The Thinking Man’s QAnon

Title: American Conspiracy – The Octopus Murders

Rating: 4 Stars

By now, I’m sure that everyone knows about QAnon. Unless you’ve fallen completely into the conspiracy vortex, it’s pretty clear that, on the spectrum of conspiracy theories, it’s deep on the batshit crazy end. The fact that it spawned from Pizzagate, the theory that there’s a cabal (theorists love to use the word cabal) of high level Democrats who regularly meet in the basement of a pizza parlor to engage in Satanic, cannibalistic, sex abuse of minors, shows you that you’re probably going to be in for a bumpy ride. The saintly Donald Trump is bravely fighting off this group of pedophiles. Let’s not forget that either the assassinated John F Kennedy or his son (dead in a plane crash) was going to reappear in November 2021 (in case you haven’t noticed, that did not happen) to be Trump’s running mate. Trump also did not get reinstated as President as predicted on March 4, 2021, or on March 20, 2021, or even on August 13, 2021.

In short, it’s madness. The fact that, fairly recently, some twenty-five percent of all Republicans believe it is astounding.

I do have a confession to make. Decades ago, when in my mid twenties, it would be fair to say that conspiracy theories were kind of a guilty pleasure for me. Still a young adult, I probably found the anarchic state of being an adult to be subconsciously unsettling. In some weird way, believing in conspiracy theories gives one some confidence that someone, somewhere, has their hand on the till of reality and is driving it. Even if that person was evil, that would at least imply that there’s some order and control in the world.

Decades older, I understand the foolishness of that. The world is anarchy. There is no meaning. We’re on a infinitesimally small rock floating in the middle of an incomprehensibly large universe, which if some theories holds true, is itself nothing more than one of an even more incomprehensibly large number of multiverses. That’s just how it is. Deal with it.

Be that as it may, in the 1980s and 1990s, I strolled around in the murky world of conspiracy theories. The granddaddy of them all is, of course, the JFK assassination. There are so many more. A certainly not exhaustive list would include: RFK assassination, MLK Jr assassination, New World Order, George Soros, reptilian humanoids, Paul McCartney (he’s dead, you know), Area 51, and fluoridating water as a communist plot. More recent ones include 9/11, Obama’s birth, and all of the people that the Clintons have killed (I believe it’s over forty now).

Yes, most of these are certifiable. However, that does not change the fact that some of the more outlandish theories actually turned out to be true. The classic example is Iran-Contra. It truly is too byzantine to go into here, but if you’re interested I did write about it here. It might be the weirdest theory of them all but a significant chunk of it proved to be true. The same can be said about Watergate, which I wrote about here. OK, maybe I haven’t -completely- gotten over my conspiracy theory phase. 🙂

That brings me to Danny Casolaro. I first encountered him when I was lost on a path in a gloomy wood (semi-obscure Inferno reference for you literary geeks). Casolaro was a charismatic, dashingly handsome man that believed that he stumbled upon the true mother of all conspiracy theories. He was down in Virginia to nail down the last confirmation. Instead he was found in a hotel bathtub dead with multiple slash wounds on his wrists.

The body was quickly embalmed without informing his family and the coroner verdict was suicide. This rush to judgment and closure has caused many to be suspicious of the official line. That, and he was apparently getting phone death threats and had recently told his brother that, if he died in an accident, that it was not an accident.

And away we go.

Many people have tried to pick up Danny’s somewhat cluttered and haphazard breadcrumbs of clues and tried to find the truth themselves. Thus we find ourselves trailing along, in a four part documentary, a researcher named Christian Hansen as he completely immerses himself in Casolaro’s documentation (of which there are boxes and boxes) to see if he can get to the bottom of it.

What, exactly, is this Octopus that Casolaro keeps mentioning? Well, it’s very complicated. I’d call it a mega conspiracy as it stitches together a disparate set of theories into an integrated whole.

It all starts with something called Inslaw. It’s a software company that created a groundbreaking application called Promis. Remember that this is the 1980s. As a software guy, it appears that the groundbreaking application was a relational database. Be that as it may, it proved to be quite lucrative. That is, until the Justice Department arbitrarily confiscated it from Inslaw and gave it to someone else.

Why, you ask? Well, as compensation to a man that apparently paid out forty million dollars to Iranians to make sure that the US hostages would not get released before the 1980 election (to prevent the so-called October Surprise; the Reagan campaign calculated that the only way that Carter could win the election is by negotiating the hostages’ release).

From here connections are made to the tiny Cabazon Native American reservation. There, a John Nichols was working with the tribe to set up a gambling casino and, oh yeah, setting up a shadow defense company to make artillery shells there.

Of course, it probably goes without saying that Casolaro manages to connect all of this up with both the Iran-Contra and the BCCI banking scandals.

As in all good conspiracy theories, there are unsolved brutal murders. One person claimed to have discovered evidence of fraud. He, along with his friends, were shot execution style. Of course, all evidence was nowhere to be found. Another victim was hog tied with wire and allowed to slowly choke to death.

There are two main people whispering secrets into ears. One is Michael Riconosciuto. A self professed child genius (although the filmmakers uncovered a childhood IQ test score of a simply above average 124), he has spent decades in prison for various drug offenses. The other is Robert Nichols (no relation to John Nichols), who presents himself as a deadly dangerous intelligence officer. It seems pretty clear to me that both men were spinning Casolaro in circles, possibly just for their own amusement.

One thing that I did find amusing is that Casolaro believed that President George HW Bush was in the middle of it. Bush is the Forrest Gump of conspiracies. He pops up at the weirdest times. It’s probably not that surprising when you realize that Bush was a CIA Director in the 1970s, was Ronald Reagan’s Vice President in the 1980s (where he allegedly had a role in, yes, Iran-Contra), and then served a term as President. I’ve read about some people that have even tried to place him somehow into the JFK assassination.

There’s so much more. What is the truth? After four episodes, probably unsurprising, the truth is elusive and unconclusive. On the one hand, one of the ‘highly placed’ intelligence sources turned out to be an Aetna office manager that apparently did her research by asking around at the bowling alley that she played at regularly. On the other hand, some twenty-five years after Casolaro’s death, the reporters unearthed evidence that appears to have been overlooked in the original investigation.

