egregious corporate media reactions, no doubt stirred by their Intel masters, was to a July, 2018 summit meeting between Russian President Putin and Trump in Helsinki emblematic of illegitimate censures from Intel veterans and its cronies: 

“Trump sides with Putin over US Intelligence” – CNN

“Did Trump Commit Treason at Putin Meeting?” – Newsweek, and

“Trump Slammed Over Disgrace, Disgusting Press Conference with Putin” – Newsweek.

Not one praised Trump for pursuing peace with Russia.

And yet, fellow Americans, it is curious to consider that there was no outrage after the 911 attacks in 2001 from any member of Congress, President Bush or the Corporate Media that the US intelligence community had utterly failed in its mission to keep the American public safe.

There was no reckoning, not one person in authority was held accountable, not one person who had the responsibility to ‘know’ was fired from any of the Intel agencies. Why is that?

As a result of  the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham appear hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama’s Oval Office.

Barr’s earlier comment before the Senate that “spying did occur’ and that ‘it’s a big deal’ when an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.

With the stark realization that none of the DNC’s favored top tier candidates has the mojo to go the distance, the Democrats have now focused on a July 25th phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump allegedly ‘pressured’ Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden’s relationship with Burisma, the country’s largest natural gas provider.

At issue is any hanky panky involving Burisma payments to Rosemont Seneca Partners, an equity firm owned by Joe’s errant son, Hunter, who served on Burisma’s Board for a modest $50,000 a month.

Zelenskyy, who defeated the US-endorsed incumbent President Petro Poroshenko in a landslide victory, speaks Russian, was elected to clean up corruption and end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.  The war in the Donbass began as a result of the US State Department’s role in the overthrow of democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

Trump’s first priority on July 25th was Crowd Strike, a cybersecurity firm with links to the HRC campaign which was hired by the DNC to investigate Russian hacking of its server. 

The Dems have reason to be concerned since it is worth contemplating why the FBI did not legally mandate that the DNC turn its server over to them for an official Federal forensic inspection. 

One can only speculate…those chickens may be coming home to roost.

Days after an anonymous whistleblower (not to be confused with a real whistleblower like Edward Snowden) later identified as a CIA analyst with a professional history linked to Joe Biden, publicly released a Complaint against Trump. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the initiation of an ambiguous Impeachment Inquiry campaign with little specificity about the process.  The Complaint is suspect since it reads more like a professionally prepared Affidavit and the Dems consider Pelosi’s statement as sufficient to initiate a formal process that fails to follow the time-honored path of a full House vote predicating a legitimate impeachment inquiry on to the Judiciary Committee.

Of special interest is how the process to date is playing out with the House Intelligence Committee in a key role conducting what amounts to clandestine meetings, taking depositions and witness statements behind closed doors with a still secret unidentified whistleblower’s identity and voice obscured from Republican members of the Intel Committee and a witness testifying without being formally sworn in – all too eerily similar to East Germany.

The pretense of shielding the thinly veiled CIA operative as a whistleblower from public exposure can only be seen as an overly-dramatic transparent performance as the Dems have never exhibited any concern about protecting real whistleblowers like Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Sterling and others who were left to fend for themselves as the Obama Administration prosecuted more true, authentic whistleblowers than any other administration since the Espionage Act of 1917.

As the paradigm shift takes its toll on the prevailing framework of reality and our decayed political institutions, (the FBI and DOJ come to mind as the Inspector General’s report is due at  week’s end), how much longer does the Democratic Party, which no longer serves a useful public purpose, deserve to exist?

Beauty and the Beast

They’ve got their eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. Gabbard’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her. That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she’s also a Russian asset. Yes, she’s a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate.

I think it’s a lot harder now for Americans to know what they’re supposed to believe. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, it was a much more controllable environment.

-- Bitter Old Narcissist

Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton! You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. 

It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

-- Young Beautiful Congresswoman

Tucker.



Some bitter old narcissist by the name of Hillareee Clinton -- well known as the most laughable incompetent in U.S. political history ("don't ask don't tell," architect of the nitwit health-care plan leading to the 1994 Newt Gingrich/Contract on America Republican midterm rout, Whitewater/Vince Foster, Iraq, Waco, Haiti, Ron Brown, Yugoslavia, impeachment, Marc Rich, Iraq again, Uranium One, with all the money in the world losing to an unknown African-American junior Senator from Illinois, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bengazi, Ukraine, with all the money in the world numerically losing to an elderly Jewish socialist from Vermont, the Podesta emails, and with all the money in the world LOSING TO DONALD TRUMP) -- everything this malignancy touches turns to shit and backfires. . . well, Hillareee has done it again.

She's taken the campaign of the only anti-war 2020 Presidential candidate -- a moribund campaign due to the lack of corporate funding, media attention(but for the smears), and the rigging of the debates and early primaries by the criminal organization known as the Democratic National Committee -- and resurrected it, giving it a power and credibility beyond the wildest dreams of the candidate, perhaps making it permanent through the whole of next year, even if in a Third Party capacity. (And let's see the Demos beat Trump with Tulsi Gabbard taking at least 10% of the progressive vote.)

You go, girl!

Not Quite Vetted

From the indispensable website MintPress News, Roger Harris and Alan Macleod explain what this impeachment is truly about.

And oh yes. :-)

The Worst Crime. . .

. . .of the Clinton Crime Family.

Yugoslavia, 20 years ago.

Dr. Michael Parenti:

Oscar

Ode to Joy!

Clayton Kershaw -- Greatest Choker since Jack the Ripper.

31 years and counting -- eat it, Dogshit fans! (Enjoy those 106 wins in the off-season.)



(And fuck you, Magic Johnson. Your pussy Lakers are next.)

Word

“The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE ... IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! We went to war under a false & now disproven premise, WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. There were none!” -- Donald J. Trump, 10/9/19

Would we ever hear such words from the blood-soaked, corporate-cocksucking lips of Obama the Crooner and the Clinton Crime Family?

