Mid-July 2019
The Finale
Last night, I watched a few clips of “Private SNAFU,” the WWII training films created by the animators of the United Productions of America (UPA). After a few of them, I felt downright depressed. It wasn’t due to the stereotypes that today would be banned as “wacist”; it was the fact that this American bloke hadn’t a hope of ever getting it right. He was too much like the socialist dolts of today!
The previous two nights, I’d watched more than 2 dozen of the shorts that UPA produced in the late 1940s/early 1950s. Let me tell you, the views of women were eye-openingly awful: Dragon ladies, vipers, manipulative shrews, black-widow seductresses, robotic idiotic mothers. And those flicks were not only produced to sell to a mass audience, they did sell, quite well!
One animated story inspired by “humorist” James Thurber was nearly night-marish in terms of the quiet torture between Man and Wife.
Dear Husband then queued up Pepé Le Pew, a Looney Tunes favorite of mine. I felt better, for a while. What was really pulling me down emotionally was an overriding sense that the past that I’d had to endure and survive, and over which I tenaciously prevailed — that past has reached its finale where I, and this Blessed Nation, are concerned.
The finale is blessedly coming to its logical and just fruition and conclusion as Leftists in America (and worldwide) go freaking nuts, in unison. It’s their only unity. Cannibals eat their enemies; liberals eat their own.
A part of me, a major part of me, feels a void and a bit at-sea. It’s not a bad void, not an empty hole that has sucked out my sense of being. There is more a sense of calm and order, the volupté that the French once held in such esteem. Oh, the French, the real French, probably still do revere that balanced mode of sensual serenity, somewhere amidst the crumblings of the EU state that was concreted over them twenty years ago. The corruption-cracks are starting to show, big-time.
I read today that France is tacking a hefty Green Tax onto airplane tickets — into France. Not sure about plane trips out of the place. The other EU colonies, formerly known as nation-states, will follow the “lead” of this latest shill ensconced at Versailles. The politician that presently proclaims to be leading is nowadays the horse’s, um, tail end. “Leading”, especially “the way” and “to the future”, are the latest bits of worthless propaganda from the political class.
Which brings me back to Private SNAFU. He thought he was in control, and ahead-of-the-game, even as he blew-it in a super colossal way, and ended up dead. Every single time.
The industries that were so popular and productive during my “youth” (because I strive to be always young-at-heart), they are now pancaked amidst their own pornographic hedonism. Hollywood, such as it “is”, persists in re-making remakes or re-molding “classics” that, in their time, visibly stretched the concept of “classic.” The latest Disney flick of the 1990s to be tormented and torqued into a weird tale of live-action/computermation is what Dear Daughter used to call “Mermee Maid.”
“The Littlest Mermaid” was not a favorite for me to watch alongside Little Dear Daughter, alongside the lengthy string of animated Disney films targeted at those preschoolers of the 1990s. Mermee Maid wasn’t as bad as “The Lion King” or “Aladdin”, but it was “off” in its own 1990s way.
Colors were too vibrant; the cartooning was simplistic and too reminiscent of each other. Voices were too excited to sound real. Boring boring boring. The highly lucrative re-issues of the 1950s and 1960s Disney films, re-mastered, were thereby almost fore-ordained by the Disney corporation.
There’s not much about marketing I don’t know. As a child, I learned from a master, a Dutch uncle who made a killing during the Great Depression in New Jersey from his produce truck. His older brother Jahn got the family farm, but this crusty canny entrepreneur created his own small business. He single-handedly, and single-mindedly, designed and built the display shelves on his own fruit-vegetable-and-canned-food-selling Ford flatbed truck. This Dutchman was still driving his canopied merchandising crate, a retail work-of-art, around my home town during the mid-1960s.
Polio had all but eliminated the use of his left leg. Whenever this shrewd geyser had to apply the brake on this manual-transmission truck, he’d slam that leg with one hand. with perfect timing, and never miss the pedal in the nick of time. Every ride was a thrill ride for me.
Bicycle helmets (brain buckets), restrictions on playground activities, restrictions on language in public school, restrictions all over the place, while, at the same time, real rules and crucial standards were chucked out-the-earthquake-proof windows.
