We Don't Know We're Insane

            We're just like the fish; we don't know what water is.  But the element in which we swim, the element that is impossible for us to recognize, is stress. 

             We have become denizens of a culture that is actually a Torture Machine.  It drives us insane by presenting demands so complex as to be impossible to  achieve.  Every day, it issues thousands of orders.  Turn your left blinker.  Pay your insurance premium.  Pick up your kids' school uniforms.  Don't forget the doctor's appointment.  Where'd you put the McFarland file?  Where are the paper clips?  Why is this milk sour?  Now I have to return it to the store.  Screw it; not worth my time, flush it down the sink.  Are the dogs' vaccinations up to date?  Do I have the receipts for my tax audit?

            Why am I always left with the feeling that I've forgotten to do a homework assignment?  Who is this screaming at me, right next to my ear so that it hurts?  Our government is letting people steal on a massive scale.  My bank account is auto- siphoned each month, it's gone and I've got nothing left to spend.

            I think I'm going crazy.  I don't have any sexual desire at all.  The last time I felt truly alive was....when?  Have I ever felt truly alive?  I truly don't think so. There's nothing to look forward to.  My old age will merely be a time when insurance machines squeeze the remaining dollars from my estate, leaving my kids with nothing.  Zero.  The globe is warming up.  It's true.  The waters are creeping on shore, slowly.  

            OUR SOCIETY IS A TORTURE MACHINE, so complex that it takes a genius to maneuver its daily routine.  It tortures by its relentless pressure.  We don't need Stalin or Hitler.  We have modern life in Amerika.  See that guy with the cardboard sign sitting at the parking lot exit?  "Will work for food."  He isn't a pathetic loser.  He's you or me or someone we know who just cracked under the pressure and opted to sit in the TIME OUT box in front of everyone.  He couldn't take the complexity any more.  Now he's doing better. He has a shoe box where his money piles up.  He's doing better than I am!  Could I take sitting in the TIME OUT box in front of everyone?  I don't think so.  I'm not tough enough.

            Life has always been complex, but not like this...Hunting, gathering, fighting off raiders, that was easy stuff compared to this.  The modern Torture Machine can't be dodged.  Your assignment is late!  Punishment will be swift and merciless!  Your interest will rise, your credit will sink.

            The injustice of it!  I'm choking on injustice.  I can't breathe!  Give me a cigarette.  Where are all these voices coming from?  Let me turn off the radio.The off switch doesn't work.  The voices are coming from my pocket.  It's my Z-Phone.  Its off switch doesn't work either.  The argument continues, shouting everywhere, lies compound in blatant and shameless huckstering.  Everything is a trick.  Even the tricks we know to be tricks conceal more subtle tricks. They say those Occupy Wall Street types are going to burn Manhattan.  Quick, we'd better launch a pre-emptive strike, mow them down before they find out where we've stashed the money.

            The fish don't recognize the sea.  The people don't recognize the element that dominates our lives.  I will coin a term for it: Phobagonovia.  Phobe-ago-NOVE-ee-yah.  It causes us to curl up inside our homes with the giant TV playing football games and scripted "reality" shows where people are abused by their in-laws.  Phobagonovia.  We are afraid of new experiences.  The Torture Machine has implanted this condition in our nervous systems.  We are afraid of relating to one another openly, of crying in front of strangers, of expressing feelings easily, of hugging or kissing spontaneously, lest we be inappropriate, our strait jacket is "Appropriate", we haven't a clue how to dance in a circle while deeply in love with members of a clan, to sing ancient songs, to sit around a fire feeling wonderful under the stars.  I don't mean we need to go backwards.  We need to invent new kinds of communities.  We are dying of Phobagonovia.  Our neck ties are cutting off our breath.  Our high heels are warping our skeletons. The future is over.  Rush Limbaugh will be reborn as a talking pig that can only sputter nonsense. The people of his remote village will laugh at him holding their sides with mirth.  They will postpone the time to eat him because he's a tourist attraction.  People come from distant villages to see him.  They stare in disbelief, listen to his pompous mutterings. They throw him pieces of rubbish.  His time will come, at last.

