Oklahoma City

it strains belief to suppose that this appalling crime was the work of two men--any two men. I believe it came about because of foreign involvement. I also believe our government might have prevented the whole thing. --Stephen Jones, Others Unknown

To take a cue from a titular local, and change direction when the geopolitical tilt is in a certain head wind, I do believe that reverberations remain in the wake of McVeigh's and Nichols' attempt to schism federal cohesion, though I am altogether uncertain that federal agents involved in the back end of building the case against the co-conspirators would have sat on the knowledge of foreign handlers. As McVeigh's defense lawyer, Jones is still advocating for his doomed client, attempting to shift the burden. If there is a burden to shift, I think it is domestic, close-lipped, bound in the code of western frontier silence, and now is as good a time as any to imagine there are stones still to be upturned.

According to Hollywood's pro-forma logic in Arlington Road, which isn't new, as utilized the same device in the more placid Parallax View, sating Warren's liberal hard on, government commissions accept the patsies created for them by black ops. Jeff Bridges moves from point to point, believes he's uncovering a home grown coup devised by Tim Robbins, and instead becomes the fall guy shielding the shadow syndicate, and nothing works that smoothly. If it did, Chinese authorities wouldn't debase themselves through the use of brute force for the sake of central planning.

But what Jones and the studio system do tap into is our underlying knowledge of civil service competency. It doesn't exist, and as such, all governments go to great lengths to assure us otherwise, hence, there is our cover up, proof of how debilitating it is to make it appear that Hillary Clinton actually deserves her authority.

Complicity, Clintons and Pecking Order

"I find the word 'cured' to be very difficult to define." --Julie Andrews

I am not going to dissect Arlington Road in the same manner that I attempted to flake from the mica of The Brothers Rico as a film; this is in part due to the fact that the agenda of Pellington and Kruger speaks for itself  in the more contemporary narrative. The threat is from within, that the American self-reliant frontier mindset is its own cancer, perhaps a crab incurable, and as dark as any ultra right wing mentality with which it might be compared. Pellington also offers Easter eggs for the flavor of any ideologue.

These are my main points of complicit ambiguity, however, with the understanding, on your part, that I do not have access to the full technical issues surrounding the making of the movie:

1. Was the child Brady a deliberate lure, whether or not Fenimore was switch hitting on bringing Faraday in, or was intent on framing and sacrificing Faraday from the opening frame?

2. Was Hope Davis used in a dual role as girlfriend / operative to suggest that no one can be trusted? Towards the close of the film there is a student, a plant from Fenimore's apparently huge resistance to the federal, progressive sensibility. I cannot tell from the credits whether this woman is an extra cast because she looks like Davis, or she is Davis in a game of masquerade, but the implication is the same.

3. What were Pellington and Kruger implying when Robbins ends the film by telling Cusack "They'll let us know."?

Perhaps homo sapiens is limited and self-deluded by First Cause entrapments in politics and physics alike.

The cult of the icon, however, is the least plausible when it comes to the validity of fronts, props, and powers behind the throne. Are the Clintons, for instance, part of a left centrist snow job? No, not in the Machiavellian sense. Hillary did not drive Vince to his death. She and her husband have a passive aggressive self-justification that was perhaps not the best thing for the US at the time, but they did not run around DC saying "Kill the bastards."

I am not in the Hillary glee club, however, and I never liked her in any of her incarnations, though she receives a passing grade for getting out of State without causing riots in Montana. Marooned taps into the psychic scar tissues that the modern autocracy makes us pay, exacerbating them. Gregory is all too convincing as the operative who has to keep the government safe from its own fallibility, and this makes it more than a movie and closer to a crumbling edifice about the price we pay for the right stuff, how the feminine is hated even in stock objectification. That no one would raise a hand to the mechanized astronaut's wife doesn't mean she isn't discarded because it is necessary, and she knows that she is complicit in the deception thrust upon her.

In Rico the government is like a binary switch. On or off, dismissed until it is a necessary last resort. In Marooned, personified in the abstract of NASA, it is the new secular religion, and in Arlington, it is a duped and impotent eunuch.