One And Done’ers

Today, a US President is considered a failure if he doesn’t win two terms. How often does an elected President get re-nominated for another term and then loses in November?

Let’s take a look. Let’s start by looking at edge cases.

First of all, I’m not counting John Adams. Political parties weren’t quite formed yet when he ran again, so it doesn’t really qualify as a modern election.

Believe it or not, Presidents James Polk, James Buchanan and Rutherford B Hayes did not even seek a second term. It’s hard to believe but there were once Presidents whose ego did not demand that they maximize their time in office. Although, to be fair, of the three, Buchanan and Hayes probably didn’t stand a chance of getting their party’s nomination and Polk died literally like two months after he left office.

Next, let’s throw out the one term Presidents who died in office. It’s certainly not their fault that they did not get re-elected. William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, James Garfield, Warren Harding, and John Kennedy all died during their first term.

We should also exclude the Vice Presidents that completed the deceased President’s term. After all, although they were on the ticket, no one really expected them to become President. When the next election cycle came, their party kicked them to the curb. John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester Arthur form this club of accidental Presidents.

Special credit goes to Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. These four finished a deceased President’s term and then got elected on their own.

As far as I can tell, Franklin Pierce was the only sitting elected President that wanted to run again and his party said, nah, we’re good. That’s gotta suck if you’re the President. Weirdly, technically LBJ also kind of falls under this category. After getting elected in his own right, he was kind of running for another term when he nearly lost a primary. That scare was enough for him to immediately bow out without further ado.

Gerald Ford is his own category. Spiro Agnew resigned and Nixon appointed him as VP. Nixon then resigned and Gerald Ford became President. He’s the only President in US history to become President without ever receiving a single electoral vote. Therefore, it’s not all that shocking that he lost to Jimmy Carter.

Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland together form their own little category. In 1884, Cleveland won the Presidency. In 1888, Harrison ran against Cleveland, and even though Cleveland won the popular vote, Harrison won the electoral college (see, it doesn’t always happen just in the twenty-first century). In 1892, Cleveland, still popular, sought a rematch. Sadly, Harrison’s wife died two weeks before the election and both campaigns ceased campaigning out of respect (simpler times!). Cleveland handily beat Harrison in both the popular vote and in the electoral college.

OK! That’s a bunch of edge cases. Let’s talk about elected Presidents that sought another term, got their party’s nomination, and then lost in the general election.

John Quincy Adams In 1824, he lost the popular vote and was behind in the electoral college to Andrew Jackson. Jackson did not have a majority in the electoral college either, so the election was thrown to the House. There, fellow nominee Henry Clay threw his support to Adams. That was enough to get Adams the victory. Adams then nominated Clay to be Secretary of State, which was then seen as the stepping stone to the Presidency. Jackson claimed Corrupt Bargain! That was enough to pretty much doom Adams’ Presidency and he lost to Jackson in 1828.

Martin Van Buren He was Andrew Jackson’s VP. He road those coattails to the Presidency in 1836. Alas, the fruits of Jackson’s economic policies finally became apparent during Van Buren’s term. There was a vicious economic depression. This doomed Van Buren to lose to William Henry Harrison in 1840.

William Howard Taft In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was on top of the world. Succeeding the assassinated William McKinley, in 1904 Roosevelt was re-elected. He promised that he wouldn’t run for re-election. He essentially anointed Taft as his successor. Taft easily won the election. It turned out that Roosevelt, still relatively young and as always, hyper-energetic, did not take to retirement. Criticizing and chastising Taft, he sought the Republican nomination in 1912. Denied, he ran on the Progressive ticket.  Taft never had a chance. Roosevelt got more votes than Taft, but with the Republican vote split, Woodrow Wilson waltzed into the White House.

Herbert Hoover Elected in 1928, he was considered one of the great humanitarians (he essentially fed Europe after it was ravaged in WWI) and one of the great engineering businessmen. When the Great Depression struck during his term, of anyone, you’d think that he would have been up to the task. Alas, it was not to be the case. Widely unpopular, he was wiped out by Franklin Roosevelt.

Jimmy Carter In 1976, with the nation stricken by Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, Ford’s subsequent pardon, the lingering after effects of The Vietnam War, faith and trust in government was at an all time low (since eclipsed). Given all of that, maybe it doesn’t seem all that strange to give the job over to the nuclear engineer, peanut farmer, evangelical, Governor of Georgia. Whatever the reason, the nation soon became disenchanted with Carter as well. With the Iranian hostage crisis, the seemingly impossible stagflation (high unemployment, high inflation, low economic growth), and the continued energy crisis, the nation was ready for a more flag waving, optimistic point of view. Enter Ronald Reagan in 1980.

George H W Bush In 1988, as Van Buren before him, Bush rode the very popular (well, except for the Iran Contra thing) Reagan’s coattails to the White House. Like Van Buren, continuing the previous President’s economic policies led him to a recession. Being (in my opinion), a pragmatic (and again, in my opinion, that’s a good thing) politician, he made a deal with the Democratic congress to raise taxes. That breach of faith from Republican dogma in conjunction with the lingering recession and the scourge of Taft, a substantial third party challenge from H Ross Perot, was enough to hand the election over to Bill Clinton.

That’s it! In coming up on 220 years of modern US political elections, a grand total of six elected Presidents lost their re-election bids in November. Did any patterns come out? Well, economic conditions seem to be a primary mover. The other major factor seems to be credible third party candidates.

Where does that leave Donald Trump seeking re-election in 2020?

With all due respect to Kanye, I don’t see any credible third party candidates.

You would think that an economy that lost 22 million jobs and that declined 33% would be a killer. On top of that, we’re in the midst of the worse pandemic in 100 years. Despite having the most expensive health care system, our country’s management of it is embarrassing in its incompetence. Despite having just 4% of the world’s population, we are currently accounting for 22% of the world’s deaths. Mass protests concerning racial injustice have been occurring for months all across the country. Trump’s approval rating, never above 45%, is now in the high 30s.

Looking at history, this fits into the pattern of a sitting President losing re-election. However, given the Republican’s current advantages in the electoral college and all of Trump’s previous norm breaking precedents (that’s pretty talk for doing whatever the fuck he wants), I have no idea what’s going to happen.

Everyone vote!

