War and Man

 

During the opening segment of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, mankind's hominid predecessors are depicted waging battle over a watering hole with screams and flailing arms. The more fearsome -- or more numerous -- win rights to the water. This appears to be a ritual.

The hominids are not the apex predators, however, as leopard attacks show. The victors crouch together in the darkness of their cave dwellings, listening to leopard breaths, waiting for mortal threats to pass.

The hominids are "transformed" one day after the arrival of the mysterious singing monolith that is the physical representation of human evolution in Kubrick's film. After touching its lustrous black side, the previously herbivorous hominids discover, idly, the utility of dry bones.

The scene of the first murder is chilling, as the "monkeymen" scream and flail their arms as they had before but now they also swing femur and tibia as weapons. The startled, unarmed hominid tribe retreats -- either to study war themselves or to be destroyed by others.

And thus it is ever so.

Ready to Rumble?

 

Rumbles in Cackalackey? Well .....

You know that scene near the end of DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956) when the Children of Israel are caught worshipping a gold-plated cow? (When the Deliverer's away and all that.)

Moses (a burly and bearded Charlton Heston) arrives with the titular orders from Jehovah, the first being NOT to worship other gods, BTW, and the party stops.

Moses issues an ultimatum -- Choose your side! -- and squares off with the Hebrew turncoat Dathan (a Foxy Edward G. Robinson), who claims Moses is bringing fake news from the top of the mountain and shouldn't be trusted.

Things get tense, and the horde starts scrambling.

Moses, armed with the tablets, trashes the Temu god in a fiery display of righteous indignation. A mighty earthquake opens a chasm, the road to perdition, and the unjust fall in, right after their idol.

It's all pretty spectacular and skunks the other miracles that came before in the picture -- including the Red Sea parting, IMO.

I say all that to say, it's been 70 years so MAGA has had plenty of warning.

Life and Art

 

     

Near the end of Stanley Kubrick's cinematic reshaping of Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1971), "reformed" teenage degenerate Alex DeLarge is pummeled by the homeless upon whom he used to prey and arrested by two of his former sadistic cronies, Georgie and Dim, who were recruited to be police officers by the new authoritarian government that rules by intimidation and subterfuge and mind-control.

Life and Art?

History written with LYING!

 

D.W. Griffith cast white men in blackface as the lecherous freedmen creeping after the virginal Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation (1915).

Uber racist and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson loved the movie -- history written with lightning, he said of the film, endorsing the picture as an accurate record of Black predation and Reconstruction corruption, celebrating the "birth" of the robed and hooded Christian Nationalist Klan.

Today, our uber racist and U.S. president and the regime propaganda machine are telling Griffith and Wilson "hold our beers" as they warn of skulking dusky men waiting to rape and rob -- as they do those very things on an unconscionable scale.

"History written with LYING."