Never.

Impeach This Too

Matt Taibbi:

Start with the initial headline, in the story the Washington Post “broke” on September 18th:

TRUMP’S COMMUNICATIONS WITH FOREIGN LEADER ARE PART OF WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT THAT SPURRED STANDOFF BETWEEN SPY CHIEF AND CONGRESS, FORMER OFFICIALS SAY

The unnamed person at the center of this story sure didn’t sound like a whistleblower. Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its ass with a real whistleblower.

Drake, who was the first to expose the NSA’s secret surveillance program, seems to have fared better than most. He ended up working in an Apple Store, where he ran into Eric Holder, who was shopping for an iPhone.

I’ve met a lot of whistleblowers, in both the public and private sector. Many end up broke, living in hotels, defamed, (often) divorced, and lucky if they have any kind of job. One I knew got turned down for a waitressing job because her previous employer wouldn’t vouch for her. She had little kids.

The common thread in whistleblower stories is loneliness. Typically the employer has direct control over their ability to pursue another job in their profession. Many end up reviled as traitors, thieves, and liars. They often discover after going public that their loved ones have a limited appetite for sharing the ignominy. In virtually all cases, they end up having to start over, both personally and professionally.

With that in mind, let’s look at what we know about the first “whistleblower” in Ukrainegate:

He or she is a “CIA officer detailed to the White House”; The account is at best partially based upon the CIA officer’s own experience, made up substantially by information from “more than a half dozen U.S. officials” and the “private accounts” of “my colleagues”; “He or she” was instantly celebrated as a whistleblower by news networks and major newspapers. That last detail caught the eye of Kiriakou, a former CIA Counterterrorism official who blew the whistle on the agency’s torture program.

“It took me and my lawyers a full year to get [the media] to stop calling me ‘CIA Leaker John Kirakou,” he says. “That’s how long it took for me to be called a whistleblower.”

Kirakou’s crime was talking to ABC News and the New York Times about the CIA’s torture program. For talking to American journalists about the CIA, our federal government charged Kiriakou with espionage. That absurd count was ultimately dropped, but he still did 23 months at FCI Loretto in Western Pennsylvania.

When Kiriakou first saw the “whistleblower complaint,” his immediate reaction was to wonder what kind of “CIA officer” the person in question was. “If you spend a career in the CIA, you see all kinds of subterfuge and lies and crime,” he says. “This person went through a whole career and this is the thing he objects to?”

It’s fair to wonder if this is a one-person effort. Even former CIA official Robert Baer, no friend of Trump, said as much in an early confab on CNN with Brooke Baldwin:

BAER: That’s what I find remarkable, is that this whistleblower knew about that, this attempt to cover up. This is a couple of people. It isn’t just one.

BALDWIN: And on the people point, if the allegation is true, Bob, what does it say that White House officials, lawyers, wanted to cover it up?

BAER: You know, my guess, it’s a palace coup against Trump. And who knows what else they know at this point.

That sounds about right. Actual whistleblowers are alone. The Ukraine complaint seems to be the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power, not only in the intelligence community, but in the Democratic Party and the commercial press.

We had whistleblowers telling us about nearly all of these things. When they came forward, they desperately needed society’s help. They didn’t get it. Our government didn’t just tweet threats at them, but proceeded straight to punishment.

Bill Binney, who lost both his legs to diabetes, was dragged out of his shower by FBI agents. Jeffrey Sterling, like Kiriakou, was charged with espionage for talking to a reporter. After conviction, he asked to be imprisoned near his wife in St. Louis. They sent him to Colorado for two years. Others tried to talk to congress or their Inspectors General, only to find out their communications had been captured and cc’ed to the very agency chiefs they wanted to complain about (including former CIA chief and current MSNBC contributor John Brennan).

The current “scandal” is a caricature version of such episodes. Imagine the mania on the airwaves if Donald Trump were to have his Justice Department arrest the “whistleblower” and charge him with 35 years of offenses, as Thomas Drake faced. Trump incidentally still might try something like this. It’s what any autocrat of the Mobute Sese Seko/Enver Hoxha school would do, for starters, to mutinying intelligence officials within his own government.

Trump almost certainly is not going to do that, however, as the man is too dumb to realize he’s the titular commander of an executive branch that has been jailing people for talking too much for over a decade. On the off chance that he does try it, don’t hold your breath waiting for news networks to tell you he’s just following an established pattern.

I have a lot of qualms about impeachment/“Ukrainegate,” beginning with this headline premise of the lone, conscience-stricken defender of democracy arrayed against the mighty Trump. I don’t see it. Donald Trump is a jackass who got elected basically by accident, campaigning against a political establishment too blind to its own unpopularity to see what was coming.

In 2016 we saw a pair of electoral revolts, one on the right and one on the left, against the cratering popularity of our political elite. The rightist populist revolt succeeded, the Sanders movement did not. Ukrainegate to me looks like a continuation of Russiagate, which was a reaction of that defeated political elite to the rightists. I don’t feel solidarity with either group.

The argument that’s supposed to be galvanizing everyone right now is the idea that we need to “stand up and be counted,” because failing to rally to the cause is effectively advocacy for Trump. This line of thinking is based on the presumption that Trump is clearly worse than the people opposing him.

That might prove to be true, but if we’re talking about the treatment of whistleblowers, Trump has a long way to go before he approaches the brutal record of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, as well as the cheerleading Washington political establishment. Forgetting this is likely just the first in what will prove to be many deceptions about a hardcore insider political battle whose subtext is a lot more shadowy and ambiguous than news audiences are being led to believe.

Impeach This

C.J. Hopkins:

So here we go. Like a 1960s straight-to-drive-in Hammer Film Production, the 2020 campaign season has begun. Dig into your bucket of popcorn, pop the flap on your box of Good & Plenty, turn off your mind, and enjoy the show. From the looks of the trailer, it’s going to be a doozy.

