"There is footage of him fleeing for his life while Capitol Police officers like Brian Sicknick died defending the rule of law." To even write that sentence took unprecedented levels of outright lying propaganda and\or blind stupidity. Both of those statements are completely false. It isn't MAGA dividing the country, it's morons like Crow who keep spewing that crap and FOMENTING division and vitriol. What an absolute turd in the punchbowl.
I don't have any particular comment to make about the contents of this blog, though what I do want to say is alluded to in it: 1968.
People tell themselves that however bad things are, at least they're not as bad as they were in 1968. But anyone who had something of an adult awareness of the world in 1968, as I did, knows that what we are going through in this era makes 1968 seem a wonderland we wish we could return to.
The divisive issue - there was really only one - in 1968 was the war in Vietnam. Yes, we had the King assassination and the riots which followed, and all of that was terrible. Then, two months later, RFK was assassinated. There is a book in this which I don't think anyone has written yet, and it may be a novel: I think that in hard to define ways, the RFK assassination had a harder effect on the country's morale than his brother's had had.
So yes, it was an awful year.
Yet, we were a homogeneous country. Except the hundred or so contemptible rich snots who would go on to form The Weather Underground, no one on the farthest edges of the Left would have entertained the idea of same sex marriage as anything but folly. Wokeness, with its Establishment fostered and maintained, self generated hypersensitivities, pronoun correctness, and organized efforts to mutilate children in the pursuit of supposed gender reassignment, wasn't imagined by our most dystopian writers. As far as I am aware ( because no one I know of except possibly Milton Friedman and a handful of other elitists would have entertained the notion ), someone who would have suggested open borders would have been seen as mad.
In 1968, it was still the norm for families to be able to buy homes on the basis of a single income earner; the possibility that I would live to see most people in their twenties in despair because of their certitude that home ownership is forever beyond them wouldn't have occurred to me.
We are so screwed in so many ways which are so much worse than the Weltenshchaung of America in 1968 that I haven't got the heart to delve any farther into them.
I lived through those times. The event that made it all so much worse on top of all the shocking assassinations was Kent State. Until troops start shooting at and killing college students, I think those times in the 60’s and early 70’s were worse than what we are going through today.
I respectfully disagree, Vero, because my brothers, relatives and neighborhood friends in Vietnam were getting killed (58,000) and wounded (300,000) in numbers and over years that doesn’t come close to comparing to Kent State (4 killed, 9 dead, 1 day). Kent State was rich college kids; Vietnam was poor and middle class men, the vast majority white. My Philly neighborhood had hundreds there in any given week. 3 of my brothers and I served in the military; 1 100% disabled from his tour in Nam. Kent State was a tragedy but nothing at all like the tragedy or impact of Vietnam here, there and internationally. Take care, amigo.
No worries, amigo. Thanks for saying that. I agree about the horrors of the Vietnam War. The protests of the 60’s were an effort to express outrage and end the war. Those peaceful demonstrations meant so much. I didn’t mean to imply that the killing of the Kent State students was in any way equivalent to all the dead and wounded in that war. No way. But for me when they were shot to death on a U.S. campus it was the end of the hope that we could as young people change things for the better, make a better world and “Give peace a chance.” Very sad. Condolences for your losses.
“Gerald Casale, visual artist and future bassist/singer of Devo, also witnessed the shootings.[53][54][55] In 2005, Casale told the Vermont Review:
All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew.
Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running from them!
I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.[56]
In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 pm curfew. It was open season on the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instance when the governor gives the order. All of the class action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble.[56]”
In Philly we have over 7 murders every week for decades. We have over 2,000 shootings every year. I already gave you the Vietnam data. To put it directly, while Kent state was personal to you, relative to Philly and Vietnam it was paradise, even on the one day of their 4 deaths. Rest of us have that and more every single week for over 40 years.
PS: Bobby, also spot on about how RFK's murder was probably more traumatizing for the public than that of his brother... maybe it was the combination of the two that was so wrenching. But, good point.
It's mysterious. But leadership can make an astonishing difference in a nation's course. When JFK was killed, people were appalled, but no one thought the nation would never be the same again.