I
was told by liberal neighbors back in the ‘90s that all of this Nanny-State
nonsense was with the consent of the Governed. I wasn’t so sure. People who vote for platitudes like equality,
fairness, justice, and freedom from pain, suffering and death do not sign on to
the strait-jacketing of their lives. And
if they do, well, then I do not weep over the pain, suffering and death that
come their way.
It got to the point where the only place where a young child could “safely” dream was in a book, which, in reality, offers a very time-honored trip through the imagination. All too soon, however, even those voyages for children became publicly monitored and restricted by the Authorities in public school (ergo, my exit with my children toward Home-Schooling). The safest break from the ever-watched written word became, for millions of Americans, the Disney films being churned out in the 1990s like sausage (a food form also being regulated through the sausage-making known as legislation in 1990s California).
Those Disney instant-classics were deep enough into PC waters, but I suspect that Disney will not be happy with its remakes/rewrites of these animated tales until they shipwreck, clumsily, via their secular Thou-Shalt-Nots, the last little bit of memories these Millennials still might have for the original creations.
Cannibalism is currently the final act for much of this attempt by global corporations to cash in on the little tykes of the Post-Cold War era. Acting, by real actors and actresses, long ago got tossed over the computer-board and into the seas of an enjoyable yesteryear, otherwise known as Vintage Entertainment. With the elimination of any need for thespian talent came the obliteration of writing any script or storyline of quality. It’s amazing to me whenever I watch television shows from the 1980s, and even into the 1990s, regardless of what the show was, how well-written were the dialogues and how well-timed and intriguingly intricate were the plots.
The unthinkable has once again happened. The satiric dialogue spoken by the cynic Joe Gillis in the 1950s film, Sunset Boulevard, has actually come true! I’ve a hunch that director Billy Wilder wrote these prophetic lines:
"Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.”
In America, as the phonies in film and politics and higher education, and in lower education, and in the corporate world, and in whatever is left of “publishing” have “gone along to get along,” they’ve left behind them only a very large slime trail of crassness and corruption, perhaps the longest slime trail of sluggards in the history of mankind.
The big finale is underway. There are no tickets for sale to this show. We chose to look away.
The Emperor had no clothes, but neither did any and all of the sycophants following him. They’ve slid into oblivion along their own slime trail. We’ll need a lot of salt to eradicate it, but I do believe that with enough sodium chloride of zest and with enough elbow grease, we can avoid the big-headed pitfalls of Private SNAFU.
Our heads are not swollen with our sense of entitlement, or of self-importance or of Inevitability. Our hearts are big with pride in this nation, a country that has had to endure lie after lie after lie, in the name of the children, and women, and the animals. Never for the sake of man, or men, or even mankind. Never for the sake of goodness.
For the good of all good men, and for goodness’s sake, we’ve eagerly awaited this finale of the politicized, phonied-up parasitic life that we were all supposed to buy into, a world that was, thank God, never real. Enough of us managed to avoid the silly schedule of getting mired in debt for the purpose of getting ahead. Many, many Americans did not buy into that pipe dream of progress, a delusion foisted for decades upon the airwaves and the sound waves and the VCR and the DVD big screens.
We worked and we hoped and we prayed and we did our best. We did not necessarily “get ahead” for many years, but we did not fall behind either. Because the progress of the heart and the advancement, or elevation, of the soul are not counted in dollars and cents, but in common sense and in the sense of the Almighty. To make the big differences when those big differences counted, there have been just enough of us in this great land who did not sell out to the Experts, the charlatans who believed they knew best how to tell other people how to run their lives, the frauds who made tons of money telling people lie upon lie upon lie.
Many of those lies ended up in films that are now on the junk-piles of digital selling platforms. Film were once an art form of immense inspiration and exacting excellence, sold to masses of people around the world. The Movies can be again what they were, only more. They can display dynamic and daringly beautiful dreams through the “reality” of celluloid.
With the emergence of new mediums of digital viewing, there will occur the “streaming” of American culture that is truly American. And because of that untapped potential that has yet to be tapped, there has sprung, at least for me, the hope that the technical trades of art will reclaim the imagination trades of art: writing, directing, and acting. That hope fills the void created within me by this finale of the frauds.
Every finale is usually followed by applause. There’s not much applause for this finale of the frauds in America. I’m saving my kudos and hurrahs for the new era in creative excellence. It’s just around the corner, the American corner, where the curtain always opens for the gala performance, the first night premiere of so many dreams coming true.