The Truthiness Of Truth

Title: Rashomon

Rating: 5 Stars

Although I haven’t seen many of his films, I always enjoy Akira Kurosawa’s films. Being a Shakespeare fanboy, I enjoyed Ran, which is based on King Lear, and Throne of Blood, which is based on Macbeth. It’s interesting how the Shakespearean tragedy of kings translate to samurai times. Given the heavily emotive style of Kurosawa films, they lend themselves to Shakespeare very well.

In the 1950s, Kurosawa made a couple of films that had a huge impact upon Westerns. I’m talking about Yojimbo and Seven Samurai. Yojimbo led directly to films like A Fistful of Dollars. In fact, A Fistful of Dollars was so close to Yojimbo that the American release of the Spaghetti Western was held up over copyright issues. It spawned the genre of Westerns where a nameless gunslinger comes into a crime ridden town and proceeds to clean it up. In fact, as in the case of Yojimbo, it cleans it up so much that the town is effectively destroyed (to quote that WWII soldier looking at the ruins of St Lo in France, “we sure liberated the hell out of this place”). Although destroyed, it has also been cleansed so it can now rebuild itself better. As always, cultural transference isn’t just one way. Yojimbo itself is loosely based on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Blood Harvest, which has an unnamed Continental Op private detective come in and take on two dueling gangs that are destroying a town.

Seven Samurai, as probably can be guessed, was the direct inspiration for The Magnificent Seven and it kicked off the whole genre of a group of sketchy malcontents getting together to take on some gang terrorizing innocent townspeople.

And then there’s Rashomon. It was made in 1950. In fact, crazy enough, filming started on July 7th and it premiered on August 25th. Keep in mind that this was just five years after a ruined Japan surrendered to end WWII. Kurosawa was operating under strict US censorship. Pretty much by definition, all Japanese films made in this period were pretty low budget affairs.

It tells the story of the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband. It’s told from four different perspectives: the bandit that set upon the couple, the wife, the spirit of the dead husband, and the wood chopper, the supposedly neutral party that quietly witnessed the crime.

The four stories vary widely. The bandit (Tajomaru, played by Toshiro Mifune), seemingly more than just slightly mad, admits tying up the samurai and then raping his wife. The samurai’s wife, now smitten with the bandit, asks Tajomaru to untie her husband so that the two men can fight to the death over her. She will willingly go with the winner. Now in love with the wife, he agrees. Tajomaru and the samurai bravely and skillfully sword fight until Tajomaru gets the upper hand and kills the samurai. He looks for her, but the wife has run off.

In the second version, the wife, nearly mad with remorse and shame, tells her story. After her samurai husband has been tied up, she bitterly fights off Tajomaru until he finally overwhelms her. Tajomaru then leaves. The wife crawls to her husband to beg for forgiveness for the shame she has brought upon herself and to kill her. Her husband just looks upon her with cold contempt. Holding the dagger, she blacks out from her shame and when she comes to, the dagger is in her husband’s chest. She later tries and fails to kill herself.

In a truly freaky part of the film, the husband’s spirit, through a medium, tells his story. He is tied up. Tajomaru rapes his wife. Tajomaru asks the wife to run off with him. She agrees but asks Tajomaru to first kill her husband. Shocked at the request, Tajomaru drags the wife to the samurai and asks if Tajomaru should kill the wife, thus gaining the samurai’s respect (?!). The wife runs away. Tajomaru frees the samurai. The samurai then kills himself.

After all of these versions are told, the wood chopper admits that he saw the whole thing but didn’t tell anyone because he didn’t want to get involved. The samurai is tied up. Tajomaru rapes the wife. Tajomaru asks to marry the wife. Instead, the wife frees the samurai and tells him to avenge her shame by killing Tajomaru. The samurai says, nah, I’m good. The wife screams at both of them, accusing them both of being bed wetting momma’s boys. The two reluctantly begin to fight. Unlike the Tajomaru version, this fight is anything but skillful or heroic. Both of them, shaking in fight, make half hearted attempts at sword play. Every time their swords even get close to contact they run away from the other. They screech in fear. They continually trip over their own feet. It’s actually quite comical. Finally Tajomaru gets the upper hand, and by pretty much closing his eyes and letting his sword fly, he kills the samurai.

Well, that’s it, right? The wood chopper story, the only version told by an impartial observer, must be the correct one, right? Well, it turns out that in all of this madness, the wife had a very expensive dagger that is now mysteriously missing. By his guilty look when accused, it’s clear that the wood chopper has stolen it. If he left out the fact that he stole the dagger, what else did he leave out?

There’s so much to enjoy. I loved the open ended nature of the film. There is no reliable narrator. What is the truth? Is there one truth? In each version, the narrator shaded the story for their own benefit. Are the narrators lying? Or does each narrator believe the truth of their own story? This is a film that will leave you thinking about it days after you watch it.

The acting is, as always in Kurosawa films, intense. I know that I’ve said this before about other novels and films, but the emotions are of operatic intensity. This is especially true of Mifune. Kurosawa and Mifune paired together in many films. In fact, he starred in all of the films that I listed above except for the much later Ran. Mifune is the Brando of Japanese cinema. He brings an intensity, charisma, and sexual energy that would seem completely at home in a film like A Streetcar Named Desire.

The drama, tragedy, and comedy work well together. Kurosawa choreographing both a skillfully fought sword fight and a comically inept one is pretty awesome.

To make such a film under such trying circumstances as post war Japan is an amazing achievement.

Abolishing Slavery But Keeping The Slaves

Title: Slavery By Another Name

Rating: 5 Stars

In 1861, America went to war against itself. Was it going to fulfill its dream of equality and opportunity for all or was it going to continue to give the lie to these ideals by continuing slavery? After four years of battle, over 600,000 soldiers dead, and wide destruction of territory, freedom won. Slavery was abolished. America took a huge step forward in its path to freedom.

So the story goes, but hold up a second. Cotton still needed to be picked. Dangerous jobs in primitive factories still needed to be worked. Coal still needed to be mined from dark, dangerous caverns.

Southern farmers, mine owners, and factory owners could not run their businesses without slaves. In fact, slaves had been doing the work for so long that, in some cases, white people literally didn’t know how to run their businesses. Their businesses were built on an economic model that didn’t support paying even the most meager of wages. After centuries of treating black people with contempt, hatred, and fear, it was simply inconceivable for many white people to even contemplate treating black people with anything approaching equality.