I was 19 years old. I went to a store to buy some cigarettes. The TV was on behind the cashier. She told me the president is dead— he was shot and killed. I said what president? She said the president of the United States. I thought at first maybe it was a different president not our president. I immediately went home and turned on the TV. I was in shock. the next day I went to my Shakespeare class. I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan. It was a large lecture class. the teacher whose name I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember (Birdsall, perhaps) gave the most brilliant lecture that helped us get over the tragedy. At least it helped me. We were reading Othello. He compared Oswald’s killing of JFK to what Iago did to Othello. It was about evil, really powerful. Somehow it articulated enough to bring me some peace and comfort.
Much later, I did some research into the etymology of the word evil, and from what I understand from that it’s derived from the Indo European word for wolf. A wolf will kill for food, stalk and hunt for food maybe also for territory. Something to think about. The fear of wolves has been deeply embedded in the human culture. There was even a relatively recent movie about wolves with Liam Nielsen. A person who acts like a wolf is evil supposedly in the mind of the wolf-scared humans. We were once prey, not predator.
It was the darkest of days, no doubt about it. The fact that because it was late November, it was evening by 6:00 PM, made it somehow darker.
It was talked about at the time, and it's probably been written about, that when The White House Press Office issued a statement in early November listing the President's coming itinerary in Texas, people in the United States and well wishers abroad had a foreboding about Dallas' being on the list.
My parents and I ( I was 11 ) had the same reaction. So help me, the following is true: at breakfast on that Friday morning, I said to my mother that Kennedy was in Dallas that day and I hoped nobody would try to shoot him.
As I say, there was no small amount of foreboding in millions of people. The Secret Service was jittery. They were also hungover, having been up until 5 AM partying in Fort Worth, which disgusting fact was by gentlemen's agreement with the press not gone into.
If you google Kennedy assassination Altgens photo, you'll see a photo you've probably seen before. It was taken between the time Kennedy was hit in the neck and the head shot. You can see that of the four Secret Service agents on the running board of the backup limo, only Clint Hill is looking ahead at the presidential limo. The others are looking behind them, knowing instinctively that the shot had come from behind.
The best analysis now suggests strongly that as many as ten seconds elapsed between the first shot and the head shot. It's hard for me not to wonder if a Secret Service which wasn't hungover might have reacted correctly.
Do you remember Criswell, of Criswell Predicts fame? He was the supposed psychic who made what seem to have been deliberately absurd predictions. I learned yesterday that in May, 1963, he predicted that Kennedy wouldn't be a candidate for reelection in 1964 because of a "mishap" which would befall him in November. Isn't that weird?
Plenty of weirdness is associated with that day for a lot of people. That year, I was in 6th grade, and did school patrol at 2 PM for the under 3rd grade crowd. The kid who was my patrol partner that year and I had learned about the assassination a half hour earlier, and were talking about it, of course.There was no traffic that afternoon.
In the late 1970s, he was sent to prison for something like thirty years for having struck and killed a child while intoxicated.
Yes, it was indeed a dark time. I wasn’t aware of all those forebodings about Dallas or if I was I don’t remember it now. That’s amazing that you had that premonition, especially so young.
I saw a documentary based on a book about the killing of JFK arguing that it was a Secret Service man who shot Kennedy. He raised his gun and lost his balance when the car jumped forward, and fired into Kennedy. This particular documentary that I saw actually identified the Secret Service person in question. You’re right they were all hung over from partying the night before . Which was insane if there were legitimate worries about Kennedy going to Dallas. The documentary said there was no way from the position that Oswald was in that he could’ve made those shots in that succession and also that different bullets were found, i.e. bullets came from different guns. The author of the documentary built a complete replica of the shooting, and they timed the shots. They had a train system for the position of the car, its traveling speed and the height of the position of Oswald, and only one of the sharpshooters they hired could achieve those shots in that succession from that angle After three tries. So the argument was there was more than one shooter, the other shooter being the Secret Service guy.
JFK’s body being flown from Dallas to Washington and the big fight with the Dallas hospital doctors who wanted to do the autopsy in Dallas are very suspicious to me. Also, are you aware that RFK Jr. talked to Tucker about his father‘s shooting and said that there was another gun involved in that too—not just the gun of Sirhan Sirhan—in other words, RFK was also shot by more than one person.
Vero, I recommend the following to you, both on YouTube:
1. LEMMiNO - that's the name of the channel. He is, as he says of himself, a Swedish guy in his twenties who enjoys making videos. His latest is an approximately ninety minute long graphic analysis of the assassination. It's the most astonishing thing of its kind I've ever seen. If you want to know what happened in those seconds, and how it happened, watch that video.
2. Sean Munger - Munger is a credentialed historian. His two part, approximately three hour long analysis of the conspiracy hypotheses is brilliant.