That’s how conspiracies work. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that is just missing a couple of pieces. In your search for these pieces, you discover that the puzzle is just one corner of an even larger puzzle, so you start working that.

Rinse and repeat.

David Copperfield Never Had It So Rough

Title: Demon Copperhead

Rating: 5 Stars

An updated David Copperfield was not something that I was aware that I needed. It turns out that I was wrong.

It seems to be a pretty faithful retelling of David Copperfield. The main difference being that, instead of being set in Victorian England, the story is told starting in late 20th century rural Virginia.

The plot, at a high level, is quite similar between the two novels. A boy (birth name Damon Fields but quickly nicknamed to Demon Copperhead) is born to a poor mother whose father dies before he is born. Desperately poor, the boy and his mother barely scrape by. Demon comes home from a short vacation to find her mother remarried. His now stepfather brutally mistreats both Demon and her mother. His mother, pregnant, tragically dies.

Demon and his father want nothing more to do with each other, so Demon ends up in the foster care system. He ends up on a farm where the owner mistreats his foster boys and mercilessly forces them to work. The owner cuts Demon loose once the crop has harvested.

He ends up with another family. The family does not overtly abuse him but the father is sketchy at best and ends up putting him to work in a dangerous place. Demon eventually runs away and ends up at his father’s mother. She is stern but practical and places him in a much better situation. For a while, he actually kind of thrives. He becomes popular and treats a young woman at the same house as a trusted sister. He also meets a young woman that he thinks is the love of his life.

Unfortunately, it does not last. His life takes an ugly turn. He descends further than he ever has before. His young love dies.  After hitting rock bottom, he begins to climb up. He discovers his passion and it seems that he can make a living at it. He discovers that he really loves the woman that he has always treated as a sister. There is at least the possibility of a life of love and happiness.

If you’ve semi-recently read David Copperfield, all of those plot points will seem familiar. Even the names are similar (besides the obvious Demon Copperfield). Instead of the evil stepfather being named Edward Murdstone, he’s named Murrell Stone. Instead of Mr Micawber (one of the more famous characters in Dicken’s novel), we have Mr McCobb. David’s grandmother is Betsey Trotwood while Demon’s is named Betsey Woodall. The weaselly Uriah Heep in Dickens is named U-Haul. And so on.

The novel is much more than a few character name changes. Just as Copperfield was a harsh exposé of Victorian poverty life filled with poor urchins, struggling people being thrown into debtors’ prison, and the abysmal life of prostitutes, so is Copperhead a primal scream about the harsh life of rural life in Virginia in our present time.

The man that serves as one of Demon’s first father figures has a body broken by years in a coal mine. Demon’s mom dies of a drug overdose. In fact, this is the height of the opioid epidemic and it’s fair to say that virtually no one comes out of it unscathed. Demon’s pregnant mother dies of an overdose. The woman that Demon first falls in love with becomes so addicted to drugs that she wastes away and basically gives up. Once Demon seriously hurts his knee playing football, his life descends into a spiral of drug use. At one point, Demon works at a meth lab.

This is a novel that is politically unsparing. There is no question that the people of this land have been ill served. They are intentionally kept underemployed and ill educated so that they’re willing to take whatever work comes their way. The drug industry sees the whole community as a target rich environment. Doctors who should know better willfully overprescribe drugs like oxyContin to get rich, regardless of the destruction that these drugs are wreaking on their neighbors. Demon Copperfield is an unsparing, brutal look at how a significant section of our country has been abused by uncaring corporate interests.

It’s been years since I’ve read David Copperfield. I don’t remember the novel venting such visceral anger at the powers that be. It could be there but I don’t remember it. Another alternative is that, since the Victorian Age is so removed from me, the anger might be there but I might have just missed it. Without question, Copperfield did raise issues about class in England and how large sections of the population were being poorly treated. Demon Copperfield seems to be an angrier book than I remember David Copperfield being. Even though it is angrier, the humanity of its characters shines through.

I’ve read books about the opioid crisis. Although fictional, or maybe because it is fictional and Kingsolver could take creative license, somehow reading this struck me harder than some of the nonfiction books on the subject that I’ve read. I’ve found myself deeply caring about the characters and being infuriated at the forces that seemed bent upon destroying them.

A Film Studies Degree In A Book

Title: How To Read A Film

Rating: 4 Stars

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been trying to educate myself on film. Back in 2019, I spent a year or two going through the 2008 AFI (American Film Institute) best films list. Although it has not been updated in over fifteen years, I still recommend it as a great place to go to get a grounding in American film lore. My major beef against it is that it is not very representative. With the exception of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the other 99 films are all directed by white men. Now that I’ve gotten more experienced in film, that is a pretty glaring problem. There are many female and people of color that could easily have been added to the list. After all, Spielberg had five films on the list and Hitchcock, Wilder, and Kubrick each had four. Seventeen percent of the list is occupied by three names. Despite that obvious lapse, it’s still an interesting list of important films.

Back in 2022, the British Film Institute published the top 250 films in the world in its Sight and Sound magazine. The good news is that the list is way more inclusive. The number one film on the list was directed by a woman and other women and people of color are all over the list.

The not so good news is that it exposed how parochial my interest in. Yes, there is a significant overlap between the AFI list and the BFI list (eg Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Vertigo), but of the top 50, well over half are non US films. I’d never even heard of the majority of those films.

So, I’ve been giving myself the homework of watching at least the top 50 of the BFI list. Having just finished watching my 49th, I’m just one away from my goal. What have I learned?

Well, my subscription to Max has proven to be quite valuable. Max has some kind of relationship with the Criterion Channel, so many of the films are available on Max. Even so, there are still challenges finding some of the top rated films. Ordet, the Danish film which is the last of the top 50 that I haven’t watched, isn’t available anywhere to stream other than the Criterion Channel, so I guess that I’ll be signing up for that service as well. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was hidden away on Tubi. I couldn’t find Killer of Sheep anywhere, but at the last moment I did find a copy of it on the Internet Archive (complete with Spanish subtitles). The Danish film Ordet is also on the Internet Archive with Spanish subtitles, but watching a Danish film with Spanish subtitles isn’t quite good enough for me to understand it.

