Despite Leftist Dogma, Some Things In Life Are Better Than Others…..Such as Movies

There are so many moments and events, memories, thoughts, likes and dislikes in my life I would like to share with my computer screen, but I am too …..gutless, embarrassed, shy, concerned, private…….no, all might be true, but the real finish to the sentence is…….likely not to do it well and that would embarrass me.

Also, I tend to be too wordy.

I have a lot a favorites in life….and it has been such a good life ……I have been tremendously fortunate for all my travels through it. 

To start with, I cannot remember the last time I was bored.  (It’s genetic, folks, but one can be trained.) 

I used to like movies…..however, I was always very picky about what I would see…..even when going to the Saturday matinees when I was only eight or nine years old….and going by myself occasionally…for ten cents a ticket.

Today,  Hollywood enjoys its present life in the tarpits of tastelessness and glitz filled with its strident political noises and smells from people who probably all of their lives never learned anything real and never  thought in the world of reality.  And so many notables are freaks of one sort or another…..that is, folks without any core.

My generation….those born in the mid 1930s, those of us approaching our eighties, learned a  powerful code of life from movies and radio  besides family and church.   ”A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, ” I Remember Mama”, “Eagle Squadron”, “Black Swan”, “Lassie Come Home”, “My Friend Flicka”, “Tom Sawyer”,  “Cheaper by the Dozen”,  even The Picture of Dorian Gray and  Henry V with Lawrence Olivier….. and I could go on and on, believe me,  listing movies which helped mold my being.

I was twelve when I saw the movie, “The Spiral Staircase”.  There was some discussion I overheard between my parents about the movie being too scary.  “Maybe the kids shouldn’t be allowed to see it”.   My dad didn’t answer and the question drifted.  I scurried off to nearby Highland Theater that very night to see it before anyone would make up their mind.   I never wanted to disobey my parents….and never, ever my dad.   Then, he never caused me to disobey.   I tried to skirt obeying instead….such as going to the movie that night.  There weren’t many rules, exactly.  “Some things simply should be done without asking persmission”….that was the rule generally. 

Going to see the movie, “The Spiral Staircase” should have required permission….not going to movies in general…I did that all of the time, alone and/or with a neighborhood buddy when I was eight…(only in the summer).  But I was supposed to know those movies I should ask permission to see…..The vagueness of what I was supposed to know,  led to a very leaky rule indeed.

I am off to see “Staircase”.  Its June.  Cloudy and muggy when I left the house.  Lightning, thunder, and rain followed me home,  terrorized as if  I were part of an added chapter to the murders which had taken place in the film.   The victims in the film were gals.  It didn’t matter.  I didn’t have time to worry  about details.

I have seen some fine films in my lifetime.  For some reason I have an urge to list some of my favorites….one which I have to see regularly from time to time.  Such as one does with exceptional art.   Most things in life are more beautiful than others, despite what our modern socialist gods claim.

If I were to live on an island alone somewhere, these are ten  films I would have to take with me:    Two are the BEST:   “The Seventh Seal” and “The Lives of Others”.   “Paleface” a hillarious comedy with Bob Hope (would be banned today)……a musical, “My Fair Lady”….  three Woody Allen”s, “Bullets Over Broadway” (also hillarious), “Purple Rose of Cairo”, and “Radio Days”, “Bridge on the River Kwai” (great war movie)….”2001 Space Odyssey” (the scene where David is executing Hal is the best example ever of what the aging mind experiences  in slower motion…..”Topsy Turvy”, beautiful to look at and listen to, and to remember the genius of  Gilbert and Sullivan…..makes ten.

Oh, I have forgotten two of the very, very best films ever made, so I would have to take twelve to my island…..”Godfather I” and “Godfather II”…..the best films ever produced in my view.  I probably have seen them twenty times…..and find them spellbinding every minute I watch.

The best scene in all movie making is the garden setting where Marlon Brando is playing around with his grandson, making faces, scaring the little boy, and begins to suffer his heart attack.

I have hated gangsters, gangster movies,  and gangs all of my life.  Disgusting people, end of story.  For a film to capture my concern and sympathy for a family based on murder and corruption, stories I detest,  adds to the power of production of this movie and the way it has commanded my viewing.

Note:  Every American should see the best rendering in art form,  of anything depicting a Marxist dictatorship…the movie, “The Lives of Others”.    Sometimes,  art can produce an education quicker and more deeply profound than some learnings from  life’s experience.  This is one of those rarities.

I visited the Soviet Union twice in my life, once in 1966 and again in 1990.  I visited East Berlin and Check Point Charlie in 1993 after the fall of the wall just  a few years earlier.  The “remodeling” of the Communist part of the city hadn’t really taken place yet.   One should become well acquainted with governments which believe in the justice of forced equality and their secret police which are required to maintain this “justice”.   Barack Obama, for one, I am thinking, who so admires government rule of our lives.

