Green Door Content: Annie Hall

Posted on December 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: By the time this posts, I will be on the roof of the new place with the chimney man getting things ready for the new woodstove. I had the flue inspected and that is fine, but the cap needs attention and I am having the flue cleaned just to be sure. The following is a post from behind the green door to hold everyone over until I return, assuming I do not fall off the roof. If there is no Friday post, it has been fun.

If I were tasked with writing a summary of the classic Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, I would be hard pressed to get past a paragraph. It is film starring a neurotic Jewish man, played by Woody Allen, and a mentally unstable woman, played by Diane Keeton, who wander around New York for ninety minutes speaking to one another as if they swallowed a 1970’s pop-psychology textbook.

The movie reminds me of the old quip about the James Joyce novel Ulysses. “A Jewish man who wanders around Dublin and nothing happens.” That is not a criticism. In fact, it is the best thing I can think of to say about the film. There is a chance that Allen was inspired by the Joyce novel and was attempting to recreate it for a New York audience, from an entirely Jewish perspective. Joyce is mentioned in this scene.

I did some digging around to see if maybe that was what Allen was doing with this film, but I found nothing to suggest it. Despite its status as a classic film and one of Allen’s best works, there is not much in the way of critical analysis. That is because there is not much to examine when it comes to things you expect in a story. It is just two neurotic Manhattanites wandering around for ninety minutes.

The film is classed as a romantic comedy, but it is probably better to call it a character study or perhaps an anthropological study. It is primarily about two people, presented as representative of the cultural elite of the time, as they struggle with their various insecurities and disconnectedness. Comedian Alvy Singer, (Allen) and Annie Hall (Keaton) are struggling with alienation in the modern age.

Alienation is the subtext of the film, but it is not entirely clear that Allen had the self-awareness to know this. Alvy Singer is the typical Jewish character struggling with his otherness in a world dominated by non-Jews. Allen hams it up quite a bit to the point where Alvy Singer is a satire of the Jewish guy who is sure that around every corner there could be a gang of Nazis ready to haul him away to the camps.

Once you get past the hyperbole, you get to the essential reality of the Jewish condition, at least as Jews see it, which is that they are always a people who dwell alone, regardless of where they find themselves. Who they are is defined by their outsider status so they must remain as outsiders or risk losing their identity. It is the essential contradiction at the heart of Jewish identity in the diaspora.

Alienation takes on a different form with Annie. She is presented as from a standard issue white middle-class family. At one point, Alvy jokes that she grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. She is the modern atomized female, a creature of both feminism and the modern economy, who sees a therapist and spends most of her time dwelling on trivialities to escape from the loneliness of her life.

The two of them sort of fall in love, but their relationship does not work because of the self-absorption rooted in their alienation. Alvy only thinks about sex, while Annie has no interest in sex. In both cases, this leads to endless self-examination that is entirely superficial and pointless. These are two people who are alienated from themselves, so it is why they cannot have a normal human relationship.

Sadly, that analysis is far more interesting than the film version. Both characters are boring and self-indulgent. There is no reason to care about them because you have met these stock figures loads of times in film and real life. Annie is a neurotic dingbat who every man over thirty has met a thousand times. Allen is the classic Jewish guy who thinks his endless complaining makes him seem interesting.

That is the main problem with the film. It wants to be a social commentary, but it has nothing to say about the things featured in the film. You get some pithy commentary from Alvie who breaks the fourth wall throughout the film, but those are just gag lines that Allen used in his stand-up. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about the people, so you have no reason to think about their dilemma.

In this regard it is like other movies of this decade in that they were made by people who held themselves in high regard, so they just assumed anything they did or said was important by itself. They made films that were supposed to lead the horse to water, but it was hard to care about the horse, so the water never came into focus. Whatever Allen was trying to say about his time and place in this film remained unsaid.

That said, the film is visually interesting. Even after fifty years it feels like you are there in Manhattan with Alvy and Annie. You often think you can smell the stench of the urine-soaked hobos, which were a feature of the city at the time. This may be why the film shows up on the top-100 list, rather than other Woody Allen films which were graded higher at the time in terms of artistic merit.

In the end, Annie Hall feels like a professionally made film school project in that it is self-indulgent and the person doing the self-indulging is not that interesting. Woody Allen’s hang-ups and insecurities are interesting to no one but Woody Allen. A film about them, not matter how well done, is still just a film about a boring Jewish man who spends ninety minutes walking around Manhattan with an equally boring shiksa.

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Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 23, 2023 by thezman

Thanksgiving is arguably the greatest American creation, despite being the one thing we have not tried to export. Around the world there are American outposts selling degeneracy of various sorts, along with the supposed ideals of the American empire, but you will never get a sales pitch on Thanksgiving. It speaks to the nature of the current ruling elite that gratitude is not something they think about when trying to change the minds of people abroad.

Regardless, the long holiday that is upon us is special. It is a long weekend of doing little more than giving thanks for what we have as individuals. We do not give thanks to our overlords for anything. We do not give thanks for our stuff. We do not even give thanks for the great fortune of being an American. It is much simpler and more honest that all of that. It is a day to be happy that you are alive, you have friends and family and you are able to enjoy those things.

What makes the holiday better than most is that it is at least a four day weekend and is slowly becoming a weeklong affair. Within living memory most people had to work Friday if they wanted to get paid for Thursday, but that is long gone. Most employers give their people Thursday and Friday off, except retailers, of course. Many offices now close up early on Wednesday. All week offices are light on staff as people use their personal time to extend the holiday.