Another thing that I’ve learned is how, even though by now, over the last five years, I’ve watched coming up on six hundred films, the fact of the matter is that I really still don’t understand a lot. Especially with the BFI list, it seems that foreign filmmakers place a greater intellectual burden on the film viewer. I find myself occasionally lost.

To rectify this, I decided to find a film studies book. I poked around and the book that was consistently recommended was How To Read A Film, by James Monaco.

I approached the book with some trepidation. After all, it was written all of the way back in 1977. Much has happened since then. Monaco has published new releases in 1981, 2000, 2009, and, most recently, 2013. To his credit, these aren’t minor revisions. Whole sections have the book were added or heavily revised.

I was not disappointed. As I said in my Goodreads review, I found it exhaustive and exhausting. It is not a book for the faint of heart. Having said that, the writing is accessible. Monaco is an encyclopedia on the subject of film and here is his life’s work. Since I can’t really do justice to his ideas in this brief review, let me just touch on the subjects that he discusses.

When I say he starts at the beginning, he starts at the beginning. Forget about film. He starts by defining art and how it’s an abstraction of reality and what that means. He brings up other art forms like painting, theater, music, and novels and explains how each informs the art of film.

He then moves onto the mechanics of film making. He explains how images are made and how sound is made. He goes into details about cameras, lens, and filmstock, including how attributes like aspect ratio, grain, gauge, and speed affect the film making process.

He then discusses the language of film via the introduction of semiotics (the study of symbols). He talks denotative vs connotative meaning. He discusses montage and mise-en-Scene. Usefully, he first defines mise-en-Scene but then explains how it and montages are separate but yet interrelated. He defines and explains paradigmatic vs syntagmatic. Believe it or not, not only does he explain it, but he does it in a way that I found the two concepts fascinating.

He then goes into film history. This is not a shallow dive. He starts with the essential contrast between the two early French filmmakers, the verisimilitude of the Lumière brothers vs the fantasy of the magician Georges Méliès and how those two different ideas of film are still redounding over a century later.

He then goes into detail regarding world wide filmmaking in the 120 years since. Sure he talks about titans like Steven Spielberg and Ingmar Bergman. That’s a given. Do you want to learn about the early 1970s Chilean revolution in filmmaking before Pinochet came to power and shut it down? Because yes, he’s got a paragraph about that. I’m telling you that the breadth and depth of his historical knowledge of global film will stagger you.

In case that doesn’t leave you overwhelmed, you learn that he considers film to be any media that consists of moving images. Yes, that includes television. He has a whole section that describes what television is, how it actually works, including signal processing and how that translates to a picture on a Cathode Ray Tube. He then delves into a history of television with discussions on everything from Milton Berle to Ernie Kovacs to The Cosby Show to South African television.

Not content to end there, he then discusses video. Not only does he discuss the various video standards but discusses how video compression works and its drawbacks. He includes in this discussion the impact that home video use has had on the film industry.

The amount of detail in this book is staggering. I feel like he used some kind of compression technique in writing it, because it feels like he packed an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge into a 700 page book.

My only beef is that he hasn’t revised it since 2013. He mentions youTube but doesn’t talk much about  the actual impact that streaming small subsets of films has had or will have on the future of film. Similarly, TikTok is nowhere mentioned here. As our consumption of media becomes ever so truncated, it would seem to follow that it’s going to have a dramatic effect on the film industry. This book is quiet on the subject of the streaming services. Nearly all films are available somewhere but now you have to find it on some fragmented set of services (Netflix, Amazon, Max, Peacock, Disney, Criterion, Tubi, Kanopy, and so on). Films can be watched on anything from a phone to a tablet to a television to a home theater room to a movie theater to IMAX. What impact does that form factor variety have on the production and design of a film? I’d love to hear his thoughts on the subject.

I’m not going to lie. It was all a bit much. I’m not even going to pretend that I absorbed even one percent of it. However, I do feel like I have a much better understanding of what to look for from some of the more nontraditional filmmakers. I also now have it as a handy reference book that I can consult and probably even re-read as I continue my cinematic journey.

God Needs A Parenting Class

Title: Paradise Lost

Rating: 3 Stars

Look, I get it. I am so not the target audience for this work. I’m a twenty-first century guy from the Left Coast that has attended possibly one non wedding religious service in the past thirty years.

Even so, holy crap.

For those not in the know about this 1660ish epic poem considered one of the great masterpieces of English literature, it’s the story of Satan’s failed revolt against God, God’s creation of Earth and his beloved creatures molded in his own image, Adam and Steve (oops, I mean Eve), Satan’s attempt to avenge his failed revolt by inducing the fall of Adam and Eve, the fall of Adam and Eve, and their subsequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

First of all, the language is amazing. Written in blank verse, as I’ve said in other posts, epic poems like this are made to be read aloud. The words flow out of your mouth like honey. It is a beautiful work of language.

Now that’s out of the way, why did I give it a paltry three stars? Instead of trying to give some cogent argument that I’m fundamentally unqualified and unequipped to give, I’m just going to write down some of my miscellaneous thoughts as I read it and you can be the judge.

Although beautifully written, it is quite a challenging read. I’m not talking about allusions or metaphors or things like that. I’m talking some of the words are difficult to read. Milton was incredibly well read and highly educated. His work is strewn with historical figures, mythological figures, and 17th century geographical references. Sure, a key would have provided clarity, but accessing a key while trying to read poetry is a sure fire way to hate reading poetry. For the most part, even if I didn’t get the reference, I could, to a pretty high probability, derive its meaning via context within the poem.

Considering that Milton was completely blind by the time that he started Paradise Lost, the fact that he composed a 10,000 line epic poem in his head and then recited it to a scribe is pretty stupendous. I understand that he didn’t sit down and do it in one sitting. In a way, creating it over a period of years is an even more amazing feat. He had to keep it all in his head, know where he had been, where he is, and where he is going. It’s a magnificent accomplishment.