That’s right, folks, it’s the final installment of the popular Trumpenstein horror movie series, TRUMPENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED! It will be playing, more or less around the clock, on more or less every screen in existence, until November 3, 2020 … or until Trump takes that lonely walk across the White House lawn to the Marine One chopper and flies off to Mar-a-Lago in disgrace.

Here’s a quick recap of the series so far, for those who may be joining us late.

When we last saw Trumpenstein he was out on the balcony of the White House South Portico in his Brioni boxers, ripped to the gills on Diet Coke and bellowing like a bull elephant seal. Having narrowly survived the Resistance’s attempts to expose him as a Russian intelligence asset (and the reanimated corpse of Adolf Hitler), he was pounding his chest and hollering angry gibberish at the liberal media like the Humongous in the second Mad Max movie.

The liberal mob was standing around with their torches and pitchforks in a state of shock. Doctor Mueller, the “monster hunter,” had let Trumpenstein slip through his fingers. The supposedly ironclad case against him had turned out to be a bunch of lies made up by the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, and the corporate media.

Russiagate was officially dead. The President of the United States was not a Russian secret agent. No one was blackmailing anyone with a videotape of Romanian prostitutes peeing on a bed where Obama once slept. All that had happened was, millions of liberals had been subjected to the most elaborate psyop in the history of elaborate deep state psyops … which, ironically, had only further strengthened Trumpenstein, who was out there on the Portico balcony, shotgunning Diet Cokes with one hand and shaking his junk at the mob with the other.

It wasn’t looking so good for “democracy.”

Fortunately, even though Russiagate had blown up in the Resistance’s faces and Trumpenstein could no longer be painted as a traitorous Russian intelligence asset (or as Vladimir Putin’s homosexual lover), he was still the reanimated corpse of Hitler, so they went balls out on the fascism hysteria, which kept the Resistance alive through the summer.

Which was all they really needed to do. Because these last three years were basically just a warm-up for the main event, which was always scheduled to begin this autumn. Russiagate, Hitlergate, and all the rest of it … it was all just a prelude to these impeachment hearings, and to the mass hysteria surrounding same, which the global capitalist ruling classes, the Intelligence Community, and the corporate media will be barraging us with until November 2020. The details don’t really matter that much. They were always going to impeach him for something, and they were always going to do it now, and throughout the 2020 campaign season.

You do not honestly believe they are going to let him serve a second term, do you? He took them by surprise in 2016. That isn’t going to happen again. Seriously, take a moment and reflect on everything we’ve been subjected to since Hillary Clinton lost the election … the unmitigated insanity of it all. The Russiagate hysteria. The Russian hacker hysteria. The Russian Facebook mind-control hysteria. The Hitler hysteria. The mass fascism hysteria. The anti-Semitism hysteria. The concentration camp hysteria. The white supremacist terrorism hysteria. Russian spy whales. Perfume assassins. The endless stream of fabricated “news” stories pumped out by the corporate media. Best-selling books, based on nothing. Comedians singing hymns to former FBI directors on national television. Celebrities demanding CIA coups. Papers of record like The New York Times coordinating blatant propaganda campaigns. The list goes on, and on, and on.

All of this because one billionaire ass clown won an election without their permission?

No, this was never just about Donald Trump, repulsive and corrupt as the man may be. The stakes have always been much higher than that. What we’ve witnessed over the the last three years (and what is about to reach its apogee) is a global capitalist counter-insurgency, the goal of which is (a) to put down the ongoing populist rebellion throughout the West, and (b) to crush any hope of resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism … in other words, a War on Populism.

Not that Donald Trump is a populist hero. Far from it. Trump is a narcissistic clown. He has always been a narcissistic clown. All he really cares about is seeing his face on television and plastering his name on everything in sight, preferably in huge gold letters. He got himself elected president by being cunning enough to recognize and ride the tsunami of populist anger that was building up in 2016, and that has continued to build throughout his presidency. It is not going away, that anger. The Western masses are no more thrilled about the global capitalist future today than they were when voted for Brexit, and Trump, and various other “populist” and reactionary figures.

Which is precisely why Trumpenstein must be destroyed, and why Brexit must not be allowed to happen … or, if it does, why the people of the United Kingdom must be mercilessly punished. It is also why the Gilets Jaunes are being brutally repressed by the French police, and disappeared by the corporate media (while the Hong Kong protesters garner daily headlines), and why Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party must be smeared as a hive of anti-Semites, and Tulsi Gabbard as an Assad-apologist, and why Julian Assange must be smeared and destroyed, and why Bernie Sanders must also be destroyed, and why anyone of any ilk (left, right, it doesn’t matter) riding that wave of populist anger or challenging the hegemony of global capitalism and its psychotic, smiley-face ideology in any other way must be destroyed.

2020 is for all the marbles. The global capitalist ruling classes either crush this ongoing populist insurgency or … God knows where we go from here. Try to see it through their eyes for a moment. Picture four more years of Trump … second-term Trump … Trump unleashed. Do you really believe they’re going to let that happen, that they are going to permit this populist insurgency to continue for another four years?

They are not. What they are going to do is use all their power to destroy the monster … not Trump the man, but Trump the symbol. They are going to drown us in impeachment minutiae, drip, drip, drip, for the next twelve months. The liberal corporate media are going to go full-Goebbels. They are going to whip up so much mass hysteria that people won’t be able to think. They are going to pit us one against the other, and force us onto one or the other side of a simulated conflict (Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis) to keep us from perceiving the actual conflict (Global Capitalism versus Populism). They are going to bring us to the brink of civil war in order to prevent civil war. And, if that doesn’t work, and Trump gets reelected (or if it looks like he’s going to get reelected), they’ll probably have to just go ahead and kill him.

