The jet-plane man’s letter today got us thinking of course about RELEVANT MOVIES, especially this one, God’s Country, a 1985 documentary by Louis Malle, one of your editor’s absolute favorites, and one that grows more relevant by the day.
Malle visits a small farming town in rural Minnesota, predominantly Lutheran, in the ’70s, and the economy, culture and the social connection are thriving in an almost self-parodied version of small-town America.
Years later, Malle goes back to the town, and a deep recession, lack of credit, and the illusions presented under Reaganomics have destroyed it.
The manifestations are similar: self-victimization, violence, people are loading up on semi-automatic weapons, Jewish conspiracy theories taking hold, resentment and anxiety over a better future no one can picture, and people — good, smart, confused people — are going to snap, involuntarily, if nothing changes: if the government doesn’t start treating people like citizens instead of expendable human capital for corporations to exhaust.
Hooray!
(This YouTube clip covers the final 10 minutes — capped by a very moving final monologue from the retired town lawyer — and if you can’t get all of the parts on YouTube, the Criterion Collection has the full film watchable online for $5, a deal like the dickens!)
[YouTube]
{ 93 comments }
I read the guy’s suicide note/manifesto. I’d feel a lot more sympathy towards him if he hadn’t tried to kill his wife and kid in the house fire and take out Federal employees at work.
[re=515728]blinky_twinkie[/re]: It’s not a matter of having sympathy or not. He just LOST HIS MIND AND DID THIS. So then the question becomes: how do you prevent people from losing their minds? Finding solutions of trending problems is a good thing.
Ok, yeah, sorry, previous comment didn’t relate to the movie recommendation. Sorry about that. I just finished reading about this guy elsewhere on the intartubes, and got het up.
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: Yes, that’s true, he just cold lost it. I guess if everybody had little airplanes, we’d be crashing them into Federal buildings all over the place.
“My Dinner with Andre” is kind of amazing. Malle finds a way to make a two-hour dinner conversation between two rather self-absorbed men fascinating.
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]:
Repugnant foresight comes in two flavors – Jeebus and Free Markets.
Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. This concept seems to have completely vanished from US culture. Well, except that I just mentioned it.
[re=515741]blinky_twinkie[/re]: Bumperplanes! WHEEEEEEEEE!!!
None of these guys cheated on their taxes (as far as I know) and got caught. We little people have always been expendable to the big boys.
“All we are is dust in the wind…”
Screen God’s Country with Gates of Heaven by Errol Morris*, and you’ve got yerself a double-header of documentary despair worthy of it’s own homicide planing.
*(SPOILER ALERT: Because we, too, shall soon be forced to eat our pets, as was foretold by Malle, in America, all those years ago.)
[re=515758]Extemporanus[/re]: Fuck you, apostrophe.
It’s Michele Bachmann’s recruiting film.
[re=515758]Extemporanus[/re]: This is not a new phenomenon out there in the flat places in the middle of the country. Check out Wisconsin Death Trip for just one example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip
A relevant song, Rosemary Clooney sings Everything Happens to Me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfgfN8oFDgc
Thanks, Jim, for the snark free zone. God knows you are funnier than shit, so this is bold. We have to reflect and proceed. We have to start trying to talk to our fellow humans on this planet.
[re=515767]x111e7thst[/re]: Tell me about it.
I was born in Indiana, grew-up in central Wisconsin, visited relatives in Illinois nearly every weekend, and have moved back to the Midwest twice since leaving in order to take care of dying family members.
However, unlike the Zombie Minnesotans, when they died I did not eat them. I did have them taxidermied, though, but I think that’s more of a Northern California thing to do.
The past couple of decades have been filled with a great deal of change, probably as much as we experienced in the 60s or other points in our history.
There’s always groups who can’t deal with change and start shutting out and shutting down. They’re the one’s who dig their heels in on civil rights, join “patriot” groups, and look at science and education with disdain.
I wish the Democrats would understand that they have to show leadership and force people like that into the future. They can’t just ignore them or try to placate them.