If we had any sense as a people, we would make the whole week a national holiday, maybe even shutter retail for a few days. Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so giving the retail people a few days off in advance would be the decent thing to do, but our greed heads will never go for it. Big box retailers now force their staff in on Thursday night to get ready for Black Friday. After the revolution, the people doing this will be hanged first.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving is it does not celebrate any of the things that have come to define America. There is no soulless gift giving. Christmas has been turned into an orgy of material self-indulgence. It is reasonable to say that what goes on in this country around Christmas is grotesque. Our other holidays are civic affairs designed to celebrate the government or warmongering. Usually, they are on a Monday so we get a long weekend, but they have no meaning.

Thanksgiving is unique in that it is about you as a person taking time to think about the good things in your life. The big traditional meal with friends and family focuses the mind on those human relationships. Even in these easy times, life is hard, so taking time to count your blessings is a gift you give yourself. Being grateful is one of those odd things that just makes you feel good. Having a long holiday to eat traditional foods and be grateful is an amazing thing we have created.

It is the gratitude part of it that gets to the heart of the current crisis. All around us are people doing nothing but showing their ingratitude. America is filling up with ingrates who do nothing but complain. One can possibly understand the ingratitude of black people, but the endless complaining from new arrivals is maddening. Even worse is seeing useless weirdos freeriding on society complain that the rest of us are not thanking them for being parasites.

Joe Sobran put it best. “The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.” That is the heart of the matter and probably why we invented Thanksgiving. It is our nature to build and create, which is why we are naturally grateful for what we have. A people who built a great civilization out of nothing have a lot to be thankful for, so having a long holiday to take our time and be grateful makes a lot of sense.

Even now, with all that is going on, we have plenty of reasons to take the next few days to count our blessings. The Good Lord in his wisdom has provided us with enemies who possess none of the qualities we respect. They may have inherited power, but they lack the ability to wield it responsibly. Like men on death row, our betters walk around with an expiry date on them. It is a long struggle, but we know that in the end we will prevail and for that we must be thankful.

Of course, we also have the community of dissidents that is slowly forming up to provide fellowship and support as we struggle though this age. Those of you who were at AmRen last time certainly know what I mean. You come back from such things humbled and grateful, because you have been reminded of how fortunate you are to be alive in this time. To be blessed with a life of struggle, to have a reason to be better each day, is the greatest gift of all.

I want to thank everyone who comes to this site to read what I have written or listen to the Friday shows. Special thanks to the many people who fill up the comments every day with commentary that is often better than my posts. This is one of the best comment sections on the internet. It is something people often say to me. Posting will be light the next few days, but the comment section will be open as always. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thank you for all that you do.

Back On Monday

Posted on November 17, 2023 by thezman

The Phoenix Must First Burn to Emerge — Phoenix Businesses, Phoenix Life | by Aidan McCullen | The Thursday Thought | Medium

Came For Dinner And Never Left

Posted on November 2, 2023 by thezman

Note: More housing shenanigans today, so this is an item from the early days of the green door when I got the idea to review the AFI top-100 films.

Some movies are on the top-100 list because they are great stories told very well, while others are on the list for their great technological breakthroughs. Some are on the list for their cultural impact. That is the case with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy about race mixing from 1967. The film had two legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and a big star at the moment in Sydney Poitier.

The film was viewed at the time as groundbreaking because it featured a mixed-race couple in a positive light. Right around the time the movie was released, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, the civil rights movement was at its peak, so this was just what white liberals wanted to see, which was white liberals being celebrated for their goodness.

The movie itself is pretty simple. It opens with the couple in question, generic rich white girl and her much older black boyfriend, Sydney Poitier, getting off an airplane and strolling through an airport like lovers on a walk in the park. Keep in mind that this is 1967, but no one in the airport notices, because you see, this is the glorious future where race no longer matters, so get used to it you terrible bigots.

I was not around in 1967, but I was around in 1977. I was around in 1987 and 1997 as well, so I have some idea what it was like in 1967. I know in 1987, a mixed-race couple would have drawn a lot of stares. It was an extremely rare thing. In 1967 you can be sure the people in that airport would have been dumbstruck, but the story needed everyone to be cool with it so the rest of the story would make more sense.

Anyway, the couple arrives at the mansion of the white girl’s parents. The black maid, played by Weezy from the Jeffersons, is predictably flabbergasted by the site of the master’s daughter bringing home a black man. The two blacks are uncomfortable for a moment, until Poitier asks to use the phone. He goes into the den to use the phone, where there is a bug picture of FDR on the desk. That could be important.

The first parent home to meet the new man is the mother, who is uncomfortable, but tries to play it cool. This is where we begin to learn that Poitier is not just a black guy, but a special black guy. He not only knows exactly how the mother is feeling, but he knows exactly how to break the tension. Unlike the rest of the characters, he alone can rise above the situation and see everything from every perspective.

Next home is the father, who is home early to get ready for his golf outing. For some reason he is not surprised to find a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter, so he just makes small talk for a while. Eventually, he notices there is a middle-aged black man in his home with his daughter and that is when they tell him that his daughter is planning to marry the middle-aged black man.

This is when we learn that Poitier is the most successful black man on the planet, as he is a famous doctor and world leader. Because the world depends on him, he is going to fly to New York to visit smart people and then head off to Geneva to run the World Health Organization. He has a plan to save Africa by teaching the smart African kids how to do stuff so they can make Africa great again. No kidding.

