Bell Jar Vibrations

 "When Jimmy Kimmel isn't unfunny, he's utterly intolerable, he makes uniformed talking points for television."-- one of Twitter's remaining true believers.

Death knells can be larger than any one small cluster of human frailty, and even though certain pugnacious leftist personalities like Maher claim that 9/11 didn’t change anything, in terms of wake up calls for the salvage of western liberalism, his assertion is a kind of confabulation about the nature of human disaster. 9/11 didn’t change anything on the surface of the American empire, but there have been a series of tabulations in relation to the state of the national psyche, which is why, for the life of me, I don’t understand whatever political muscle Keith Ellison has in Minnesota; it’s obscure, shrouded in fog, the diagram that divides his definition of patriotism from Nation of Islam’s own jingoism, this is discomfiting, regardless of whatever Maga bullshit was orchestrated behind the scenes on January 6^th from Charlie Kirk and his brand of Christian nationalism. I tried to warn Charlie about this before he tarnished whatever coup de grace Maga’s revolt once had in 2016, but hot dogs don’t abide by the chastisements of a world weary fury, such as both his and my Twitter accounts amounted to prior to Dorsey’s understated and eloquent diatribe about healthy conversations; his thread reads like a Kafkaesque dissertation waving a “guilty as charged” flag, but Twitter was never about the health of any lingua franca. My diffident wading into social media’s alure in the mist of its contradictory crackdown is over, despite the inordinate amount of time I recently spent on deactivation out of sympathy for our latest Bull Moose Idiot, only to reinstall it temporarily upon realization that Gab is about building capital through outrage; I have been mortally wounded by enough dalliances with pre-pandemic losses to the Exchequer, and knock off models which claim to offer agitators against progressives a firewall for a hefty fee isn’t much of an inducement, not when socialized medicine continually illustrates the folly of rationed care through so many arbitrary layers of nonsense. A woman who is a static failure gets to experience on a daily basis the tenuous relationship between entitlement and constitutional right. There is no such fucking thing for a wheelchair user who has to operate under and be haunted by “nursing home eligibility” her entire life and then have society break her down for its final act. So she avoided more triggers about 9/11 in documentary hyper-realism, such as films like United 93.

In this context, the Amazon Original 7500, although much later than United 93, coming out for distribution in 2019, is gently derivative in it’s spin off from the perspective of Paul Greengrass. As far removed as Vollrath's narrative is from the events of that day, I still had a panic attack watching this from beginning to end. It is only under the duress of populist cynicism that I begin to question this. Ilhan Omar bleats in the House like one of Orwell’s pigs, while I, always aspirational in my patriotism, until the ghetto scorched my eyelids, sit dying in her socialist belief system, not simply due to lack of retail insurance.

White Noise in Infectious Diseases

 "Sleep tight sucker!"-- Chuck Norris in a propaganda campaign which Trump apparently appreciated

Late Thursday evening, just sitting, burrowing inward, while a film like  Delta Force plays on low volume, because this is how the black technician needs to leave the patient, agitated and wound like a Yo-yo, with one appreciable difference: the shock of recognizing Robert Forster as Abdul, a fanatic for the Reagan era teletype of what would become Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. As a serial viewer of weak broadcast signals the FCC parcels out to local UHF stations, which in the digital century, mimic cable subscription, Delta Force has been played on television enough to be too familiar, Chuck Norris somewhat antithetical to one’s taste, which means what? The spastic dowager has often written with conviction that enemies need to be defined and caricatured for the sake of a Western civilization now intent on unravelling, and Delta Force does exactly that. The Lebanese depicted in this political action thriller are little more than two dimensional paramilitary rogues who have made Beirut synonymous with urban horror, or an extreme form of what we mean when we use “urban jungle” to heighten the terror of survival in our environmentally adaptive cities. I didn’t even come to appreciate Forster’s abilities until Tarantino gave the late, and financially strapped, character actor room to breathe. The same could be said, in a different context, for Pam Grier, not that I didn’t know she was chocolate glory mama before, in the vibrant vigor of the seventies as oversexed with visual cues, for white or black action figures, but Tarantino gave her a bit more to work with in a thickened middle age playing it against the swirling vortex of all that male ego.  (I have also seen Grier as truly aged in BEA style pictures not meant to be cross-over vehicles; she is too old now to play spin the bottle with grifter and sheriff transference figurines, economics of being an ostensible trail blazer aside.) It brings up the issue of why Tarantino is able to do so much with dramatic irony as opposed to those who direct Norris. Norris is linear figure, a quasi martial arts can do it all flesh wound guy, and Forster doesn’t look happy being the zealot who kills Greek Orthodox priests. He is sweaty and oily and desperate enough, and I have seen his key scenes often enough that it’s beneficial that his effort doesn’t register too closely, but it seems Forster would have preferred something else before he shrivels into the old man of even more androids are people too entries. Why do I feel a sense of loss about Forster and those like him only after conscious appreciation occurs late in the game?

The British Left of The One-Armed Man

 "When they live like that, they die like that."-- Liev Schreiber, season one apologia

Theodore Johnson is elevated into the documentary examination of how parapsychology informs on his low-burn serial murders not for the murders themselves, but because of his successful manipulation of Britain’s criminal justice system in relation to them. It is difficult to gage at this juncture whether the eleven years he received for the murder of his first wife Yvonne wasn’t an equitable balance against the loss of life, as there is no reason why a husband cannot be abused in the face of domestic discord with suicidal ideation. In this criminal defendant’s case it’s borderline as to whether mitigating circumstances applied, but to all accounts, Theodore served his full term for manslaughter before he once again married a second Yvonne, produced a daughter, and then strangled her mother. He got out on early release again because of the daughter, with a less than scrutinized stipulation that he was not to engage in relations with the opposite sex from the wagging paternalism of Europe and the United Kingdom’s belief in rehabilitation. Canada and Britain both seem to have excessively brutal murders from their emigrant populations, whether they’re Indian, Asian, Iranian (at least two of these were particularly savage), or as in this case, Jamaican. Retired DCI Colin Sutton, with traditional Anglo-Saxon shrewdness, may delineate the investigation and mechanisms for British and American audiences alike, but he and other documentary analysts, including psychologist Linda Papadopoulos, fail to ever mention geographical displacement or immigration policy. Why not? Is this somehow a liberal taboo, particularly as it relates to the European forge in the creation of Jamaica today? Although film critics assert that Marlon Brando’s neo-imperialist movie Burn is hot to trot about the domino effect regarding incursions into Vietnam, it reads far more closely about British guilt over hanging Paul Bogle for killing civilized Caucasians, and of course, no judge today is that self-conscious as it relates to clemency for indigenous individuals in this age of technocratic supremacy, but the case that being too lenient with the descendants of human trafficking is as harsh as being too authoritarian can be made, and it cost Angela Best her life, because apparently, the only humans who still know how to draw lines in the sand are Nigerian extremists, but let’s not forget Johnson himself; it’s theorized that his last suicide attempt, throwing himself in front of a train, was germane, setting himself up as the nebulous figure which drove David Janssen and his pursuer through every episode of The Fugitive, but this is one amputee not slated for the release of the disabled on compassionate grounds.