There’s a reason that FDR was elected to four terms.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who are too stupid for their own good. Yes, I understand some of them are too stupid to ever get it, but I think the majority of them choose stupidity because it’s easier than thinking.
Fuck the douchebag who couldn’t figure out how to pay his fucking taxes and took it out on his wife, step-daughter and potentially hundreds of innocent bystanders, and fuck the dumb farmers who ever thought Reagan gave a shit about them.
The thing is that there are lots and lots more out there like that. I’ve got my own relative who’s an engineer and on the pharmaceutical bandwagon, but if anything ever goes wrong…guy has a pissy bad temper and is pissed off at the world already (shudder).
[re=515741]blinky_twinkie[/re]: No, if everyone had the right to concealed airplanes, society would be more polite and people would not attempt these kinds of crimes.
Atheist Libertarian terrorist. From Texas. Ron Paul, give us your donors list! We must prevent future attacks!
[re=515778]Advocatus_Diaboli[/re]: Yes, that and this is the second time an anti-government nutjob targeted that building.
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/14/us/man-denies-plotting-to-bomb-irs-office.html
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]:
I used to say to people “If rats in a cage attacked each other, or ate their own babies, or lay down and did nothing until they died, we’d say to ourselves: That is unnatural behavior for a group of rats, we need to fix the problem- a bigger cage, more food, less food, something. But when people take up firearms and just randomly blow away somebody, when KIDS do it, we just shrug our shoulders and say: Wow, something was really wrong with THEM.”
Flying a plane into a building and setting your house on fire with your kid in it is unnatural behavior. It doesn’t come from nothing.
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: [re=515772]Mustang[/re]: Amen to both.
To help requires trying to talk, and that takes time. Look at the reactive war on drugs that Ronbo launched in the early 80s, and that is clearly the US’s least successful war ever (excepting the bull market involved in constructing & running prisons).
Seems that our collective image that looks back at us from the mirror maybe leans to the self-center and perhaps has the attention span approaching that of a gnat. We demand immediate solutions that do not require much in the way of time or self, sacrifice included.
Quick & dirty solutions are just that. Collectively, we need to recognize that make significant inroads in physical and mental health will require time-dependent, proactive intervention. Like building a good road, it demands serious clearing, grubbing, and grading not just a one-time Saturday morning litter pick-up and sweeping.
If we can suck-it-up way beyond our typical tl;dnr limits we would see not only clear improvements in collective temper and improvements in quality of life for those at risk but some extra nickles in our pocket. Just sayin’.
[re=515749]Sharkey[/re]: maybe it’s just people realized how stupid the seven deadly sins are. Lust and pride rule, sloth and gluttony are pretty great when you’re stoned, and envy isn’t best dealt with through moralizing self-repression. That leaves “wrath”, which is great too if it involves slowly walking towards the camera while something blows up in the background
[re=515778]Advocatus_Diaboli[/re]: “…the dumb farmers who ever thought Reagan gave a shit about them.”
When you find out that the country and system you love does not give a shit about you then something has got to — or is bound to — give. Maybe you fall into conspiracy theories or racism or anti-semitism, because it simply can’t be that America, and everything you’ve been told about it, is a lie. Somebody has got to be to blame. However, this applies to the Minnesota farmer and lawyer and families in the Malle movie. The Austin guy has a whole different kind of pathology going on, I think.
What’s worth worrying about is that legitimate gripes of the teabaggers (and like-minded) — who are right about one thing (and only this one thing) — that the little people are getting screwed, that those gripes are being channeled into some pretty awful, sad, infuriating politics. BUT. What else is new?
[re=515792]AddHomonym[/re]: “What’s worth worrying about is that legitimate gripes of the teabaggers (and like-minded) — who are right about one thing (and only this one thing) — that the little people are getting screwed, … ”
I’m shocked, shocked, to find that the little people are getting screwed.
[re=515743]V572625694[/re]: A great little film, and impossible to think of without recalling Martin from the Simpsons, “Tell me more!”