            When the chief takes the first bite, he will spit it out.

            "We laughed too long," he will say.  "This fat talking pig tastes like shit."

A Review of the film HANNA

Hanna: A Review

            I should make a rule.  If a movie blurb has the acronym CIA in it, I should pass.  I got suckered by the idea of a wild child being raised in the back woods of Finland.  I wanted to see Finland.  That's why I rented the movie HANNA.  Everything else was loaded with the usual signals. CIA, CIA, CperiodIperiodAperiod.

            The CIA has become a  cinematic boogeyman, a narrative trope for deception, rogue agents who are awesome martial artists, plots within plots within plots, old paper files that should have been burned at the end of the Cold War, EVIL, pure old fashioned EVIL.  This is our main national security agency, the one that sets the paradigm.  It's interesting how much we depend on it and hate it.  No one imbues the DIA, the NSC, the FBI or dozens of other acronymic agencies with such an aura of sinister misdirection.  No other agency is synonymous with THE BIG LIE.

            Here is the movie, HANNA, directed by Jon Wright, and starring Saoirse Ronan as the waif-like uber-warrior, martial artist supreme.  My first problem was simply working out the pronunciation of the girl's name.  Turns out it's pronounced Seer-sha.  Hoooray!  I think the Irish are just having a laugh at our expense, cleaving with ethnic loyalty to the old Gaelic names.  I can imagine it, the Christening of a girl child, and the parents confer in ponderous whispers.  "Let's call her Riaoirdhagnha-hna."  Couldn't just call her Riordan, could ya?

            I'm having a bit of fun, certainly not slinging ethnic slurs.  The Irish are entitled to defiance.  As are the Blacks, the Jews, the Arabs, the Ethiopian Coptics, the Mormons, The Kurds and everyone else.  No one needs opt out of defiance.  It's the national creed of all nations.  Oh say can you seeeeee?

            Let me see if I can compress the plot of this movie into a logical sequence.

A while ago, in the mid-nineties, the CIA funded a program to mess with genetic sequencing via in-vitro fertilization.  The idea was to see if they could produce a SUPER SOLDIER, a warrior with superior reflexes, intelligence, better vision, better hearing, greater strength and so forth. 

            If we want to trace the origins of this cliche, we may go back to sci fi maven Isaac Asimov writing in the fifties and then fast forward twenty years to Bionic Man. 

            This program (the one in the movie) produced maybe twenty children and then the bottom dropped out of it.  The film gives us a five second vignette of fast cuts of news and magazine items.  Apparently a certain number of children met untimely deaths, around the same time and locale.  Guess the CIA didn't want freaky little chromosome carriers running around the world.

            There's a flashback scene of Cate Blanchett stepping out from behind a snow-bound road sign and firing six or eight or ten shots from her nine millimeter Beretta at an oncoming car.  The vehicle contains a man, a woman, and a toddler.  This brilliant, foolproof assassination plan doesn't work.  My goodness!  The toddler's mother is dying in the snow and curses Blanchett's character, agent Marrisa Wiegler, with her final words: "You'll never take her."  Or was it, "You'll never find her?" Whatever.  Male person/daddy and super-toddler have vanished into the eerie north woods.

            There must be another rule, a Hollywood rule, that if you have a movie that's just middling in quality and if you can land Cate Blanchett in the cast it will add enough class to the project to push it uphill a notch into cinematic respectability.

            I must admit that Blanchett played her high level agent like the perfect Wicked Witch.  "Come here, child, I won't hurt you," she says with a voice like dry ice.  We know her character's nuts by the way she brushes her teeth.  She attacks her gums until she can spit blood.  It's interesting that Blanchett distances herself in the movie's credits.  It's hard to discover that she is actually IN the movie.  In spite of  near-dominant screen time, she's a somewhat hidden "And Cate Blanchett" way back in the cast credits.