One way or another, this is it. This is the part where the global capitalist ruling classes teach us all a lesson. The lesson they intend to teach us is the same old lesson that masters have been teaching slaves since the dawn of slavery. The lesson is, “abandon hope.” The lesson is, “resistance is futile.” The lesson is, “shut up, eat your tofu, get back to work at your three gig jobs, service your school loans and your credit card debt, vote for who and what we tell you, and be grateful we don’t fucking kill you. Oh, yeah … and if you want to rebel against something, feel free to take up identity politics, or to march around town with posters of Saint Greta demanding that we stop destroying the planet. We’ll get right on that, don’t you worry.”

What? You thought this had a happy ending, that Trumpenstein and the Bride of Trumpenstein were going to ride off into the orange sunrise at Mar-a-Lago in a Trump-branded golf cart, having made America great again … or that Bernie was going to storm the castle, vanquish Trumpenstein, and set up something resembling basic social democracy?

I told you it was a horror film, didn’t I?

Blowing

Caitlin Johnstone:

The word “whistleblower” has been trending in news headlines lately, but not for the reasons that any sane person might hope for.

“Read the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump’s communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky“, says The Washington Post. “Trump responds to hearing on whistleblower complaint“, says MSNBC. “Trump-Ukraine scandal: what did the whistleblower say and how serious is it?“, writes The Guardian. “Whistleblower complaint says White House tried to ‘lock down’ Ukraine call records” announces CBS. “Whistleblower’s complaint is a devastating report from a savvy official“, declares CNN.

So who is this “savvy official”? Who is this courageous whistleblower who boldly shone the light of truth upon the mechanisms of power in the interests of the common man? Who is this brave, selfless individual who set off an impeachment inquiry by taking a stand and revealing the fact that the US president made a phone call in July urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son?

Well believe it or not, according to The New York Times this brave, noble whistleblower who the mainstream media are currently championing is an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity,” The New York Times reports. “The man has since returned to the CIA, the people said. Little else is known about him.”

So there you have it. A mysterious stranger from the lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, assassinating, coup-staging, warmongering, psychopathic CIA was working in the White House, heroically provided the political/media class with politically powerful information out of the goodness of his heart, and then vanished off into the Langley sunset. Clearly there is nothing suspicious about this story at all.

In all seriousness, even to call this spook a “whistleblower” is ridiculous on its face. You don’t get to call someone from the US intelligence community a whistleblower unless they are actually whistleblowing on the US intelligence community. That’s not a thing. A CIA officer who exposes information about government officials is an operative performing an operation unless proven otherwise, because that’s what the CIA does; it liberally leaks information wherever it’s convenient for CIA agendas while withholding all other information behind a veil of government secrecy.

A CIA officer who exposes information about CIA wrongdoings without the CIA’s permission is a whistleblower. A CIA officer who exposes information about someone else is just a spook doing spook things. You can recognize the latter by the way the mass media supports, applauds and employs them. You can recognize the former by the way they have been persecuted, imprisoned, and/or died under mysterious circumstances.

But if you listen to the billionaire media, we should be calling this CIA officer a whistleblower, we should be enraged at The New York Times for exposing that CIA officer’s identity, and we should be raising a small fortune on GoFundMe for “legal aid” that this CIA officer will never need.

“The idea that the media needs to ‘protect’ a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics,” journalist Michael Tracey tweeted today on this new development.

While all this political/media class cheerleading for whistleblower protections is going on, the most prominent whistleblower in America remains imprisoned for taking a principled stand against secret grand juries while being driven into crippling debt. Chelsea Manning is still racking up fines of $1,000 per day while locked in a Virginia federal detention center for refusing to testify against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The mainstream press that is so keen to champion a “whistleblower” who works for the CIA and provided information which feeds into America’s fake partisan pro wrestling feud has been almost completely silent on the actual whistleblower who exposed actual US war crimes.

“The courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning has now been held in a federal detention center in Alexandria, Virginia for more than six months,” reads a recent article by World Socialist Website, one of the only news outlets to consistently report on Manning’s plight. “Manning has not been charged with or committed any crime. She was sent to jail on March 8, 2019 for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury that has indicted persecuted WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who published the information she leaked exposing rampant US imperialist criminality.”

“The vindictive treatment of Chelsea Manning has included ‘administrative segregation’—a prison euphemism for solitary confinement—and being fined an unprecedented $1,000 per day for refusing to answer grand jury questions,” WSWS reports. “By the time she might be released in October 2020, she will be left owing the US government as much as $440,000. Convicted antiwar activist Jeremy Hammond, who provided intelligence documents to WikiLeaks, has been also brought to the same jail as Manning in order to coerce him into giving false testimony.”

“On a scale of ‘haha’ to ‘lol,’ how likely would you say it is that politicians’ sudden interest in whistleblowing will lead to the reform of the Espionage Act, which the government has routinely used to jail the sources behind some of the most important stories in US history?” tweeted NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in response to an Onion article satirizing the latest hypocrisy.

Pointing out hypocrisy is such a common practice in politics that it often wears a bit thin these days, especially since it’s frequently done in a disingenuous way, but when implemented with intellectual honesty it serves a very useful purpose: it shows when people aren’t really being truthful about the position that they are taking.

The political/media class of the United States do not care about whistleblowers. They do not care about truth, and they do not care about justice. They do not care about holding power to account, because they exist only to serve power.

I don’t pretend to know what the CIA’s game is here; it probably isn’t to remove Trump from office because everyone knows that will not happen and failed impeachments historically boost a president’s popularity. But I do know that everyone cheerleading for this fake “whistleblower” while ignoring the real ones has exposed themselves.

Boch

The greatest manager of his time. (If Barry had this guy, he would've won at least 5 titles.)

THANK YOU, BRUCE BOCHY! 



Now let's watch the store-bought, sniffy, gutless Dodgers get punked once more.

The Greatest Movie Solo Dance Ever?

