untethered

There’s an old joke that goes something like “gee, blow one guy and all of a sudden you’re gay.”

In the woke era you offend minorities once and all of a sudden you’re irreedemably racist, forever.

Poor Don Imus. I sampled his show back in the day and had to ask: where was the promised controversy? The first thing I heard was a parody song (last refuge of the morning zoo dj) mocking Rush Limbaugh’s racism (Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” became “All My Friends Have White Faces”); how daring! How relevant! Even for the nineties, it was bad. Cringe wasn’t a word yet.

I suspect the politcally incorrect image was exagerrated by the same establishment figures who lined up to appear on his show. They could engage in a sort of Kabuki, a mock engagement with controversy, knowing it would never go too far. Like the late Tim Russert on Meet the Press, the only people who praised his “tough interviews” were the interviewees, all establishment figures who appreciated Tim’s ultimate discretion. Like Conrad’s Lord Jim, to the powerful Imus was “one of us”–or at the least a dependable patsy.

But he was definitely not one of us.

His service to the status quo would not save him after he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the thuggish-looking Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” in 2007. He managed to salvage a radio career and was allowed to live in a sort of partial exile from the powerful, but, he had to know this too, sadly, whatever penance he performed would not spare him the posthumous fate of all “racists” and–especially–“antisemites”; upon death his crimes would be ritually read out. He, like many better and more accomplished people before, would forever be “Don Imus, Racist.” The human stain that even in death does not fade but only grows.

You wonder what any aging white public figure–who sees the lies–is saving himself for, or from, the shellacked, multi-colored nails of a Jezebel hack?

On the morning of December 27th, known racist and radio host Don Imus died at the age of 79.

If you’re lucky, you grew up not knowing who Don Imus was. If you’re around my age, chances are you found out who Don Imus was in 2007 when he was fired from CBS for referring to players on the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes.” At the time, it felt like it was almost impossible to turn on the news without seeing someone offering their opinion on his remarks.

Gwen Ifill, who had previously been referred to by Imus as a “cleaning lady” appeared on Meet the Press and offered a sentiment that is, unfortunately, just as relevant today, over a decade later, as it was in 2007. Speaking with Tim Russert she said, “My concern about Mr. Imus and about a lot of people… is not that people are sorry that they say these things, they’re sorry that someone catches them.”

This was, of course, not the first or the last time Imus had been caught using racist language, which is not surprising given that he was, in fact, a racist.

Later in 2007 Imus appeared on Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to address his remarks. After becoming frustrated with the conversation, Imus remarked that he couldn’t “get any place with you people.” That comment obviously didn’t go over well with Sharpton.

A 2006 The New York Times reported that in 2004 he had referred to book publishers Simon & Schuster as “thieving Jews,” and had previously called Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed … beanie-wearing little Jew boy” in 1998.

In 2008 Imus, while discussing the suspension of Dallas Cowboys’ cornerback Adam Jones, asked “what color” Jones was. When he was informed Jones was Black, Imus cavalierly replied, “Well there you go, now we know.”

It’s unfortunate that Imus was allowed to continue making these kinds of remarks and spewing his vitriol into the airwaves until his retirement in 2018. After his firing from CBS, New York based radio network WABC picked up Imus’ show Imus in the Morning from 2007-2018. Fox Business Network also ran Imus’ show on TV from 2009-2015.

If somewhere there do exist fans of Imus’ work, they can return to Imus’ infamous quote, forever solidified in Nicki Minaj’s 2012 track Stupid Hoe, certainly a far more generous memorial than Imus deserves.

Someone who’s decided to nod along with the ongoing rape of the West has made something of a nihilistic determnation; he’s abandoned posterity for the present and, presumably, a respectable image in death. He fears the wrath of no god; he respects the desires of no ancestor; he protects no descendant.
Even after retirement almost to a man they maintain the respectable lie all the way to their death bed. Fear of God is replaced by fear of man–of a shameful reputation.