Unfortunately for black people, the thirteenth amendment prohibiting slavery has a huge gaping exception. The amendment states that: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”.

The solution became obvious. The first step was to arrest a black man. If there was a particular need for labor (eg a crop was coming in or a new mine was opening), the owner would notify the local sheriff and arrests of black men would then suddenly spike. The charges were trivial, ranging from vagrancy (and a black man was considered a vagrant if he did not have evidence that he was actively under the employ of a white man) to ludicrous charges like speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman. The arrested man would be sent to jail and would be arraigned in front of the local justice of the peace. These justices were essentially the local big shot running their own legal fiefdom. The black man, having no rights to representation, was swiftly found guilty. He was then fined. Not only was he fined for the crime, but he was also fined for the cost of the justice, of any witnesses, the sheriff, and for his time in jail. By the time it all added up, there was no way that he had the money to pay the fine. In lieu of paying the fine, the man would instead be sentenced to up to a year in jail. Yes, for the crime of speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman, a man could be sentenced to a year.

Once sentenced, then a farmer or a mine owner would approach the sheriff and pay a small monthly fee to lease the now prisoner. This was a significant source of income to all participants in the justice system. It goes without saying that the prisoner saw none of this money.

The mine owner would take possession of the prisoner and could do whatever he wanted with him. The prisoner was often chained at all times. He would be worked in long shifts in very dangerous situations. He would hardly be provided food. He would be provided with a daily quota of work. If he did not meet the quota, he would be lashed with a whip by an overseer. His prison sentence could be extended for arbitrary reasons. If he tried to escape, he would be hunted down by dogs and whipped even harder.

If anything, this was even worse than slavery. With slavery, at least the slave had some intrinsic property value, as horrible as that is. Here, the slave could be worked to death and the mine owner would just go get another. If a prisoner was recalcitrant, he would be murdered by the overseer and dumped into a swamp. The death rate for these prisoners ranged from 25% to 40%.

It really is as horrible as it sounds. If a mother could not pay her debt, her children could be used as labor. If a black farmer could not pay a debt to a white landowner, instead of evicting him, the landowner would have the farmer arrested on fraud. The landowner could then get the farmer’s labor for free. If someone had a need for labor, any black man walking down the street could be falsely arrested, convicted, and be sent off to die under slave conditions. It changed the behavior of black people that weren’t arrested. They were incentivized to stay in the relative safety of white owned farms. Even though they could barely eke out an existence under those conditions, it was marginally better than dying as a slave at the bottom of a coal mine. Enslaved black prisoners were used as a tool to defeat attempts at unionization.

This started shortly after The Civil War and did not completely end until World War II. Several factors brought about its end. Modern production methods removed much of the backbreaking labor that was previously required. The arrival of boll weevils laid waste to the cotton fields. The Great Depression killed labor demand. During World War II, Germany was able to make use of America’s poor treatment of blacks for propaganda purposes. In response, the federal government began to more aggressively prosecute suspected slavery. A middle class white boy on a cross country trek got caught, arrested, convicted, was leased out, and died while being brutally treated. The resulting outcry that a relatively privileged white boy got entrapped led Florida to outlaw the practice. The federal government didn’t get around to writing an explicit anti-slavery law until 1951.

There’s nothing good here. This was one of the hardest books that I’ve read in years.

Before we pat ourselves too much on the back of how far we’ve progressed, we should probably look around a bit. Think about the private prisons currently in place. Many of them have a required minimum number of prisoners. If they fall below the minimum, the state is required to pay extra. This directly incentivizes states to convict at a higher rate. Think about our bail system. People today arrested on relatively minor charges are required to post bail. If they cannot, they stay in prison. Think about mass incarceration. People of color are sentenced at much higher rates with much higher sentences than white people for equivalent crimes.

People who always respond to Black Lives Matter with all lives matter should read books like this to understand. There’s a reason that people of color have a fundamental distrust of the legal process. From day one of our country to the present day, the legal system has, for them, not been a tool of protection but a tool of oppression.

English Not For Dummies

One of the things that I do in my retirement is to take some online learning from Great Courses. Two of my favorite courses so far have both been about languages. One was about the development of languages while the other was about language usage with an emphasis on usage of English.

I’m a classic mono-lingual American.  On the one hand, that’s a classic sign of the arrogance of being American. I’ve traveled many times to Europe, Asia, Central America, and the South Pacific, and I’ve been able to get along just fine with my miserable one little language.

On the other hand, it actually does kind of make sense that most Americans only speak one language. I live in Seattle. I live about twelve hundred miles from Mexico. I live about twenty-five hundred miles from Quebec. Based in Seattle, I could easily live my entire life and travel a pretty vast range and never need to go anywhere where the default language isn’t English. Considering that, it’s not that strange that American education doesn’t really prioritize other languages.

Over the years, I’ve tried several times to pick up Spanish or French. On the surface, it seems kind of easy. After all, children seem to have no problem learning it. I’m smarter than a two year old, right?

Most people think that it’s an exercise in memorization. Book in Spanish is Libro and in French is Livre. Just sit down and memorize a bunch of lists. How hard can it be?

Of course, it’s way more than that. Vocabulary is the easy part. There are syntax and semantics. There are dialects, creoles, and pidgin. There are what’s written down and what’s spoken. There are all of the rules. There are all of the exception to the rules.

Maybe you’re still thinking that, even so, it’s really not that hard. Maybe you’re one of those people that gets annoyed when you’re speaking to someone and you have trouble understanding them. They came to this country. Why can’t they flawlessly speak the language?

Let me give you two examples. Both are from the language usage course.

You go to the grocery story. You see an aisle full of canned products. You pick a can of corn. You pick a can of beans.

Wait! Why don’t you pick a can of corns? Or why don’t you pick a can of bean? After all, beans and corn seem to be pretty similar things.

Well, it turns out that there are two kinds of nouns. There are mass nouns and there are counting nouns. Mass nouns are associated with concepts like liquid, powders, and grains. Mass nouns are considered undifferentiated units, so are not pluralized. Therefore, since corn is a grain, it is a mass noun. Beans, even though they are a seed, are not considered to be a grain, so therefore the noun bean is considered to be a counting noun, so it’s pluralized.

I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t remember any discussion about mass nouns and counting nouns when I was being taught English in school. How did I learn this? To me, a can of corn and a can of beans are totally obvious things to say.