The Howard Donahue/Bonar Menninger idea, that the Secret Service agent lost control of his BAR and accidentally discharged the shot which hit Kennedy in the head, hasn't been discredited, it's been thumpingly, sliced 'n' diced discredited.
I lost the enthusiasm I'd had for RFK, Jr., when I read that he believes that a second gunman was involved in the death of his father. I don't want someone that irrational in the Presidency.
Isn't it odd, Vero, that in that packed kitchen, in which Sirhan had to stand on a table to fire his shots, not one person saw a second shooter?
His father didn't believe that the CIA had killed Jack. Of course, that doesn't mean that there wasn't another shooter in his own assassination five years later.
Kennedy assassination hypotheses - both Kennedys - melt into nothing if subjected to scrutiny. Not only could Oswald have made the shots, I, at 11, probably could have made them. Have you ever been to Dealey Plaza? It's bizarre that in photos and film it seems as large as it does. It's compact, small, really.
If you want a book which is an excellent analysis of the JFK assassination, I recommend Gerald Posner's painstaking, "Case Closed."
Bobby Lime, you are so so right on (to use a term from that era) about today's division being infinitely worse than 1968. So nice to think that some people still have that kind of historical perspective to offer. Yes, the trials and traumas of 1968, serious as they were, happened against a backdrop of rising prosperity and bedrock national unity... today, not so much.
And yes, there is much more that could be said about how today's crises as compared to 1968's, but it pains the heart to even think about it.
Well, you grasp them, too, or it wouldn't have resonated with you as it did. 1968 stands out because "The Sixties" were primarily a coastal phenomenon, with outposts in Chicago and college towns. Otherwise, in most ways, the 1960s were far more like the 1950s than not.
When RFK's funeral train made its way from NYC to DC, there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, many of whom probably wouldn't have voted for RFK if he'd lived, standing solemnly watching the train pass. Some were saluting, others pledging allegiance. There are plenty of photos of this. They're extremely moving.
We had that kind of unity then. The two sides weren't out to cut one another's throats. Democrats weren't thrilled when Nixon won in November, but Wednesday was just another day in America.
Again, I find your insights to be quite perceptive, which I guess is just a sneaky way of saying that they much align with mine, esp the part about the bi-partisan expression of grief displayed along the route of RFK's funeral train. Yes, even in that grim, divisive year of 1968, national unity was predominant.
But the seeds of today's near civil war-level divisiveness were being planted in the late 60s and early 70s... faced with the defeat of their frontal assault on both the idea and reality of "America." the so-called "New Left" retreated to a Long Game to achieve their revolutionary aims--thus began the long march through the institutions, as it became known--beginning with academia, which the establishment more or less conceded to the New Left as a bribe to stop burning/bombing things down. "They can't cause any trouble there," I believe was the thinking--as if control of the intellectual apparatus of the United States of America was not something to be too worried about.
So yeah, 50 years later, the lineal descendants of "The New Left" control virtually every major American institution, and here we are contemplating a Second Civil War--who'd have thunk it?
Exactly. Two generations of academic indoctrination ( dumbing down ), the gradual turning of the news media from vaguely liberal but sane and fair to overt Leftist advocacy, and, in my Christian certitude, the principalities and powers whose greatest effort has been expended on shaping popular culture.
Here's how things have changed in a quarter century: when Bill Clinton got into his scandal with Miss Lewinski, I remember the embarrassment on the faces of quite a few female newscasters in the early days of the story. Imagine! A quarter century ago, we still had a culture in which modesty and boundaries were not seen as hopelessly retrograde.
This will stomp on people's feet and I don't care: age or lack of natural physical attractiveness are entirely understandable reasons why many people may not be as appealing to look at as others. But it's certainly not disconnected from the trashing of moral standards that sometime in the 1990s, The New Slobbery began to make its appearance.
You and I remember a time when people took pride in their appearances. Remember how beautiful women's dress designs were when we were kids? Remember when the annual Ten Best Dressed Men's list was significant? Remember grooming, in the good sense? Remember when people didn't dress like utter slobs in public? Remember when few men had tattoos, and almost no women had them? When someone might dye her hair, but it would be purple, and crewcutted, besides?
I'm astonished by the fact that 60% of America's young qualify as obese.
It's all saddening, and the slobification of this country is what you'd expect in a decadent people.
Fun review, Sasha. I can see that movie criticism might be your prime metier. Can't wait to see it.