Knowing a little bit about Milton’s background makes the poem even more interesting. Earlier in his life, he’d become disenchanted with the increasingly autocratic Charles I. He supported the puritan republican efforts. When Charles I was overthrown and ultimately executed in the Civil War, Milton wrote tracts supporting the new government. He actually got a position in the Commonwealth, acting as a censor and a propagandist. Among other things, he wrote tracts justifying the regicide.

All was well and good until Oliver Cromwell died in 1858. His son was no Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth was overthrown. Charles II assumed the throne. Considering Milton’s support of the Commonwealth and his propagandist writings (and, oh yeah, he was totally blind by this point), things got a little awkward for him. He went in hiding but was caught and imprisoned. Luckily, he still had friends in high places. As a result he was released.

Given that, is it no surprise that Milton kind of had a soft spot for Satan? By far, Satan is the most interesting character in the poem. He can barely bring himself to worship God. When God abruptly introduces his son to his heavenly choir and tells them all that they must worship him now as well, that’s just a step too far for Satan. As an immortal being next in power to God, for God just to arbitrarily introduce a new layer of management, Satan simply cannot bring himself to bend his knee to this upstart. Even though he knows that his rebellion is futile, Satan feels that he has no choice.

In later sections of the poem, Milton has an archangel denounce any man that sets himself so far above another to require abject obedience. It’s not exactly a subtle critique of the entire concept of royalty.

Can we talk about free will for a second? On the one hand, God insists that man has free will to make his choices. On the other hand, God says that he knows that man will fall. How can free will exist if an omniscient being already knows the result? The whole free will thing even makes less sense when the archangel Michael, when preparing to expel Adam, lays out the future of humanity to Adam. He describes Cain murdering Abel, he talks about Noah’s ark, and he talks about Moses leading his people to the promised land. Now, considering that all of this is without question in the future (after all, these are Adam’s unborn descendants) and is stated as a fact, it makes the concept of free will nonsensical.

Even beyond that, God tips the scale against Adam and Eve. He gives them the one rule to not eat from the tree of knowledge. Why make the tree of knowledge so handy and tempting? Why make Eve so completely naive?

Satan is trapped in hell, behind an iron gate protected by two fierce guards. The entrance to the Garden of Eden is protected by angelic guards. That sounds pretty secure, right? Well, it turns out that the two fierce guards are literally children of Satan (Death and Sin). Two minutes of conversation with them and they unlock and open the door for Satan. Once open, they can’t even close it.

As for the angel guarding the Garden of Eden, John Parker would have done a better job. In case you’re not up on your presidential arcana, Parker was the lone policeman assigned to protect Lincoln at Ford’s Theater and decided to leave at intermission to get drunk. Later, when Satan is talking to the archangel Gabriel, he tells him that God really should have protected the Garden of Eden better. You think?

Satan effortlessly slips by the security, assumes the aspect of a snake, and tricks Eve into sampling the fruit (“Hey, not only did I not die, I’m now a talking snake? Just think what would happen to a hot number like yourself!”). Adam, not much smarter than Eve, just kind of says, well, I guess if you’re screwed I might as well be screwed too.

Adam and Eve never had a chance. God is the kind of parent that would put a loaded gun into a baby’s crib and then be shocked that it went off. After all, the baby had the free will not to pull the trigger, right?

This goes to the blog title. For being an infinite font of love, God is actually kind of a jerk. Perhaps being eternally immortal has caused a few wires to cross in his head. Why does he insist on total adoration? Why does he set up Adam and Eve to fail? Once they do inevitably fail, why is the punishment then passed on to not just them but to all of their descendants? Adam is like, I dunno, I guess that sounds fair. Seriously?

I can understand Satan’s reluctance to bend the knee. After all, as Adam said himself, he did not ask to be born. God put all of this into existence, who knows why, maybe he was bored and wanted to have some toys to play with. Given that he chose to create all of this, why does he require that everyone worship him? How does requiring abject obeisance align with infinite love? In fact, in one part of the poem there is a phrase something along the lines of loving with fear? Love with fear? WTF?

The poem describes the battle between the forces of Satan and of God. I found the battle to be amusing. Here’s the thing, all of the arrayed forces are immortal. They quite literally cannot be killed. Not only that, but God has weakened everyone’s fighting capabilities, so not only are they immortal but they can’t even be really hurt. The fighting angels can cause each other pain, but when “injured”, they just kind of move to the side until they feel better and can reenter the fray. It was basically the heavenly equivalent of dodgeball, except the stakes are who gets to rule over everything.

I remember the first time that I watched The Dark Knight. There were incredible actors in the cast, including giants like Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman. As I watched it, I remember sitting there waiting impatiently for The Joker (Heath Ledger) to make another appearance. He dominated that film.

So it is with Satan here. Every scene with Satan was exciting and dramatic. Whenever Satan was off the page, things started to drag. For whatever reason, Milton felt duty bound to include the biblical story of creation (the whole, on the first day, let there be light thing) and then later, as mentioned above, gave Adam a whole preview of biblical biographies from Cain/Abel to Noah to Moses to Abraham to David to the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These parts, in comparison to Satan scheming, sulking, and boasting, seemed lifeless.

Finally, there’s the whole Adam and Eve thing. Adam basically bosses around Eve to no end. The one time that he should put his foot down he lets her go to her doom. After they’ve both eaten of the forbidden fruit, when God comes down to lay a can of whip ass on them, Adam totally throws Eve under the bus. Eve is overcome with guilt to the point of even suggesting that they should kill themselves. Adam, at his best, pretty much says, yeah, you’re a dumb bitch, but I love you and we’ll somehow make it work, despite you.

Just as God is a father figure to Adam, Adam is weirdly not only Eve’s lover but also her parental figure. Eve never once talks to a heavenly figure. In at least one case, the angel puts her to sleep so that the men can talk undisturbed. Adam is essentially her sole source of knowledge and wisdom.

In regard to both God and Adam, the fathers failed their children.

To Steal A Presidency

Some time ago, I wrote that I might start manifesting my anxiety of the upcoming presidential election by writing about weird presidential facts. Here’s yet another example of my anxiety manifesting.

Between 1788 and 2020, there have been (if my math is correct), 59 presidential elections. Most of them have been uncontroversial affairs. George Washington ran unopposed. James Monroe was virtually unopposed. The only reason why even one elector voted against him in 1820 was to keep the honor of being unanimously elected exclusive to George Washington.

