Miserere, A Traduce of Jimmi Shrode

 Like anyone else, radicals will fail.-- Alfred Kazin

A little research indicates Justin Marks adapted Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book for Disney’s reboot against its animated film version, which may be considered a classical rendition of sentiment, and provides a bit of a brace to explain “Counterpart” and the essential weight JK Simmons carries in it. What Marks role was over that of Amy Berg, who was the series writer for season one, mystifies those of us not paying into guild dues to understand how to meld original narratives into contemporary molds, but as the man with the key responsibility for the concept, Marks clearly knows how to bring fabulism to life on television, a fabulism with an inherent allegorical bent; as crisp as critics found Counterpart to be, its dramaturgic roots reside in Medieval morality plays, where the characters are direct symbols. The Iago of the curled mustache being the Vice, or Falstaff as the fool of Appetite, most of Counterpart’s characters are archetypes of this sort. Some are more complex than others, like Howard and Emily Silk, and how their choices define them, or James Cromwell as Yanek, yet another master manipulator whose misguided focus impacts the entire species. Others are easier, like Stephen Rea as Alexander Pope, the mission oriented creator of black mirror assassins, very clever compact irony there, to name a rogue agency manager after the most renown British poet of mock epics. In and of itself, the twenty episode allegory isn’t complicated. The writers sprinkle a bunch of clues, Karl Marx and the pernicious attraction of his political philosophy, the mention of a Prime world Holocaust survivor, obvious allusions to the Berlin Wall, a weaponized biological agent injected into what we might consider to be the “Eastern bloc,” which the “original” Western world denies occurred, but what Marks ultimately wanted transfixed viewers to take away from all this is more elusive. I ate the convoluted story line up like candy, right up to the implied black widow sex and death associations, particularly as it related to the marginally drawn homosexual composites, but the intensity of this melodrama isn’t for everyone, and it rarely takes its foot off the gas pedal. A rare exception, toward the denouement, is when the FBI agent Temple’s husband says raising a disabled child is akin to a detour in Holland, and Clare’s more tortured spouse rejoins with, “Italy has too many tourists.” Touche, in the same vein, the disabled community has too many fractal patterns to succeed. Setting aside my excoriation of the integration models of my generation, Jimmi’s obituary to his partner lacks the balanced restraint most trained journalists know to offer readers. When Jimmi writes Erik came to University of Pennsylvania to seek treatment for numbness in his hands, this is a tell. A better way to phrase it: Dr. von Schmetterling was unable to complete his internship due to illness. Such reticence offers the decedent just that much more respect, something poor Mr. Shrode cannot affix to his own person. Despite his claims of advocacy for the meek and enslaved of the passive with spittle in the crevices of their lips, Jimmi buckles when the going gets rough. He caves, fearful of righteous anger, transformative, much like Clare as “Shadow,” as her admirers point out, she eliminates a more effervescent Other to run a crew with as much ruthlessness as Emily Silk, on the other Housekeeping end. That Mr. Marks seems more linear minded in his progressive sensibilities disappoints me. I expected a less binary perspective, especially as the left has scored all its major victories. Eradication of divergent views isn’t going to change how adversity inflicts itself on the acknowledged dread of the expendable.  

The Phalanx of Walk Aways in Corrugated Engines

How about moving us up from number 3 for state corruption to 10? Then I will start to smile.