This is what sets the plot in motion. The parents have a day to give their blessing to the marriage or Poitier will break it off, as he is so noble and kind that he will not come between the white girl and her people. You see, he is not just the most accomplished black man on the planet, he is a numinous Negro. He is the saintly black character who exists to help the whites make their journey to enlightenment.

For a while Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn fret over what to do. Then a priest arrives and hams it up as the stereotypical Irish priest, accent and all. He thinks the whole thing is wonderful and this is where we see he is supposed the be the audience in this drama, enjoying how the rich white liberals struggle with their hypocrisy while trying to get with the times and accept the race mixing.

The catch phrase that is the title of the film comes when Tracy learns that Poitier’s parents are coming for dinner. Tracy is at his wit’s end over having been put in this situation when Hepburn says, “guess who’s coming to dinner?” Then she explains how Poitier’s parents are flying up from Los Angeles. Then the priest invites himself to the dinner, because he is the voice of the audience and needs to be there.

At the big dinner we learn that the black parents are opposed to the race mixing, but the mother is more open-minded to it than the father. We now have the predictable setup of the females trying to bring their stubborn husbands along. At some point the women commiserate and agree to work on the men. Poitier tells off his father, not so subtly implying that old blacks were responsible for keeping blacks down.

Finally, the black mother has a heart to heart with Spencer Tracy and he finally sees the light and agrees to bless the marriage. He then gives a big speech that sounds like it was written by the ad hoc committee of the revolutionary council on race in the 1967 people’s assembly. I actually felt sorry for Tracy having to say such stupid things in what would be his last movie before he died. It was ten minutes of cringe.

You have to judge movies in the context of their age, but even making big allowances for the age, this is a bad movie. It is ham-fisted, predictable, and preachy. The main characters are shallow and basic, with little to no development. Poitier is not even a real person in this movie. He is just a ridiculous version of the Magic Negro. The only character with any depth is Tracy and that is not much.

That said, the movie belongs on the top-100 list for its cultural value. It made $54 million in 1967, which is $420 million in today’s money. That is a massive success, which tells us that whites were enormously gullible and stupid back then. Sure, the movie had big stars and it was intended to be a comedy, but the fact they could not see that this was nothing but anti-white propaganda does not speak well of them.

There is also the fact that fifty years ago the usual suspects were pushing the idea that the only way for white men to be saved was to allow their daughters to run off with non-white males. The reason that white people face a long war to regain dominion over their societies is because it has been a long war against them. The people on the other side played the long game. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a good reminder of that fact and therefore worth watching today.

Midnight Cowboy

Posted on October 26, 2023 by thezman

Note: Today is a house hunting day, which means I am out at the crack of dawn to head off to the hills in search of a new lair. Instead of rushing something in the few minutes I have before leaving for the day, I am re-posting a green door item. This is a film review I recently did that feels like a nice break from the usual routine.

The concept of the antiwhite is new to most people, but it has been bubbling under the surface of American culture for a long time. In movies, it often turns up in the “moral complexity” of quintessentially American characters. The prototypical American cowboy, for example, is also a villain. Alternatively, the American dream is turned into a nightmare for the protagonist of the film.

It is not a direct racial assault on white people, like we now see on movies and television, but more of a bank shot. Some aspects of society are criticized, often by inverted reality, as in the case of Easy Rider. Normal people are turned into violent monsters, while two bums are the heroes. The Searchers introduces the concept of racism as a defining feature of American society.

By the late 1960’s, there was no need to obscure the intent. American life was portrayed as seedy and degenerate, the result of the original sin of some “ism” or maybe the falsity of the founding myth. There is the sense that the general terribleness of the period was deserved. Cities were festering sewers riddled with crime and degeneracy because that was the real America.

Probably the peak of this seedy realism was Midnight Cowboy. It is the story of a young guy from Texas named Joe Buck, played by Jon Voight. He quits his menial job and takes a bus to New York City for reasons that are never explained. He immediately decides to make a living as a male prostitute, targeting middle-aged women. His first efforts fail, but he gets the hang of it and finally gets lucky.

This totally naive guy from Texas is shrewd enough to become a hustler but not smart enough to make money at it. He also gets suckered by a crippled conman named Rico, played by Dustin Hoffman. Rico introduces Joe to a pimp, for a finder’s fee, but the pimp turns out to be a religious fanatic. Joe flees this situation and goes looking for Rico but is unable to locate him.

Joe runs out of money, so he gets tossed from his apartment and decides to let a gay guy give him oral sex in a movie theater, thinking that the gay guy is going to pay him for the privilege, but that is now how things work. Joe eventually finds Rico, who lets him stay in his condemned apartment. They become partners with Joe slowly taking care of Rico, who has some sort of respiratory disease.

Eventually the two of them decide to leave New York City for Florida, so Joe picks up a gay guy and murders him for his cash. They use the cash for a bus ticket to Florida, but Rico is now extremely sick. At some point Rico soils himself, so Joe buys them new clothes at a rest stop, but Rico has died. The close of the movie is Joe hugging his dead friend as the bus trundles along toward Florida.

The message of the film is clear. White America is a myth, just as Joe Buck’s cowboy act is a myth that he created for himself. In realty, America is a faker, a fraud, a hustler that can only be redeemed by dropping the act and turning gay. This is a movie made by and for people who hate themselves, their country and would have been better off killing themselves and their intended audience.

That is the main reason the film is on the top-100 list. Another reason is it started the process of normalizing sodomy. It is not just an antiwhite, anti-American film, but it is a homosexual film that seeks to normalize homosexuality, by making Joe Buck a victim of a system that is intolerant of homosexuals. If midcentury bourgeoise decadence could have come to life and made a film, this would be it.

