RUTHFULLY YOURS

It all started with “Airport” (1970). Then there was disaster at sea with “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972). And, of course, chaos on land followed with “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno”—both came out in 1974. All cashed in at the box office.

Hollywood’s addiction to disaster movies was born.

Over time, the Tinsel Town formula turned formulaic. Assemble a cast of well-known actors. String together a plot of people in peril. Stir in some stirring special effects. The results have ranged from decent movies like “Twister” (1996) to awful cinematic trash like the recent disaster of a disaster flix—”San Andreas” (2015).

Now comes a film that does not follow the formula. “The Wave” (“Bolgen” in Norwegian) is a new movie from Norwegian filmmaker Roar Uthaug. Last year, it was submitted for Oscar consideration as the best foreign film. Inexplicably, the movie didn’t get nominated. Now, “The Wave” is playing in limited theatrical release around the United States and Canada.

What is at risk from the “wave” in the movie isn’t some metropolis. No—under peril is the picturesque tourist town of Geiranger overlooked by an ominous mountain. Kristian is part of tiny team monitoring the unstable Åkerneset, because when the hillside slides into the narrow adjacent fjord the rock debris will trigger a tsunami. Ten minutes later the wave will wipe out the village. The job of Kristian’s team is to warn the town before the unthinkable (but inevitable) occurs.

It’s good work if you can get it, this business of lecturing others on what they are morally obliged to do (and pay) if the poor/diseased/downtrodden/oppressed masses of whatever dismal variety you prefer are to be lifted from their benighted misery. The trick is not to get caught being inauthentic.
You might recall the story of the white-as-snow Rachel Dolezal, who lied about her ethnicity and culture to assume the mask, moral privileges and kudos of an oppressed African-American activist. She was an ordinary white woman who, by appropriating the culture and physical appearance of an ethnic group with a goldmine of victimhood cachet, made herself feel very special indeed. Think here of private school kids getting tribal tattoos or Prince Harry affecting the odd glottal-stop or a bit of H-withholding, as in to ‘ow much ‘e ‘ungers for a lager with the lads. It’s the classic case of the outsiders wanting membership of a club to which, presenting as themselves, they can never belong.

Now, with an election looming it’s time to get ready for another cast of political thespians trying to be what they are not, sneaking into our lives and pockets via the belly of the Trojan horse of the Fairness Industrial Complex (FIC). For those who don’t know, the FIC is like the Qantas Club for PFS Operatives — Professional Fairness Spruikers. This is a comfy place where cake-eating clipboard carriers, meeting-minuters, shiny-suited private-school union lawyers, progressive politicians, publicly funded activists and lanyard-wearing, conference-attending, frequent-flyer-points-accruing public servants can relax and thrive in comfort, all courtesy of the proceeds of the FIC and the support it wrings out of others, mostly the taxpayers.

The FIC, unlike its cousin the Military Industrial Complex, is proud to peddle its influence and does so openly. Its foot soldiers often live together and work together, as seen at the ABC, where sharing a bed and daily breakfast with someone already on the national broadcaster’s payroll is always a recommendation on any job application. Their strength is in their numbers. For instance: alone, one member might be thought a poseur or a grievance monger; but as part of the many, an activist or a social justice warrior is more than a mere and clamorous pest. Rich, greedy and lazy, the Western world shrugs and indulges the snivels of what amounts social-issue hypochondria. Should anyone raise an eyebrow or dare to disagree with the narrative, cue a mob pile-on, maybe even a lynching. Supporters of, say, traditional marriage are howled down, interrupted ceaselessly in mid-sentence by Tony Jones, branded “homophobes” for daring to disagree, no matter how politely, with such a fashionable cause and meme.

Membership of this house of smarm and sinecure has its privileges, but there are rules. First and foremost is the possession of a compassionate ‘false self.’ Now we all have ‘false selves’ – split-off bits of our character that represent the sort of people we’d most like to be and be seen to be. Con artists knowingly cultivate such personas for the purpose of criminal enterprise, which at least blesses the then the virtue of honest self-knowledge. Fairness spruikers, by contrast, are often blissfully unaware of their impostiture; they think their false selves represent the totality of their personhood.