The second example is the word up. Everyone knows what up means, right? It’s a direction. You can’t see me, but I’m pointing to the ceiling right now. It’s as simple as can be.

Now, I’m going to fry up some eggs. I’m going to clean up my room. What does up mean in this context? Am I going to throw my fried eggs up into the air? Am I going to throw my vacuum cleaner up into the air?

No, it’s not an idiom or some weird folk saying. It’s actually a grammatical rule. In English, there are markers that can be attached to a verb. Up, in this context, marks that the verb will be completed. Notice that this is different than past tense. Here, I’m saying that I will complete the action of frying some eggs and complete the action of cleaning my room.

I have used the word up in this context many times. I’ve heard it used in this context many times. Never have I been confused in its usage. However, I’d never heard of the term completion marker before I listened to this lecture. Where / how did I learn this? By osmosis? By repeatedly being corrected until it got hammered into my head? Most likely, I learned it very early when my  child’s mind was uniquely receptive to learning language.

These are just two examples. There are many, many more subtleties to English that I just blithely use on a daily basis without being aware of its byzantine complexities.

At my age, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to learn a new language with any facility at all. I guess that I have to learn to live with that.

I also need to be sure to be empathetic to those around me that learned / are learning English as adults. What they’re attempting to do is fiendishly difficult and I should recognize their valiant attempts.

Contents Under Pressure

Title: Wuthering Heights

Rating: 5 Stars

Wuthering Heights is, to say the least, an intense novel. All of the characters are intertwined and are either madly in love with, or screaming in hatred at, each other.

There are two families. The Earnshaw family lives at Wuthering Heights. The Linton family lives at Thruscross Grange.

One day Mr Earnshaw returns back from a trip to Liverpool with an abandoned urchin that he found on the streets. The child is filthy dirty and is basically feral. He is named Heathcliff (just Heathcliff, no first name or last name) and becomes a favorite of Mr Earnshaw, much to his son’s, Hindley, dismay. Heathcliff becomes intimate friends with Mr Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine. Mr Earnshaw dies and Hindley inherits the estate. Hindley now brutally treats Heathcliff like a servant. Hindley marries Frances. Frances dies giving birth to Hindley’s son, Hareton.

One day, Heathcliff and Catherine steal away to Thruscross Grange. There Catherine meets the two children of the Linton family, Edgar and Isabella. Edgar and Hindley mock the common Heathcliff. Even though Catherine is passionately in love with Heathcliff, she cannot bring herself to marry a poor orphan. Edgar and Catherine become engaged. Heathcliff, in great rage and sorrow, runs away.

A couple of years later, Heathcliff comes back, now a wealthy man. Catherine is now pregnant and deathly ill. Edgar and Heathcliff fight over Catherine. To make Catherine jealous, Heathcliff marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella. In despair, Catherine dies after giving birth to a daughter named Cathy.  Nearly mad with grief, Heathcliff drives away Isabella. Isabella later gives birth to a sickly child named Linton.

Heathcliff swears revenge on all. He drives Hindley to bankruptcy and early death through drink and gambling. Heathcliff buys Wuthering Heights. He intentionally keeps Hareton unschooled and vicious. As Edgar lies dying, Heathcliff forces a marriage between Cathy and the dying Linton so that he’ll also become the master of Thruscross Grange upon Linton’s death.

Heathcliff is now the undisputed master. All are either dead or directly under his thumb. Even so, Heathcliff is tormented by thoughts of Catherine and wants nothing more than to join her in death.

In this unholy mess a spark of love starts between Cathy and Hareton. Cathy begins to lovingly teach Hareton to read. Heathcliff sees his revenge plan start to come undone but no longer has the will to fight it. One night, Heathcliff goes out into the dark night to die. After his death, there are occasional spectral sightings of Heathcliff and Catherine, walking together at night.

There is a LOT going on here. First of all, so much young death. For those keeping score, Linton does at 17. Catherine dies at 18. Frances dies at a young age. Hindley dies at 27. Edgar dies at 39. Heathcliff dies at 38. Even Isabella, who essentially disappears from the story, dies off page at 32. One of the characters in the novel is the local doctor, Mr Kenneth. I have to say that he kind of sucks at his job. This was set in the late 18th century, so maybe that is a true reflection of reality.

Every now and then you hear talk of a Gothic novel. Well, if you ever want to see a perfect representation of a Gothic novel, look no further. You have brooding characters. You have emotionally overwrought characters. You have grand houses falling into disrepair. You have vaguely supernatural elements. This is truly a classic Gothic work of fiction.

It’s also interesting that, I think without exception, none of the characters come off as particularly likable. Heathcliff, who I guess is kind of the protagonist, is really a piece of work. His great love Catherine kind of enjoys torturing Heathcliff. Edgar is basically kind but even he is basically a pretentious prig. The two most positive characters are probably Cathy (a silly spoiled mean rich girl that finally shows love, but only to someone that she can totally dominate) and Hareton (a rude and crude brute that apparently just needed the love of a silly young girl to motivate him).

How does the novel compare to the 1939 film version starring Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff? First of all, the film greatly simplifies the plot. It essentially stops the story at Heathcliff, Catherine, and Edgar. This is understandable. Trying to force all of that plot into a two hour novel would have probably rendered it incomprehensible.

I know that Olivier is an all time great, but I just don’t think he makes an awesome Heathcliff (and yes, I know that he got an Academy Award nomination for it). First of all, he’s simply too pretty to be Heathcliff. Heathcliff is a brutal force of nature. Olivier just does not project that animalistic energy. Now, if they’d just waited ten years, watching Brando try to tackle it might have been interesting.

Also, in 1939, it’s pretty clear that people are still figuring out how to act in a film with sound. Olivier, even at that time an acclaimed stage actor, was just a bit too stilted and kind of declaimed his lines more than acted them. Some of the other actors had the exaggerated acting styles that seemed more reminiscent of silent films.

So, in my estimation, the novel is a clear winner.

Wuthering Heights is essentially a maelstrom of violence, yelling, crying, pouting, decadence, and dying. For me, Dostoevsky is the gold standard of emotionally overwrought novels of operatic intensity. Emily Bronte definitely gives him a run for the money with this novel.