— Thomas Lynn Hamaker (@LynnHamaker) January 16, 2019

The corruption embedded in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania surrounds me like the Earth's penumbra. I have lived it intuitively, know it intimately, and had I had the ability to intern under a rational conservative such as Kinberley Strassel, then perhaps I could delineate it for you within the parameters of her no nonsense approach, but I have to strike at it with an ice pick in more dilatory fashion, wondering how much of it can be traced back to King Charles settling his debts in his aristocratic restoration with a radical egalitarian like William Penn. Probably more than we'd like to think, even though The Society of Friends has dissipated from a radical stripping down of Christian worship into a body of zealots determined at all costs to eliminate caste of any kind. Whatever accusations the left wants to hurl at conservatives for race baiting, a la Willie Horton, guilt riddled Caucasians cannot face the reality of what they subject congenital disabled individuals to as embodied in the Elwyn expose. It would be political suicide for a pedestrian such as Tom Wolf to even hint that invalids suffer even more hardship at the hands of black intransigence than they otherwise would against white indifference, and as for me, who cares? I have burned my bridges into a de facto censure from the establishment, but that doesn't make my observations less accurate or otherwise anguished: you're the one who wanted to move to the city. This is my cousin Jessica's accusation, in code, that as a deluded collegiate I too suffered from this utopian fairytale. And due to it, my rage transposed itself into the destruction of civilization that we see in a crudely constructed parable like Surrogates. Cromwell's depiction of Lionel Canter isn't as remote a possibility as you'd like to think. Family cohesion is always superseded by the institution, by the myriad clinical classifications that don't matter to the unskilled menial tasks bequeathed to African care givers. It isn't slavery anymore, of course not. They receive a salary for these crippled bodies economic necessity forces them to tend, only to have their own resentments lead them into a prosecutorial scold. But then again, I am not the only one burdened by the shame this Commonwealth's face presents to the nation. The perspective this allegation of fraud exposes is unacceptable, precisely because we all collectively deny the truth.

Cromwell's Invidious Frustration With The Unforeseen

For the more delicate and costly articles of food for the sick we relied mostly on the agents of the Sanitary Commission.-- William T Sherman, ushering in the modern era, p 883

In terms of its neo-realism, Surrogates has many issues. Critics ask why humans would desire to be enveloped in a body length sensory console, but as the studio FX for this Willis vehicle illustrates, our physical bodies could not long survive such extended periods of inactivity, unless one has to adapt, as Cromwell's Canter does, to being a mobility impaired tyrant. The plot is also problematic. If VSI hired Stone to kill its founder in order to prevent catastrophe, one that makes the Third Reich seem inept, then you hire a contract killer to penetrate to the source, to make sure the hit is done right. If Willis can do it as Greer in the flesh, one can assume Kodjoe's no nonsense cueball supervisory agent could have found someone methodical and efficient enough to kill Canter before he uploaded the virus. But beneath the surface of its weak story, the industry's kick in the teeth toward itself might generate rancor. Even seeing what we see, and making pneumatic blockbuster allegories reveling in the very psychosis of mortality, we cannot stop the train. We're already plugged in and enhanced automated liars, and even the dowager, courageous as she is with appalling truths about physicality, poverty, and a stacked, corrupt deck, has certain episodes of omission. I do not reveal certain things about Lakisha Doe, not because I know she is online, but because her guilt doesn't deserve that I use it to hurt her. She wasn't a bad assistant as far as really African blacks go; tried to help me, using her money to buy me clothes, but I did not want a nigger surrogate for a daughter, and booted her, doing her a favor, really. Where she is at now with her dental company is better than where she was with me on the waiver system. And I'm sitting here writing this to jack up. God forbid I stay offline for a week and prioritize my many issues. I am sure this is what many followers who've abandoned this voice think. Do what you need to do, but like Rosamund Pike, many of are infected avatars, and mine concurs with Cromwell's final, insidious, implosive, intent. In the alternate timeline of Surrogates' futureworld, Canter would have become an immortal legend, demonized in eternal infamy. The truth of the matter, however, is there are already thousands of people in an extended matrix much akin to sim operators, forced to view the world through lenses with limited periphery. Of course it will not evolve in the manner of the graphic serial brought to life like a plastic surgery bill, but the allegory already lives. Much as Black Mirror's writers already know. Humanity isn't sure what exactly it wants for itself, a homogeneous utopia which removes adversity from our existence, which is what makes us thrive, or to limit our collective altruism for individual circumstances unique to each.