[re=515768]DC Hates Me[/re]: Try Chet Baker’s more atmospheric version –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4drgHKYCIdE
Scott Brown says the same anger that made that terrorist crash his plane into a federal building was the same anger that got him elected:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEDXW87ptFU
The teabaggers are all talk, whining, wandering malls, gulping down Double Whoppers and filling those Pajama Jeans, but provide absolutely no solutions . Now, they’re making up excuses for this terrorist. MA voters , choke your Scott Brown. You voted in a rightwing extremist.
I grew up in St. Cloud, Minnesota–which I believe recently earned the dubious distinction of being the most anti-Semitic city in the United States–and I find it interesting that, given this climate of boiling and pointless hatred, virtually every Minnesotan who has risen to some level of distinction has been Jewish. Dylan, Franken, Wellstone, even (ugh) Norm Coleman.
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: Fuck all that. Let’s waterboard his family and bomb something. That’s how America solves terrorism.
Have we forgotten Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: It certainly helps if the level of desperation one can sink to isn’t bottomless, as is the conservative ideal — Sean Assity was lecturing tonight about what a virtue this was. Apparently not having guaranteed affordable healthcare gives people an incentive to achieve — that without this motivation to take our care into our own hands, we become lazy and shiftless and dependent on the government to do everything for us, like those Europeans who’ve basically ridden their society into the ground.
Of course Assity never addresses why the Europeans are doing pretty well as a society despite their indolence and ineffectualness. And he never seems to address why places like southern Asia and all of Africa, with what one might think of as huge incentives to achieve, are so completely fucked up.
Louis Malle is a God.
[re=515754]ManchuCandidate[/re]: Why cheat on your taxes when you can buy new tax laws?
The 1980s sideburn guy with ironic trucker hat in your ghey french surrender-movie likes to ‘watch things reproduce’. Are farmers the original furries?
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: I think by Norm Coleman (a New Yorker, after all) you meant Coen brothers.
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: Thanks for the perspective. That blue-eyed Nazi fuck was making my stomach turn. Blaming the Jews?! For a FARMING crisis?! Really??!!
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: [re=515830]SayItWithWookies[/re]: The people Malle interviewed were intelligent, articulate and knowledgeable people who like a certain way of life. In France, small farmers are protected by the government, so that way of life is still possible. In the US, small farmers are being proletarianized. So then I ask myself, “Are you surprised at this? You didn’t know this has been going on for fifty years?” But it’s different when these people tell you about it. Maybe it’s the way Malle gets it out of them.
[re=515754]ManchuCandidate[/re]: Hey, that’s me!
O/T, in case of you’re following FamilyGuyGate:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/2/18/838448/-Actor-with-Down-Syndrome-Puts-Palin-in-Her-Place
Down Syndrome actor can do an interview without a handprompter.
The other thing that might drive a man to babble incoherently about taxes, set his wife and kid on fire, and fly a plane into a building is if he has teh ghey but hates admitting it.
Needs more fertilizer bombs.
[re=515836]predilectrix[/re]: I forgot the most important Minnesodan Jews of all!!! Three screenings of _Blood Simple_ for my penance.
Boy, that takes me back, to the 80′s when we lost the farm and were all horribly depressed and each of us went crazy in our own special way and in many cases still are.
Thanks!
“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
[re=515849]Aurelio[/re]: Clearly the farmer dude wasn’t a stereotypical yokel-don’t-know-what’s-good-for-him teabagger possesed of ignorant rage against minorities — yet even he was feeling swept along on the tide of frustration and resentment that was building. Problem is, we have a society where the little people do most of the struggling and suffering, while several notches above them, fat bald white guys who inherited Daddy’s company are buffered from failure by suitcases full of other people’s money and feel this comfort enables them to lecture the rest of the world on the value of hard work.
And like a bunch of damn fools — or maybe freshmen at a fraternity hazing — the people at the bottom don’t look to reform the entire system, but prefer to struggle through the constant humiliation so that they can be the guys on top inflicting the pain on others. Unfortunately, they’ve been conditioned to believe that, like a fraternity, three years of being a peon earns you a ticket to be the bully. Unfortunately the economic world is a lot more stratified and the top is far less accessible to the people at the bottom than a frat is.