But: let's hope Alex Garland's artistic vision is more nuanced than is his political analysis, i.e.,
"Left and right, are ideological arguments about how to run a state. That’s all they are." Really? that's all that divides us today? I think it goes a little deeper than that, involving contrasting visions regarding how to live, and why. Differences regarding the role of the state is only one part of that larger debate.
From the first review: "the Missouri politician who spent months fermenting discontent and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election"
I'm looking forward to the day ChatGPT takes over. It will be woke, but at least it will know the difference between "ferment" and "foment."
There must be something like Gell-Mann Amnesia at play on the left when they read a review like that: 'Sure, this person lacks basic grammar skills, but I'm sure the review is otherwise spot-on.'
I really like Alex Garland’s call for tolerance. What happened to the idea of tolerating another’s point of view? We need to get back to that. We’re all fellow travelers on Planet Earth. Working together to solve our common problems, using our various abilities to reach common goals, is the way to go. These are heart-breaking times but I hope they will lead to a new flowering of our human spirit. Looking forward to this movie.
Well, Vero, I appreciate your call for tolerance, seems on the surface to be a good idea. But I'm not going to "tolerate" pediatric genital mutilation as public policy. You?
Could be that the "kumbaya" approach to life is in part responsible for the mess we are in. Just something to think about.
About “kumbaya” —from a NYT article: “The first known recording of the song was made in Darien, Ga., in 1926, sung by a Gullah Geechee man named H. Wylie. The chorus was actually “Come By Here,” which in the Gullah’s Creole accent sounds like cum-by-yah. Over time, that pronunciation transformed into what we know today as kumbaya. The hymn was a call to God to come and help the people as they faced oppression.”
The meaning of “tolerate” I have in mind is in line with its origins in Latin (see link). It turns out there are some current definitions that imply sympathy or support— so the meaning of the word is more varied than I realized. I do not support the idea of minor kids undergoing these surgeries! No way. Nor do I support biological males competing in women’s sports, etc, etc.
The film is now on my shortlist. I appreciate the balanced review. Although why you bother using Rolling Stone for a reference is beyond me. I’m guessing that part of the director’s message for someone like me is - if i expect the Left to see their flaws, I should be open to seeing my flaws as well.
Just watched the trailer and now maybe the movie is too close to reality for me to handle seeing it. Too many people are brainwashed today. The civil war could happen over people still up in arms that Trump didn’t wear a mask!
"Left and right, are ideological arguments about how to run a state"? Not quite. Left is how to tell others how to live their lives and spend & invest their earnings; right (at least the "true" right, the libertarian right) is how to protect citizens from the rapacious greed of others who would tell others how to live their lives and spend & invest their earnings.
H/T to Pacificus for zeroing in on this crucial distinction.
I’m with you Sasha, I thought for sure this film would be some kind of woke scribe against Trump/MAGA predictive programming, where they are the “bad guys” who must be defeated at all costs in order to save the country. But apparently that’s not the case, and I definitely look forward to seeing it…
Movie reviews should have died with Siskel and Ebert. Blah blah blah go see a movie and make up your own mind about it. Why go in with preconceived notions written by mostly half-wits?
Apropros of nothing, but it popped into my mind just now: if the left wanted peace, there’d be no violence. If the right wanted violence, there’d be no left.
"There is footage of him fleeing for his life while Capitol Police officers like Brian Sicknick died defending the rule of law." To even write that sentence took unprecedented levels of outright lying propaganda and\or blind stupidity. Both of those statements are completely false. It isn't MAGA dividing the country, it's morons like Crow who keep spewing that crap and FOMENTING division and vitriol. What an absolute turd in the punchbowl.
Biden still believes that capitol police were killed on J6.
I think Biden knows damn well capitol police were not killed on J6 but he hopes you don't.
I don't have any particular comment to make about the contents of this blog, though what I do want to say is alluded to in it: 1968.
People tell themselves that however bad things are, at least they're not as bad as they were in 1968. But anyone who had something of an adult awareness of the world in 1968, as I did, knows that what we are going through in this era makes 1968 seem a wonderland we wish we could return to.
The divisive issue - there was really only one - in 1968 was the war in Vietnam. Yes, we had the King assassination and the riots which followed, and all of that was terrible. Then, two months later, RFK was assassinated. There is a book in this which I don't think anyone has written yet, and it may be a novel: I think that in hard to define ways, the RFK assassination had a harder effect on the country's morale than his brother's had had.