It isn’t as if Imus dared challenge a single operating assumption. He was only too glad to join the point and sputter mob and reinforce them. You see in his gaffes no substance, just crude insults. They are deplorable, and stupid. Especially so coming from a false renegade, establishment hanger-on who supported the system and narrative that elevated his dumb jokes to absurd heights of transgression.
He would never dare challenge the order that sustained him in comfort.

So his lame “racist” jokes only serve to harm, albeit not much, the cause of turning back that system, by serving up the image of the hate-spewing bigot. When someone calls out the system for one of its many contradictions, when someone points out the lie that is “racism”, for one, he at least forces the powerful to reveal their hypocrisy as they take him down.

Don Imus never dared go there. I hope he’s in a better place, and I hope he wishes he had.

Of course had he, you wouldn’t be reading this. We wouldn’t know who he was. So he got to have his career, money, even some status but in the end he will be forever “Don Imus, Racist”; this was the price he paid to play.

An analysis of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
(spoilers ahoy)

Quentin Tarantino has made a career making nostalgia acceptable to the critics by clothing it in irony. I think without his postmodern pose they would be hostile–or will be when the Feminist Inquisition finally comes around for him–to the recurring lament implied in all his sampling of the recent past: things were better before.

Coupled with another of his dominant themes–the necessity of violence to protect the weak from the depraved–it’s surprising they haven’t unpersoned him already. By celebrating righteous masculine violence through satire and pop culture sampling, giving it the veneer of irony (irony now, ironically, takes the place of false piety) he’s been pulling one over on hipsters and critics for a long, fruitful career. Nearing the end of that, and, probably, seeing the feminist tyranny on the horizon, his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood defiantly takes nostalgia from setting to story.

Tarantino’s never been much interested in the present; most of his films are not set in it. Even his breakthrough Pulp Fiction disdained the early nineties in which it was set by shuffling (“pulping”) a narrative peppered with references to recent history–even Samuel Jackson’s Jeri Curls and mutton chops mocked a present we found so boring we had to scramble it up and spice it with a more colorful past; critics and audiences responded instinctively. But there’s an implied theme here, who knows if it’s intended, fittingly nothing new, and its timing was perfect–we’ve gone soft.

Despite being seen as a norm-shattering postmodernist, Tarantino’s outlook is one of reverence for the past. Whatever else is going on in one of his films, there’s a continual celebration of film-making and its history, traditions and great men. It’s a conservative point of view in a world rapidly becoming hostile to any genuine conservatism. Hollywood is to be looted by diversity and womyn just like everything else now; its privilege earned for propagandizing on behalf of the new diverse order that will soon devour it–like baby spiders eating mom–is expired. Tarantino got his career in just in time; I’m not sure there’s a place for him now, despite his influence on the culture we have now.

Is there money now for something like Reservoir Dogs, about a group of white guys sitting around in suits speaking frankly? No; if it gets made now it’s handed off to a soulless JJ Abrams type who casts it with a diverse crew of uninteresting minorities, making no impression on the culture from which it is indistinguishable, like a drop of rain joining a puddle.

Tarantino’s references aren’t all pop culture either, but reveal the dedicated student of film; in his latest we find him once again paying homage to French director Robert Bresson, with his close shots of feet. I had to read about him doing this in Kill Bill to notice it here; side by side with his embrace of “low” pop culture, red meat for critics and commoners alike, there is an elitism, congruent with his themes of elite heroes operating outside societal norms. Tarantino is for hierarchy and order, whether he knows it or not.

The hero operating outside of the social order is an old, favored trope, but the fact is the social order has changed. There’s no place for operating outside norms now that the progressive left, for lack of a better term, sets them.

But the common people, for whom Tarantino distills film down to the good juicy bits the way a pulp novelist does, or the way a dj extends a break (his references too come just like samples in dj music) are attracted not just to the flashing violence and recognition of reference, but also to the strong leader. The people, as Tarantino’s more politically sophisticated supporters know, are naturally attracted to the fascistic.

Tarantino holds in himself the democratic contradiction, the source of his genuine, not critical, popularity: in appeasing the popular he praises the strong. His characters are violent elite ubermenschen (born to the role, that is it’s genetic) who uphold an order outside the law. Pacifism is depraved, egalitarianism disdained.