Some elections were wipeouts, like Richard Nixon defeating George McGovern or Lyndon Johnson defeating Barry Goldwater or Franklin Roosevelt defeating Alf Landon or Ronald Reagan defeating Walter Mondale.

Some elections were surprises. Here we have Harry Truman defeating Thomas Dewey and Donald Trump defeating Hillary Clinton.

In most presidential elections, the winner was unambiguous.  However flawed the process, there was an election, the electors voted, and the results were accepted.

Notice that I said most. In a few elections, there has been some serious chicanery. I’ve identified six elections in which tomfoolery or suspected tomfoolery took place. I’ve split them up into three categories.

Cheated and won the presidency

Rutherford Hayes

Let’s start with the worst example. Let’s talk about the case where it’s pretty clear that cheating worked. That is, a candidate lost the popular vote, lost the electoral vote, and still ended up president. Thankfully, there is only one case thus far.

I’ve talked about the 1876 election before. The Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden was running against the Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes. At the end of election night, Tilden led the popular vote by 3%. He’d won 184 electoral votes to Hayes’ 165. He was one electoral vote short.

There were four states (Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon) outstanding that amounted to 20 electoral votes. Now, to be fair, there was voter intimidation in the Southern states by the Democratic party, so it’s not like their hands were clean . Be that as it may, Florida and Louisiana clearly had chosen Tilden. Their electoral votes normally would go to him, thus winning him the presidency.

A commission was established to figure out who should get which votes. Tilden only needed one vote to win. Out of that commission came the Compromise of 1877. The Republicans offered to remove the last federal troops from the South, thus ending Reconstruction and leaving Black Americans to their inevitable tragic fate. In return, the Democratic members agreed not to challenge Hayes’ election. As a result, all 20 of the outstanding electoral votes went to Hayes, winning the presidency by a vote of 185 to 184.

Pretty suspicious but probably did not cheat

George W Bush

For those of a certain age, we remember the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W Bush. Gore clearly won the national popular vote. On election night, it all came down to Florida. Early in the night, it looked like it was going Bush’s way. Gore called Bush to concede. Later, votes started to break towards Gore. Gore called Bush back to unconcede.

And then chaos.

There were multiple recounts. There were controversies of how to count ballots with hanging chads. There were poorly designed butterfly ballots that resulted in some ten thousand votes for the arch-conservative Pat Buchanan in a reliably Democratic county. There were tens of thousands of Black voters thrown off voter rolls due to the actions of the Florida Secretary of State, who just coincidentally was Bush’s campaign chair in Florida. Let’s not forget the hilariously named Brooks Brothers Riot, where over dressed and well groomed Republican partisans tried to bum rush election offices to shut down the count.

Finally, the Supreme Court stepped in, and in a blatant party vote, shut down the last recount while it was still ongoing.

Thus, out of six million votes cast in Florida, George W Bush won by a total of 537 votes.

Was there chicanery? In the days and months before the election, most definitely. The actual vote counting seemed to be a sincere effort.

The bottom line, at least from my point of view, is that Florida was truly a coin toss. If you counted Florida votes 100 times, Bush might have won 51 and Gore 49.

John F Kennedy

This one is a little older. The 1960 election pitting Kennedy against Richard Nixon was a nail biter. In the popular vote, Kennedy eked out the vote over Nixon by 100,000 votes out of 68 million total votes (a scant .2% margin of victory).

Kennedy had about the same margin in Illinois. However, Cook County was rather infamously run by Mayor Richard Daley. It was believed that, through connivances between Daley and Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, the voter rolls were inflated and that they put the fix in for Kennedy.

Although this a great conspiracy theory tying a political machine to the mafia, the fact is that it’s not as if Cook County was that much of a statistical outlier for Kennedy. Not only that, but even if Kennedy had lost Illinois, he would have still had enough votes in the electoral college to get elected president.

John Quincy Adams

If you’re a history geek, this is a famous one. With four presidential candidates running, no one won a majority in the electoral college, so the election was sent to the House of Representatives.

Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and led in the electoral college, so he naturally assumed that he would prevail in the House.

However, Henry Clay, the House Speaker, had other ideas. He threw his support over to Adams, which was enough for Adams to win the majority of the states and get elected.

He promptly named Clay to be Secretary of State. It’s not considered such now, but back in those days, Secretary of State was seen as the stepping stone to the presidency (Madison was Jefferson’s, Monroe was Madison’s).

Jackson assumed that there was some wink-wink deal between Adams and Clay. Adams would support Clay at the end of his presidency. This led to the infamous accusation of a ‘Corrupt Bargain’.

I don’t know the truth here, but Adams, being an Adams, was kind of a stiff, prissy fussbudget that I don’t see lowering himself to make such a deal with Clay. I think that Clay legitimately thought that Jackson, being Jackson, was an ignorant hothead not qualified to be president. Clay was one of the most successful and popular statemen of his day, so his appointment as Secretary of State seems legitimate.

If anything, this whole episode just shows how bad the Adams political family was when it comes to the optics of practical politics.

Cheated but failed to win the presidency

Donald Trump

You probably knew that I was going to lead this section with Trump. In fact, even now, there are tens of millions of Americans who think that Biden should fall into the cheated and won the presidency category above. Considering the fact that this was most heavily supervised election in history, that over 60 lawsuits were filed to no effect (my favorite moment in that fiasco is still Rudy Giuliani telling a judge that they have a lot of theories but not a lot of facts), and that multiple recounts in Arizona only increased the victory margin in that state for Biden, that claim is, frankly, delusional. Biden won decisively both in the popular vote and in the electoral college.

That did not stop Trump from trying to steal the election. Everything from having protesters chanting to ‘stop the count’ in states where he was leading and ‘count the votes’ in states where he was trailing to a highly suspicious call to the Georgia Secretary of State asking him to ‘find some votes’ to having false electors illegally send in their votes to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to, I’m not sure, maybe set fire to ballots he didn’t like to telling insurrectionists to ‘fight like Hell’ and march on to the Capitol building to stop the vote counting, Trump did not leave any stone unturned in his attempts to steal the election.