So yes, it was an awful year.
Yet, we were a homogeneous country. Except the hundred or so contemptible rich snots who would go on to form The Weather Underground, no one on the farthest edges of the Left would have entertained the idea of same sex marriage as anything but folly. Wokeness, with its Establishment fostered and maintained, self generated hypersensitivities, pronoun correctness, and organized efforts to mutilate children in the pursuit of supposed gender reassignment, wasn't imagined by our most dystopian writers. As far as I am aware ( because no one I know of except possibly Milton Friedman and a handful of other elitists would have entertained the notion ), someone who would have suggested open borders would have been seen as mad.
In 1968, it was still the norm for families to be able to buy homes on the basis of a single income earner; the possibility that I would live to see most people in their twenties in despair because of their certitude that home ownership is forever beyond them wouldn't have occurred to me.
We are so screwed in so many ways which are so much worse than the Weltenshchaung of America in 1968 that I haven't got the heart to delve any farther into them.
The 1968 version of the Summer of Love was very different than the 2020 version.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
I lived through those times. The event that made it all so much worse on top of all the shocking assassinations was Kent State. Until troops start shooting at and killing college students, I think those times in the 60’s and early 70’s were worse than what we are going through today.
I respectfully disagree, Vero, because my brothers, relatives and neighborhood friends in Vietnam were getting killed (58,000) and wounded (300,000) in numbers and over years that doesn’t come close to comparing to Kent State (4 killed, 9 dead, 1 day). Kent State was rich college kids; Vietnam was poor and middle class men, the vast majority white. My Philly neighborhood had hundreds there in any given week. 3 of my brothers and I served in the military; 1 100% disabled from his tour in Nam. Kent State was a tragedy but nothing at all like the tragedy or impact of Vietnam here, there and internationally. Take care, amigo.
No worries, amigo. Thanks for saying that. I agree about the horrors of the Vietnam War. The protests of the 60’s were an effort to express outrage and end the war. Those peaceful demonstrations meant so much. I didn’t mean to imply that the killing of the Kent State students was in any way equivalent to all the dead and wounded in that war. No way. But for me when they were shot to death on a U.S. campus it was the end of the hope that we could as young people change things for the better, make a better world and “Give peace a chance.” Very sad. Condolences for your losses.
"4 killed, 9 dead,"?
4 killed, 9 wounded
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
That sounds better
From Wikipedia:
“Gerald Casale, visual artist and future bassist/singer of Devo, also witnessed the shootings.[53][54][55] In 2005, Casale told the Vermont Review:
All I can tell you is that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew.
Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends. We were all running our asses off from these motherfuckers. It was total, utter bullshit. Live ammunition and gasmasks – none of us knew, none of us could have imagined ... They shot into a crowd that was running from them!
I stopped being a hippie and I started to develop the idea of devolution. I got real, real pissed off.[56]
In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 pm curfew. It was open season on the students. We lived in fear. Helicopters surrounding the city with hourly rotating runs out to the West Side and back downtown. All first amendment rights are suspended at the instance when the governor gives the order. All of the class action suits by the parents of the slain students were all dismissed out of court because once the governor announced martial law, they had no right to assemble.[56]”
In Philly we have over 7 murders every week for decades. We have over 2,000 shootings every year. I already gave you the Vietnam data. To put it directly, while Kent state was personal to you, relative to Philly and Vietnam it was paradise, even on the one day of their 4 deaths. Rest of us have that and more every single week for over 40 years.
So do I.
PS: Bobby, also spot on about how RFK's murder was probably more traumatizing for the public than that of his brother... maybe it was the combination of the two that was so wrenching. But, good point.
It's mysterious. But leadership can make an astonishing difference in a nation's course. When JFK was killed, people were appalled, but no one thought the nation would never be the same again.
RFK's murder was like a blow to the solar plexus.
I was 19 years old. I went to a store to buy some cigarettes. The TV was on behind the cashier. She told me the president is dead— he was shot and killed. I said what president? She said the president of the United States. I thought at first maybe it was a different president not our president. I immediately went home and turned on the TV. I was in shock. the next day I went to my Shakespeare class. I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan. It was a large lecture class. the teacher whose name I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember (Birdsall, perhaps) gave the most brilliant lecture that helped us get over the tragedy. At least it helped me. We were reading Othello. He compared Oswald’s killing of JFK to what Iago did to Othello. It was about evil, really powerful. Somehow it articulated enough to bring me some peace and comfort.