In his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood he sets the story in the late sixties, pairing and pitting his two favorite types (and themes)–a movie star and a man of action–against what Tarantino sees as their loathsome opposites: degenerate hippies.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Rick Dalton, a television star who’s made a couple of films that a young Quentin Tarantino would have studied and whose career appears to be petering out. It’s 1969 and eight years since cancellation of his successful television series “Bounty Law”, a black-and-white western that belongs entirely to the previous era, but he doesn’t see that, even as he mutters about hippies on the street, driving home devastated after a meeting with an agent (Al Pacino) who wants him to go to Rome to make spaghetti westerns.

Brad Pitt is his stunt double, Cliff Booth, who’s relegated to gopher for the most part after getting caught sparring with Bruce Lee on the set of The Green Hornet. It’s a welcome surprise: Lee is portrayed as a pompous ass who brags he would “cripple” heavyweight champion Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) and is then bested by Pitt. The scene even triggered the Lee family, used to years of fawning reverence.

We learn at some point DiCaprio lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive; as he enthuses over the possibilities of living next door to the “hottest director in town” it’s supposed to come off darkly comic: DiCaprio doesn’t know the horror history has in store. In reality a pregnant Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family not long after he says this.

But Tarantino is offering an alternate history, a preferred history, as he did in Inglorious Basterds. He imagines the 1969 horror as a sort of historic wrong turn, and our dual heroes, Pitt and DiCaprio, are redeemed by setting it right.

The Manson girls arrive in the film as a feral, dumpster diving, sexually charged pack (it’s hard not to see today’s lost girls in them), singing a song written by Charles Manson:

Always is always forever

As one is one is one

Inside yourself for your father

All is none all is none all is none

It’s time to drop all from behind you

The illusion has been just a dream

The Valley of Death may not find you

Now as then on a sunshine beam

So bring only your perfection

For then life will surely be

No cold no fear no hunger

You can see you can see you can see

From a sinister low angle we see the girls singing “as one is one is one” as they march single file past a mural of the Marlboro Man, contrasting the new self-erasing egalitarianism with an icon of the heroic individual–Western–ideal they’ve come to destroy. They are egalitarianism become nihilistic, and despite Tarantino’s nihilistic trappings (he’s sort of nihilistic-at-a-distance) as nihilists they are the other pole to his worldview of strong characters living by strong codes.

Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate appears and it’s just more subversion of the new feminist norms. She’s lovingly, unapologetically objectified; we see her in close shots, in slow motion, we see her dancing. There’s no edge to her; she’s all sunny, feminine optimism and enthusiasm. She’s also vulnerable by virtue of her feminine virtues, in need of a strong male protector–which she doesn’t have. In a hilarious scene we see her dancing at a party, being watched by Steve McQueen, who laments that Tate’s penchant for short, unimposing pretty boys meant he “never stood a chance”.

Tarantino has us follow Tate into a theater to watch herself on film. It’s a remarkable scene, where he brings that celebration of film-making to the fore. This is the opposite of the dark critique of Hollywood you might get from David Lynch or countless lesser directors. Tarantino sees in Hollywood–at least an earlier Hollywood–a blessed community of talent coming together to create excellent art. Tate dons a pair of glasses with massive lenses–like camera lenses–and revels at the audience’s approval of her performance. After decades of the culture ridiculing the vanity of actors–the easy gag–Tarantino offers a defense of it. Tate watches herself in a successful fight scene and recalls with joy her training with–who else?–Bruce Lee. It’s an unironic celebration of the joy of the multi-discipline magic in film-making and acting. It’s what he’s done with the picture as a whole, pairing a war-hero stuntman with an actor.

In a counterpoint scene later, DiCaprio, guesting on someone else’s television pilot and struggling, rebounds and nails a scene; his good-natured and simple Rick Dalton has learned finally to act. This is after an encounter with an eight year-old prodigy and her method acting comes as a harbinger of the future. DiCaprio’s tearful reaction to the success of the scene is the only earnestly touching moment I’ve seen in a Tarantino film.