The Degrees of Charlie Kaufman

I’ve written before, recently even, about the screenwriting genius of Charlie Kaufman. Sure, there are obscure writers hidden off in the corners doing weird things. Charlie Kaufman, if not actually mainstream, can probably be considered mainstream adjacent. His works aren’t spectacular blockbuster hits, but they do get released and are consistently reviewed by mainstream critics.

I recently decided to do a dive into his work. I’ve seen several of his films fairly recently. I re-watched those that were either new to me or that I have not watched within the last several years. The one exception is Human Nature. It was an especially obscure release that had, at best, mixed reviews from both critics and the public.

I decided to rank them, from the least amount of mind fucking to the greatest amount. Note that all of them had at least a moderate amount of such fuckery. Kaufman seems incapable of writing a straight forward screenplay.

6. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

If this was any other screenwriter, this would probably be the weirdest film on their list. This is an adaption of the ‘unauthorized’ autobiography of Chuck Barris. It tells the story of how Barris became a renowned creator of game shows like The Dating Show and The Newlywed Show and became a television celebrity for being not only the creator but also the emcee of the The Gong Show. Oh yeah, at the same time that he was doing that, he apparently was a prolific hit man for the CIA.

It is definitely a strange premise and a strange film. What made it not so mind fuckerish is that it was a fairly straightforward adaptation of Barris’ autobiography (if you call it that). A lot of the weirdness was already baked into it, so Kaufman didn’t really add that much.

5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

It really seems strange to me that this fell so low on the list, because it has a significant amount of mind fucking.

The film opens with a couple doing a cute meet on Long Island. By the end of the first act, it appears to be a standard romantic comedy.

And then it gets weird. In this reality, there is a process that allows a person to completely erase another person from all of their memories. Previously, the woman had erased the man from her memory. The man, desperate in grief, decides to erase his memory of her. Once the process starts, the man regrets his decision, and as his mind slowly erases all of his memories of her, he tries to figure out to back out of the already started process.

Wrapped up inside this nonlinear plot are all kinds of themes running through it like love, loss, technology, inevitability, and, of course, memory.

All of this and, at its heart, it’s a romantic comedy.

4. Anomalisa

This is such a hard exercise! Again, I can’t believe that this, in mind fuck rank order, is in the middle of the pack. After all, it’s a movie about anatomically correct puppets that, among other things, have graphic sex.

Michael, a consultant in customer service, travels constantly and lives a drab life. Every single person that he encounters, male or female, looks and sounds alike. One day, he meets a woman that’s completely different. Entranced, he falls in love with her. Over time, as his love wears off, she becomes the same person as all of the others.

This is The Man in the Gray Suit territory. It’s all about the drabness and banality of the cookie cutter life of the modern world. There is no escape.

3. Being John Malkovich

This is the Kaufman classic. A struggling street entertainer puppeteer gets a Brazil like corporate job. There he finds a tiny door. Going through the door, he enters the mind of John Malkovich. He begins to charge others for the experience. He uses his puppeteer skills to take over both the mind and the body of Malkovich. Malkovich himself enters the portal and ends up in an Anomalisa like world where everyone is Malkovich.

It is truly brilliant madness.

Major themes here include celebrity, gender fluidity, agency of actors, and identity.

2. Synedoche, New York

I just recently watched this for the first time. I’m still processing it. It’s Kaufman’s directorial debut and it is truly a world class mind fuck.

A stage director’s sculptor wife, taking their daughter, abandons him to live in Europe. The director is distraught and is at loose ends. Shortly after that, he wins a MacArthur genius grant. It comes with a substantial prize. He decides to use the money to create a play like no other play ever before.

He rents a huge warehouse. In that warehouse, he recreates the city that it resides in. Over time, it becomes painstakingly realistic. He peoples it with actors. The actors have no script. The director just feeds them story ideas and they must live their lives according to those ideas. Realizing that he is a character in the play, he casts an actor to play himself. Realizing that the actor playing him is also now in the play, he casts an actor to play that actor.

I’m guessing that you can see where this is going. It recurses in on itself. The warehouse that the play is staged in becomes part of the set and the city gets replicated inside of the inner warehouse (and theoretically, so on until turtles are reached (insider software developer joke)). At times it’s not clear if the action is taking place in reality or within the stage set. This goes on for the rest of his life. His last stage direction is to die, which he does.

This is truly world class mind fucking. This goes into the nature of reality, life, death, hypochondria, play in a play, psychology, and probably a billion other things that I missed.

This is some seriously deep, murky water.

1. Adaptation

If you’ve seen this film, this will not come as a surprise that it came out at number one in mind fucking. Kaufman was tasked to adapt the novel The Orchid Thief. The main problem with this task is that The Orchid Thief, to put it charitably, does not have a plot. It’s much more of a series of meditations. How to do you convert that to film?

The answer is that you can’t. Kaufman, suffering from paralyzing writer’s block, ended up writing himself into the story. In the adaptation, he is suffering from writer’s block trying to write The Orchid Thief. His twin brother, Donald, tries to help him write it. Donald, in his way a much more practical person than Charlie, tries to convince him just to write a standard screen play.

Doing so involves having The Orchid Thief’s author, Susan Orlean, start an affair with the book’s protagonist, John LaRoche. Their affair devolves into usage of a drug that is compounded by orchids. When Charlie discovers this, Orlean and LaRoche decide that they have to kill him. The adaptation ends with gun shots and a car accident. Donald is dead. LaRoche gets killed by an alligator. Orlean is arrested.

Obviously, none of this happened. Kaufman turned in the screenplay fully expecting that it would never get made. He was just trying to meet his commitment. When the screenplay was given to her, Orlean, a respected writer, was horrified at her representation in the script and barely granted consent.

The screenwriting credit went to Charlie and Donald Kaufman. They were both nominated for the adapted screenplay Academy Award. Charlie does not have a twin brother named Donald. Undoubtedly this was the first time that a fictional character was nominated for an Academy Award.

This is such a postmodern screenplay with mind fuckery taking place in nearly every scene (even including scenes in the film from Being John Malkovich) that it would be hard to imagine it ever being knocked off its top perch.

A Crime Family Novel With Gynecology?

Title: The Godfather

Rating: 3 Stars

Continuing in my series of book and film adaptations, I just recently finished re-reading the novel The Godfather. I re-watched the film a couple of months ago, so it’s still pretty fresh in my mind. The film is number two on the current AFI top 100 film list and, in my opinion, deservedly so. It’s a great story of family, loyalty, deception, ambition, and ruthlessness.