Much later, I did some research into the etymology of the word evil, and from what I understand from that it’s derived from the Indo European word for wolf. A wolf will kill for food, stalk and hunt for food maybe also for territory. Something to think about. The fear of wolves has been deeply embedded in the human culture. There was even a relatively recent movie about wolves with Liam Nielsen. A person who acts like a wolf is evil supposedly in the mind of the wolf-scared humans. We were once prey, not predator.
It was the darkest of days, no doubt about it. The fact that because it was late November, it was evening by 6:00 PM, made it somehow darker.
It was talked about at the time, and it's probably been written about, that when The White House Press Office issued a statement in early November listing the President's coming itinerary in Texas, people in the United States and well wishers abroad had a foreboding about Dallas' being on the list.
My parents and I ( I was 11 ) had the same reaction. So help me, the following is true: at breakfast on that Friday morning, I said to my mother that Kennedy was in Dallas that day and I hoped nobody would try to shoot him.
As I say, there was no small amount of foreboding in millions of people. The Secret Service was jittery. They were also hungover, having been up until 5 AM partying in Fort Worth, which disgusting fact was by gentlemen's agreement with the press not gone into.
If you google Kennedy assassination Altgens photo, you'll see a photo you've probably seen before. It was taken between the time Kennedy was hit in the neck and the head shot. You can see that of the four Secret Service agents on the running board of the backup limo, only Clint Hill is looking ahead at the presidential limo. The others are looking behind them, knowing instinctively that the shot had come from behind.
The best analysis now suggests strongly that as many as ten seconds elapsed between the first shot and the head shot. It's hard for me not to wonder if a Secret Service which wasn't hungover might have reacted correctly.
Do you remember Criswell, of Criswell Predicts fame? He was the supposed psychic who made what seem to have been deliberately absurd predictions. I learned yesterday that in May, 1963, he predicted that Kennedy wouldn't be a candidate for reelection in 1964 because of a "mishap" which would befall him in November. Isn't that weird?
Plenty of weirdness is associated with that day for a lot of people. That year, I was in 6th grade, and did school patrol at 2 PM for the under 3rd grade crowd. The kid who was my patrol partner that year and I had learned about the assassination a half hour earlier, and were talking about it, of course.There was no traffic that afternoon.
In the late 1970s, he was sent to prison for something like thirty years for having struck and killed a child while intoxicated.
Yes, it was indeed a dark time. I wasn’t aware of all those forebodings about Dallas or if I was I don’t remember it now. That’s amazing that you had that premonition, especially so young.
I saw a documentary based on a book about the killing of JFK arguing that it was a Secret Service man who shot Kennedy. He raised his gun and lost his balance when the car jumped forward, and fired into Kennedy. This particular documentary that I saw actually identified the Secret Service person in question. You’re right they were all hung over from partying the night before . Which was insane if there were legitimate worries about Kennedy going to Dallas. The documentary said there was no way from the position that Oswald was in that he could’ve made those shots in that succession and also that different bullets were found, i.e. bullets came from different guns. The author of the documentary built a complete replica of the shooting, and they timed the shots. They had a train system for the position of the car, its traveling speed and the height of the position of Oswald, and only one of the sharpshooters they hired could achieve those shots in that succession from that angle After three tries. So the argument was there was more than one shooter, the other shooter being the Secret Service guy.
JFK’s body being flown from Dallas to Washington and the big fight with the Dallas hospital doctors who wanted to do the autopsy in Dallas are very suspicious to me. Also, are you aware that RFK Jr. talked to Tucker about his father‘s shooting and said that there was another gun involved in that too—not just the gun of Sirhan Sirhan—in other words, RFK was also shot by more than one person.
Vero, I recommend the following to you, both on YouTube:
1. LEMMiNO - that's the name of the channel. He is, as he says of himself, a Swedish guy in his twenties who enjoys making videos. His latest is an approximately ninety minute long graphic analysis of the assassination. It's the most astonishing thing of its kind I've ever seen. If you want to know what happened in those seconds, and how it happened, watch that video.
2. Sean Munger - Munger is a credentialed historian. His two part, approximately three hour long analysis of the conspiracy hypotheses is brilliant.
The Howard Donahue/Bonar Menninger idea, that the Secret Service agent lost control of his BAR and accidentally discharged the shot which hit Kennedy in the head, hasn't been discredited, it's been thumpingly, sliced 'n' diced discredited.
