Posts Tagged → Hollywood
Hollywood child abusers protest anti-child abuse film
A month ago, at a party celebrating my daughter’s impending marriage to a fine young man, a strange older man approached me. Me, of jovial mood and big hearted happiness upon this wonderful occasion, found myself backing up as the stranger puked up bitter venom and anger at me.
“I heard you are a big Trump guy. Well, he is morally reprehensible, reprehensible, I tell you, and degenerate. Trump is morally bankrupt, corrupt, and has broken every law known to mankind. And I can’t believe you support him.”
Some people, well let’s say it, liberals, have no class, because they live by their feelings, not their thinkings, and so they are like rabid dogs roaming about randomly peeing on and biting the guests at parties where happiness is supposed to reign. This old guy was true to form, and I must say, having myself grown up surrounded by liberals, I have yet to meet one, and I mean one liberal person, who is capable of calmly discussing or debating politics or culture. Their feewings always turn them into stark raving lunatics. And here I was face to face with Exhibit Number Eight Bazillion of that rule.
“Well, I see no evidence to support what you have just said,” said I. “And I am genuinely interested to hear what you have to say that supports your pretty radical statement just now, especially in light of all of the child sex slaves being trafficked across Biden’s open border. Not much more morally degenerate or bankrupt or reprehensible than selling child sex slaves. Right?”
And the man turned around and walked away.
Every now and then at the party that evening I would catch him glaring angrily at me from across the room. And days later, even as I, father of the bride, was giving my doting father of the bride speech at the wedding itself, this foolish old dolt of a well formed liberal dingbat sat and did his best disapproving scowl at me to let me know what he thought.
And so it is now with the Hollywood-Media Industrial Complex reaction to The Sound of Freedom, a movie about stopping child sex slavery. Turns out that all of the evil child molesting Hollywood-Media people really oppose a movie that shines an unfavorable light on their reprehensible, morally bankrupt, degenerate and corrupt child molesting behavior that is not just aided and abetted but actually jet-fueled by child sniffing Joe Biden and his court of freaks enforcing a wide-open southern border.
Who else am I thinking of here…hmmmmm well, let’s start with Jeffrey Epstein and all of his hundreds of close Hollywood chums raping underage girls at his dungeon island in the Bahamas. And the DAs and judges of one single political party across several states, mostly Florida, who went out of their way to enable and to protect Jeffrey Epstein after the fact was known that he was a reprehensible, morally bankrupt, corrupt child rapist.
After that example there is a laundry list as long as my leg of outed pedophile Mainstream Media personalities in England and America. These morally reprehensible people are trying to get normal people to accept the idea of adults having sex with underage children as a normal thing.
Isn’t it interesting that when you type in the words “pedophile” and “pedophilia” on your iPhone, the autocorrect and instant spell check don’t recognize either word? To the evil woke child-hating psychopaths at Apple, Inc. who programmed our iPhones, these two words should be canceled, they must not even exist, because they highlight and draw attention to a significant amount of morally reprehensible crap Hollywood, Corporate Media, and Silicon Valley people actually believe in and want to do, to children.
There is a sick and evil culture in one political party today, and it is infecting everything it touches. Turns out that party’s PR arm – the Hollywood-Media-High Tech Industrial Complex- isn’t just on the job for professional, financial, or even ideological reasons. These people are actually running interference and carrying water for sold-America-to-China Joe Biden and his administration’s dark den of child molesters because of their own personal immoral sickness and evil.
It is why they are all up in arms about this good movie, The Sound of Freedom. Qanon affiliated? What a joke that accusation is, because Qanon is at most just an idea, and one that is pushed more by liberals than anyone else; it’s not even a real group. It is just another liberal-created boogie man.
It is said that all it takes for bad people to prevail is for good people to do nothing….but sit and scowl, wordless and without evidence or cause, at the father of the bride at his daughter’s wedding. I don’t know how we break through to these liberal people. They are enabling and promoting pure evil, they badmouth a good movie for shallow political reasons, and yet they say it is all someone else’s fault when the problems cross our open border and show up in the “conservative” news.
Say, what is normally done with rabid dogs?