“I will serve you in Congress like I served you on the battlefield…without regard for personal gain and without regard for personal sacrifice.”After graduating from South Christian High School in 1999, Mast followed in his father’s footsteps and enlisted in the military, where for over 12 years, Brian Mast served our country as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Brian’s service also included the honor of serving under the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as a bomb disposal expert. Working under JSOC meant that Brian fought at the tip of the spear for the U.S. military in the ongoing war against radical Islamic terrorism. Being a bomb technician in this high level of special operations came with the responsibility of protecting his fellow soldiers from the wars most deadly enemy, the improvised explosive device (IED). For Mast this meant putting himself directly in the line of fire without the use of bomb suits or robots.

While on his last deployment in Afghanistan, Mast was tasked with protecting his brothers from IED’s on a nightly basis. While he was able to detect and destroy most of these IED’s, the very last IED Mast found resulted in him sustaining catastrophic injuries, which included the loss of both his legs.As a result of his service and sacrifice to our country, Mast was awarded medals for Valor, Merit, and Sacrifice, to include The Bronze Star Medal, The Army Commendation Medal for Valor, The Purple Heart Medal, and The Defense Meritorious Service Medal.

While recovering from his injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., Mast’s focus was singular: get better and get back to serving America, which is exactly what he did. Each day for him consisted of 8 hours of grueling physical therapy, after which he would also provide his requested expertise to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco & Firearms (ATF), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), all on top of his ongoing military duties.

Mast recently donned an army uniform again in a show of support for the nation of Israel and the freedom it represents in the Middle East and around the world, as he volunteered along side the Israeli Defensive Forces (IDF).

Son of Saul, the first film (to be released next week on DVD) of László Nemes — he both directed and co-wrote it, and it won both the grand prize at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film — is the latest in a seemingly endless string of Holocaust films. However, both in its peculiar plot — which focuses exclusively on the story of one man, Saul, brilliantly performed by Géza Röhrig — and in its cinematography — a hand-held, mobile camera that remains persistently and tightly focused on Saul — it marks out its own territory. The film is simultaneously an immersive, physically taxing experience of life in a camp and a self-conscious reflection on the conditions of, and motives for, Holocaust movies.

Saul is distinctive in a number of ways. Consider, for example, its focus on one man. As Nemes observes in a brief scene analysis of the film’s opening segment, this is the “story of one man,” Saul, who has “become almost like a robot.” Saul is a Sonderkommando, whom Nemes describes thus:

The Sonderkommandos were a group of prisoners who were actually separated from the rest of the other prisoners — male prisoners who were forced to assist the Nazis in the extermination process. These were the prisoners who had to accompany the deported people to the gas chamber and then take out their corpses and burn the corpses in the ovens at the crematorium and then scatter the ashes. So these were the people who were at the heart of the extermination machine. They were, in exchange, better fed and better clothed, but they knew that they would be liquidated in a few months [NPR interview, “Fresh Air”].​

In preparation for the film, Nemes worked his way through volumes of testimonies, known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, from members of this group.

Because the Sonderkommandos had intermediate status between the Nazis and their fellow Jews, and because their jobs afforded them greater liberty of movement than the other prisoners, the film’s concentration on Saul offers a compressed and highly particularized access to the entire camp. Early in the film, Saul observes a Nazi doctor standing over the body of a young boy who has inexplicably survived the gas chamber. As the doctor calmly smothers the boy to death, he orders an autopsy. It is a mark of the morally topsy-turvy world of the camp that an autopsy is necessary to determine, not the cause of death, but the cause of survival. His attention riveted on the boy’s body, Saul asks another worker in the camp to hide the body so that he can find a rabbi to say Kaddish and provide a proper burial. Saul’s motives are mysterious. He repeatedly claims the boy is his son, even as others counter: “You don’t have a son.” Saul is as mechanical in his burial quest as he is in his assigned duties in the camp, and that raises a basic question about his mission — whether it marks a kind of transcendence of, or at least an ennobling rebellion against, the dehumanization of the camp, or whether it is merely a mechanized obsession rendered absurd and even futile by the very existence of the camps. Revolt pervades the conversations of the Sonderkommandos, who hatch plots to try to undermine the Nazis. (There was in fact a Sonderkommando rebellion at Auschwitz in 1944.)