Tarantino loads the film up with constantly shifting background pop music and advertising. Anytime someone takes a drive across town (and it’s an LA story so there’s lots of driving) we’re treated to a array of pop songs and radio commercials. It’s a noisy film but it works. The effect reminds me of impressionism achieving realism: just as a painter blurring objects on a palate seeks to represent a messy world as we see it, half focuse and in motion, Tarantino’s ever-shifting background of pop noise conveys how our chaotic, noisy world feels–more than a conventional, cleaner soundtrack.

The commercial samples are often used to great narrative effect: when DiCaprio catches first glimpse of his famous neighbor Polanski, he’s in his sports car with stunning Tate by his side, the image of carefree success; the radio commercial for a men’s cologne is an un-ironic celebration of masculinity. It encapsulates the dynamic, of the scene and a theme, perfectly.

The action is given mostly to Pitt’s stuntman, who encounters the Manson family at Spahn Ranch–where he and DiCaprio shot their successful television series and then later in a scene that will likely confuse people–the Manson killers arrive at DiCaprio’s house instead of next door. I’m still not sure if they get there by accident or if they changed plans.

But there’s a note here that seems to be Tarantino addressing the role of all the violent imagery he celebrates in the horror: a Manson girl suggests they “kill the people who taught us to kill”–DiCaprio being one of them. It’s a brilliant scene, though I’m sure he doesn’t intend it how I took it: there’s an element of blowback in the horror.

What he intended with that I don’t know. Is Tarantino acknowledging the pop culture he celebrates produced these monsters in the first place?
In killing them off does he see himself excising the sickness emerging from the culture he celebrates?
Awareness is key to producing art. Perhaps a certain lack of awareness is required as well.

I talked about the film a bit here:

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Black Hebrew terrorist goes into the Narrate-o-Matic, comes out white. Poor bastard.
The New York Times:

For almost two decades, the intelligence bureau of the New York Police Department has built a security apparatus designed to track international terror groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Now, the department is aiming those resources at a different target: far-right and extremist hate groups.

Police officials say they have formed a new unit within the department’s intelligence bureau, known as “Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism,” or “R.E.M.E,” that will be primarily dedicated to investigating terror threats from far-right and neo-Nazi organizations, including groups like the Atomwaffen Division and The Proud Boys.

The unit became operational early this month, and already has dozens of open investigations, police officials said.

John Miller, the commissioner of the intelligence division, said the far-right extremist groups are not that different in nature from Islamic extremist groups like Al Qaeda. “There’s no different recipe except our offenders are likely to be on the ground here,” he said in an interview.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the unit’s creation on Wednesday at City Hall, just a day after a gun battle in Jersey City, during which two people with guns opened fire at two different locations, including a kosher supermarket, killing three bystanders and a Jersey City detective.

“What we saw yesterday was a premeditated, violent, anti-Semitic hate crime,” Mr. de Blasio said. “In other words, you can say it was an act of terror.”

Did super-skeevy TMZ neglect to mention the (apparent) overdose of rapper “Juice WRLD” happened during a drug bust out of a woke sense of decency?
TMZ:

Juice WRLD, the talented young rapper and singer whose career was just taking off, is dead after suffering a seizure in Chicago’s Midway airport … TMZ has learned.

Juice’s flight from California landed early Sunday morning and, after deplaning … witnesses tell us he suffered the seizure while walking through the airport. Law enforcement sources say he was bleeding from the mouth when paramedics got on scene.

We’re told Juice — real name Jarad Anthony Higgins — was still conscious when he was transported by Chicago Fire. However, he was pronounced dead a short time later at the hospital. The cause of death is unclear at this time.

Couldn’t help noticing the inner-family diversity of these humanoids on a poster ad (for what I don’t remember) at a local market. Looks like that honeymoon in Jamaica was, er, interesting.

Kamala Harris was arguably the establishment candidate before Elizabeth Warren surged ahead, despite being virtually unknown beyond California and Democratic politics (Liz is actually getting a boost now from earlier national attention as Trump’s foil).