And the ones at the top are increasingly getting the rules changed to benefit them, while every time someone tries to make the system more equitable, they’re accused of inciting class war. And people invested in the fake-frat system — even the ones without a chance of ever getting very far off the bottom rung — are invested enough in the chance of making it that they react viscerally to the idea that someone wants to make the system unfair to the winners.
Wanna test this theory? Walk into any convenience store, tell the first person you see that the lottery is a scam and should be outlawed.
Anyway, people buy the dream and end up advocating for the reality that works against their ever achieving that dream. How do we fix this? Education. Not just the three R’s, but also critical thinking — the ability to tell what works and what doesn’t. The more educated the populace and the stronger their ability to tell good data from crap, the better people will be at creating an equitable society.
[re=515865]SayItWithWookies[/re]: Good post. I hope you’re right about education as a potential solution. I used to think that, too. Then someone pointed out to me that America has had the greatest expansion of higher education of any nation in the world since the advent of the GI bill in the late 1940s. But are we any better as a people? Maybe education isn’t the answer. People change the system that they live under when conditions become intolerable. This happens causally, and is not the product of reasoning.
Being an angry atheist from Texas, all of a sudden I am scared for my own sanity and the wellbeing of those around me. D: Good thing I don’t have access to an airplane. All I have is a banged-up Sentra with a Donald Judd bumper sticker—neither of which is any kind of potent rebellion/destruction instrument.
Why do I read you, Wonkette? You don’t do anything good to me. For many years now you’ve made me froth at the mouth with impotent rage at all the ways in which we’re fucked. And I read history and I see what a harrowing struggle every single inch on the road towards some truer democracy has been in this reluctant, nominally democratic parliamentary plutocracy. And I listen to spooky subversives like Noam Chomsky and Elizabeth Warren and NPR and recognize the injustices they’re talking about around me.
It all makes me nauseous. How does someone in my position—a white, fat 20-something non-land-owning male whose only tangible source of oppression is the fresh, fascist dress code at his cushy, boring, white-collar, allegedly “creative” job—ever get an outlet and venue and organization to change anything at all? I can’t even make peace with the fact that any change I can bring about in my lifetime will be slight and fought with much bloody tears (look at civil rights, universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, etc).
Do I try to work for the reformation of prisons? Immigration reform? Reducing the grasp of the weird, abstracted feudalism in which we exist? Getting creationist dentists off the Texas Board of Education? Educating the dumb hicks in Minnesota who think Jews did this to them? (Is this last one even possible? All these Teabaggers and like manipulated fools don’t even know they’re being fucked, and they see me as the dandy cultured Antichrist and the source of all their problems. They are unreachable. Maybe their kids will not be?)
All of these sound like multi-generational, thankless efforts, and I have mouths to feed. I don’t have any time to dedicate myself to causes that I will not even scratch the surface of.
And yet I can’t not care. Why can’t I just sell out, work hard on dumb shit I don’t really like, like most of my ancestors before me? Why the fuck do I feel so entitled to my instant revolution? Why do I read you, Wonkette? You make it all worse.
[re=515857]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: Or better yet, A Serious Man. Ugh, I loved/loathed seeing my childhood trotted out on the screen: family dinners at The Embers, Ron Meshbesher commercials, tornado drills, tanning with reflectors…
And St. Cloud, for all its shortcomings (including the drunkest students outside of Faber College), has its charms. About 10 years ago I tried ordering a glass of wine at a huge, 2-story bar downtown, and they couldn’t locate a drop, red or white, anywhere. But if I wanted Hamm’s, Schmidt’s, Schlitz, Leinie, Bud, or the hard stuff, I was in the right place.
[re=515869]Aurelio[/re]: Higher ed seems less high than it used to be, and is increasingly focused on development of professional/practical skills rather than “character” (the end result, as the Greeks would argue, of strengthening the mind through logic, aesthetics, and other disciplines). So, while I agree education is the answer, that kind of education isn’t much on tap any longer. (Sorry, [re=515871]MysteriousHoatzin[/re]: I’ve really depressed you now!)