It was all for naught and it sure does look like, here we go again.

Henry Clay

These last two, probably because of the passage of time, seemed pretty amusing to me.

Henry Clay had a plan. The election of 1824 was going to be madness. Yes, I’m going to talk about 1824 again. Although there was still only one political party in the US (Democratic Republican), there was not one, not two, not three, but four candidates from the Democratic Republican party running to be president. The candidates were John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford.

Clay knew that he wasn’t going to win the popular vote. Playing chess while everyone was playing checkers, he knew that, with four candidates running, that the odds were pretty low that one of the four would end up with a majority of the electoral vote.

In that case, the House of Representatives decide. Each state gets one vote and whoever gets the majority of the votes becomes president. I’ll give you one guess who was the Speaker of the House. Yep, it was Henry Clay.

He counted on the vote going to the House and then using his position as Speaker to get enough votes to get himself elected president.

There was only one flaw in the plan. Only the top three vote totals in the electoral college move on to the House. You guessed it. Clay finished in fourth, a scat four votes behind Crawford.

Let the corrupt bargain commence!

Aaron Burr

If anything, this one is even funnier than Clay’s grand plan falling apart by four electoral votes.

The 1800 election was really the first true election led by parties. The incumbent John Adams was running as the Federalist candidate. Thomas Jefferson was the Democratic Republican candidate. With the growth of parties, there now was the concept of a running mate. For Jefferson, Aaron Burr was tapped to run as his vice president.

Jefferson unquestionably beat Adams, winning 73 electoral votes to 65. In the original electoral college system, each member of the electoral college had two votes. The top two vote getters then became president and vice president. One Democratic Republican elector was supposed to cast one of their ballots for a third party or to abstain. Whoever was supposed to do this either did not get the memo or panicked. Regardless, at the end of the count, both Jefferson and Burr had 73 electoral votes. Since there was no separate president / vice president vote, it was a tie. The vote got thrown to the House.

Everyone knew that Jefferson was supposed to be on top of the ticket. There were two factors in play. One was that it was a Federalist dominated outgoing House that was going to make the decision and Federalists hated Jefferson. The other was Aaron Burr. Although Burr, along with everyone else, knew that he was supposed to be vice president, he was a morally suspect slippery politician that thought that he might have just found a back door path to the presidency. He didn’t outright campaign for it, but his silence was notable.

After 36 ballots, the House finally did the right thing and gave Jefferson the presidency. Interesting, it was Burr’s bitter rival, Federalist Alexander Hamilton, that convinced enough of his fellow Federalists to select Jefferson that put Jefferson over the top. Some three years later, their rivalry became deadly when Burr fatally shot Hamilton in a duel.

Let’s all cross our fingers that I won’t have to add the 2024 presidential election to this list!

Joe Rogan Is Not Lenny Bruce

Title: Outrageous

Rating: 3 Stars

By now, everyone has probably heard the arguments. Comedy crowds are too woke. You can’t joke about anything without someone’s feelings getting hurt. Many comedians decry the state of comedy. Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, and Whitney Cummings are just a few of the prominent comedians that believe that they are at risk getting cancelled.

Just on the surface, their arguments are ridiculous. Joe Rogan’s satellite radio deal is worth up to $250 million dollars. Dave Chappelle gets paid $20 million dollars for each of his Netflix special. Louis CK recently won a Grammy for his comedy special and has sold out Madison Square Garden. Although Whitney Cummings isn’t in that stratosphere, estimates of her net worth range in the tens of millions.

If any of that counts as being cancelled, where can I sign up?

The fact is that none of those comedians’ free speech is at risk. Rogan can spew his anti-vax nonsense to his estimated eleven million viewers. A significant part of Chappelle’s last several specials has been anti-trans, but he’s still cashing $20 million checks.

What is happening is that other people are exercising their freedom of speech to criticize their speech. That is a perfectly valid form of speech. In fact, people can use their freedom of speech to shout down other people’s speech through boycotts. This is America.

It’s amusing to me how butt hurt these comedians get. They think that they can say offensive things with zero repercussions? The fact that they are shocked shows who the true snowflakes are.

In this cultural moment comes a new book by Kliph Nesteroff. For those not familiar with Nesteroff, he wrote The Comedians. It is without doubt the best history of comedy and comedians that I’ve read. When I heard that he was writing a history of cancel culture and culture wars, I was excited.

Although I only gave it three stars (more on that later), it was an interesting survey of the controversies that comedians and, in general, cultural figures have experienced over the past century or so.

As expected, there really is nothing new in the world. For well over a hundred years, there have been multiple protests against popular comedians of the day. In many ways, the protests in the past were even stronger than the current day. In 1927, Mae West, famous for her winking, vixenish double entendres, was arrested and sentenced to ten days (she served eight). In hindsight, it was pretty amazing that Mae West staged a play in 1927 that featured gay love and interracial love. Lenny Bruce was arrested eight times for public obscenity. In 1974, Richard Pryor was arrested for disorderly conduct since the authorities knew that an obscenity arrest would not stand up. In 1972, George Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee while performing his seven words that you can’t say on television.

These protests occurred independent of the entertainment venue. Whether it was vaudeville, clubs, radio, or television, there was always someone waiting to be offended.  Everything from All in the Family to The Simpsons were protested as attacks on the American family.

To be clear, it’s not just comedy. Any cultural phenomenon comes under immediate suspicion. A good example is dancing. Dancing seems to be a pretty joyous activity. Well, in the 1920s if you were jitterbugging or if in the 1960s you were doing the twist or if in the 1980s you were slam dancing, apparently many people believed that you were doing the devil’s work.

Nesteroff describes two main thrusts of complaints. One is the type that we now think of when we think cancel culture. Even way back in vaudeville days, there were people complaining about comedy that attacked groups of people. There were people protesting against blackface or ethnic humor. Over the years, as other historically disenfranchised groups acquired some measure of power, they would raise their voices in protest to crude, stereotypical behavior.

The usual response to these protests is, what’s next? There were comedians back in the day that were like, if you take away blackface, what’s next? Jewish dialect humor? Lazy Mexican jokes? Polish jokes? When will it stop?

