Month: March 2021

REVIEW – Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Well, after much time and anticipation, this week HBO Max has released the director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, or as I call it, The Butthole Cut.

Because much like The Butthole Cut of the Cats movie, there seems to have been some impression among fandom that there would be a director’s cut that would redeem a fiasco movie, even if it was presented as just a joke. The difference being that the Snyder Cut actually exists.

At this point I need to digress. Whatever the merits of Zack Snyder, the judgment on Justice League is largely tied up with fandom perceptions of both him and the guy who finished the theatrical release, Joss Whedon. Prior to Joss getting involved, Zack Snyder was being called out as a filmmaker for being sexist (Sucker Punch), or fascist and homophobic (specifically 300). But what really caused social media to hate this guy was that he confessed to being an Ayn Rand fan who (still) talks about producing a new version of The Fountainhead. And I’ve already done an extensive analysis on how Batman v Superman proves that if Snyder is a follower of Rand’s aesthetic philosophy, he’s not a very good one.

But Snyder and his production company were called upon to do Wonder Woman (which he did not direct) and Justice League, which proceeds directly from the conclusion of BvS, and midway through the filming of Justice League, his young daughter committed suicide and Zack and his wife Deborah (a co-producer in his company) had to leave the film in order to grieve. And it needs to be said that whatever one thinks of Joss Whedon, he wouldn’t have been hired to complete Justice League if Zack had still been available.

But at the time, Joss had something of a golden boy reputation, being the main creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character who was his primary example of feminist empowerment. Whedon was also an experienced script doctor and director who did the fast-paced and witty Avengers movie for Marvel as well as the less successful but still blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron. So Warner/DC seemed to think he would be the best person to take over for their interrupted project, but even those of us who liked the theatrical release had to concede it was awkwardly pasted together from improvised parts – like when Henry Cavill had to reshoot scenes after taking on a role that obliged him to grow a mustache, so that half of the time Superman’s upper lip looks weird because it had to be CGI’ed.

The mixed reviews on Ultron and negative feedback on Justice League were causing Whedon to lose his luster already, and even before this, his feminist cred was undermined when his wife announced she was divorcing him largely over affairs she accused him of having with his Buffy co-workers. Where this all ties into Justice League and support for The Snyder Cut is that Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in Justice League, has taken action against Warner Media, including the DC Comics film arm, claiming that Joss Whedon was unprofessional to him and others on the Justice League set, and that higher-ups in production were enabling and covering for this. Fisher, much like Colin Kaepernick, seems willing to speak truth to power even at the risk of his career. But recently Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on Buffy and Angel, agreed to make a statement on Fisher’s behalf and then posted an extended tweet detailing how Whedon had harassed her backstage and pushed her out of the Angel show. (The whole thing had previously been behind the scenes, but the treatment of Cordelia Chase was not popular with Buffyverse fans even at the time.) This caused almost every other actor on the Buffy and Angel shows to make social media posts, some merely in support of Carpenter, others (like Michelle Trachtenberg) corroborating her accusations. More recently Whedon was involved with another HBO project called The Nevers, and announced he was quitting over the perennial “exhaustion.”

So the end result is that Whedon, once considered a feminist hero, is scum, and Snyder, who was once considered scum, is now treated like a heroic auteur who is finally getting to present his work the way he wanted it. This is all a great example of why I do not support “cancel culture” or political correctness in general, because such judgments are superficial, transitory, and based on information that is subject to change. It is why I make no apologies for separating a judgment of an artist’s work from their behavior as a human being. (See also- J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Rowling, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.)

Now, given that I am a Whedon fan, I liked the movie Justice League (with reservations) and I didn’t like BvS (although I did like Man of Steel), the main value of the Justice League Snyder Cut is to prove once and for all whether the problems with the theatrical Justice League were Whedon screwing up something that would have worked without him, or Whedon trying to salvage something that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

(And there’s no point in prefacing ‘SPOILERS’ because I know everybody’s seen this movie before me and this post is just giving my impression of it.)