Did the last humorist die yesterday?
Blazing Saddles was a movie that still defies categorization. In 1974, movies in America were highly regulated, and there were all kinds of seemingly artificial limits placed on what you could and could not see, or say, for people of all kinds of age groups. OK, normal people recognize that foul language, violence, and nudity are not appropriate for young people, but the censors then went far beyond these basic limits.
Somehow, Blazing Saddles made all kinds of end-runs around the film censors, without showing any naked bodies or using four-letter words, while still carrying a very adult social theme. One word in particular that is used throughout the movie is “The N Word“, and it is used to great effect in stabbing racism against blacks straight in the eye. And that’s the beauty of good art. Left to function properly without censorship or outside meddling, good art maximally tells its story and makes its best point.
Blazing Saddles may be funny, but it also addressed racism straight on in a way that has never been done since. And it moved the discussion about race relations farther ahead than all of the serious blather about feewings ever could. You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, though, because of the censorship, and so you’d never benefit from its valuable message.
This subject of censorship and free speech has been brought to the fore by (among other direct assaults on free speech) recent revelations that PC Woke book publishers are going through existing books by Roald Dahl and other authors and actually, unbelievably, incredibly, re-writing them to fit today’s snowflake boo-boo word fearing man-child.
It seems that today’s censors and book burners are the same people who are publishing books, and they have taken it upon themselves to be like the scientifically illiterate church censors of old re-writing Galileo’s scientific theories. They are destroying important art in the name of protecting people. These same people today would never have allowed Blazing Saddles to be released, because of the “hurtful” boo boo words nonsense.
This is civilization-destroying stuff, because when the people who publish the books are also burning the original books and then re-writing the books, you really end up with, in effect, no books worthy of being called books. Real books of original creative content carry real messages and real information, real insights, not artificially dumbed-down, white washed, or filtered content that misses the entire purpose and point of the author’s original work.
Yesterday a man named Norman Steinberg died, at the age of 83. He was the humor-filled screenwriter for Blazing Saddles, among other funny and powerful message movies. I wonder if he died of old age or of a broken heart, because he surely must have been America’s last humorist. Today’s censors say that no one is allowed to say or depict certain things (except for pedophilia, or cross-dressing, or biologically impossible and socially implausible gay/trans/etc beings which all seems all the rage among the Left), because somewhere in the universe a person’s feewings will be hurt.
Today’s censors don’t mind hurting the feelings of religiously observant Christians, Muslims and Jews, the people who keep modern society functioning, but God help you if you hurt the feelings of some pathetic 20-year-old weenie college kid somewhere. Burn that book!
You couldn’t build America today with all of the outrageous and useless regulations (which I had a direct hand in when I worked at USEPA in Washington, DC) weighing down our nation, and you couldn’t film or write Blazing Saddles today, because of all of the censorious book-burning crap coming out of Hollywood and from the supposed caretakers and curators of American culture.
Rest in peace, Mr. Steinberg. Wherever you are now, I hope you have been able to travel across artificial boundaries and achieve your highest and best abilities and purpose. Lord knows, you couldn’t do any of that here on earth today.
Today’s cultural censors would never approve this silly poster because of the gun (“guns are bad”), the rope (supposed violence), the horse (supposed animal abuse) etc
Movie review: “Avatar – Way of the Water”
If you can and also desire to endure three solid hours of anti-White racism, anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and a whole host of other “woke” evils being jammed up your butt, by white American capitalists no less, then go spend your money to see “Avatar – Way of the Water.”
One of my kids persuaded me to go see it with him, encouraging me to do so in order to confirm in person my own impression that the movie was crap. Well, for twenty-eight bucks, I can now absolutely confirm by personal experience that Avatar is what many people might already think it is, and what I thought it is, and that is garbage propaganda and crap.
Avatar- The Way of Water is just crap. It is also a theft of major themes of at least half a dozen major movies, including Star Wars.