Yes, it's done in blackface. And yes we don't do things like that anymore. Yet Fred Astaire's tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson is so deep from the heart; and so beyond race.

Impressions

September, 1963 -- McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.

Tenor, John Coltrane, born 93 years ago today.

Benn

One of the great Socialist leaders of the 20th-century, very much the real thing.

Unlike what we see on our screens today. . .

Sacrament

In honor of its 20th-Anniversary release, a re-post.

20 years on, Eyes Wide Shut remains the last great English-language movie.

*

When Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut opened in the summer of '99 -- on the day JFK Jr's airplane disappeared -- it was greeted by both New York's movie press and the Arts & Leisure section cultists with overwhelming hoots and derision. And by walkouts. (In my theater, people actually cheered the walkouts.) It would be gone from the city within a month. The dumping came from two directions. The (seemingly) promised on-screen sex between its then-married co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman did not happen. And the movie was derided as being wholly out of touch with fin de siècle Manhattan reality -- unlike say Friends, Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and the stillborn Talk Magazine. After all, the director (who had died several months before the film's premiere) had not even been to New York City since 1968.

As it never is in a Kubrick film, time has been very kind. Eyes Wide Shut, if not the greatest English language movie of its decade, is certainly (the only?) great work of movie art dealing with the malignant rot at the center of Manhattan's Clinton/Giuliani go-go 90s; and a work which opens the door to what was to come: the stake driven through the city's heart by the Overworld vampires now in total control. (See Epstein, Jeffrey.)

Yet the awesomeness of Kubrick's final achievement is less sociological in nature (more of a sideshow actually) than in the absolute concentration on the movie's real subject: the sufferings and confusions of a decent man's soul caused by the purity of his marital commitment.

*

Doctor to the Overworld Bill Harford (Cruise) lives with wife Alice (Kidman) and 7-year-old daughter Helena in a Central Park West apartment about the size of a floor at Saks. After coming home from a rather bizarre Christmas party at the Madison Avenue mansion of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), Alice confesses to Bill, while both are stoned, lusts for other men heretofore unimagined by her stunned husband. A call comes in for the doctor -- an elderly patient has died. While visiting the bereaved daughter of the deceased, thinking of little else but Alice's confession, the daughter (Marie Richardson) confesses her love for Bill. Escaping from the inevitable confrontation back home, toward a nightclub called Sonata, a place featuring his former co-medical student / turned jazz pianist buddy Nick Nightingale, Bill is assaulted by a gang of toughs, then picked up by a street hooker. At her degraded, cramped place (the bathtub is in the kitchen), he receives a cell-call from Alice, does not have sex with the hooker, but before leaving pays her anyway. At the Sonata Cafe, Nightingale's last club set has just ended -- but Nick has a later date, one requiring him to pronounce a password for entrance: Fidelio. Intrigued, and again not wanting to return to Alice, Bill convinces Nick to reveal the location of the engagement and, it turns out, the dress code: elegant costume, cape, and mask. Arriving at a costumer's who was a former patient, for it is now two o'clock in the morning -- now under new ownership as the former patient has moved away; with the new owner demanding $200 over the rental price for his middle-of-the-night troubles -- Bill finds what he's looking for; and more. Appearing at a Glen Cove, LI château with password, cape, tuxedo, and mask, Harford finds inside ballrooms worthy of Lubitsch, filled with ritual, mystery, incense, chanting, a blind-folded Nick Nightingale, and hundreds of other caped, masked people -- and sex: the most beautiful women of New York. But Bill, asked for a second password by a man who seems to be some sort of Satanic priest, is unmasked. And demanded, under threat of death, to get naked. A masked girl comes to his rescue. "Take me instead" she declares, unasked. Now warned, Harford leaves. Back at Central Park West -- now past 4:00am -- he checks on his sleeping daughter, then hides his party garb inside a locked cabinet. In his bedroom, he comes upon a laughing Alice -- in the throes of nightmare. He wakes her up and listens to her dream: one even more savage and wounding toward him than that night's earlier confession.

Next morning, Harford's obsession begins to split: debilitation caused by Alice's confession and nightmare; fear rising over the condition of his masked party savior, and others. He discovers Nightingale's hotel, goes there, and is told that Nick has checked out, at 5:00am, bruised and flanked by two big scary guys: Nick even tried to hand the desk clerk a letter, but was stopped. Harford drives back to the Long Island château and is greeted by an old man who hands him a letter -- a second warning to stop poking around, to forget what he saw and heard last night. Bill does not. Flipping back, Harford calls the home of Marion Nathanson, his dead patient's daughter, but hangs up when Marion's boyfriend Carl answers the telephone. Harford returns his costume to the costume store, and the owner offers up his adolescent daughter for Bill to use, if interested. And the mask is missing. Bill returns to the hooker's apartment -- this time no call from Alice will stop them. But Domino is not there. Her even-lovelier roommate Sally is. But no. She cannot take the chance, for she thinks Bill and Domino were together last night, and that morning Domino found out she is HIV-positive. Bill leaves. And is now being followed. Buying a newspaper, falling into a coffee shop, still afraid to go home, he reads of an "ex-beauty queen" rushed to hospital because of "an apparent drug overdose." Could this be his savior from last night? At her hospital, he learns the girl has died. Seeing her in morgue, he realizes it is the girl from the château. Leaving the hospital, he receives a call requesting a return visit to Victor Ziegler's mansion. In Ziegler's gaming room, he's told by his host that he was also at the château last night. Ziegler saw everything. Although told nothing but lies by Ziegler -- the girl really did OD by herself, Nightingale is safe and sound back home in Seattle, Domino's disappearance really was caused by panic over her HIV condition -- Harford gets it. The Overworld's mask is at last, for a moment, for the doctor, allowed to slip.