It is impossible to express how much I detest this film, but it is not the worst film on the top-100 list and it probably does belong here for artistic reasons. The message is vulgar and degenerate, but the production and acting are extremely good. Despite the obvious plot holes, Jon Voight makes Joe Buck believable. Dustin Hoffman plays himself, so he is quite credible as a skeevy hustler.

Like Taxi Driver, which I also hated, Midnight Cowboy is important because of what it represents on the historical timeline. When the robot historians attempt to retrace the steps that led to the collapse of the American experiment, they will no doubt look at the popular entertainment of this period for clues. Within a single generation, America went from the pinnacle of cultural achievement to the world of Midnight Cowboy.

That said, if you can avert your gaze from the political messaging and step outside of our current political context, it is a good film. Joe Buck has a story to tell, and we get enough of it to fill in the rest. He is a tragic figure, but he is not without redeeming qualities and we get the sense that redemption is possible for him. That is a lot to do in a film and that speaks to the skill of the people behind it.

In the end, it is all about the main question. If you have not seen this film, should you take the time to watch it? Even though I hate this film, I do not regret having watched it twice now. There will be no third viewing, but if you can stomach the politics and the ugliness of it, it is worth watching for historical reasons. At the minimum, you come away with a sense of the time and place in which it was made.

Numbers

Posted on October 5, 2023 by thezman

If you were a young person in the 1980’s and caught up in the swelling conservative movement, you needed to know the numbers. Conservatism, to a great degree, was about making rational arguments which meant starting with the numbers. Things like the budget deficit, economic growth, crime rates and inflation were a common part of the conservative counter to progressive claims. At its most basic, conservatism was rational while liberalism was emotional.

For a while it seemed like the conservatives had carried the day on this issue as the public discourse slowly mirrored conservative discourse. When public figures talked about politics and social issues, it was about the numbers. The media would make a day of covering the latest speech by the Fed chair. Alan Greenspan became a rock star who gave speeches to huge crowds. Every politician made sure to have the Congressional Budget Office bless his latest idea.

Through the Bush years, economists took the place of the court astrologer, providing empirical authority to every normative claim. This reached its peak in the first Obama term when they said that every dollar spent by the government created more than a dollar of economic activity. A line of people with impressive sounding credentials provided the math of this claim. This was the argument in favor of the massive spending program unleashed by the Obama administration.

It was not just politics that got the numbers treatment. After every Super Bowl, the media would spend a day or two crunching the numbers to prove that you were the only weirdo who did not set aside the day to watch the big game. Television ratings were a mainstay of media coverage. The stock market became the central measure of social happiness, with cable channels dedicated to telling us the numbers and what the numbers meant for your happiness.

Today, no one discusses the numbers. Someone arguing for a policy on the grounds that it is good the economy sounds like someone arguing for free silver. In fact, it is the primary criticism of Conservative Inc. They do not care about crossdressers chasing your son around the playground or the tidal wave of brown people pouring over the border into your neighborhood. They care about the carried interest deduction and locking in tax cuts that few experienced or remember.

What is the current projected federal deficit? Without googling it, few people would know, and most people would not bother to do it. The same is true of the total federal debt, which used to be a headline topic. How much does the Federal government owe and to whom do they owe it? Washington is embroiled in a huge drama right now set off by the Federal budget debate and no one bothers mentioning that about forty percent of what they spent is borrowed.

One reason no one talks about the economic numbers is they have become inconceivable large, so they have no impact. People can grasp a million and they can sort of grasp a billion. Being a millionaire would be nice and being a billionaire would be awesome, but trillionaire? It is probably better than billionaire, but what is bigger than anything you can imagine? The thirty-plus trillion federal debt is a meaningless number because it is outside of what most people can imagine.

There is a bigger issue that applies to all the numbers. Decades of lying about the numbers have made all of them suspect. The totally fake economic data pumped out in the Obama years sunk the credibility of the court wizards. When those people with impressive credentials put on their serious faces and said that taking money from you and giving some of it to your neighbor would grow the economy, even the most innumerate started to question the math.

It is not just the big stuff where lying has undermined the trust in the numbers that used to be the guideposts of society. Television ratings are obviously bogus or not as meaningful as claimed. If the people making the content cared about ratings, they would not have smeared their feces all over popular content. Ad makers would not have replaced most of the white people with nonwhites. They certainly would not have every white woman paired with a black guy.

Probably the most egregious offender of the numbers are the tech companies, who clearly fake all of their numbers. How many users are really on Twitter? No one knows but we know the official number is a lie. We can clearly see that the follower counts and impressions are fake. Before buying Twitter, Elon Musk made the rather obvious claim that the site was riddled with bots and fake accounts. Once the deal closed, he stopped talking about the bots and fake accounts.

There is more to the general fakery than the unreliability of the numbers. It is that it reflects a collapse in trust. When the government claims inflation is under control, but you keep seeing your expenses climb, you are reminded by the numbers that the people in charge cannot be trusted. When some new personality bursts on the scene claiming to have a huge audience, but no one you know heard of the guy until last week, you cannot help but wonder if it is a lie.

The numbers of life are not supposed to tell us what we ought to do, but to be a measure of what we are doing. If we cannot trust the numbers or the people issuing the numbers, then we cannot know what they are doing. We have no way of judging what is being told to us or if it is on the level. The only logical response is to assume the numbers are fake and the people issuing them are lying. A society with unreliable numbers is a society run by unreliable people.