Nazi Germany was largely built on this movie’s same kind of colorful propaganda, however, so do not dismiss Avatar. Oh sure, Nazi Germany did not live beyond a dozen years, its “thousand year Reich” blown to bits in an orgy of mass murder and retaliation by Germany’s victims. So the woke world of Caucasian slaves serving communist overlords and whatever else pure crap Hollywood envisions for us won’t last very long either. But in Nazi Germany’s short twelve year time span, tremendous destruction was done to Europe and to the world. So, when the propaganda works, it works, and if you are on the receiving end of it, do not ignore it. Or, put another way, if you love a free America, you ignore this crap at your own peril. Like fentanyl and other scary drugs purposefully being allowed over America’s southern border by the current administration, it is powerful crap. Avatar is not innocuous. It is damaging America, as it is intended.
We all know that Hollywood is a cesspit of hideously evil people playing dress-up and make-believe on behalf of China, and Avatar has found a new way to use its power of evil suggestion with only voice actors. This movie, like its predecessor, is Computer Generated Imagery. Fake. Basically anthropomorphized Gumby people presented to us as human-enough-like humanoids that we can relate to them. The Gumby movie characters all have really nice big white teeth smiles, of course. Friendly racists.
In a nutshell, an American Marine Corps colonel, Miles Quaritch, is symbolic of everything that is supposedly bad in our life today – hoo-rah toxic macho masculinity, guns, military, America, technological culture, meat eating, natural resource extraction, Western invasions of supposedly “indigenous” lands, and overall Man vs. Nature. This very white Colonel Quaritch is the ultimate antagonist bad guy with a thoroughly American personality (in reality, the real Miles Quaritch Marine Corps people are right now protecting America and Americans so that people can enjoy their high end lifestyle and also continue to virtue signal about how aligned with the oppressed they are). We are instructed to hate him, because everything he does is wrong and bad and evil and…well, if you are trying to demonize an entire ethnic group, you would heap upon them all of the ills that he suffers from and brings to others, and Avatar does that to white people via Miles Quaritch.
That, despite the fact that in this Avatar movie, Quaritch returns to life as one of the genetically modified, lab-grown blue humanoids, along with a cadre of fellow former US Marines likewise re-animated, all of whom look the same as the natives, but who suffer from the same “bad” thinking as the white people they used to be. It seems that regardless of his skin color, Colonel Quaritch and his American Marines still represent everything that is bad: Bad ideas, bad whites, bad identity, bad values, bad desires, etc. while they invade this Garden of Eden planet where everyone and every thing lives in kumbayah.
Pitted against Colonel Quaritch and his cadre of all-bad all-white guys and gals, are a bunch of tall humanoids colored green and blue, depending upon which area of their planet they inhabit in their traditional pre-technology tribal ways. These things are presented as the innocent indigenous sentient beings whose sole purpose is to hunt, fish, make love, and get stoned together and also get stoned with the animals around them on deep love psychology via emotional tethers growing from their heads. Yes, yes, this is meant to demonstrate the peaceful interconnectedness of all things. Gaia. Peace. Their leader Jake was once a moron white guy, but he changed, and morphed into a blue guy at one with Gaia and all the animals.
None of this makes sense, logically, nor would it have made any sense to a Lakota warrior trying to take a squirming Pawnee’s scalp with a dull stone knife, but if functional Americans over the age of fifty are wondering what the hell just happened to America and why we can’t find young people to work at our businesses and why young people prefer to live in a virtual fantasy land rather than work and volunteer and support themselves and why they prefer to get useless college degrees and follow evil corporate media and pretend to be victims while drinking ten dollar coffees, then you need look no further than this movie, Avatar – Way of the Water.
This movie’s illogical woke bullshit is the reality our American kids believe they are living in.
Never mind that the movie’s plot has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese, it is the feewings it induces that we all must entertain and service most. Feelings of hate for traditional White American males, feelings of hate for the people who mine natural resources for us (which logically must also include the little black African slave children digging in the rare earth mineral and cadmium mines right now so that child actor Greta Thunberg can pose with an EV car that is primarily an explosive bomb that only drives a short distance on Mondays, but don’t tell the makers of this movie), feelings of hate for technology, for human migrations, etc. etc. etc.