Guess what? As each of these groups acquired some measure of power and raised their protests, comedy adapted. So, yes, there is no more blackface, Jewish dialect, Mexican, and Polish jokes, at least by mainstream comedians. Despite predictions of eminent destruction of humor, comedy endured.

The other thrust is the conservative reaction to culture. Nesteroff paints Paul Weyrich as the mastermind behind this, using large amounts of money from the likes of Joseph Coors, the Koch brothers, and Richard Mellon Scaife. Setting up a large number of innocuously named foundations, they made it seem as if there was a massive groundswell of support for what were previously fringe beliefs. In fact, these organizations took the universally condemned beliefs of the extreme John Birch Society and put just enough lipstick on the pig to make them seem mainstream. Nesteroff devotes several chapters in his book to tracking these organizations.

So, why the three stars? First of all, at least for my taste, the book seemed to be a pretty dry recitation of pretty repetitive stories. In Nesteroff’s defense, that was kind of the point. The fact is that cultural protests have been going as long as there’s been culture. Describing very similar activities as they repeatedly reoccur over many decades does make that point, just not in a very entertaining way.

My second concern was that the Weyrich chapters seemed to be a separate book from the rest. They almost seemed to be written even in a different way. Although I do see a common thread to the entire book, it just struck me odd as I was reading it.

Having said that, if you feel yourself getting caught up in the tragedy of Joe Rogan somehow getting cancelled because of some ‘brave’ stance that he’s taking, reading this book is a good antidote. When you hear of someone like that spouting off, just remember Shakespeare, that it “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”.

Mac The Serial Killer

Every now and then, probably like most people, I stumble upon some topic that I find mildly curious. Before I know it, I end up deep down some internet bunny trail. Here is the story of one of those times.

Twenty years ago or so, I bought my first iPod. At that time, iTunes was this amazing application that, for the small price of $1.99 (I think that it might have even been 99 cents in those days), you could buy almost any song made. Compared to the hassle of going down to the CD store and buying a CD when you only wanted one or two songs off of it, it was pretty amazing.

Over the ensuing years, I just kept on buying and buying more songs. I even continued buying songs long after iTunes jumped the shark and actively began to suck. Finally, one of my friends shamed me into abandoning buying songs off of iTunes and just use a music subscription service.

The end result is that I now have several thousand hand picked songs. Most of the time, I just keep it shuffling on one playlist that contains nearly all of my songs. Over the past twenty years, my music tastes have ebbed and flowed, so I now have built up a weirdly eclectic set of music. I have everything from psychobilly to punk rock to torch songs to yodeling to Russian chanson to early jazz to Christmas songs to gangsta rap to reggaeton. Keeping all of those songs in the same shuffle, it makes me smile when NWA’s Straight Outta Compton is immediately followed by Pat Boone’s cover of Smoke on the Water.

For some reason, Bobby Darin’s version of Mac the Knife has been coming up regularly. It’s actually a pretty awesome song, building to a slapping climax. Released in 1959, it was a huge hit, selling millions of copies and winning him a couple of Grammys.

I’d always pictured Bobby Darin as a silky smooth, non-threatening crooner. I figured that his songs were just vehicles for his butterscotch vocals.

For some reason, I decided to read the lyrics to Mac the Knife. Never listening too closely to the words, I imagined that Mac was some kind of mafia like crime figure who was handy with a knife that is now back in town for some reason. I had in mind some slightly comedic and colorful but also dangerous character that might have appeared in the musical Guys and Dolls.

Nope. Mac is actually a serial killer. Named MacHeath, he’s in town and he’s offing people left and right. The song is basically a list of people that he’s going to kill. In fact, one of his victims is known to have had a wad of cash. Now he’s dead and MacHeath is spending money like a drunken sailor.

It seems like a strange subject for a mainstream performer like Bobby Darin, especially considering that at that time, his main fanbase was still teenage girls.

Curious, I dug deeper.

Bobby Darin was not the first performer of the song. In fact, the song is quite old. It dates all of the way back to 1928. It first appeared in a German music drama called The Threepenny Opera. The lyrics were written by Bertolt Brecht. The original lyrics were even more hardcore than Darin’s version. In addition to the stabbing, the original lyrics had Macheath (yes, the ‘h’ is not capitalized in this version) committing an arson that killed seven children and raping a young widow.

So, yeah, someone heard this song and said, let’s get Bobby Darin to record this song. I bet all of the bobbysoxers will really love it!

I’ve written about this before, but since it’s been several years, I’ll talk about it again. I have to admit that I’m a bit obsessed with murder ballads. It just seems so strange to write songs that seemingly glorify murderers.

This isn’t new. Murder ballads date back centuries. The story is that, before public executions, minstrels would go around singing the killer’s crimes to the assembled audience for their entertainment and edification. Some of the more enterprising performers would even sell their music on broadsheets so that their songs could live on in posterity.

Hundreds of years later, murder ballads are still sung and enjoyed. Some of the more modern versions include Cocaine Blues (many people, including Johnny Cash), Hey Joe (many people, including Jimi Hendrix), Janie’s Got A Gun (Aerosmith), Long Black Veil (many people, including Johnny Cash yet again), and Tom Dooley (again, many people, but most famously The Kingston Trio).

Back to The Threepenny Opera, it in turn was based upon an English ballad opera called The Beggar’s Opera, which included a highwayman named Macheath. That Macheath was based upon a historical thief named Jack Sheppard. Sheppard was born in 1702 and was hanged at a very young age in 1724. He was not a murderer. He was a thief that got caught pretty quickly. He proved adept at escaping. He was arrested and escaped four times. After his final arrest, he was encased in 300 pounds of chains. His jailers charged gawkers four shillings to look at him in prison. His final escape attempt was thwarted and he was hung.

So, to sum up, the serial killer in Mac the Knife was based upon an earlier musical that featured a character even more violent that in turn was based upon an opera featuring a highwayman that in turn was based upon a historical young man that was a thief and escape artist. Bobby Darin’s Mac the Knife was released in 1959 and the original young thief was executed in 1724.