[re=515869]Aurelio[/re]: Then someone pointed out to me that America has had the greatest expansion of higher education of any nation in the world since the advent of the GI bill in the late 1940s. But are we any better as a people?
Oh, absolutely one hundred percent freaking yes we are better off as a people than we were in the late 1940s. Black people can vote (yes, they’ve been legally able to for quite some time before that, but we know the reality was somewhat different). Old people on a pension barely enough to feed them can now get basic medical care, no questions asked. Education, while still sadly deficient, is more available at a more standardized rate. Women in college aren’t diligently shuffled to the fluffier courses so the boys can study the real stuff. Almost everyone in the country has access to clean drinking water, air that won’t leave them gasping, a decent wage with recourse if they’re treated unfairly, a car that won’t kill them, a fridge that won’t blow up or destroy the ozone layer (which used to be the only two choices a while back, but we forget that) and on and on and on.
These came about not through prayer and not through unfettered free markets. They came about through education — the process of tens of thousands more people who knew about chemistry, engineering, sociology, the law, metallurgy, broadcasting, organizing, history, quantum mechanics, agriculture and dozens of other fields.
Education does incredible things — too many of which we take for granted. The challenge that remains is use education to foster better citizens: people with more critical thinking skills, who can tell a slogan from a plan and a celebrity endorsement from a double-blind controlled study. We have a lot of highly-educated technocrats (though not enough) but they can still be fooled by carnival barker tricks — sometimes more so, as expertise in one field can sometimes make a person think he’s an expert in all kinds of other things.
And it can be done. One of the best examples, believe it or not, is the officer corps of our military. We have very rigorous graduate academies of military science where officers are taught to judge their own and their colleagues actions with a clinical impartiality — lives and the progress of nations depends on it. This too has been sorely corrupted by the Dubya experience and must be repaired — but our officer corps harbors some of the most lucid and impartial historians and strategists who have ever walked this earth. And while many of them were exiled for saying the plain and obvious truth, their position has been vindicated. And if the value of education can survive the crucible of our modern military, then it’s gold — period.
But critical thinking and impartiality are the key. A brilliant engineer who thinks all taxes are bad but wants more out of his government might not be much of a voter.
I keep picturing the uprising his manifesto could inspire. A speeding Escalade slams through the patio and into the packed dining room of a three and half star restaurant. Waving her fist outside the window, the doomed driver screams “36%!! FOK YOU PEOPLE! I just bought this damned car with that card! CAPITALISM?! WAKE UP!” blam carnage
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: Garrison Keillor is Jewish?
Here’s my take on the Teabag Terrorist: http://www.gurukalehuru.wordpress.com
I’ve read his manifesto and, to a certain extent, feel his pain, but one thing struck me: the guy flew his own plane into the building. He owned a plane. Planes cost a fuckload of money. Why didn’t he sell it and settle at least some of his tax problem, publish the manifesto and not kill himself and possibly some government drones in the process.
V572625694: One my life, bucket list, goals is to do a remake of ‘My Dinner With Andre’.
Two people alone in a room talking, how hard can that be?
I figure with the highly educated populace that America is currently composed of, I can’t miss with a Project like that.
Oh, wait, right…
This manifesto thing is getting out of hand.
Yeah, yeah, let’s all kick Reagan around in 2010, like these hooplehead farmers weren’t already fucked by Carter’s 20% interest rates for farm operating capital and boom/bust in grain prices in the 70′s, even then it was a world market. And Blondie’s prognostications about violence “this coming winter” didn’t exactly unfold either unless you count a few dust-ups down the Sidetrack Tap. I’ll guarantee you the cropland these people farmed is still in production, they just got caught in the tractor’s nuts, as is said around here, with the decline of the family farm in response to worldwide market pressures. Farming: either compete your way to a third-world standard of living, innovate or get out…
And you Yellow Dog Dems out there, remember all your howling about Reagan’s deficit these fucks are whining about? Well, we bankrupted the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War with some profoundly unproductive spending yet that deficit didn’t destroy the nation. Maybe you could repeatedly remind the righties of that in the ongoing Hopey’s Stimulus debate. Heh, heh, Hopey & Reagan, two sides of the same coin…
[re=515885]stanpan[/re]: Shithead could have poured gasoline on himself and struck a match. Nice big fire, plenty of attention to his stupid manifesto and less chance of killing bystanders. Would have been a win win.