Never mind if the blue and green people migrated to the planet (we are briefly shown the giant rusted ribs of whatever spaceship they all arrived in), and killed each other to establish territories. Human migration and killing for territory is only wrong when white people do it. Dontcha know.
About the movie’s ridiculous plot: Why the hell is it OK for the blue people to hunt and eat animals, but it is wrong for anyone else to kill said animals?
And where the hell were all the green people during the end of the last fight? It is like they dropped off the face of their water world with spears held high, at the most crucial moment, and just gave up and went home to eat some dead fish that were once friends but had recently become food. Meanwhile the blue people were locked in a life-and-death fight with high technology that could easily have been won if the green people had stuck around to fight, which they said they were there to do. Crickets. Big plot hole.
My criticism of this racist and childish cartoon movie could fill buckets, rivers, oceans, entire planets, but my biggest observation about it is that it is effective propaganda designed to corrode America from the inside out, to demonize and pit people against white Americans. Probably done at the behest of the communist Chinese, America’s greatest enemy. Go ahead and mock Avatar, but don’t underestimate its negative effect on young Americans and America.
Or go ahead and mock me, late to the show here, but no one pays me to write this blog, and I do as much as I can with the time I have. And in that vein, sorry about the mis-alignment of the photos below. No idea why this happens, and I do everything I can to eliminate it and get them properly aligned.
Character “Jake” the once White guy who became a blue guy, here high on the Earth Mother (Gaia), no lie
Mrs Jake, also high on the Earth Mother and the oneness of all life (what movies have we heard this from before)
There are black blue people and Asian blue people, all opposed to the White people
Lots of current teenage lingo and hookem horns type hand signals meant to appeal to teens
US Marine Corps colonel Miles Quaritch, the representative white guy everyone racist and woke is supposed to hate. He actually looks a lot like my buddy Ron Boltz
Movie review: Top Gun: Maverick
Sounding like a nattering nabob of negativism is not my thing, so suffice it to simply say Hollywood is an overflowing sewer of anti-Americanism, anti freedomism, anti rule-of-lawism, anti-religionism (except radical Islam, which the areligious ethnic Jews of Hollywood looooove), anti Constitutionalism etc. Meaning that Hollywood rarely produces anything of value or anything worth seeing any longer, unless you are so desperate to see anything at all on the big screen that you also like clawing out your own eyes afterward so you can un-see the garbage Hollywood poured into them.
Suddenly, enter Top Gun: Maverick, a new re-make update from the fun, cool, and patriotic 1986 military movie Top Gun. People (Hollywood movie “critics”) complain that actor Tom Cruise (center stage in both Top Gun movies) plays pretty much the same masculine stud role in almost all of his movies (Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, The Last Samurai etc), but who else in Hollywood is going to or even can actually act like a real man these days? Radical feminism axe murdered masculinity, and so Hollywood is now filled with lisping, mincing, Valley Girl talking actors born with boy parts down there, but who can not possibly be mistaken for a man’s human shell with a hint of testosterone. And Brad Pitt traded in his masculine stud acting persona for something a lot more drunk, high, and pathetic in real life.
So, fact is, Tom Cruise has the masculine stud role market cornered. He is the only Hollywood male who could play the role of fighter jock Maverick. I think he does it well, and he plays a compelling guy with feewings, too. Actor Tom Cruise has depth and breadth, in addition to acting skill. Thank you, Mister Cruise.
At a time when America is being purposefully failed and destroyed from within in every way, it is refreshing to watch a movie about American freedom’s greatness and motivational patriotic grit. Unique aspects of our nation that we took for granted. Top Gun: Maverick does this very well, as well as delivering on all of the military technological finery one had come to expect from America just 18 months ago. Before the Biden Administration began shoveling our most valuable technology out the door to our enemy China on purpose.
America needs heroes now, and especially military heroes, and no, a guy pretending to be a woman in a military uniform is not a hero. From the time of Ulysses, Samson, and Achilles until just 18 months ago, a military hero has always been a strong man (and occasionally a really impressive and brave woman chopper pilot) who is brave enough to risk his life in combat for the safety of America (or any other nation under risk of failure). Treading on dull military procedural failure at every step, Tom Cruise’s ultimately successful character Maverick gives us that heroic figure here, exceptionally well.