I lost the enthusiasm I'd had for RFK, Jr., when I read that he believes that a second gunman was involved in the death of his father. I don't want someone that irrational in the Presidency.
Isn't it odd, Vero, that in that packed kitchen, in which Sirhan had to stand on a table to fire his shots, not one person saw a second shooter?
His father didn't believe that the CIA had killed Jack. Of course, that doesn't mean that there wasn't another shooter in his own assassination five years later.
Kennedy assassination hypotheses - both Kennedys - melt into nothing if subjected to scrutiny. Not only could Oswald have made the shots, I, at 11, probably could have made them. Have you ever been to Dealey Plaza? It's bizarre that in photos and film it seems as large as it does. It's compact, small, really.
If you want a book which is an excellent analysis of the JFK assassination, I recommend Gerald Posner's painstaking, "Case Closed."
Bobby Lime, you are so so right on (to use a term from that era) about today's division being infinitely worse than 1968. So nice to think that some people still have that kind of historical perspective to offer. Yes, the trials and traumas of 1968, serious as they were, happened against a backdrop of rising prosperity and bedrock national unity... today, not so much.
And yes, there is much more that could be said about how today's crises as compared to 1968's, but it pains the heart to even think about it.
Thanks.
What you're really saying, my dear Pacificus, is that we're a couple of old guys.
Bobby, there a lots of us still around who were alive in 1968. but few grasp the distinctions between now and then as well as you do.
Well, you grasp them, too, or it wouldn't have resonated with you as it did. 1968 stands out because "The Sixties" were primarily a coastal phenomenon, with outposts in Chicago and college towns. Otherwise, in most ways, the 1960s were far more like the 1950s than not.
When RFK's funeral train made its way from NYC to DC, there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, many of whom probably wouldn't have voted for RFK if he'd lived, standing solemnly watching the train pass. Some were saluting, others pledging allegiance. There are plenty of photos of this. They're extremely moving.
We had that kind of unity then. The two sides weren't out to cut one another's throats. Democrats weren't thrilled when Nixon won in November, but Wednesday was just another day in America.
Again, I find your insights to be quite perceptive, which I guess is just a sneaky way of saying that they much align with mine, esp the part about the bi-partisan expression of grief displayed along the route of RFK's funeral train. Yes, even in that grim, divisive year of 1968, national unity was predominant.
But the seeds of today's near civil war-level divisiveness were being planted in the late 60s and early 70s... faced with the defeat of their frontal assault on both the idea and reality of "America." the so-called "New Left" retreated to a Long Game to achieve their revolutionary aims--thus began the long march through the institutions, as it became known--beginning with academia, which the establishment more or less conceded to the New Left as a bribe to stop burning/bombing things down. "They can't cause any trouble there," I believe was the thinking--as if control of the intellectual apparatus of the United States of America was not something to be too worried about.
So yeah, 50 years later, the lineal descendants of "The New Left" control virtually every major American institution, and here we are contemplating a Second Civil War--who'd have thunk it?
That's my very brief history of how we got here.
Exactly. Two generations of academic indoctrination ( dumbing down ), the gradual turning of the news media from vaguely liberal but sane and fair to overt Leftist advocacy, and, in my Christian certitude, the principalities and powers whose greatest effort has been expended on shaping popular culture.
Here's how things have changed in a quarter century: when Bill Clinton got into his scandal with Miss Lewinski, I remember the embarrassment on the faces of quite a few female newscasters in the early days of the story. Imagine! A quarter century ago, we still had a culture in which modesty and boundaries were not seen as hopelessly retrograde.
This will stomp on people's feet and I don't care: age or lack of natural physical attractiveness are entirely understandable reasons why many people may not be as appealing to look at as others. But it's certainly not disconnected from the trashing of moral standards that sometime in the 1990s, The New Slobbery began to make its appearance.
You and I remember a time when people took pride in their appearances. Remember how beautiful women's dress designs were when we were kids? Remember when the annual Ten Best Dressed Men's list was significant? Remember grooming, in the good sense? Remember when people didn't dress like utter slobs in public? Remember when few men had tattoos, and almost no women had them? When someone might dye her hair, but it would be purple, and crewcutted, besides?
I'm astonished by the fact that 60% of America's young qualify as obese.
It's all saddening, and the slobification of this country is what you'd expect in a decadent people.
But hey, we got the Reagan tax cuts!
Brian Sicknick died "defending our rule of law"?
Thought he died of natural causes.