Bill returns home. On his bedroom pillow, next to the sleeping wife, is the missing mask. He begins to cry. She awakens. Harford promises to her tell her everything. Next morning, Christmas shopping with their little girl at FAO Schwarz, Bill and Alice Harford decide to stay together. For now. The story ends with her one-word suggestion as to what they both should do.

*

It is an astonishingly classical work ~ in its operatic, silent-film formalism, often with the beauty of stained-glass windows; in its stillness and awe. Its narrative unwinds as a ribbon of mass-like Mystery tableaux -- the Glorious, the Joyful, the Luminous, the Sorrowful -- where story is not hidden (far from it): it is drenched with secret meaning. And it is a thoroughly conservative work, rejecting not only its own post-modern time, but perhaps much of the 20th Century as well. Along with complaints about its lack of hotness and about Kubrick's late-90s irrelevance, there were the tired old Kaelian remarks about coldness and nihilism. Far from being a cold movie, Eyes Wide Shut is an extraordinarily emotional one, stripped naked in its (beyond physical) revelations, and deeply generous-hearted toward its main character (if not to undeserving others, such as Alice) -- a main character whose consciousness controls every frame. In this way, the movie's classicism is reversed. Most great works of the past century have a female's suffering heart at their center. Here the man's isolated love is the crucified.

 *

At first, there is his distraction, his auto-pilot bedside manner -- easy smile, the quip, a warm compliment as he hurries, not too fast, through the Harfords' spectacle of an apartment, on his way with the wife to a black-tie Christmas party. "Honey? You seen my wallet?" No doubt she has. Over-decorated and tomb-like, as if the Soho art gallery the wife had been working at (until the place went bankrupt) had been transplanted uptown, now like a box around them. . . He imagines. The music we hear (Shostakovich's "Waltz 2") is his music, playing on his bedroom stereo, then turned off: is the early shot of their Central Park West apartment front a piece of his self-satisfaction, imaged? The titles' strip-shot (as Kubrick taunts our voyeurism) of Alice removing her black chemise surely is. Yet the disconnect, the husband and wife, the father and mother, going through the motions, between themselves, toward Helena their girl and Helena's babysitter. But for the magical Christmas tree, here the colors and feelings are in a minor key.

Smugness continues by all, entering the Christmas party home of Victor Ziegler. He actually lives here? For it is a home -- depopulated but for party guests; and the sinister male aides prowling the floors -- belonging to the Breakers. Clearly, a modern Vanderbilt, one married to pretty much what one would expect -- a plasticized Lady Who Lunches. No wonder Victor Ziegler is a poonhound. And no wonder the glibness, as the Harfords greet the Zieglers, as they drift into drinking and dancing. First up: "I'm in the Mood for Love." Party rooms filled with golden light like a Moselle, decanted, strangely, on a wave of vibrant melancholy.

Finally an engagement. Bill Harford has spotted an old friend from medical school. Playing the piano at Ziegler's party? He wants to say hello as Alice does not. So they part, leaving her to her first (and only) encounter.



Harford with Nick Nightingale is hale and hearty, solicitous toward his friend's life and past. He will keep his promise to come hear Nick at the Sonata Cafe. (Under unimagined circumstances.) Her meeting with the Hungarian Count (played by Sky du Mont as a vampirish Louis Jourdan) is something else again. If it's possible to have public sex -- under the watchful eye of Nightingale -- without having public sex, married Alice does. Yet Bill, returning to the party, is now on the arms of two beyond-belief models. "Where exactly are we going? Exactly?" he asks with a beautiful laugh. "Where the rainbow ends. . ." says the taller girl. No ~ he's not going there. Even without the interruption of the threesome's journey by Ziegler's main man-prick.

Bill's called to an upstairs bathroom, where he finds a just-fucked Victor Ziegler re-dressing; and a sex goddess near death, from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. The doctor does not ask, yet the movie (and therefore Harford) makes us wonder: How did she OD? Did she shoot up during sex? Before or after? Did Ziegler shoot her up? Her name is Mandy, short for Amanda, as we will later learn. (She looks somewhat like a ripe, full-bodied version of Alice.) Bill's manner with her is tender and consoling. Ziegler just wants her dumped, out of his mansion/mausoleum damn quick. No, says the doctor. Just between us guys, right Bill? Oh, yeah. . .

Yet for Harford, for us, the Ziegler Christmas party is Christmas: glitter, glamour, good cheer, warmth, elegance, harmless (mostly) flirtation, comradeship (on the main floor his hail-fellow-well-met with Nightingale, upstairs his saving of Ziegler), comfort toward the speedballed call girl. And the swooning romanticism with which Bill surrounds Alice: "I'm in the Mood for Love," "It Had to Be You," "When I Fall in Love (It Will Be Forever)," "Blame It on My Youth". . . Colors and feelings in a major key.

Back home, we get the work's only erotic scene, between husband and wife, 50 seconds long, set to Chris Isaak. He is so into her. She's into the mirror.



Montage of an average Harford day, leading us toward one of the most emotionally sadistic and malevolent sequences in movie history. The wife and husband get high. For her, the curtains open. She sets the trap. She accuses him of fucking the two models at the Christmas party. What? he says. She then gets hissy when Bill mentions that, of course, the Hungarian count would want to fuck her. What man wouldn't? (Offense taken at this by someone who does little but push her sex-look.) But he trusts her. . . because she's his wife and because, yes, she's a woman.

"Remember Cape Cod last summer?" she asks, as the trap is sprung. "Remember the young Naval Officer at the next table?" No, he doesn't.

Alice does.



And it breaks his heart. And his balls. As intended. Her sadism is total, for it includes within it the sop of tenderness.

The telephone rings. Lou Nathanson has died. She doesn't care. He must go.

The miraculous Marie Richardson plays Nathanson's grieving daughter, Marion. (That same year she would be Gertrud, in a Swedish television production of the Soderberg play.) Marion is more than grieving when Bill arrives. She's expectant, fretful. His bedside manner is in full consoling bloom here -- in the midst of his torture. Both their tortures.