It feels good to believe in a free and robust America again, even if just for two hours and ten minutes. Go see this fantastic movie, which also has a classic early Kawasaki Z-1000 superbike (Mad Max), an original Mustang P51 fighter plane, and some other classic gas guzzlers whose presence once highlighted and then underpinned American greatness. It is worth the price of admission, and your buck sends a message to Hollywood that they will ignore, but which the normal people in America will understand.
10/10 rating here (I liked it even more the second time).
Matthew McConaughey = Hollywood Idiot #1,367,189
So an actor named Matthew McConaughey has stepped into the freedom debate, advocating for stripping law-abiding citizens of our Constitutional rights because of what certainly appears to be a remarkably well funded and coordinated attack on the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.
None of what McConaughey advocates for would have stopped the attack, although “hardening” the school would have easily defeated the mysterious gunman. McConaughey did not advocate for hardening public schools. He wants American gun owners to be at the mercy of unaccountable bureaucrats and vindictive neighbors who disagree with private gun ownership, period.
Why the hell does any American in their right mind care what this actor guy says? McConaughey is a paid actor, someone who engages in silly dress-up and make-believe fairy tales for a living. This ain’t rocket science stuff, it is childish. McConaughey is just one more idiot from Hollywood, whose forte is definitely not public policy. And we all know that lawless, goofball, doped up, Marxist Hollywood has been at war with a Constitutional America for fifty years, in any case. So of course people from Hollywood will come up with all kinds of ridiculous policy ideas like McConaughey has.
I for one do not care about McConaughey’s opinions, nor do I care for his acting. Actors are a dime a dozen, generally unimpressive to seriously failed as individuals, and they depend upon the support of their audience to make the ridiculous millions of dollars they get for simply fooling around in front of a camera.
McConaughey has definitely lost a lot of his audience with his publicity stunt. But then again, he probably already has so much money in the bank from ticket-buying gun owners while he has play-acted being a violent gun owner in his movies that he doesn’t have to work for a living.
If only some Hollywood script writer would write this whole farce up into a movie…it would probably make a lot of money as a macabre comedy.
Alec Baldwin’s snuff film
Hollywood goof Alec Baldwin just gunned down an innocent person on the mismanaged set of his new movie in the making, “Rust.”
There is all kinds of analysis and hand wringing and wonderment about how this murder ever happened, and who is really responsible for it. Let’s take a look at this issue, and in the end I will present my own take on ‘what probably really happened’.
Some people say that Baldwin is 100% responsible for the murder of Galina Hutchins and the serious injury of Joel Sousa, because he ignored Rule #1 of gun use: Never point a gun at something or someone you do not want to destroy (shoot). And of course it is difficult to argue with this line of reasoning. I agree with it. But others have sought to dilute and undermine this thinking.
Other people, notably the establishment press, are trying to find anyone to throw under the bus to save a bona fide Hollywood actor from being held accountable. Remember how much effort went into protecting Hollywood scumbag Harvey Weinstein? And Weinstein really was a lecherous monster who was feared and loathed by most of Hollywood. So how much more so will the establishment wagons be circled to protect a just regular kind of gay-hating, violent jerk like Baldwin?
For example, the establishment press keep writing that the revolver was a “prop gun.” Ummm no, no it wasn’t. It was a real gun. Obviously. But that doesn’t stop the mainstream media from trying to pretend this away as some sort of non-gun-gun-non-crime.
The establishment press also tries to say that other people were more responsible for the gun and how it was loaded etc etc than Baldwin could be. Again, no, because that danged real gun was used for target practice by many of the actors and set workers in the desert surrounding the movie set. They all knew it was a real gun and that bullets had been shot out of it a lot.
Here is what I think probably really happened: Rust was a snuff film, a la Jeffrey Epstein’s way of just having fun and never being held accountable for it, no matter how evil and wicked.
Recall ol’ Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex slave trafficker whose pedophile island hideaway was frequented by the rich and famous like Bill Gates, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and others. The same Jeffrey Epstein who was strangled with a wire garrote in his prison cell while the cctv cameras were turned off and the guards mysteriously walked away. A guy with a lot of names and knowledge in his head, who had to be shut up before things got public and messy.