Nobel Leftists Sleep: Nobel Choice for Literature Prize Has Meaning….It Was Earned

If I had been asked a week ago “Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?” I would have paused.  Even now I am not certain, but Peru comes to mind…so my answer would have been, “I think he is a writer from Peru.”   (I was taught in grade school that the national language in Peru is Spanish.   In Brazil it’s Portuguese.  I was also made aware in grade school that the Pope  at the time when Spain and Portugal were competing for control in the South American continent, decreed that some longitude would be the dividing line  with Portugal controlling the eastern portion and Spain west of the line.)   

The following is an article by Carlos Alberto Montaner in the Miami Herald.   Americans of Cuban refugee experience would recognize the name Mario Vargas Llosa as a dictator critic, no doubt….at least the older generation might:

“The Swedish Academy gave an odd reason for granting Mario Vargas Llosa its Nobel Prize for Literature — for his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Some gobbledygook. I imagine the writer was struck speechless. It would have been far simpler to say that the academy rewarded the most outstanding living novelist in Spanish literature.

The news found Mario at Princeton University, where he’s teaching a class this semester. Oscar Haza, the Dominican journalist from Miami, was first to interview him after the announcement. That, in journalistic parlance, is called a “scoop.”

I was on the air with his son, Alvaro Vargas Llosa, celebrating the triumph, when Haza managed to contact Mario. This year, the critics didn’t even mention him among the candidates. Mario had even forgotten that around this time every year the Swedish academicians select the winner. Always an early riser and careful teacher, he was preparing his lesson when he received the unexpected phone call from Stockholm.

Ever since, in 1981, Mario published The War of the End of the World, an extraordinary novel with a Brazilian theme, he deserved this recognition. It is probably the only important award he had not received.

The list of prizes, doctorates and distinctions he has been given in the course of his 74 years is impressive. Some were given to honor him; others, to extol the institutions that granted them, but that’s the inevitable ambiguity of all medals.

In this case, if Mario died without the Nobel for Literature, it would have been another unpardonable mistake by an institution that, throughout its history, has ignored figures the size of Kafka, Joyce or Borges while rewarding some writers with a lot less heft.

On this opportunity, however, there is a phenomenon beyond literature that morally boosts the figure of Mario Vargas Llosa. Among the dozens of messages I have received, many come from Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Chileans. All express their thanks for the permanent defense of freedom that the Peruvian-born author, along with his wife, Patricia, and son Alvaro, have turned into a true family leitmotif.

Paraphrasing Churchill, “Never did so many owe so much to so few.” There is no Latin American tyrant who hasn’t faced Mario’s criticism. There is no persecuted democrat who hasn’t encountered his helping hand when knocking at his door. There is no public protest that he hasn’t endorsed if the cause is worthwhile.

He even created (and heads) the International Foundation for Liberty, with the collaboration of Argentine economist Gerardo Bongiovanni, for the purpose of effectively disseminating the ideas in which he believes.

For us Latin Americans, this is very important. We live in dangerous political quicksand, where liberty and democracy always hang from a thread.

In the past, the generals would strike a blow and seize the government, but today the most obvious threat comes from elected leaders who use their authority to dismantle the rule of law and turn the judiciary into a tool to perpetuate themselves in power and persecute their adversaries, as happens in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Faced with such leaders, because of the legitimacy of their origin, the genuinely democratic governments and institutions such as the OAS remain silent. Only the protests led by major figures manage to make headlines in the media.

This firmness in the defense of freedom has been costly to Mario Vargas Llosa. As always happens, the friends of tyrannies have accused him of selling out to Washington or being a CIA agent and have not spared their worst insults and slander.

They have even put his life in danger, as happened in Rosario, Argentina, a couple of years ago, when the most violent communist groups stoned and tried to burn a bus in which he traveled, along with other writers participating in a seminar organized by the International Foundation for Liberty.

What is going to happen to Mario now that he holds the Nobel? Nothing special, except in one aspect, which his son Alvaro has referred to in jest: Nobody will again mortify him with the uncomfortable question, “Why didn’t you get the Nobel this year?”

Justice has finally been done.”

Comment:  Now I know more about the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.   It seems to me his name was mentioned in a Cuban film which I saw a few years ago……an excellent movie, a sensitive one about a touch of trouble in the Cuban  paradise under Fidel rule.  Such a film could never have been produced in Hollywood, a place which cannot even spell the word “sensitivity” much less enact something resembling it.   This Cuban movie in the era of Fidel, mind you, offered a message several layers higher than Hollywood’s typical leftwing propaganda and its tastelessness.

I highly recommend ”Strawberry and Chocolate”  to any and all conservative audiences.   (Lefties wouldn’t understand its purpose.)  Conservatives will appreciate its complexities…..and is characters.  It is an adult movie.

Now That We Know Obama Better, What Is His Real Campaign Message? How Is It Doing?

“N.Y. Times Questions Obama Srategy stirs this John Hinderaker article at Powerline today:

“The Times does question the effectiveness of President Obama’s attempt to salvage November’s election for the Democrats: “Obama Message in Flux as Election Day Nears.”