Of course, this is most clear in politics. The most important numbers are the votes counted on election night. The logic of democracy is that everyone gets their say, then everyone votes and the side with the most votes wins. Along the way polling tells us how the various arguments and people are doing. If all of these numbers are fake, then what is the point? If the numbers at the soap box and the ballot box cannot be trusted, you are left with the numbers in the cartridge box.

Since the end of the Cold War, American society has travelled along an arc that started with a trust in the numbers and the people behind them to a place where no sane person trusts the numbers or the people behind them. That is probably why it feels like this pirate ship of a society called America is sailing into dangerous waters. Odds are just numbers, and the odds say that in a world without reliable numbers, the most likely outcome is the ship eventually sinks.

What Lies Beneath

Posted on September 13, 2023 by thezman

Imagine a world of perfect candor where any hint of deception or inaccuracy is considered a blot on a man’s character. Everyone is raised to answer every question as honestly and forthrightly as possible. When the wife asks the husband if he thinks she is getting fat, he tells her he does think she is getting fat. Instead of getting upset and running into the bedroom, she excitedly hugs him because he was perfectly honest to her regarding an extremely sensitive matter.

This Vulcan-like candor would alter social relations. For example, stores would seek the best way to show their customers that they are completely honest. When they put something on sale, they would say it was because no one liked it or that they mistakenly bought too much of it and now need to unload it. The sign at the customer service window would read, “The customer is usually wrong.” Clerks would never say “have a good one” to customers.

That would still leave room for deception, so the stores would insist the product makers use candid labeling for their products. Frozen pizza boxes would read, “It tastes like cardboard, but it is cheap and easy to heat in the microwave.” Ingredient lists would include all of the ingredients, even the ones that cause cancer and those would be highlighted so the customer could see them. Organic food would not exist as everything about it is fake and therefore a lie.

Keep in mind that this imaginary world is not enforcing honestly at the point of a gun but as a matter of cultural preference. For some reason, the people in this society came to believe that only through perfect honesty can they have moral society. Therefore, the customs, folk legends and religious practices are all geared toward enforcing this idea that honesty is the highest virtue. Because honesty comes with status, everyone in public engages in honesty signaling contests.

It may seem ridiculous at first, but every human society selects for subjective qualities and against other qualities. The English prefer interesting over boring, which is why their popular figures appear eccentric and weird. Americans dislike phonies so popular figures try hard to look sincere, even when lying. There is no objective reason to prefer interesting over dull or sincere over inauthentic. Preferring these qualities is not more or less strange than celebrating candor.

Now think about this in the American context. Walk into any grocery store in America and the first thing you will experience is a lie. Typically, the produce section is located at the front of the store. There will be piles of fruits and vegetables labeled organic, but as a practical matter there is no such thing. Even if the fruit is grown according to the rules of the organic cult, the suppliers lose track of it long before it reaches the store, so there is no way to know what is organic and what is inorganic.

The stores know this. They put the best-looking stuff on the table marked organic and jack up the price to reinforce the lie. The suppliers know this, and the growers know it too, if you can get them to be honest about it. Everything about that organic tomato you bought is a lie, including your belief that it is better than the other tomato. You reward yourself by accepting the lie. You reward the store for lying to you and the store rewards its suppliers for lying to them. It is liars all the way down.

You have made it a few feet into the store, and you are deluged with lies. Venture further and you are swimming in an ocean of lies. The packaging of food is carefully designed to trick consumers. Tens of billions of dollars have gone into figuring out how to trick people into buying things. Of course, everything about the American diet is a lie perpetrated by the government at the behest of agribusiness. A man from Planet Candor would be horrified by the frozen food section.

Now, think about what sort of government would work best in a society run on the principle of complete candor. Monarchy could work, but it would be less than honest to claim that the son of the king is the most qualified to rule. A ruling council of the most honest citizens, maybe picked by the people, would probably be best as it would reward candor with the highest office. Candidates for seats on the council would prove their worth through campaigns of total honesty.

In fact, democracy would work well on Planet Candor. One of the foundational principles of democracy is that “all members must have equal and effective opportunities to learn about the consequences and alternatives of a proposal.” In a society where honesty is the highest virtue, the pressure to make sure everyone is as well informed as possible would lead to the most informed citizens. You would not have to worry about voter fraud or ballot stuffing on Planet Candor.

This is where you might think something is wrong. America is more democratic than any society in history and it is riddled with lies and corruption. The man holding the highest office recently claimed he was at the World Trade Center on 9/11. He repeatedly tells outlandish whoppers like this about himself. He is in office because he was the beneficiary of the most corrupt election in American history. That was made possible by a tsunami of lies from the mass media.

We seem to have a dilemma. On the one hand, the society of perfect honesty seems like the ideal place for democracy. On the other hand, democracy in practice results in a society ruled by the least honest people. When you think back to how our marketplace operates on a foundation of lies, it suggests any open market, whether it is for goods and service or ideas, becomes an elaborate game of liar’s poker. The marketplace rewards deception, so you end up with a lot of liars.

There are some possible solutions to this dilemma. One is that humans naturally want to live in a society controlled by liars. We have steadily become more democratic because mankind is slowly reaching its desired end. Alternatively, democracy and the marketplace turn even the most honest people into liars. If someone unleashed democracy on Planet Candor, it would quickly devolve into Planet Deception and come to resemble modern America.