This is to say that with incredible wealth and power comes incredible debasement and debauchery. Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein epitomized the more openly grotesque aspects of it, as well as Epstein’s teenage girl sex party guests, and I think the murder of Galina Hutchins was probably a more subtle expression of one untouchable person’s secret desire to do something unimaginably evil, in the open, and then get away with it.
If this is true, and why not, then Alec Baldwin purposefully murdered Galina and then tried to blame it on everyone else. But inwardly he is gleefully laughing — he got away with it! With murder. And no one will ever try to hold him accountable for it. Because bully boy Baldwin is one of the many untouchables in America these days. People who commit pedophilia rape, murder, treason, and simply walk away from the scene of the crime because the entire cultural and political establishment surrounds them and protects them.
It is quite probable that Rust was actually a cheap and slovenly run movie set because it was never meant to actually be a movie. It was probably just an elaborate opportunity for Baldwin to live out one of his many sick fantasies, and never be held to account for it.
Just my theory, anyhow. It certainly is possible, because if we look at all the insane crimes that all the other American elites have gotten away with (and I am not even mentioning innocent young Mary Jo Kopechne, the sweet girl murdered by Democrat senator Ted Kennedy, another untouchable elite), murder in the open was just the next logical thing for one of them to do and then go laugh about behind their closed doors.
Talk about rust, this murder is an example of how America is becoming a diseased, corroded hell hole from all this unaccountable elitism. Like a bunch of Emperor Neros prancing around, hurting people and hurting America, with zero consequences…but unlike the Roman citizenry, we Americans do have the means to take matters under control.
But do we have the will power?
America’s Voice gone but not silenced
Sadly, America’s Anchorman Rush Limbaugh has died.
Anyone who regularly listens to his show is not surprised, as the stand-in radio show hosts have been daily for the past couple of weeks. Their daily presence was an indication that Rush was physically unavailable, due to his increasingly severe cancer. And it was only that kind of bar that would keep Rush from sitting at the EIB Golden Microphone himself. His love for what he did was clear.
Rush’s impact on American culture and world-wide politics was unprecedented. He represented the thinking of at least half of America’s citizens. He raised unique questions about the world’s best political system, America, and he posed piercing analysis of the players in it, including members of both major political parties.
Ironically, Rush was a product of a politically partisan mainstream corporate media that had fully merged with the Hollywood entertainment industry. Had the mainstream media actually produced real “news reporters” that simply reported the facts, instead of mounting nonstop daily attacks on Heartland America and the conservatives who represent it, Rush Limbaugh would not have had an audience. Because there would have been no demand for Rush’s service.
Rush’s greatest service to America has been to point out the obvious lies and partisan hypocrisy in the American media and establishment cultural centers, and to be a powerful force for limited government, individual freedom and liberty.
“Rush’s death is a huge loss. He was the best, period. He had a way of articulating the seriousness of politics in a way that didn’t depress the listener. He was a relief to listen to, and of course understood the real nature of politics and politicians better than anyone,” says Central Pennsylvania political activist Ron Boltz.
Right on, Ron. Perfectly said.
I myself was introduced to Rush Limbaugh in 1991 by my friend Kenny Gould in Potomac Maryland, when I was working at the US EPA. Listening to Rush changed my life for the better, and to be frank, I don’t think any radio hosts come close to his performance. Of all the radio hosts I have heard, I believe that Mark Steyn comes the closest to capturing Rush’s analytical way and also his positive, personal way interacting with radio listeners who called in to the show.
America is a poorer place with Rush Limbaugh removed from our national conversation. His quotes and voice will live on, as will the pro-freedom America-first movement he helped start. We will miss you, Rush. Godspeed to wherever you are headed now.
p.s. Rush’s “bumper music” in his radio show was usually the 1970s fun disco/funk stuff from a time when skin color boundaries were being broken by music and generally people felt good about being together. Here is one song that he especially liked: Every 1’s a winner by Hot Chocolate.
p.p.s. for those people who claim that Rush Limbaugh was “racist” etc, they obviously never listened to his radio show, and therefore had no justification for their ridiculous accusation. Rush was the canary in the coal mine for American conservatives, who are now being silenced for “wrongthink” by Big Tech, Big Media, and the Big Political Establishment Uniparty, all of whom try to badmouth and impugn anyone who disagrees with them.