For this post, I’m going to concentrate on the novel. The film is, by and large, directly inspired from the novel. The novel is broken into nine different books. By far, the largest book is the first one. It has Connie’s wedding. It has Michael, as the family outcast fresh from the war, explaining his family’s way to his fiance. It has Tom Hagen going to LA to try to get a part for Johnny Fontaine. The movie executive rejects and insults Hagen. The movie executive wakes up to a horse’s head in his bedroom. It has the meeting with Sollozzo. The Don turns down Sollozzo’s offer to enter the drug trade with him. The Don is shot. Visiting his father at the hospital, Michael saves him from being murdered. The police captain smashes Michael’s face in rage. Micheal later meets the police captain and Sollozzo ostensibly to negotiate peace. Michael shoots them both dead and then escapes to Italy.

Any of this sound familiar? It’s exactly the plot of the film, almost in scene order. Lines from the novel directly translate to the film. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The author of the novel, Mario Puzo, and the director of the film, Francis Ford Coppola, shared screenwriting credit. The introduction that Coppola wrote for the edition that I read made it clear that it was very much a collaborative process between the two while authoring the screenplay.

I think that The Godfather is justifiably considered one of the great American films. The film is taken almost directly from the novel. I only gave the novel three out of five stars. What gives?

Well, the main problem is that, although the first book in The Godfather is brilliant, unfortunately there are nine books in the novel.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of the other books are also very good. There is a book on Michael’s time in Italy. Again, the film nearly directly translates this book to the screen. There is a book that describes the path that a very young Vito Corleone takes to become Don Corleone. A good chunk of this book ends up in The Godfather Part II.

That still leaves several books. How much more did I really need to know about Johnny Fontane? Yes, he’s the Godfather’s godson and is clearly based upon Frank Sinatra. Did I really need to know about Fontane’s relationship to his first wife, second wife, and his children? Was I going to be interested in learning why he lost his voice and how he recovered it? Did I really care whether or not he was going to be successful as a movie producer?

If we’re not that interested in Johnny Fontane, how interested are we going to be in his childhood friend, Nino Valenti? Valenti is also a talented singer, even if he’s not at the level of Fontane. Valenti is an alcoholic with little ambition. Fontane decides to bring him out to LA to help him become successful. Valenti does become moderately successful both as a singer and an actor. Jaded and dismissive of the LA and Las Vegas lifestyle, the clearly self destructive Valenti drinks himself to death.

The whole point of these books is to hold the West Coast carefree lifestyle in contempt. Fair enough, but there’s a lot of ink spilled to draw the contrast between the conservative values of the East Coast Don and the hedonistic moguls of the West Coast.

In the film, you get a pretty small glimpse of Lucy Mancini. She is Connie’s maid of honor. At the wedding, Sonny sneaks away with her to have sex. I don’t remember seeing her again.

She has a much more prominent role in the novel. She has a ‘pelvic malformation’ that apparently left her with, um, a large vagina. No man could satisfy her. That is, until the notably well hung Sonny comes into the picture. Finally with a man that can satisfy her, she and Sonny have a long running, torrid affair. She is devastated when he is murdered. She is sent off to Las Vegas to help the casino business. There she meets a doctor. Ultimately, they have sex, at which point he was able to immediately diagnose her condition. She has surgery to fix her condition. She is then able to be satisfied by a man with, um, normal dimensions. She and the doctor fall in love and get married.

Like with the Fontane sections, exactly why was this in the novel? At least Johnny Fontane is the Godfather’s godson. It just seems to distract from the major theme of family that is the main thread.

Not only that, but on Reddit, there is a whole subreddit devoted to men awkwardly writing about women. There are many subjects that Puzo does successfully write about. It’s safe to say that rendering the thoughts, motives, feelings, and actions of women are not his strengths. It was a bit cringe inducing.

That is why it only got three stars from me. It was about 600 pages in length and so much of it seemed extraneous. Puzo kind of reminds me of Mark Twain. Twain’s reputation is that of a writer that was equally capable of creating sublime fiction and utter dross and apparently incapable of differentiating between the two.

I came away from reading it much more impressed with Francis Ford Coppola. He was able to extract out the parts that made a cohesive film. Those parts, freed of dross, make for one of the all time great compelling films.

Postmodern Game Show Host

Title: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Rating: 3 Stars

I know that I’ve been on a tear recently of comparing and reviewing books and their adapted films. On the surface, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind falls into that same category. I just watched the film. I’ve also read the book, but it was about thirty years ago or so. Accordingly, I don’t remember enough about the book to do my normal compare and contrast.

I watched the film because I’m embarking on a Charlie Kaufman retrospective. For those that don’t know him, he writes the most creatively unique screenplays of films that are at least semi mainstream.

I’ll probably end up re-watching most of them over the next several weeks. Movies that he’s most known for include Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Anomalisa. All of these films are awesome. I just re-watched Adaptation. Next month, a new film that he wrote, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, will be released on Netflix. He just released a novel called Antkind. I’m trying to psyche myself up to read a 700 page novel of weirdness. I’m not sure if I’m there yet.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is the autobiography of Chuck Barris. The autobiography was written in 1984. The film was released in 2002. It was, I believe, George Clooney’s directorial debut. It would make sense if this was true because there were a number of directorial flourishes in it that would seem to mark the work of a director trying to show off a bit.

Unless you’re of a certain age or if you’ve watched the film (released nearly 20 years ago to at best modest success), you probably have no idea who Chuck Barris was (he passed away a couple of years ago).

Starting in the mid 1960s, he got into the game show business. Even if you’ve never seen them, I’m pretty sure that you’ve at least heard of The Dating Show and The Newlywed Show. They were both successful, both running over ten years (and periodically getting rebooted since). They were both considered ground breaking due to their openly sexually suggestive nature. They were very much of their time.

He became famous (or possibly notorious) in the mid 1970s when he started The Gong Show. Again, even if you’re too young for it, I’m guessing that you know the concept. A number of amateur acts would individually come out on a cheap stage. If they finished their act, they were given a score by three judges and the winner would receive some modest prize. If the act was particularly bad (of which there were many), then one of the judges would take their mallet and bang the gong, immediately terminating the act.

It was essentially anarchy. There were some standard acts that would make regular appearances (eg Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, The Unknown Comic). There were some hopelessly bad acts. The studio audience would be yelling, screaming, and occasionally throwing things. The judges seemed drunk.