There is a third option. Let us suppose that Planet Candor operates on perfect honesty because long ago a powerful force came to their planet and told them that unless they stamped out deception, their planet would be destroyed. Over time this belief in the risk of deception became a central part of who they are as a people and who each person is in relation to society. Put another way, honesty has become a religion for them, one that leads to salvation for themselves and their posterity.

Under such conditions, the acid of democracy and the free market would land on a society immune to its corrosive effects. All those snakes selling organic apples in the produce section of the grocery store would find no takers. Similarly, the fig leaf makers would have no reason to exist. After all, those they did manage to tempt would be selected out of the gene pool due to low status. In time, democracy would be a mechanism to select against the dishonest.

John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Outside of the various forms of authoritarianism, this is true of all governments. You cannot have an honest monarchy if the people over whom it rules are immoral. You cannot have a benevolent dictator if his people are liars and crooks. Morality is what ultimately controls the behavior of the people and what makes good governance possible.

That is the source of what plagues us today. The structures we inherited assume a specific moral foundation. When the ruling class that emerged with the American empire in the middle of the last century exiled the principles that made up that moral foundation, society was left without any protection from the temptations that lie in the marketplace for goods and ideas. The endless haggling over what we ought to do is only possible when there is no moral authority.

It also explains the panicked frenzy by the ruling class to conjure a moral framework to justify their behavior. The endless chanting about diversity is not intended to convince anyone that it is a strength, but to prevent anyone from asking who gave them the authority to fill our communities with strangers. The weird sexual fetishes they have unleashed are squid ink to prevent anyone from asking them upon what moral authority they are basing their sweeping claims about society.

The great critic of the Enlightenment, Joseph de Maistre, famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” Most people think this means the people deserve punishment for supporting unscrupulous politicians. What de Maistre meant here is the morality of society determines the type of government. In the case of France, stripping away the Catholic Church and the monarchy left French society without a moral foundation for government. Tyranny is what followed.

That is what we see happening in the West. The American empire jettisoned its moral foundations a century ago and the result is an empire that imposes cultural and spiritual chaos on the West. Democracy and the promiscuous lying that we see are just symptoms of the moral hollowness of the empire. The West is now ruled by moral nullities who demand to be treated as moral arbiters and in the end, they are left to operate as dictators holding power by force.

I’ll Drink To That

Posted on September 1, 2023 by thezman

About two months ago I had my annual physical, a thing I have come to hate mostly because it is a waste of time. The theory behind getting a physical every year is that it may catch some terrible disease you have before it gets to the point where they tell you to get your affairs in order. The belief is that if they catch it early, they have a better chance of curing it. At the extremes this is obviously true, but in the main it is one of the many myths that keeps the system awash in your cash.

This time I learned, to the immense joy of the staff, that my blood pressure was out of whack and my cholesterol was getting high. The reason for the cheering and celebrating was that it meant pills. I would need pills, lots and lots of pills. This is the best of times at a doctor’s office. The average American now takes four different prescription medicines. Humans made it into the 20th century with no pills, but we left the 20th century addicted to them.

Instead of giving my future over to the pharmaceutical companies, I decided to take a hard look at my lifestyle. I have always been someone who has more on the schedule than time permits. This not only means plenty of stress, but it also means I often stay up late getting things done. Lack of proper rest is probably the worst thing you can do to yourself as you get old. Of course, being overly busy means not eating properly and not exercising on a regular basis.

It did not require an intervention to know that I had allowed by schedule to take over my life, so the trip to the doctor was more of an excuse to reorganize things than a “come to Jesus” wake up call. The last year has brought a lot of changes and one of them was seeing the numbers on the scale get bigger every week. The late middle-age life reorganization has been in the back of my mind for a while now, so the trip to the doctor was an excuse to finally get serious about things.

One of the first things I decided to do was cut out alcohol. This is not a big deal as I have often cut out booze to lose weight. For me, losing weight has always meant cutting carbs and beer is nothing but carbs. Even though drinking lowers your blood pressure initially, regular drinking tends to drive up your blood pressure. It can also drive up your cholesterol, which was the other issue from my physical. I need to lose weight anyway, so dropping alcohol was the obvious first move.

Something I never thought about until now was that in the past when I cut beer from the diet was that it was situational. I would stop having a beer with dinner or on weekends, but if I had a social engagement I would go ahead and have a beer. The point was to cut out the calories that come with beer, not cut out the beer. This time the plan was to cut out beer entirely, which meant no beer at social events. I did not realize it, but I was going to be that guy at the party.

That guy, of course, is the person at just about every social event who has to tell people that he is not drinking. This usually happens a few times before his last name turns into “who is not drinking.” I have become that guy. Worse yet, I have had to explain the blood pressure business a million times now. In retrospect, I should have made up a story about how the terms of my parole prohibit drinking. At least people would not feel the need to look like they are interested in the answer.

The other part of the diet and exercise plan is obviously exercise. I used to lift weights regularly and cycle, but nagging injuries got me out of the habit. Before heading back down those roads, I decided to research the topic a bit. I am not a kid anymore and we are awash in aging baby boomers. I assumed that there was a mountain of information on the best exercise for old people. I was surprised to learn that it is pretty much the same stuff they have been peddling for years.

Odder still, the fitness rackets are not aiming at the geezer demographic. This seems like a logical market if you are selling exercise plans or gym memberships. Imagine a gym that caters to old people. You have to be an AARP member to join. That way the old people do not have to see those young and fit people while they are pretending that age is just a number. Maybe there is a local chain working this demo, but it looks like the fitness rackets are still aiming for the young and fit.