[re=515889]plowman[/re]: The very best thing about RayGun?
He’s DEAD.
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: Interesting observation. Sort of like a self-fulfilling prophecy or expectation.
The lesson of Joe Stack is: don’t let other people control your thoughts and life. Fix your own problems and don’t expect others to. And most of all .. use your brain. It comes in handy from time to time.
[re=515891]x111e7thst[/re]: That’s what YOU think, he’s been reanimated and is ready to take the stage in 2012. What do you think all this tea-bagging is leading up to anyway? Reagan-Palin 2012, Undead and Braindead for AMERICA! USA, USA, USA!!
[re=515865]SayItWithWookies[/re]: Wookie, agree, but I also think the generation that grew up indoctrinated with a complete terror of SOCIALISM has to die off before anything changes. This is the hypocritical generation that grew fat under a 95% top tax rate in the 1950s, could get a job just by breathing, were the first to get Social Security and Medicare, and have no clue about reality today.
[re=515875]SayItWithWookies[/re]: You just about said it all (again!). Interesting how something like this kinda takes the snark out of us, at least for a little while.
[re=515768]DC Hates Me[/re]: Thanks for the link. Rosie could make any song relevant.
[re=515825]Come here a minute[/re]: I HAD forgotten that nightmare of a gem (gem of a nightmare?). Thanks for the reminder.
[re=515896]plowman[/re]: I prefer King Tut/Miz Campbell the Soup Nancy year after next.
http://goph3r.com/su
Air jordan(1-24)shoes $33
BOOT $50
Nike shox(R4,NZ,OZ,TL1,TL2,TL3) $35
Handbags(Coach lv fendi d&g) $35
Tshirts (Polo ,ed hardy,lacoste) $16
Jean(True Religion,ed hardy,coogi) $30
Sunglasses(Oakey,coach,gucci,Armaini) $16
New era cap $15
Bikini (Ed hardy,polo) $25
FREE sHIPPING
http://goph3r.com/su
Welcome to—————– http://www.9elife.com ———————————-
All kinds of world brand shoes,jeans,t-shirts,bikini,beach pants,handbags,wallets,sunglasses,belt,caps,watches etc..Nike shox(R4,NZ,OZ,TL1,TL2,TL3) $35,Sunglasses(Oakey,coach,gucci,Armaini) $16,Sunglasses(Oakey,coach,gucci,Armaini) $16
New era cap $15
————— have some cheap things …———————
————— have some good gift …———————
————————— free shipping!
—————– http://www.9elife.com ———————————-
[re=515871]MysteriousHoatzin[/re]: Tnx. I feel the same way, but you said it better. Now let me get back to crying in my beer.
[re=515883]gurukalehuru[/re]: No, he’s just ugly.
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: I grew up in St. Cloud, Minnesota–which I believe recently earned the dubious distinction of being the most anti-Semitic city in the United States…
That’s odd. I used to date a really sexy guy from St. Cloud, (in Connecticut), and not only was he not in the least anti-Semitic, he seemed to love anything about me that says “Jewish.” He would always laugh (in a good-natured way) at me when I spoke too quickly, saying I spoke, “faster’n a New York minute,” and I saw no evidence of any prejudice. I mean, I know you can’t generalize, but it surprises me that you even say that. I just would never have guessed it, knowing him. I never heard a racist or anti-Semitic word from him; I don’t believe he had it in him.
Oh, and I like the way you guys say “roof” all wrong. It’s cute.
[re=515889]plowman[/re]: Wrong. Brezhnev bankrupted the Soviet Union. If anything, Reagan’s macho insecurity saber-rattling did nothing but prolong the end of the end of the USSR.