Because it never leaves him, the camera forces viewers to come to terms with Saul’s pursuit. The film’s director of photography, Mátyás Erdély, employs two techniques: Besides the hand-held camera, he uses shallow focus, which leaves everything beyond the center of the frame blurry. The jittery, mobile camera is unsettling. That the camera remains fixed on Saul creates a nervous uncertainty in the viewer, who longs not just for the camera to be still but also for it to show us what Saul sees, or at least to provide a wider context for Saul’s movements and facial expressions. Nemes himself notes that the film deliberately excludes location images. There are no long train tracks leading into the concentration camp or signs indicating arrival at Auschwitz.

The result is that the film is continuously disorienting and physically exhausting, almost sickening. We hear screams, moans, and screeches; we see indistinctly the piles of mutilated bodies; and we feel the encroachment, on one side, of the lurking guards and, on the other, of the mounting piles of ashes. What we see and hear most is the non-stop work of the Sonderkommandos: the scrubbing of the crematoria, the shoveling of ashes, and the transporting of carts full of what the Nazis call “pieces.”

Years ago, looking out at the Pacific surf from a beach in Chile, a friend — alert to the ways of tsunamis — gave me some advice about what to do if suddenly the water all went away. “Run. Run for your life. Because it’s all coming back.”

That advice has come to mind all too often since President Obama made his 2012 reelection campaign proclamations about the receding tide of war. Not that the tide of war has receded anywhere except perhaps in the fantasies of Obama and his followers. But after more than seven years of U.S. policy predicated on such propaganda, it’s getting ever harder to read the daily headlines without the sense that there’s a deluge coming our way.

Just a modest sampling of some of the latest warning signs:

— Russian warplanes have been demonstrating that they can with impunity buzz our military aircraft and ships. Which is by now no surprise, because Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned — in the flexible era of the Obama “reset” — that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency.

— China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia — and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, in the South China Sea.

— Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran’s Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out.” Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran’s Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away from Obama’s cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions — in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran’s banking transactions, so Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars.

— Saudi authorities have been threatening that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What’s most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis — beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran — feel free to try to bully the U.S.).

At a London press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron today, President Obama said the death of Prince is a “remarkable loss.”

The White House put out a statement Thursday after the music legend’s body was found at his studio compound outside of Minneapolis.

“Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince,” the statement from Obama said. “Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer.”
Today, Obama was asked what made him a fan.

“I love Prince because he put out great music and he was a great performer. I didn’t not know him well. He came to perform at the White House last year and was extraordinary and creative and original and full of energy,” Obama replied.

“And so, it is a remarkable loss. And I’m staying at Wyndfield House, the U.S. Ambassador’s residence. It so happens our ambassador has a turntable and so this morning we played ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘Delirious,’ just to get warmed up before we left the house for important bilateral meetings like this,” the president quipped.

Obama paid tribute not only to Prince but the Queen, saying his London visit was in part to wish a happy 90th birthday to Elizabeth II.

President Obama defended his decision to evict a bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office during his first term, telling Britons today that he loves the legendary prime minister but wanted to keep tables from “looking a little cluttered.”

After Obama took office, he returned a Churchill bust that the White House said had been lent to President Bush by Prime Minister Tony Blair. That replaced a Churchill bust that had been in the White House since the 1960s, which the administration said was being “worked on at the time and was later returned to the residence.”

In 2010, the original Churchill bust was moved from the Oval Office to outside the Treaty Room.