She is mad for him -- older and more worn-looking than Alice, she is much warmer, more engaged, selfless in her love, far less self-contained: indeed more beautiful. Her kiss of him is full and wet, full of heart, giving herself up and trying to take his. Even if she never sees him again, she says, she will be happy just to live near him. Gertrud indeed. And yes, she does know what she's saying. An enormous doorway, to a loving woman's heart, opens. He -- in torment -- will not walk through it. And when her boyfriend Carl, a math professor, shows up -- he's a taller, bespectacled version of Bill. The heart does indeed want what it wants. For those who have one.

Outside now, leaving Marion to the affections of Carl, Harford's sexual doubts and fears appear everywhere. Hot kissing in the streets. Physical and verbal assault from a drunken Bay Ridge gang fresh from a strip club night. But there's a hooker named Domino, who invites him upstairs, to her coldwater flat. "Cozy," Bill says. They kiss and the call comes in from Alice. "What time are you coming home?" The last place he wants to be. But he must leave. He pays the girl. Here Cruise makes us feel that even without the interrupting call, he would not have gotten down.

At the Sonata Cafe -- where he reunites with Nick Nightingale, to the sound of "If I Had You," and where we learn the Harfords have been married for nine years and of Nick's four sons back in Seattle -- the chance to heal his suppurating sexual wounds arrives: anything to close them. In a work of enormous visual beauty (the whole movie seems enthralled), the Sonata interior is perhaps its peak. The cafe glows with a sort of holiness. Kubrick's colors (he was his own DP) are intensely present, like a host of angels in rapture. The air is luminous, the illumination of the lights like the rose chill of winter morn. Christmas morning. When have we seen such intensity? In the bluish shadows, the back and side-lighting of both men. In the mystery of their interactions. A transfiguration, as Harford learns the password: Fidelio. Beethoven's famous celebration of wifely loyalty.



Along with a password comes costume and mask. To find one, he goes to the end of the rainbow, at warehouse-sized Rainbow Costumes. Bill dredges through sleaze and is made part of an act: witness to the outrage pretended by store owner Milich (Rade Serbedzija) when Milich finds his adolescent daughter (Leelee Sobieski) having sex with two Japanese men dressed in women's underwear and make-up.

On to the party. He travels by taxi across bridges and highways, through small holiday towns, into woods dark and deep -- all the while seeing only Alice and her navy officer. A (literally) Rothschildian country house appears. A place guarded by two men. Bill gives them the password. And we see the luminous mansion fronted by a lot filled with Bentleys, limos, and many Rolls.



The titillation Bill Harford hopes to find there is non-existent; while the terror of his wife's sexual nature is severely deepened (as it will be deepened again, to the point of collapse, when he returns home). His love for her is so great that he's willing to ride the rapids of her lust. What he finds, instead, is ritualized, de-eroticized sex. Sex as ceremony, as masked mass, with all the involvement of a tourist taking snapshots, now from this angle, now from that, with no kinetic relation to the spectacle itself. An alienation -- a dry, chilled distance -- a newborn loathing toward the female body. So his scent goes out. . . sensed by a man upstairs, who meets his eyes -- the man and his female companion strangely reminiscent in mask of Milich and the daughter. Harford is also sensed by a masked beauty who takes him away to warn him. He must leave now, she says. We see a blindfolded Nick Nightingale, being forcibly led away. The last time we see him.

It is too late. Bill's asked for a second password, one he does not know. He is unmasked and demanded to take off his clothes. The masked Goddess appears: "Let him go. Take me. I am ready to redeem him." She does; and he doesn't even know who she is.



Now past 4:00am, Bill arrives home and checks on his sleeping daughter. Then hides the Fidelio costume inside the cabinet. (Does he not destroy it in hopes of a future château visit?) Trying very hard not to awaken his sleeping succubus, he fails.



That night's attempted sexual adventures, desperately taken to heal the rips in his heart and mind, have also failed. They have led him only to further humiliation. And worse. Now, in her telling of her nightmare -- how could she tell him, coming off her Navy Man confession? (how could she not?) -- her destruction of him is total. A destruction he seems strangely eager to receive. And there is nothing.

The completeness of Bill's love (without stain) for Alice is now blocked. His obsession now splits: terror felt for his wife's fidelity; fears for others' safety and well-being -- and his new sense of the evil supporting him, (literally) feeding him. He awakens early to see if Nick is safe. As we see him do many times through the work (Nick is his patient, and Amanda, and the costume store owner), the doctor lies about his relationship to the person he seeks, in order to find him or her; usually implying he has some bad news to report, as he implies to a waitress at the coffee shop next to the Sonata Cafe. She tells him of Nick's hotel and Bill goes there.

The mincing hotel desk clerk (Alan Cumming) -- a flame, as they say -- has bought in completely to the surrounding sexual totalitarianism: he defines himself and relates to others wholly via his sexual identity; and, by the last shot we see of him, to despair and misery. He tells of Nightingale's kidnapping at 5:00am (about the time Alice was revealing her nightmare to Bill), of Nick's fear and the bruise on Nick's face. Of the official order not to touch or give away any of Nick's mail. Harford returns to Milich at Rainbow Costumes. The mask is missing, but Milich's daughter is there. For a price. "I thought you were going to call the police," Bill says about what he saw the night before. "We have come to a new arrangement," says the father.

He revisits Somerton, the château deep in the woods. To save something, someone. To understand. To still his panic over the girl who saved him, over Nick. Or perhaps to reassure his tormentors. No ease or safety. Or knowledge. Instead a warning, this time in a letter. No place to go, he returns to Central Park West. Finding them doing homework at the dining room table, he quickly tells Alice and Helena that he must leave soon for an appointment. He gets a beer from the kitchen; he begins to watch them. He begins to hear Alice's nightmare, and to see images (again and again) of her confession. An idea is born: Is his daughter really his? (The paternity fear underscored by Alice's Naval Officer looking a lot like Helena.)