As we know, the Snyder version of Justice League is exactly four hours and two minutes. In theory the whole thing should be easier to digest because Zack divided his narrative into separate chapters (much as producers indicate specific scenes in the DVD release of a movie), but even in pieces the movie goes very slowly because Snyder’s scenes seem to be in slow-motion even when they’re not. His camera has three speeds: Slow, reallllly slow and real fast. In fact, the scenes where Wonder Woman deflects bullets make her look that much faster than The Flash using his superspeed powers, because Snyder, like every other director since The Six Million Dollar Man, indicates a character’s superhuman speed by slowing the camera down.

If nothing else, Snyder’s cut explains why Ray Fisher is so damn pissed at Whedon and the DC execs who approved the 2017 film, because there’s less of his character in that one than there is of Vic Stone’s original body. This film actually shows his backstory and notes, among other things, that Victor Stone was a computer genius even before he got powers. Fisher is very expressive in these scenes and really conveys the pain of his character.

The main improvement on Justice League as a narrative is that where the 2017 cut presented Steppenwolf as the Big Bad (including the Ancient Age flashback scene) and barely mentioned Darkseid, here Steppenwolf is clearly a lieutenant of Darkseid, who is using the Mother Boxes in an attempt to attain the “Anti-Life Equation” that is supposed to grant control over life, although it’s odd that the discovery of the Equation on Earth seems to be kind of an afterthought, but I guess Darkseid’s memory wasn’t so good 6000 years after coming here the last time. And of course some people make comparisons between that character and Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War when in the comics, Darkseid was created first. The real problem is that while Thanos in the movies was mostly CGI, he was still played by Josh Brolin, who gave him a certain gravitas and an understandable (if not sympathetic) motivation. Steppenwolf is just a CGI effect (even if he is shiny and chrome) and Darkseid in this movie isn’t much more than that.

But THEN, after at least three and a half hours of actual movie, they had the after-credits scene now placed before the credits, in which Deathstroke meets Luthor after he escapes the asylum, and it looks much like Whedon’s scene, except that the dialogue is a lot more climactic. Except that scene isn’t the climax. Right after that scene, with no segue, they just go straight to the apocalypse “Knightmare” scenario Bruce Wayne dreamed in BvS, where Batman has to lead a last-chance mission with Cyborg, Flash, Deathstroke, Mera, and Marilyn Manson Jared Leto’s Joker. And that doesn’t get resolved or explained any better than it did in BvS. But after Bruce wakes up, he finally gets to meet the seventh member of the League, and that part was at least a cool geek moment. It’s just that with all the flak The Return of the King movie got for being anti-climax, nobody talks about this thing.

See, in my review of BvS, I’d mentioned that the director’s cut of that movie really was superior – not necessarily good, but a lot better than what came out – and one of the reasons it didn’t come out in general release is that all the extras put over thirty minutes on a movie that was already overlong.

What it comes down to for me is that if you need four hours to make your movie even coherent, then you’re really not that good a filmmaker. And the thing is, in the new media environment, ironically promoted by HBO Max, this sort of thing isn’t even necessary. Streaming services mean you can do long-form storytelling now. WandaVision, for instance, was more a miniseries than a feature movie, but its premise didn’t really provide for more than a single storyline.

Although there was a pretty detailed overview in Pajiba of all places, and one of the things they pointed out is that the need to put the pieces together on Justice League during the spread of coronavirus was in some respect a good thing – Deborah Snyder said, “‘No, this is the right time because our visual effects houses that (we) rely on so much are running out of work, so now is the time to be doing this.” So at least you can say that much for these guys.