At the center of it all was the emcee, Chuck Barris. It’s not clear why he decided to do the gig. He wasn’t in any way shape or form fit to be the emcee. He was nervous, sweaty, randomly clapping his hands. He couldn’t read cue cards. Although he claimed he wasn’t, you’d swear that he was on coke during the show.

For the so called intellectual elite, this was one of the first shows that really got them making comparisons of the US to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This was American culture at its lowest, rudest and crudest (little did these critics know how much lower we could go).

After The Gong Show, Chuck Barris faded away into obscurity. He did some more game shows, but nothing really caught. He ended up selling his entertainment company and, I believe, moving to France.

All of that is kind of interesting, but is it really worth an autobiography and an adapted film?

Well, there is one more thing. During all of this time when he was producing and, ultimately, starring in a game show, Barris claimed that he was also a CIA assassin.

Yes, seriously.

In his book, he talked about the rigorous training that he underwent to become an assassin. After he completed his training, he was sent out on missions. Prizes from The Dating Show included international trips. Under the guise of serving as a chaperone for the winning couple, Barris would steal away to kill some unsuspecting victim.

Barris told of his adventures in a straightforward manner. He mentioned names. He mentioned places. He mentioned dates. It’s been a long time, but I don’t remember any irony in his descriptions. It seemed to be just a recitation of his time in the CIA.

The novel came out in 1984. I don’t remember exactly when I read it, but it was probably sometime in the early 1990s. I definitely remember that it was before Google because, after reading the book, I even tried to validate some of his assassinations by searching on names or places. I never could did find any evidence, but at the time I didn’t know if it was because Barris was bullshitting me, the CIA covered it up, or search engines of that era were just being their usual shitty selves.

I just remember loving the cleverness of it. Here’s this guy, that I very much remember watching on television acting like a clown, telling what appears to be just another rags to riches celebrity ego stroking autobiography, and then he mind fucks you.

The only wink that he gave was that the subtitle of the book was An Unauthorized Autobiography. That in itself is actually pretty awesome. How can an autobiography be unauthorized? Either you wrote it or you didn’t. If you didn’t it’s not an autobiography and if you did it must be authorized. It’s a twist on the Liar Paradox.

In a true exercise of postmodernism, it subverts the form. Who ever heard of an unreliable narrator of an autobiography? And then the truth of what he’s doing hits you. All narrators of autobiographies are unreliable. Every single such author has a reason for telling their story, and there’s a good chance that that reason has little to do with writing down some accurate reckoning of the facts of their life.

I really didn’t love the film and I don’t remember really loving the book, but hey, I have to give a tip of my cap to the concept. Well played!

 

Phillip Spade

One of the ways that I’ve entertained myself during the time of a global plague is by reading a novel, watching its adapted film, and then comparing the two. Over the last couple of days, The Big Sleep received this treatment.

The plot is about the same in both the novel and film. The ending is different, which I’ll get to in a bit. Phillip Marlowe is a private detective (a shamus). He is hired by the very wealthy and dying General Sherwood that happens to have two wild daughters, Vivian and Carmen. The General is being blackmailed by a man named Geiger due to actions of his daughter Carmen and wants Marlowe to fix it. The General implicitly also wants Marlowe to find a former confidant of his named Regan. Marlowe stakes out Geiger’s house. He hears a shot. He investigates and finds Geiger dead and Carmen passed out in a chair. He takes Carmen home and when he returns to Geiger’s house, Geiger’s body is missing. The Sherwood’s chauffeur, Owen Taylor, has driven one of their cars off a pier. It’s not clear if its suicide or murder.

The next day Marlowe finds a man named Brody taking over Geiger’s business. Brody tries to blackmail Carmen. Marlowe goes to Brody’s apartment. Carmen bursts in and tries unsuccessfully to kill Brody. Brody is then killed then by Geiger’s friend, Carol Lundgren. Marlowe captures Lundgren and turns him over to the police. Lundgren confesses to moving Geiger’s body.

Thus solving the blackmail problem, Marlowe turns his attention to Regan. He meets with a casino gangster named Eddie Mars. It’s rumored that Regan has run off with Mars’ wife. Through more murders and mayhem, Marlowe finds Mars’ wife hidden away by one of Mars’ henchmen. Marlowe gets captured at the hideaway but gets free and murders the henchman.

Out of all this, it comes out that Carmen had tried to seduce Regan. He rebuffed her. In a rage, she killed Regan. Vivian engaged Mars to help with a cover-up. Mars did help by disposing of Regan’s body, hiding away his wife, and starting the rumor that the two had run away with each other. Mars is now using this information to blackmail Vivian.

Here, the plot splits out a bit. In the novel, Carmen tries to seduce Marlowe and is rebuffed. In revenge she tries and fails to kill Marlowe. Vivian promises to institutionalize Carmen but will continue to be blackmailed by Mars. Marlowe heads off to a bar to drink scotch and to ruminate upon his adventures.

In the film, Vivian confesses all. She agrees to institutionalize Carmen. Marlowe indirectly gets Mars killed. Marlowe and Vivian realize that they are in love with each other. The film ends with them together.

So, what’s the verdict?

I say that the book wins this time. Usually I give the nod to the book because it allows for so much more plot and detail. In true noir manner, in this case the novel is pretty straightforward. There’s not a lot of turns in the novel that don’t play out on the screen as well.

Some of the problem is, yes, I’ve talked about it before, the Hays Code. There are some pretty explicit things that can’t be dealt with in the film. Geiger is a pornographer and it is naked pictures that he is using as blackmail. Geiger is gay and Lundgren is his lover. Without knowing this, Lundgren’s actions are pretty incomprehensible. Carmen is not just passed out in a chair when caught at Geiger but is naked as well. In the book, Regan is actually Vivian’s estranged husband. I honestly don’t understand why that was left out.

I hate to say it, but some of the problem is with Humphrey Bogart. He starred in The Maltese Falcon as Sam Spade. If you read the two novels, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe are two pretty distinct characters. There is simply no difference between Bogart’s two performances. Since I’d seen The Maltese Falcon fairly recently, I was disappointed at Bogart’s performance in The Big Sleep.