Lacking the desire or nerve to separate herself from the pack, which at this point resembles a dog race with fringe group approval as the rabbit, she was left with only her record as California’s Attorney General, in our season of “mass incarceration”, and her Law and Order-Homocide-SVU acquired affectations. As when grandstanding during her questioning of Bret Kavanaugh, in debate she was all pursed lips and stern gazes; she seemed to be always channeling her favorite characters from television, on television (we see a curious effect here that deserves study–art imitating life imitating art imitating life imitating…spiraling down into–imagine that–boring mediocrity).

But if that’s her real personality she must be hell to live with–“did you not, in fact,” tossed hair, lowered chin, raised eyebrow, hand on hip, “leave the cap off the toothpaste–let me finish, sir–yet again?”, head tilt, icy glare.

The occasional dips into ghetto inflection, a silly controversy about her listening to Tupac Shakur while smokng weed (to deflect from all the Tupac-wannabes she’s put in jail–a comic affirmation the Democrats have completely inverted the morality of law and order), getting smacked down by the younger Tulsi Gabbard, the bad hair days, and Willie Brown leering over it all.

Despite favorable coverage from the Press she simply couldn’t get traction with the actual human citizens the Democrats still, sullenly, have to deal with. She thought she was playing to her strengths–“black” status and a vagina–and running from her weakness–having put away countless criminals in California.

Apparently outflanking Trump on the law-and-order issue–after immigration perhaps the biggest reason for his success and something he’s abandoned entirely–was unthinkable, at least in the nomination stage. So it ended, with her finally showing some genuine emotion as she addressed her defeated troops and packed it in.

The Daily Caller reports now on the predictable response from the Democratic left:

“Obviously I’m no centrist but it’s downright effed up that smart, compelling, *very* experienced, centrist Democratic candidates of color are floundering while a smart but wildly inexperienced, centrist white mayor of teeny tiny city is surging,” liberal writer Sally Kohn wrote in a tweet. “Bad look, Democrats.”  

Left-wing commentator Lauren Duca implied that Democrats have a racism problem, as evidenced by Harris’s failed campaign. “White supremacy is not just a Fox News problem, folks,” she charged.

Some are talking of abandoning the Party:

“Kamala may not have been my number one candidate, but she belongs in the race,” added Imani Gandy, an analyst at left-wing outlet Rewire News. “Now we’ve got rich white dudes papering the airwaves with their bullshit,” Gandy wrote, adding: “I’m not voting for Biden or Buttigieg.”

Sanders is unwanted by the Party because he threatens to actually attempt some of the progressive economic reforms he champions. Oh, and he’s “white”. Tulsi Gabbard, woman of color and especially despised by Harris, likewise regarding foreign policy.

This mini-rage might be a deliberate action on behalf of the campaigns of Stacy Atkins and Julian Castro to rearrange the Democratic primaries to give the Democrats’ most powerful constituency, black women, a greater whip hand in the nomination process

“We can’t go around thanking black women for powering Democrats to victory all over the country and then at the same time, hold our first caucus and our first primary in states that have almost no African-Americans,” Secretary Castro told Vogue. “We’re right to call Republicans out when they suppress the votes of African-Americans or Latinos, but we’ve also got to recognize that this 50-year-old process was created during a time when minority voices had zero power in the party.” (Iowa initially began going first in 1972.)

Ironically, identity politics enthusiast Castro has virtually no support among Latinos. He has none among black women either, but their status as least productive, most loud demographic has made them the collective idiot king of the debased Democratic Party.

Castro concedes that the third and fourth primary states, Nevada and South Carolina, which come almost a month later, are more racially diverse. But he also says that the first states of primary season can make or break a candidate’s momentum. “Nobody can pretend that the first one or two states don’t have an oversized influence on what happens in the whole process,” he said. “If you can’t do well in Iowa or New Hampshire, then the chances of doing well in Nevada or South Carolina are much slimmer.”

The Democratic Party is the model for the future one-party United States they have planned, and they appear increasingly untenable as a meaningful institution.
Good times.

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The cruelty of the weak exceeds the cruelty of the strong.