Are Obama and Reagan both in the end a pair of neoliberals as you suggest? One could easily make that case, sure. But if you’re going to be an asshole, at least get your history right and if you don’t mind, bring the snark.
[re=515892]DC Hates Me[/re]: What I wonder is how come the few times I’ve gotten to a really bad place, all I’ve wanted to do was bang my own head against a wall, and have never wanted to take anyone else out with me, and Joe Crazy chose another path.
Perhaps the first solution to the problem is MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT for everyone who needs it, even for free. How much more fucking obvious does it have to get? Fuck it all. I want to scream at Scott Brown until he shits his pants. Is the fucking asshole trying to get someone else to fly a plane into a gubbmint building? Irresponsible teabagging motherfucking pencil dick. He’s presented with his first real chance as a senator to do some good, and instead he actually encourages more violence. DEFEND THAT, PLOWMAN, you motherfucker.
Riley’s not in this movie at all.
[re=515875]SayItWithWookies[/re]: You’ve listed some real positive changes since the 1940s. On the other hand, America has become an imperialist nation that tortures people. Our streets are littered with homeless people, many of them veterans. Both parents have to work now to support a family in the same standard of living as they used to have when only one parent worked. Higher education isn’t free at state universities anymore (yes, it used to be free!), and graduates are loaded with a ton of debt as soon as they leave school. The big banks and insurance companies have consolidated their control over the economy and the political system, with Supreme-Court-approval. Yes, black people can vote and sit at the lunch counter now, but, with some token exceptions their economic situation is as bad as ever. I could go on. But you get the point. A swami once told me that the total sum of good and evil in the universe always adds up to zero. I’m not sure that’s a metaphysical truth, but it sure applies to the US since WW II, despite the enormous growth in higher education.
Too much thinking. The only Malle with whose work I’m intimately familiar is the late, great Anna Malle.
(SFW) http://www.celebsdb.com/1/pornstars/anna-malle.jpg
Louis Malle also directed “The Lovers,” which led to the famous “I know it when I see it” line about obscenity from the U.S. Supreme Court; “Murmur of the Heart,” about an incestous affair between a mother and her biological son; “Pretty Baby,” which featured a teen or pre-teen Brooke Shields in sexually provocative poses and scenes; and “Atlantic City,” which featured Susan Sarandon rubbing lemons all over her body while someone else watched her from afar.
So he definately knew something about human character, good and bad.
[re=515942]gfvmhq[/re]: eat shit and die, cocksucker. And no, I don’t mean that in a nice way.
Hey, gfvmhq isn’t a bad guy. He has good prices on Pajama Jeans.
[re=516065]teebob2000[/re]: Seriously, lighten up, everybody.
Boobies exist: http://boobz.dk/ (NevenatinybitSWF)
[re=515729]Jim Newell[/re]: Merci beaucoup. Lovely to wake up and read a discussion generated by a mention of the great Louis Malle. You saved my day from being 100% devoted to an asshole golfer.
[re=515788]Tommmcatt[/re]: [re=515875]SayItWithWookies[/re]: Merci beaucoup to you, too. Excellent comments.
[re=515857]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: THE most important Minnesota Jew: Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, raised in Hibbing.
And please, everyone, in addition to the other titles mentioned here, also see Au Revoir, Les Enfants and Vanya on 42nd Street, if you have not.
[re=515875]SayItWithWookies[/re]: All that to say, with complete correctness I might add, that in general, the world is WAY better off now than it ever was at a previous point in history, but we tend to forget that when 1 person decides to do something stupid.
Perhaps instead of reacting to this guy’s delusions by wringing our hands and wondering how it happened, we’re better off remembering how many times it DOESN’T happen. Every year, month, day, hour, minute, and second there are thousands of people moving around our nation in 2 ton weapons called automobiles, and the vast majority of them never choose to run headfirst into a pedestrian in a crosswalk, or fill their back seat with gasoline and drive into a building, or even run through a stop light just because they’re pissed off at . Is that not equally, if not MORE unusual than an isolated act of violence?