Two minor male characters in the novel were switched over to female roles in the film. I was thinking that that was actually a pretty progressive move on the part of the film makers, but alas no, they were switched to being women just so that they could be seen swooning over Phillip Marlowe. Once again we have a movie where very young women are throwing themselves at a middle aged, pretty beaten down man. Humphrey Bogart is 47 at the time of this film and it shows. All of the women appear to be in their early 20s.

Having said that, sometimes life does imitate art. Lauren Bacall, playing Vivian here, did marry Bogart when she was 21 and he was 46.

The acting in the film was very tough guy noirish. All dialog was spoken fast and without affect. This is contrast to the film The Maltese Falcon, where you had interesting actors like Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Interestingly, Elisha Cook Jr has small roles in both films and his role as Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon is much more interesting than the Harry Jones role here.

Part of the problem might have something to do with the fact that they did try to cram all of the plot from the novel in the film. There was so much A to B to C to D plot movement that there wasn’t really a whole lot of time to explore character. It might have been served to have simplified the plot a bit. One of the screenplay’s credit went to William Faulkner. Yes, that William Faulkner. Considering the pretty mechanical translation of novel to film, I’m guessing that his heart might not have been in it all that much.

One final note about both the film and the novel. There is a famous plot hole in The Big Sleep. In neither is it ever explained what happened to the Sternwood’s chauffeur. Was it suicide or murder? It turns out that Chandler wasn’t all that concerned about such niceties. When he was asked, he confessed that he didn’t know.

That murkiness plays better in the novel than in the film. The novel is told in the first person by Marlowe. There is no omniscient narrator. Really the only two options are that Taylor either killed himself or that Brody murdered him. Given that both characters are dead, there is no way for Marlowe to know. Therefore, from the point of view of a first person narrated novel, that’s actually consistent (even if it’s annoying to readers that want all loose ends tied up).

So, my recommendation is to read the novel. If you want to see Bogart playing a tough guy LA gumshoe, watch The Maltese Falcon instead.

A Revolution In Progress

Title: These Truths

Rating: 3 Stars

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This line is, of course, from the Declaration of Independence. Lepore’s book, These Truths, is a history of the United States, specifically through the lens of this line from one of its founding documents.

Despite its high sounding nature, even at the time that it was written, these words were not true. These words are not true today. Over the centuries of US history, there have been a continuing series of revolutions that have tried to make it more true.

You can say that the US experiment was flawed from its beginnings. The House of Burgesses, meeting on Jamestown Island, in Virginia, was the first representative legislative body formed in what would become the US. This was in July of the year 1619.

In August of 1619, in Hampton, Virginia, a mere 30 miles away or so from where the House of Burgesses met, the White Lion docked. Among the cargo offloaded was some twenty Africans. They were purchased and moved to Jamestown. They were the first slaves.

So, yes, within a month of each other and essentially at the same place, the first tentative steps towards a democracy were started and the first slaves were sold.

The phrase all men are created equal haunts in more than just the slavery dimension. There have been continuing struggles for equality for women, Native Americans, immigrants, and populist fights on the behalf of poor farmers and factory workers.

What gains for equality that have occurred have never come without a struggle. The Civil War is just the most obvious example. There is always someone saying that some group that’s fighting for equality is somehow un-American or are demanding some special right that they are not entitled to.

These struggles for equality clash even as our democracy becomes more sophisticated. In early days, there was no private ballot. A voter explicitly stood and was counted for the candidate that he (and yes, it was a he) supported. Later, a paper ballot afforded secrecy and was quickly broadly adopted as an improvement in the democratic process. It was especially quickly adopted in the South, where due to the low literacy rates of blacks at the time, the paper ballot was now a burden to them for voting. The South further discouraged voting by using the paper ballot as justification for literacy tests. There was  an exception to these literacy tests for those lucky voters whose grandfathers had previously voted. I’m sure that it was a coincidence that the quite literal grandfather clause only applied to white voters since their grandfathers were the only ones that could vote in those earlier times.

Steps like this drove black voting in the South to negligible percentages until the revolutionary time of the 1960s, when voting rights acts were passed.

Another thread running through American history is whether truth is derived from faith or from reason. An often overlooked fact today is how secular the founding fathers really were. It is not random that the word God does not appear in the constitution (and the word Lord only appears in ceremonial phrases such as “in the year of our Lord”). They  were trying to build a government free of religion.

In the early days of the nineteenth century, there swept through the US the Second Great Awakening. This wave swept over the country with such fervor that some parts completely given over to religion were called burned-over districts. Church membership soared.

This proved to be a recurring theme. There would be a wave of religious fervor that then would subside. Another example is that, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, church membership was on the decline. As the US met the challenge of the Cold War by facing off against the apparently godless Soviet Union, the fires of faith started up once again. Church membership soared. It was during the 1950s that one nation under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.

Sometimes faith is used to further equality. The abolitionists were part of the Second Great Awakening. Sadly, it appears that more often it is used as a cudgel against equality.

At one point, the Equal Rights Amendment had broad bi-partisan support. The amendment passed easily in the House and the Senate. Many states quickly ratified it. Phyllis Schlafly helped launch the modern conservative movement by rallying opposition to it from religious organizations that felt as if they were under attack by feminists.

Similarly, believe it or not, abortion also at one time had bi-partisan support. Pat Buchanan, at the time Nixon’s speechwriter, convinced Nixon to make it a religious partisan issue (Nixon, from his tapes, actually believed that sometimes abortion was necessary; the example that he used was if the fetus was of mixed race; you can always count on Nixon to have the worst possible racist take). Jerry Falwell, having had no previous problems with abortion, took up the issue with gusto. George H. W. Bush was once such a fan of the availability of birth control that he had a nickname of Rubbers (you can’t make this up). By the time he was Vice President, he had gotten the memo and was firmly toeing the line on conservative reproductive rights.

And so now here we are. In the 1950s, people couldn’t really tell pollsters what a Republican or a Democrat stood for because a wide range of beliefs were tolerated within each party. Now, the party positions have solidified into concrete and members of each now just shout at each over the ramparts. Modern polling and political operatives have further cemented the issues in each party.

While all of this legislative paralysis sets in, the truly rich have taken the opportunity to bend laws to their advantage. The gap between the rich and everyone else is now broader than ever before. With no government check, there seems to be no way to stop this trend.

Although this work was released before the latest demonstrations, could it be that we’re in the midst of the next revolution? Will the election of 2020 usher in true change?

And if it doesn’t, what then?