He died of a stroke a day later. Totally unrelated to his duties on the sixth.
👍🏽
Was the jab being offered that early?
It’s hard not to chuckle because a man did die but that was some dark humor.
I'm done with "nice."
Fun review, Sasha. I can see that movie criticism might be your prime metier. Can't wait to see it.
But: let's hope Alex Garland's artistic vision is more nuanced than is his political analysis, i.e.,
"Left and right, are ideological arguments about how to run a state. That’s all they are." Really? that's all that divides us today? I think it goes a little deeper than that, involving contrasting visions regarding how to live, and why. Differences regarding the role of the state is only one part of that larger debate.
"I think it goes a little deeper than that, involving contrasting visions regarding how to live, and why."
....and who pays for it.
From the first review: "the Missouri politician who spent months fermenting discontent and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election"
I'm looking forward to the day ChatGPT takes over. It will be woke, but at least it will know the difference between "ferment" and "foment."
There must be something like Gell-Mann Amnesia at play on the left when they read a review like that: 'Sure, this person lacks basic grammar skills, but I'm sure the review is otherwise spot-on.'
I really like Alex Garland’s call for tolerance. What happened to the idea of tolerating another’s point of view? We need to get back to that. We’re all fellow travelers on Planet Earth. Working together to solve our common problems, using our various abilities to reach common goals, is the way to go. These are heart-breaking times but I hope they will lead to a new flowering of our human spirit. Looking forward to this movie.
Interesting article on tolerance vs intolerance—some good references. I looked this up after reading comments by Pacificus.
https://standtogethertrust.org/stories/should-we-tolerate-intolerance/
Well, Vero, I appreciate your call for tolerance, seems on the surface to be a good idea. But I'm not going to "tolerate" pediatric genital mutilation as public policy. You?
Could be that the "kumbaya" approach to life is in part responsible for the mess we are in. Just something to think about.
About “kumbaya” —from a NYT article: “The first known recording of the song was made in Darien, Ga., in 1926, sung by a Gullah Geechee man named H. Wylie. The chorus was actually “Come By Here,” which in the Gullah’s Creole accent sounds like cum-by-yah. Over time, that pronunciation transformed into what we know today as kumbaya. The hymn was a call to God to come and help the people as they faced oppression.”
Interesting to hear about the origins of "kumbaya," and to contemplate how the meaning of cultural signifiers of that sort change over time.
But: you did not answer my question regarding whether we should "tolerate" pediatric genital mutilation. Why not?
The meaning of “tolerate” I have in mind is in line with its origins in Latin (see link). It turns out there are some current definitions that imply sympathy or support— so the meaning of the word is more varied than I realized. I do not support the idea of minor kids undergoing these surgeries! No way. Nor do I support biological males competing in women’s sports, etc, etc.
https://ancientlanguages.org/latin/dictionary/tolero-tolerare-toleravi-toleratum
Well written
The film is now on my shortlist. I appreciate the balanced review. Although why you bother using Rolling Stone for a reference is beyond me. I’m guessing that part of the director’s message for someone like me is - if i expect the Left to see their flaws, I should be open to seeing my flaws as well.
Thanks, Sasha. I look forward to your essays about film!!
Interesting. I’ll have to check it out in April.
Just watched the trailer and now maybe the movie is too close to reality for me to handle seeing it. Too many people are brainwashed today. The civil war could happen over people still up in arms that Trump didn’t wear a mask!
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/civil-war-first-reviews-haunting-thought-provoking-and-probably-not-what-you-think-it-is/
"Left and right, are ideological arguments about how to run a state"? Not quite. Left is how to tell others how to live their lives and spend & invest their earnings; right (at least the "true" right, the libertarian right) is how to protect citizens from the rapacious greed of others who would tell others how to live their lives and spend & invest their earnings.
H/T to Pacificus for zeroing in on this crucial distinction.
I’m with you Sasha, I thought for sure this film would be some kind of woke scribe against Trump/MAGA predictive programming, where they are the “bad guys” who must be defeated at all costs in order to save the country. But apparently that’s not the case, and I definitely look forward to seeing it…
Thank you Sasha!
I’ll wait for your review.
Movie reviews should have died with Siskel and Ebert. Blah blah blah go see a movie and make up your own mind about it. Why go in with preconceived notions written by mostly half-wits?
Apropros of nothing, but it popped into my mind just now: if the left wanted peace, there’d be no violence. If the right wanted violence, there’d be no left.