            Okay okay okay.  The movie was entertaining.  It was as saturated with cliche as a Denny's waffle is with maple syrup.  Two thirds of the film time was taken up with chases.  Watch out for chases.  Rule Number twenty three: long chases are evidence of the director's lack of imagination. 

            At the end of the movie the chasing goes on in an abandoned theme park with headless dinosaurs and roller coaster tunnels.  The final scene has Blanchett emerging from the mouth of the Big Bad Wolf.

            I never quite figured out why Blanchett was chasing Hanna through the park and then suddenly Hanna was chasing Blanchett through the park.  It didn't make sense.  Did Marissa Wiegler (that's another thing, was she a German with a Southern accent?  Or a Southern with a German accent?.  Sheeesh.)  Each had hurt the other.  Hanna had created a functioning crossbow while running full tilt through the abandoned theme park.  Blanchett had shot Hanna somewhere near the abdomen but apparently her super genes included quick healing.  There was some symbolic dwelling on Wiegler's shoes in an earlier scene.  Apparently these shoes are the witch's undoing, because she slips, ooops, just at the climactic moment of confrontation, and goes head first down some bobsled track thingy.  Then the ironic comments get to be uttered.  "I just missed your heart", says Hanna, in a reference to the first scene in the film when she's hunting a caribou buck and mercifully gives him the coup de grace.  She told the magnificent animal, with appropriately aboriginal predator/prey bonding, "I just missed your heart."

            I guess I won't be spoiling anything to say that the movie ends with a bang.

            I rate it three muskrats.  Coulda been better.  Fairly entertaining. Coulda been a lot worse.

A Rant About Marketing

A Rant

I deeply resent THEM, the marketing people, playing on my fears.  It all came home to me as I was watching a  smarmy Grecian Formula commercial.  First, a sexy female voice-over says "She'll never know, even though she runs her fingers through your hair". A man and woman are happily embracing.  The girl purrs "ooh, I love your hair. It's Soo sexy".  Then the man looks directly into the camera and winks.

Right.  I get it.  He uses Grecian formula.  He scores. In order to sell thousands of tons of this diabolical scalp acid the marketers saturate us with the implication that we won't get laid by beautiful women if we look old. 

Women are treated far worse.  Every day they’re told that if they get a wrinkle or two, they're ready for the crone-heap, they can go out to the shack in back and start stirring newt's eyes and lizard scrotums into a big pot. 

The evil that seeps up from the black heart of our commercial culture is so insidious that we become zombies under the influence of something we can 't hear, smell, taste, touch or see.  We should spank these greedy marketing people on their tush.  We need "re-education camps" for advertising execs. They will attend mandatory  therapy sessions administered by ex-con hermaphroditic junkies. 

Who the fuck do they think they are?  Scaring me into wanting to buy Rogaine?  Telling me my sex life is over if I lose a few patches of hair.  I've ACTUALLY thought about it.  I refuse to give in, I won’t be a victim of faux peer pressure.  Instead I’ll spend the money I’ve saved not buying Rogaine and I'll go to Venezuela to get a face lift by Doctor Mendoza.  This jovial man is a world famous plastic-surgeon.  He has worked miracles on hundreds of Miss Universe contestants and many Hollywood stars.  He is also a philanthropist who donates part of his time fixing up hare-lipped urchins from the streets of Caracas. 

If you’ve reached a certain age you realize that the world has been going progressively more psychotic.  Nothing is genuine anymore, everything is used as a shuck.  I got a flyer from a so-called "Green" investment firm.  They want me to invest my money in their mutual fund, and I should do so because they only buy “Green Stocks.”  Uh huh.  I was born yesterday.  The most tender ministrations of the most altruistic do-gooders have been turned into Wall Street spam.

Even if I had money I would feel queasy about investment.

I can't help but feel as though the whole banking and finance system will go through a REAL meltdown around the year 2014 that will result in all the world's money winding up in Rupert Murdoch 's underground strong-room.  He must be like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons. 

I wonder if he wrings his hands.