But essentially, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is like the BvS director’s cut, only more so. A LOT more so. Whatever people might think of Joss Whedon now, remember when he wasn’t doing his own projects he was a professional script doctor. That was his job here. As with BvS, the studio wanted to get the thing cranked out as a two-hour movie, and he did that. The problem versus the Snyder Cut is that Whedon cut one, most of Ray Fisher’s stuff, and two, the Darkseid background explaining the whole premise. But it’s not like including it helped that much. Snyder at least didn’t keep Whedon’s odd premise that Superman was some mythic inspirational figure like the comic character became over the course of decades, where Snyder’s previous movies presented him as this Iron Age vigilante who was just more powerful than everybody else and who hadn’t been around nearly as long as even Batman. Snyder’s cut just gets straight to the premise of fighting Steppenwolf. Except of course, it’s the radical antithesis of getting straight to the point. So this would work better as a set ’em up action movie than Whedon’s cut, except that it’s four fuckin’ hours, and the reason Whedon had to lop so much was to make Justice League a better action movie. Yeah, Part 6 got to show the heroes blow up a bunch of stuff real good, but the Marvel movies are accused of being a bunch of big-budget scenes to blow stuff up real good, and they work a lot better on other levels. For one thing, Marvel directors can get a story across IN LESS THAN FOUR FUCKIN’ HOURS, and if they can’t (like the Russo brothers) they know to split it into sequels.

But as Batman once said, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”

REVIEW: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Well, Justice League: The Butthole Cut was released on HBO Max March 18, but I can’t set aside four straight hours, or even non-consecutive hours, to check it out until my next day off, so I waited until midnight to check the first episode of Disney+/Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, especially since, at about 50 minutes, I knew it was going to be less of a slog.

It certainly starts off with a slam-bang action sequence, and it’s noteworthy that in a TV project they’re actually showing more of what Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) can do with his Falcon gadgets than they did in all the movies he was in before. The first episode also shows James “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Shaw) trying to get over the assassinations he was brainwashed into performing as the Winter Soldier, and it doesn’t look like he’s holding up that well. However most of the episode centers on Sam, as he first decides to turn in Captain America’s shield after deciding he can’t take up his mantle, then going home to try and save his family fishing business (and his sister’s house), only to find that even if you’re a beloved local hero, you still can’t get a home loan if you’re black. And then Sam sees on TV that the government decided to turn the shield over to a new Captain America. And it’s not a good omen that this new guy looks just like fucking Homelander wearing a mask.

Much like WandaVision, this Disney+ show puts a spotlight on good characters who didn’t get a focus in the Marvel movies. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as psychological as WandaVision, but the Captain America movies were probably my favorite films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier looks like it’s going to be a good continuation of that action-thriller style.

Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist

The after-the-fact coverage of the Atlanta shootings March 16 just happened to be on Saint Patrick’s Day, and on March 17, and as I was getting up, the buzz on Facebook was largely about how certain people wanted to push an apologist line about how the shooter told police he had a “sex addiction” that compelled his actions. And then as I turned on the TV and went to MSDNC, Nicolle Wallace had a couple of people on, one black, one white Irish guy from Detroit, and they pointed out that if the suspect was going to attack women for “sex addiction” he could have gone to strip clubs or other places associated with sex, rather than attacking two Asian massage parlors and killing eight people, six of them Asian women.

But another thing the panel brought up is how Wallace and one of her guests were both Irish-American, and the white guy brought up that yes, there was some discrimination against Irish people when they first came to this country. It really pales in comparison (so to speak) with the attacks on non-white people today and over history, but it still ought to be addressed.

In more recent times after Catholic Ireland became independent, a lot of Irish moved to ‘the mother country’ in Britain to get work (a pattern that repeated with people from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and other parts of the former Empire) and suffered their own discrimination. Sex Pistols singer John Lydon (son of immigrants) titled his autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Considering that, and again, the later pattern of non-white immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the other big stories from Britain is the Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry about how they were essentially frozen out of the royal family over Harry’s decision to marry and have children with a biracial woman who is darker than the usual Brit but still fairly Caucasian.

Bringing up how Irish were discriminated against shouldn’t be whataboutism or negation of the point in question. It should point out to white people that if even other white people can get hit with prejudice and legal discrimination, that should tell you how bad it is for everybody else who’s not white. For black people, American Indians, Indian Indians, the Chinese during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor (for which we created internment camps), the Vietnamese refugees after 1975, all of it.