As we and many others have done, the Times reviews the shifting targets of Obama’s rage as the President has sought to gain traction–John Boehner, Karl Rove, the Chamber of Commerce, and so on. The paper quotes James Carville and Stanley Greenberg for the proposition, based on current polling data, that Obama’s current message is, shall we say, not optimal:

Mr. Carville and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg went further in their criticism in a polling memo over the weekend, writing that Mr. Obama is too focused on the wrong underlying argument. They say he could help win over undecided voters with a promise to change Washington on behalf of the middle class and to oppose Republicans who support tax breaks for big companies that export jobs.

Mr. Carville and Mr. Greenberg argued that those messages would work better than the president’s current argument. In their survey, they asked voters about Mr. Obama’s message that Republicans are going “back to Bush and the old policies for Wall Street that cost us 8 million jobs.” They said that message was “painfully weaker” than the other ones they tested in surveys.

“Compared to the other messages, it falls very short,” they concluded in the memo, saying it does little with “winnable voters” across the country. “That message framework cannot extend the Democratic vote.”

Which is another way of saying that the voters don’t want to hear any more about President Bush. The Democrats’ real problem, it seems to me, is that it is late in the day for them to start listening to the American people. If they had cared what voters think, they wouldn’t have passed the stimulus bill or the government medicine bill, wouldn’t have run up trillions in debt, wouldn’t have adjourned with tax increases looming for every tax-paying American. Nothing the Democrats can say or do now is likely to change the underlying dynamics of the election.

Still, that doesn’t mean that Obama’s flailing for a theme is entirely wasted effort. The best the Democrats can do is to try to change the subject, and to some degree they have succeeded in that. Every minute a voter spends thinking about Karl Rove or the Chamber of Commerce is a minute he isn’t thinking about taxes, spending, or the economy”. 

Comment:   The human species is easily distracted….and I am a member of this clan.  No Democrat wants Americans to remember Obama as the first American Marxist elected president.  The American Leftwing doesn’t want you to know what Marxism is…..until it achieves the point where government is big enough to manage citizen life replacing the American tradition where CITIZENS MANAGE  government.

We Americans have sat around watching our Potentates for Life in Washington and at university ruin  the nation  for a long time.  They primp and preen and like Obama sweet talk in public and plot in private……and give new fuel to the meaning of disingenuous.

Tea Party Candidate, Conservative Lt. Col. Allen West Needs Your Support

It’s in Florida folks,.  Tea Party  Republican, Allen  West is running for Congress !  …..He is a conservative and seems to be quite male, an old fashioned one who apparently can solve problems QUICK TIME!

Here is what I read about him in today’s Wall Street Journal:

“Deerfield Beech, Florida- In 2003, Lt. Col. Allen West forced an Iraqi prisoner to the ground, counted down to zero and fired a pistol over his head, scaring him into revealing planned attacks on U. S. trooops.”

I’d say that is problem-solving in quick time.  How about you?  We need these kind of quick-time conservative  solving people in Washington, don’t you agree?

Well back in 2003 Washington D.C.’s Army division determined that Mr. West acted too quick-time with his problem-solving and fired him….He was relieved of his command.

Today,  Mr. West is in a dead heat battle against his Democrat opponent.  This opponent might be a decent American  chap despite being a Democrat.  I used to be one, too, and certainly I think I am an ideal American!!  (One with a flaw here or there, of course.)

But Allen West’s opponent is a  Democrat…..which disqualifies him for reelection for countless reasons….his Party’s support for Marxist control over the American health care industry, control over automobile productions and some financial organizations, its support for Islamic propaganda campaign to construct its victory memorial mosque at Ground Zero, its beliefs and support in the political fraud called  global warming……. its president’s general incompetence in managing the nation, his authoritarian arrogance disdaining the interests and needs of his citizens…his determination to create a government large enough to  micromanaging its citizens, rather than the citizens managing their government, and name the ones you can list which should disqualify a Democrat from reelection this year.

The article mentions:  “The 2010 race here is proving one of the most expensive House contests between a pro-Obama liberal and a tea-party conservative.  Mr. West, riding the wave of anti-Washington anger, had rasied  $4 million as of Aug.4, led by a surge of Internet donations prompted in part by the endorsement of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.”

Conservative, West was quoted, “If you think I’m extremist, I’d have to agree with you.  Because I’m extremely devoted to this country  and I’m extremely devoted to the Constitution.” 

“”He condemns the ‘ruling class elite’ and warns that the U.S. is on the same ‘glide path’ as the Roman Empire ,”  reporter, Michael M. Phillips noted.

How about Americans united to elect a conservative who is a real quick-time problem solver, and has proved his point. 

(Wouldn’t it be extra special  if Lt. Col. West were placed on the Armed Services Committee!!!  Perhaps he could give  those folks some training  about quicktime solutions.)

But,  Allen West needs to be elected first.   He needs our support.

Democrat politicians must pay a price for damaging  the nation in so many ways.  

Fellow citizens, never forget the truism, “Great civilizations are not murdered.  They commit suicide!”

Please help great candidates like Allen West to stop America’s slide into suicide of Obama’s Marxist management of citizen life and American nothingness.