I know that I’m running long, but I have one more thing. For those of you into the dramatic arts, the name Bertolt Brecht (the lyricist) might seem familiar.

Typically, the point of a dramatic play is to pull an audience into the play. Brechtian plays are the opposite. Brecht wanted the audience to be thinking critically about the play even as the play was being performed.

To accomplish this, a Brechtian play tries to break through the traditional illusion of an on stage performance. This can be done in several ways. An actor can break character. The so-called fourth wall can be broken by the audience being openly acknowledged by the actors. An actor might assume several characters, including costume changes.

If you’ve seen a dramatic performance that leaves you, the audience, feeling somehow discomfited or alienated, then you’ve probably seen a play with Brechtian elements.

Remember that we started with a snappy little song by a crooner. Somehow we ended up with a eighteenth century thief and a major innovator of the dramatic arts.

Thank you, Mac the Knife. It was quite the ride!

Neo-Realism Through A Woman’s Gaze

Title: Wanda

Rating: 4 Stars

Just a short while ago, I watched and wrote about the film Killer of Sheep. In that post, I wrote about neo-realism and how it’s typically inspired in poor, desolate, powerless situations. I’d mentioned Bicycle Thieves, created in the ruins of post World War II Italy and Pather Panchali, created in 1950s rural India. I’d wondered how the concepts of neo-realism would translate to an American filmmaker, given the unprecedented wealth and power of the US.

I didn’t have to wonder very long because shortly after watching Pather Panchali, I watched Killer of Sheep. Pather Panchali was 35th on the BFI Sight and Sound List. Killer of Sheep was ranked 44th. Killer of Sheep was the product of a Black man (Charles Burnett). Given the state of African Americans, especially the ones that he focused on in the Watts neighborhood in 1978, creating a film in the style of neo-realism made perfect sense.

Now, coming in at 48 on the BFI list, is Wanda. It’s another American example of a neo-realistic film. In this case, it was written by, directed by, and starring a woman named Barbara Loden. When you consider the state of women in the US in 1970, a female auteur creating a neo-realistic film makes perfect sense.

Loden stars as Wanda Goronski. When the film starts, she appears passed out on her sister’s couch. Her sister’s house directly faces a loud, dirty coal plant. She has to get up and walk across the torn up wasteland of coal country to get to the courthouse. She’s late, and her soon to be ex husband and the divorce court judge are impatiently waiting for her. Her husband accuses her of being a bad wife and mother. She basically shrugs and agrees. When her husband demands sole custody of their children, she meekly agrees that they’d be better off with him. Given that this was filmed in 1970, I can imagine that this scene would be shocking.

That business concluded, she tries and fails to get her job back at the sewing factory. She ends up in a bar, where a man sits with her and buys her beer. After a one night stand with him, the man abandons her at an ice cream store. She takes a nap at a movie theater. When she wakes, she discovers that she’s been robbed.

Penniless, she goes to a bar and cadges a beer from a man that she assumes is the bartender. In fact, he’s a thief that has bound the bartender. Desperate not to be alone, she leaves with him. The man (Norman Dennis, played by Michael Higgins) is angry, rude, and abusive to Wanda, but Wanda, accepting that this is her lot in life, passively takes all of it as long as she can stay with him.

Norman is a small time thief. At a department store, he rifles through cars in the parking lot, stealing anything that isn’t nailed down. Perhaps inspired by a visit to his father who doesn’t have much faith in him, Norman plans a big score. It involves an outlandish plan to tie up the bank manager’s family and then place a bomb in their house. Threatened with violence to his family, the bank manager would take Norman to the bank, open the vault, and steal the money. Wanda’s part is to follow behind and serve as the getaway vehicle once Norman has the money.

Unsurprisingly, the plan falls apart. Wanda gets lost and arrives at the bank late. In the meantime, a silent alarm has been triggered at the bank and Norman is killed by the police.

Once again cast adrift, Wanda falls in with another group of people. As people joke and laugh around her, she just quietly stares ahead.

Let’s tick off the elements of neo-realism in the film. Other than Higgins and Loden, all of the actors are amateurs. It was shot on a small budget of $100,000. Numbers vary, but the size of the film crew was between four and seven. Probably due to the small budget, it was filmed in 16 mm. Due to that and other choices Loden made, the film has a grainy, documentary feel to it. Also to save costs, it was filmed on location in the depressed coal country of Pennsylvania. Although there was a screenplay, Loden soon essentially abandoned it, and through the use of improv, watched the film morph and take different directions as the shooting unfolded.

Although this does have a somewhat more conventional plot than other neo-realistic films I’ve seen, the characters are still being buffeted by conditions larger than themselves. Wanda, especially, has very little agency. She is swept up by events and is generally passively accepting of them, never imagining that her life could somehow be happier, more successful, or more fulfilling. Her life, whether it’s being a wife and mother in a small, bleak, dirty coal town or working in a sewing factory full of deafening machines, or tagging along with an abusive, small time thief, seems hopeless.

Throughout the entire film, men treat Wanda with casual sexism. The men call her doll or sweetie, usually to avoid the effort of having to remember her name. They use her for sex and then discard her. For Wanda, sex seems purely transactional. She lets them use her body and in exchange the world allows her to exist for another day.

It’s interesting that, during this time, Loden was married to Elia Kazan. Both a famed Broadway and film director, he’s most famous for A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and East of Eden. By the time 1970 rolls around, Kazan is embroiled in controversy because of his decision to name names in the McCarthy hearings.

Loden claimed that much of the film was autobiographical, not so much in fact but in the attitude of Wanda. If so, that makes me wonder how much of Kazan was in Norman. Having been a director of such fame and power, I can only imagine that being married to such a man must have been stifling. Kazan apparently even tried to claim credit for the film Wanda. He said that he wrote the script for Loden as a favor to her.

Loden also claimed other inspirations for the film. Besides her own experience, she claimed to be inspired by a woman who thanked a judge after he sentenced her to twenty years for robbery. She also claimed that the film was in response to the bank robbing glamour of the film Bonnie and Clyde.

Whatever the truth is, this film is a great example of the benefits of representation. I can’t conceive of a man being able to make this film. Especially in 1970, this film presents the perspective of a woman never before brought to screen.