What I gather from yesterday’s act of failure and cowardice is that life is a precious and fleeting gift. Wasting that gift trying to figure out why assholes chose to do stupid shit is a recipe for misery. Instead, I chose to shake my head, murmer ‘that’s fucked’ under my breath, and move on, because it’s really the only thing any of us CAN do…
[re=516051]Aurelio[/re]: Which is exactly why we need more education in critical thinking — it’s a skewed society we live in when people are given advanced tools to do things like brain surgery and flying airplanes, but are totally lost when in an unfamiliar setting. We have, as a consequence, people with PhDs who don’t seem to understand why evolution is true or why Libertarianism has never created a perfect society anywhere. Of course, guess which group is opposed to spending money on education and wants to suck money away from public schools so kids can be taught at home by their unqualified fundamentalist parents?
[re=516327]SayItWithWookies[/re]: It should be pointed out too (if it hasn’t been already) that the goals of education need to be de-coupled from the goals of capitalism. The belief that ideas, information, or learning must be “useful,” which is to say “profitable” or “practical,” is profoundly destructive. I mean: what is the practical use of Bataille or Eliot?
There isn’t any.
Our American distaste for things lacking clear applicability is one of the reasons why we’ve been saddled with (the clearly evil) NCLB. The protocols of NCLB are causing history and civics classes to disappear. For fuck’s sake!
[re=516087]gurukalehuru[/re]: HEY, better be kind to our Chinese overlords.
[re=516162]Jukesgrrl[/re]: I know that Jukes, I just used the name by which Bobby Z. is known by the rest of the world. I even have my own four degrees of separation from Dylan: he dated the mother of my stepmom’s best friend from high school. Her parents made her break up with him because he had a motorcycle.
[re=515989]Katydid[/re]: It’s not that odd–I think that whenever any St. Cloudian with half a brain left manages to escape into the world and actually meet some Jews (to most people who live in St. Cloud, they are about as real as leprechauns), s/he will usually realize that they are, in fact, just normal people. Or, in the case of your beau, develop a nice little fetish. (Blondes become really boring in this neck of the woods.)
[re=515890]x111e7thst[/re]: Setting himself on fire would have been an act of self-sacrifice and the act of a revolutionary but our man wasn’t into that shit. No way. His thing was about being pissed off and making others pay for it then hiding his murderous desires in a screed meant to make the rest of us “relate” to him because yeah the government and the greedy rich DO suck. But see that’s just what motherfuckers like that do, they take our legitimate grievances and poison it with rationalizations for murderous acts. That’s terrorism 101.
[re=516000]ForTheTurnstiles[/re]: Sure, Leonid’s junk habit was getting a little excessive even for the 70′s (why do you think they invaded Afghanistan anyway?) but the combination of hamfisted Communism, about 85 different ethnicities and, most importantly, the fabulously expensive Cold War was too much, Reagan’s defense spending just sent them on over the edge. If you’re going to be an asshole, get your history straight… And no, Reagan and Hopey are clearly opposites but both big spenders, so one more time only try reading slowly while avoid bong-hits between words: If the righties think Reagan saved us all with deficit defense spending then why the fuck can’t the lefties seize on exactly that and advance the idea that more deficit stimulus spending is the same strategy against a different foe, blah, emergency, blah, crises, just let Hopey pretty it up and do what he does best.
And might I add, now this thread is done, that Rutger Hauer has a fabulous accent coach.
[re=515821]DeLand DeLakes[/re]: So you’re saying that Prince is a Jewish Seventh Day Adventist Jevohah’s Witness? Cause I’d probably believe that. Anyway, the overarching point is that Minnesotan Lutherans and Catholics ain’t done shit. Even Garrison Keillor was raised a congregationalist (whatever that is).
Anyway, great film. I watched all nine parts at work.
[re=515871]MysteriousHoatzin[/re]: exercise, fatty!
[re=515875]SayItWithWookies[/re]: metallurgy!!!
[re=515889]plowman[/re]: death squads!
Comments on this entry are closed.