Carpe diem
Carpe diem means “seize the day,” and while it may have been an especially well worn adage given from fathers to sons standing over large firewood piles that were not going to stack themselves, it became much more widely appreciated and used as a result of one of those now all too rare things – a meaningful Hollywood movie. Yeah, we have to go back to 1989.
In The Dead Poets Society, now deceased and yet still amazing actor Robin Williams plays the sort of inspirational high school teacher we all wish we had (and I did have several like Williams’ movie character, notably Master Spencer Gates, wrestling coach Master Tim Loose, wrestling coach Master Jay Farrow, and Teacher Agnes Hay). While reading and teaching both good and bad poetry with his adolescent students, with humor and also sincerity, Williams’ character leads them into deeper reflection about their growing self-awareness, hopes, dreams, etc. His teaching all culminates in one line, one forever-lesson that must never be let go of for fear of forgetting to stay focused on the best of life: Carpe diem.
In the movie, carpe diem becomes the watch word, the reminder, the quick phrase meant to sum up all the teaching and to remind young people not to live up to the old adage that ‘youth is wasted on the young’. To always do better, to strive for even better than that, and that by seizing the day and making the most of it, a person realizes her or his fullest potential in a life that is under the best of circumstances so very fleeting, and often is truly fleeting.
At his 102nd birthday, my grandfather Morris lamented “I don’t know where my life went!” Despite his long years, dying just two weeks shy of his 103rd birthday, his life had flown by on wings. And he was a guy who had truly lived every day to its fullest, by nearly every measure.
I mention Morris to give the reader some perspective on the true meaning of carpe diem…when you are blowing out the 102 cramped candles on your birthday cake, and you reflect on your long life, and you openly feel like it has flown by you, you had damned well better have made the most of it, in every way, or you have committed both a tragedy and a crime by wasting your God-given opportunities and potential.
This all came to me in recent weeks because of the “permanent retirement” of several people with whom I was close, one way or another. Their sudden and unexpected deaths stuck a sharp stick in my ribs, reminding me of carpe diem.
One of my friends is, or was, US Army Col. John “Jack” Francis Keith, who dropped dead in his foyer three weeks ago after walking the dog, at the tender age of 77. Jack was one of the most amazing and humble men I have known, not necessarily because of his fascinating career, but because of his “way.”
We met when Jack was hired to start up the brand new Pennsylvania Parks and Forests Foundation, and he then came to me for help finding an office in which to set up shop. Naturally, I found him office space one floor below me at 105 North Front Street in Harrisburg, one of Dick Etzweiler’s amazing historic buildings. We immediately bonded and worked together on a variety of projects, as well as hunting together, socializing together, him always gently mentoring me (the poor sonofabitch was a hell of a kindly optimist).
In 2001, Jack got me to acquire my first custom longbow at the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous. It was crafted by bowmaking legend Mike Fedora, the “modern grandfather of traditional bowmaking,” if any of that makes sense, and as it remains an extension of my very soul, I still hunt with it. While he was mostly silent about his Vietnam combat tour, Jack once briefly told me how he had earned a Silver Star for combat valor, among other medals: Their forward position being overrun, like the movie “We Were Soldiers,” the U.S. Army soldiers had backed themselves into a defensive circle around and amongst a copse of trees. Jack distinctly remembers pulling the cord that detonated a dozen mortars or small cannons leveled waist-high around their hastily thrown up perimeter in the dark, and then in the morning finding Vietnamese soldiers both on the ground and literally nailed up to the trees by the long steel flechettes (long nails or spikes made into arrows) blasted shotgun-like from the mortars. He described the various rifles brought into action by the Viet Cong also being pinned across the soldiers’ chests by the same swarm of steel mini-arrows, the carrier and gun frozen in mid-stride.