It is too much for him. He flips back. The appointment that night is his return to the desolate suite of doctors' offices where he works, to sit alone and again to see Alice. He makes a call, to Marion Nathanson. Answered by Carl, Bill hangs up. He goes back, bringing pastry, to the hooker's apartment. This time, Harford will cheat, to escape his panic. But Domino is also now missing, says the beautiful roommate, who is not available: Domino is HIV-positive and that's why she's missing, but we wonder: Bill visited her after Victor Ziegler's party. Has Domino been eliminated as well?

Now he's being followed. All around him hangs a late-90s Manhattan of elegant sleaze. He buys a New York Post with a LUCKY TO BE ALIVE front page blare, and falls into a nearby coffee shop to hide, from his pursuer and from the wife. He reads: a former "Miss New York," returning to her apartment at 4:00am, was found ODed. Two men were seen entering with her. The NYPD would like to speak with those men. Harford rushes to the named hospital. But Amanda Curran has died. Bill visits her corpse in the morgue. It is the same girl. She died to save him. What to do now?

A call comes in to his cell. Can he see Victor Ziegler that night? He'll be there in 20 minutes.

At the depopulated mansion, inside the ominous and monumental game room, Ziegler greets him with cheer, a drink, an invitation to shoot pool, and an offer to send Bill a case of beautiful 25-year-old scotch. Who is this man? What is he? How can he live in this crystal-and-marble palace in the middle of Manhattan? (Actually the Polish Consulate at 37th & Madison.) A monster, for sure. But of what sort? A Jamie Dimon sort? Mort Zuckerman? Donald Trump? Rupert Murdoch? Perhaps Ralph Lauren or Carl Icahn. We don't know or care. In this deeply classical work, Kubrick throws out (but for a meaningless line or two) all the swill currently taught as backstory -- here there is a higher reach of imagining than the factual or merely psychological. What we do know is how Ziegler lays out the choice for Bill Harford and for us. Forget and move on. Or death. Forget and ignore: his doubts about Helena's paternity, about Milich and the daughter, about Nightingale, about Domino, about Amanda Curran, about Alice's confession and nightmare. In return, he gets sex, comfort, pleasure, safety. Forget about the victims. We get something else as well. Sex = the numbing of the knowledge of evil. Is it possible there's an inverse relation between a society's sexual openness and license; and its empathy, communalism, heart, and sweetness? We now have eyes wide open for physical titillation, yet unseeing toward evil and the eating of others. Sex, work, parties, other people's deaths and much more -- keeping us blind.



Bill Harford finds the mask, on his pillow next to the dozing wife. To go forward with comfort, joy, marriage, fatherhood, and work, he must put it back on. He does; and breaks down. "I'll tell you everything," he weeps to the awakened wife. But what, we wonder, is there for him to tell? Lots. But not what she wants to hear. He mea culpas about his straying and his bad thoughts. Not about how he tried to find and protect the victims. Not about his knowledge. Not how he resisted temptation at each turn. He did not destroy his partner's heart and soul -- twice. She did. But now he will tell her everything. . . What choice does he have, but to lose it all? So he clings for now. When we see them both the next morning, he's like a naughty boy before his succubus, a succubus so upset over his reactions to her savagery and malevolence. Owning none of it.

Christmas shopping with their daughter at FAO Schwarz, now firmly back under her (and others') control, he begs. For him, he's sure. For him -- when he falls in love, it will be forever. For her -- not sure. For her -- forever? She laughs. But there is one thing she's sure about, one thing they must immediately do together:

Fuck.

Fuck her.

*

Is the movie unfair to Alice Harford? Perhaps. But her urban type (of all genders) was -- and is -- legion, as common and dominant to our social (especially marital) culture as Bill Harford moves toward -- then finally rejects -- the uncommon. And therefore, she is vastly less interesting.

It is Cruise's movie. And he is great. Then at the top of his A-List power, he carries us with him through what is 160 minutes of humiliation and, at last, subjugation. Slick and glib, elegant and dashing, superficially corrupt, by turns a liar and sneak, Cruise's Bill Harford becomes a man racing between separate madnesses, like a car picking its route through the collision of other cars, in a rush toward sacramental Grace. He fails at the end, yet the movie is more than a hymn of despair. Harford's (and Kubrick's) Stations of the Cross is also a hymn of belief, hope, and transcendence. A genuine compassion does come out of his wounds and terror: for his daughter, Nick, Domino, Amanda. Even if he allows Alice, and a desire for his former safety, to close it over, perhaps temporarily.

Isolated beyond time -- like so many of his movie characters -- within his British estate, Stanley Kubrick sensed our savage, sexed-up future -- one increasingly driven by power, pleasure, and privilege psychotically divorced from talent, brains, ability to love, compassion, empathy, community, respect, courage, love of the earth, or a sense of the past. As Kubrick bids farewell to his art form (his intended 1:37 to 1 aspect ratio was impossible to project in all but few 1999 theaters [fewer still today], so even the movie itself had to be "masked" -- projected at 16:9 with the top and bottom of the frames lopped off -- but not here) and to the century that gave it birth, Bill Harford says farewell to the purity of his marriage and his life. We are left, with him, with eyes half-closed (or half-open). He does close over, having now eaten the apple, continuing on with his fractured, deeply compromised life. Or does he, after we leave him, turn and walk through the open doorway, toward courage and deeper knowledge; and the darkness, isolation, and death that come with them? Will Ziegler and his associates leave him be? How many nights will Harford wake up feeling that winded worried heart-fatigue, wondering how they are going to pay him back in return? How will fucking still that?

Questions this great work of art poses for us, for our century. Twenty years after its release, they have been so far, at least for New York, definitively answered.

The century is young.