I wonder if the issue is not cultural. Marketing fitness to old people means telling them that they are old, and that age is more than a number. Baby boomers are not going to react positively to being told that they are as old as feel. This is one of the consequences of youth culture. Everyone has to lie to themselves about getting old, which means everyone with something to sell to old people lies to old people about the undeniable reality of getting old.

The one exception to this is the weightlifters. There are lots of old guys with YouTube channels talking about their weight training. The reason is this is the one thing you can do until you die. It turns out that strength training is probably the one thing old people can do to hold off father time. The man with the world’s strongest grip is a 73-year-old Norwegian dude named Magnus, of course. Here is a great video of him explaining what he does to remain strong into old age.

None of this matters as the Grim Reaper is undefeated. The best you can hope to do with regards to your health is to take Father time into the late rounds and remain as fit as possible to the end. My clash with the sphygmomanometer was nothing more than a reminder that I have a choice. I can make the best of the time I have, or I can just mark time like a prisoner in an aging body. It also means that life is for living, so have a beer on me over the long holiday weekend.

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Ooga Booga

Posted on August 31, 2023 by thezman

Note: This is a post from behind the green door. I am taking the animals to the vet first thing in the morning, so I had not time to write. A few month ago Paul Ramsey mentioned this movie, so I gave it a watch and wrote a review. The description of the film is not a joke. This is a real film available on Amazon.

The reason to watch a B-movie is they are often unintentionally funny because they are so poorly made, or they have ridiculous premise. The film Killer Clowns from Outer Space has a cult following because of its absurdity. The people working in this segment of the entertainment industry have no illusions about what they are doing, so they hire the most cynical writers and the most desperate actors.

There are exceptions and one of them is Ooga Booga, a film written and directed by a long time B-movie maker named Charles Band. He has been in the B-movie business for half a century. He is the creator of the Puppet Master series, which has a cult following for some reason. So far, fifteen films have been created in the series, all heading straight to home video.

Mr. Band is known for horror and sci-fi films featuring puppets and Ooga Booga falls into that category, assuming such a category officially exists. What makes this film stand out is that it is 90-minutes of vulgar hatred of white people. The film is a crude expression of what Hollywood people think about white society, but it is so poorly executed that it comes off as unintentional self-parody.

The film starts on the set of a local children’s show. There is a cartoonish farm girl doing kids entertainment stuff. She then signals for another actor to come on stage, but he does not arrive. The scene shifts to the backroom where a man wearing a pig nose is pleasuring himself while drinking white liquor. The producer comes in and drags him out onto the stage where he then says crude things.

The producer then fires pig man and we cut to a scene in a swanky apartment where an idealized black guy, IBG for short, comes home to his strong black female, SBF, to announce that he passed the medical exam. They are about to get funky when the phone rings and it is Pig Man asking IBG for help. Of course, IBG breaks of the funky time and goes to help Pig Man.

Pig Man explains to IBG that he has this scheme to get rich selling dolls that depict the oppressed in unflattering ways. The Asian doll has big, bucked teeth and the gay doll is outrageously gay looking. The black doll is an African savage, of course, with a bone in his nose. He is Ooga Booga, and the Pig Man then says some things based on black stereotypes. IBG takes offense but agrees to accept the doll as a gift.

After rendering no help at all. IBG then leaves and stops at a convenience store, which is then robbed by three white meth heads. IBG is hiding in the back as the meth heads execute the clerk and then leave with some snacks. IBG calls the police and tries to render help by dragging the dying clerk around the floor, because he learned that in medical school.

Two cops arrive. One is Racist Cop and one is Antiracist Cop. We know this because Racist Cop lets out with a string of cliches about black people and shoots IBG. He then takes the gun from Antiracist Cop and shoots IBG again to make sure he is dead, while explaining to Antiracist Cop that he cannot say what really happened because his gun was used to kill IBG.

The cops leave and the slushy machine then starts to make noise. Soon, slushy mix is spilling out in volumes far greater than the machine could hold while lightning bolts come out of the top. The slushy mix crosses the floor and touches IBG and the Ooga Booga doll that he had brought with him. Then something magical happens and the doll disappears without explanation.

Next, we are in the office a judge who is calling the two cops “honky” for some reason while telling them they are lucky he rigged their case. Then we are in the apartment of IBG, and we see SBF trying to be sad while looking at a picture of IBG, but she is such a terrible actress it looks like she is about burst out laughing. It is a touching scene if you have ever dreamt of murdering your spouse.

This is where Ooga Booga shows up. Keep in mind that he is a twelve-inch-tall doll, who somehow made it several blocks from the store and up several flights of stairs. He then chases SBF around the apartment until she hides in the bathroom. He then carves his name on the table using his toy spear. At this point she suspends all disbelief and accepts that this twelve-inch cannibal doll is IBG.

Then we are in the trailer of the three meth heads. The point of this scene is to tell us that white people are all meth smoking crackers. Then we are back in the apartment of IBG who is smoking reefer. Apparently SBF left for some reason. The landlord bursts in shouting generally accurate but prohibited things about black people. Ooga Booga gets angry and kills the landlord with his tiny spear.

On the street, SBF is accosted by the three white meth heads. They debate whether to gang rape her or sell her into slavery. They choose rape. She then comes home to take a shower, while Ooga Booga masturbates watching her. I did not make that up. It is an actual scene in this movie. One has to assume it was the writers who were smoking weed when they wrote part of the film.