“I don’t know if people are aware of this, but in the residence, on the second floor, my office, my private office, is called the Treaty Room. And right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill. It is there voluntarily ’cause I can do anything on the second floor,” Obama said today at a press conference with Prime Minister David Cameron at which he was asked about the U.S.-UK special relationship. “I love Winston Churchill. Love the guy.”

A friend sent me a library discard chiefly because she thought I would be interested in its cover of Clark Gable, for Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, and the Birth of the Modern Man, by Mick LasSalle. The book was published in 2002, and is available now only on Kindle, although there are probably numerous scores of hard copies and paperbacks of it that can be had for a song from various Amazon associated vendors.

The cover is definitely interesting. The non-mustachioed Gable could very well be cast as Cyrus Skeen, the hero of my private detective series set in San Francisco between 1928 and 1930. The only thing missing from Gable’s arresting and commanding gaze is the lock of hair that often falls over Skeen’s brow and which his wife, Dilys, is forever flicking away. Skeen’s ears, however, would be a mite smaller.

One of the most memorable contrasts LaSalle marks is the on-screen rivalry between Gable and Leslie Howard, who both appeared in “Gone With the Wind” and “A Free Soul” (1931). Howard is steamrolled by Gable over a woman. But Gable “had a way of making any man in the vicinity look like he should be wearing a dress.” (p.65) One look at Gable, and you know he’s not “transgender” material. He’d more likely clean your clock if you ever questioned his virility or his identity as a man.

LaSalle’s book is also interesting in that it paints a picture of the changing status and character of male characters in Hollywood between 1929 and 1934, the Pre-Code era, after which the Hays Office of “voluntary” censorship put the kibosh on “immorality.” Will Hays and his mostly Catholic and Presbyterian allies put visual and vocal fig leaves on men and woman. There is a political stance in LaSalle’s book but it is difficult to nail down; he implicitly endorses from the right, from the left, and from the middle, and he applauds every position imaginable, as well as the stances taken by the stars he discusses.

Earth day 2016 TURN LIGHTS OFF
Earth Hour 2016 will be held on Saturday 19 March between 8.30PM and … The first thing anyone can do to get involved is to turn off their lights on Saturday. … the lights are turned off at the end of the business day the Friday before Earth Hour …
My Earth Day Message:
Keep the home lights burning…..RSK

After President Obama moved on his own to normalize relations with Cuba, White House officials told reporters they were confident that the thaw between the countries would result in positive change in Cuba. How’s that working out?

Not well. Political dissidents were rounded up before and after Obama’s visit last month. The Columbia Journalism Review noted that last week’s Communist Party Congress was “a particularly opaque affair, even by Cuban standards. Raúl Castro emphatically rejected new reforms during the opening speech.” “Julie Martinez,” a Havana secretary who asked that her real name not be used, told the Financial Times: “The same [80-year old] leaders and the same [lack of] reforms. . . . Am I supposed to wait till I’m their age to see some real change?”

Castro supporters are crowing that the Cuban regime has gained new credibility and legitimacy without having to make more than surface concessions to openness. Indeed, the evidence is that the U.S. policy on Cuban dissidents has, if anything, gotten worse since Obama’s opening. “Obama said his policies would help change Cuba, but instead the evidence is that Cuba is changing America more,” concludes Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, an internationally respected organization fighting authoritarian and totalitarian rule of both the Right and the Left.

Consider the following three examples of U.S. interests’ kowtowing to the Cuban regime, and discriminating against Cuban Americans, in just the last month.

Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban-American jazz musician who has won 14 Grammys, had already played at White House events. He was invited to perform there again, on April 29, by the renowned Thelonious Monk Institute — but was then told by the White House that he wouldn’t be attending, because he was “not passing the vetting process.”

D’Rivera quickly smelled a Castro rat, and expressed his belief that Cuban officials had intervened and tried to have him banned. In February, he had told the Miami New Times that Obama’s openness to Cuba would result only in “cosmetic” changes, mostly improvements in the Cuban elite’s access to the West: “Maybe now, some people, some elites, have the chance to go play with American musicians, like Wynton Marsalis going and playing there . . . but that doesn’t change much.”