Like I said, Jack was a hell of a guy. I could go on and on about what he did, the outdoor adventures we had, and how his friendship improved my life. I know that other people also feel the same way about their friendship with Jack.
And other beloved people have also died, one as recently as in the past 24 hours. Joanna was not just a loving mother, daughter, and sister, in terms of career she had “made it to the big time.” Serving as a general counsel attorney at the US EPA, where I started my career oh so long ago, Joanna started feeling not so good just weeks ago. Now she is gone, in her mid sixties, and the people who loved her and who drew strength and deep pleasure from her company, including her own aged parents, are bereft.
If I could ask Joanna one thing, one reflection on the high value of our lives before she floated away, it would be “Should I carpe diem?”
I know what she and Jack would say in response: Do not take any day for granted, make the very most of every day and minute that you are given, gather ye rosebuds while ye may; you never know when it will end.
And so, as these positive, constructive, giving people leave us, as is the end for each and every one of us here, I keep thinking carpe diem. And you should too, I believe. Whatever your dream is, whatever your good and positive passion is or could be, perhaps subdued because of financial fears or some other challenge, carpe diem. Make it happen, make life happen to its fullest, before it is too late.
The kind of Vietnam-era US Army flechettes that shaped a young Jack Keith’s life as he moved forward
A full bag in 2004 (where oh where did that time go?). Me on the left, Jack Keith on the right, and Tim Schaeffer in the middle. If anyone could write a book on carpe diem, it is Tim, who got his PhD and JD simultaneously and now runs the PA Fish & Boat Commission
My wife says that Jack Keith was the most handsome man she ever met. Right on.
Jack in later years with wife Dottie
A remarkably young looking Robin Williams, back when he looked old and serious to my 20-something eyes. He is saying Carpe Diem like he means it.
Savage tribalism vs. the Red Pill
In recent discussions with people of varied perspectives about political choices in the upcoming election, what has struck me is the high volume of tribalism involved in selecting who to vote for. We can also call this political party partisanship, which it is, but at its core this simplistic solution to complex problems is really just tribalism.
Tribalism is Us versus Them, Black vs. White, Good vs. Evil, Democrat vs. Republican etc., and at its core, it represents human savagery. Savagery because tribalism requires little analysis or critical thinking, and because people act out their unconsidered partisan politics in brutal ways that would make them blush in any other venue.
Sure, people living in America have a wide variety of reasons for voting the way they do – Biblical values, atheistic values, pop culture values, no values, but if you watch the YouTube videos of intensely partisan people responding to questions about why they are supporting a given candidate, you will often see that they really don’t know the particulars. All they know is Orange Man Bad, Republicans bad, white people bad, capitalism bad, and so on. Don’t push them too hard, because they can get upset quickly when asked to think about their actions and decisions, or to explain them. Tribalism has pretty much shut off the I Can Think For Myself button in their head.
The over-arching question for the next three weeks is, Can enough people take the Red Pill to overcome their simplistic tribalism in this election?
Recall that in the scifi movie The Matrix, good guy Morpheus offers our clueless young man two choices. He can take the blue pill, and he will wake up in his bed with vague memories of some weird discussion, and a red pill. The red pill opens his eyes and he suddenly sees reality, not silly tribalism. People who have watched the movie know that Neo takes the red pill, which wakes him the hell up to an uncomfortable reality, which he eventually changes through his informed actions.
And so as the mainstream media-Democrat Party-Hollywood entertainment complex has created an evil dream-like “Matrix” environment, you, me, individual Americans are taking the red pill and waking the hell up is imperative.
Today, the red pill means getting voters to read www.breitbart.com and www.thegatewaypundit.com and www.zerohedge.com and #walkaway and the Black exit from the Democrat Party slave plantation among many others sources of information. Anything to get voters off of tribal MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR etc. Daring people to open their minds, to free their minds, is step one to ending tribalism. Getting voters to actually take the red pill, cut through the mainstream media fog, stop behaving like savages, and realize that there is no Orange Man Bad, just false choices that work against their own interests, is the hard part.
Take the damned red pill, Carla! Open your mind!