At this point, Ooga Booga and SBF agree to go on a revenge-murder spree. The judge sends Racist Cop to investigate what is happening with the white meth heads, who we learn are in charge of the judge’s drug and prostitution rackets. This brings everyone to a trailer park filled with the sorts of white people the makers of this film imagine are the standard issue white person.

Ooga Booga then kills an old woman. Then SBF helps Ooga Booga kill the meth heads with his tiny spear. Somewhere along the way SBF ambushes Antiracist Cop thinking he is a racist cop, but he shows her a pic of his wife, who is also a strong black female and they have a couple of caramel-colored kids. SBF thanks him for being a good ally and does not kill him. This is real and it happens.

Eventually SBF and Ooga Booga kill Racist Cop. Ooga Booga then shows up in the judge’s office and kills him. In the final scene, a case full of cash shows up at the apartment door of SBF. Inside is a note from Pig Guy who got rich selling his dolls in China, so he sent what he considers to be a fair share to IBG. The lesson is that racism is fine if you can “get yo chips” or something like that. The end.

If you can look past the terribleness of the film and the ridiculous premise, it is a good look inside the head of the typical Hollywood person. It is a crudely drawn version of the stylish TV series Mad Men. In this telling, blacks are innocent victims of evil, selfish white people. In the scene where SBF is supposed to be mourning, she says something about how they had a great life until whitey arrived.

Even though this is a terrible film, it is a good reminder that the people behind these antiwhite pogroms are not amenable to reason. Their complaint is not about anything that can be addressed, but about the existence of white people. The war on whiteness is not just a war on specific things or even on white people. It is a war on the very humanity of white people. To them, we are just talking pigs.

Film As Art

Posted on August 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: The following is green door content. I am posting here as a reminder that you can support my efforts with more than just your pithy comments on the site. You can sign up for a green door account here or here. I am just shy of 700 subs and it would be nice to push through that barrier by the end of summer.

Can a movie be art? It probably depends upon your definition of art. The general definition is “something created with imagination and skill that is beautiful or expresses important ideas.” There are a lot of subjective words there. What is beautiful to one person can be silly looking to another person. Important ideas are not always easy to define and often take a long time before they are seen as important.

Using this general definition, even allowing for variations of taste and perspective, movies can be art in the same way a pop song can be art. It is unlikely that anyone will be performing Madonna songs a century from now but lots of people thought the songs were beautiful at the time. Some people even say that she was a culturally important figure at her peak. But is Madonna in the same club as Beethoven?

Another way of looking at art is that it is something that holds a mirror up to the society that created it. Greek statues speak to the nature of the people who created them in ways that their graffiti and pornography does not. The Greeks had graffiti and crude art produced for the masses, just like this age. They had pornography too, but what stood the test of time was their sculpture, literature, and architecture.

When you look at it this way, pop songs are not art because they do not speak to the nature of the society that produces them. The reason no one thinks about the pop songs of the 19th century, and they did have pop music, is the same reason no one will talk about Madonna songs in the 22nd century. This sort of crude entertainment has nothing important to say about the people who produced and consumed it.

That brings us back to movies. Most films are made for the same purpose most popular music is made, which is profit. You get a decent script and some famous actors, have it made by a competent director and profit! The only films made for reasons other than profit are the small projects by famous stars and directors. The studios let these guys do pet projects as a way to keep them happy.

This is probably why studios are fine with ruining their franchises by making unnecessary sequels and reboots. Star Wars is a punchline now, but it made billions for the studios, so it is all good. The Indians Jones franchise has ended with the thud, because the studio views it as a profit vehicle, not a work of art. You do not reboot Mozart or remake a Da Vinci painting. You can reboot a movie franchise.

This brings us to the classic Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is number fifty on the AFI top-100. There is no need to summarize it or even offer a critique, as everything that can be said about this has been said. Not only is it the greatest animated film of all time, but it is also based on a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, thus tying it to the soul of Western man.

Does this film have something important to say? Does it hold a mirror up to the society that produced it? Is it beautiful? The answer to the first question is no, but the second and third questions are not obvious. It does feel like a statement of some sort, but that is mostly because we view it from the perspective of this age. It reflects what we have come to view as a better, more decent age than our own. But is it art?

Probably the best argument for it being a work of art is the response to the news that Disney plans to vandalize this film. They wanted to reimagine it by making it diverse and vulgar, like everything else. Instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs it is going to be Nonwhite and the Seven Diverse Weirdos. People were not outraged or offended as it is too late for that now. Instead, everyone laughed.

Vandalizing Star Wars makes people angry because you are destroying a part of their childhood, but once those people are gone, the film, the remakes and the outrage around those remakes are forgotten. When someone says they want to improve on Beethoven or paint a better version of the Mona Lisa, you laugh because you know the person doing it is an idiot and he and his work will soon be forgotten.

In other words, a work of art cannot be remade, rebooted, or even vandalized, as it has deep roots in our cultural consciousness. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are still with us, even though they are long gone, because they made such a deep impression on the people of that time that the memory of them has been preserved. Art not only stands the test of time, but it also transcends time and place.

The one issue with this line of reasoning is that unlike any other form of art, film has to be seen to be appreciated. We can appreciate the Colossus of Rhodes from descriptions and drawings. We know it existed and we can imagine what it was like seeing it at the time. You cannot do that with a film. Once Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is gone, all we have left is the fairytale on which it is based.

That is the reason to watch this film. Given the age in which we live, it could soon be condemned for heresy. They removed Song of the South and now hardly anyone remembers it existed. If you want to see it, you have to watch it on a weird website or download it from the Chinese. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a great film, but it is also a reminder that we have to fight to keep our art.

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