In this country, anti-Irish prejudice, like our other prejudices, has a longer provenance. Putting up “No Irish Need Apply” signs was enough of a tradition that they wrote songs about it. And in the time leading up to the Civil War, one of the major political movements was the American Party, who were actually called the “Know-Nothing Party” because as was the custom of the day, they organized into societies taking oaths of secrecy, obliging them to say “I know nothing” when asked about the movement. Of course, 19th Century English was also lacking in irony. But the other reason the name fit was because “members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation’s highest values.”

Stop me if this seems in any way familiar.

This sort of nativism was eclipsed during the Civil War, because we had other priorities, but the guy who led the Union at that time was also against the Know-Nothing sentiment. Abraham Lincoln had said: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

Again, a surprisingly relevant quote for today.

Now there’s also been some reconstructed history about how Irish indentured servitude in the American colonies meant that we have some claim to being slaves. That isn’t the case. But it ought to demonstrate some need for empathy, not “well, my people had it rough, so don’t complain so much.” Yet you not only have that attitude, you have ‘white separatists’ from Slavic families that would have been killed by the Nazis and Italian families that would have been attacked by the Klan. And then there’s Stephen Miller, and I don’t know what HIS fucking deal is.

Point is, we do have a pretty strong history of immigration (in addition to institutional racism against African Americans and native tribes), and in almost every case they came from countries where even white people couldn’t “pass” because they dressed different, spoke English “wrong”, had the “wrong” religion, whatever. In the days of the Know-Nothing Party the Catholic immigrants were Irish and Germans. Later they were Italians. Now they’re Mexicans and Central Americans.

And yet, the modern Know-Nothing Party, the Donald Trump Fan Club formerly known as the Republican Party, actually increased its share of black and Latino vote in the 2020 presidential election compared to 2016. Which seems odd given that both Republicans and Democrats wanted to brand Trump’s party with a certain form of identity politics, but people who talked about the subject told foreign interviewers that politics weren’t just “black and white.” One Texan told the BBC that while he grew up in a Mexican-Lebanese family, “”Neoliberal expansion has really hurt both Mexico and the US, and when you have family that live there, and you can see how it’s hurt people living, their jobs, their wages, it really has increased the narco-war, and this is one of the things Trump came in saying – ‘hey, we’re going to tear apart these trade deals’ – and then he actually did it.” Others pointed to the Republican stance against abortion, or against socialism, which was critical to the Cuban and Venezuelan communities that helped Trump win Florida.

This fact both undermines and supports the Left’s need to make everything about race. Even for non-white communities, not everything is about race. The recent waves of immigrants were discriminated against, just as the Irish were in their time, and as we see even now, they’re assimilating and voting for regressive politicians. Just as the Irish did. Because they don’t see how this stuff has anything to do with them.

Just ask the Jews who grew up in Germany during the 1930s (if there are any left). You can be a perfectly assimilated member of the society and think you’re just like anybody else only to have your rights taken away because some know-nothing faction took control of the government. That’s why everybody needs to be on guard against it.

May the luck of the Irish be with you.

The Once and Future Libertarian, Continued

“No advocate of reason can claim the right to establish HIS version of a good society, if such society includes the initiation of force against dissenters in ANY issue. No advocate of the free mind can claim the right to force the minds of others.”
-Ayn Rand, Letters of Ayn Rand

One will note that I called my last post “The Once And Future Libertarian” without doing much to advocate for libertarianism or the Libertarian Party. That’s because, having gone over what’s still wrong with the duopoly, and why simply assimilating into the Democrat Collective is not sufficient to solve this country’s problems, it requires a bit more analysis as to why going libertarian is a good idea. Especially these days.

Since one of the major issues in the news the last few weeks is Texas. What specifically about Texas? The whole thing. First, while the winter storms of February were intense for most of the country, it was only in Texas that the weather caused both power and water to go out across the state, since lack of power also caused the systems heating (and cleaning) the water lines to freeze. And that, it turned out, was because a, the Texas power grid is separate from the rest of the area around it, and b, the state didn’t protect that power grid by winterizing the equipment. And of course, now people are getting charged four-digit power bills for that period, because Texas utilities were allowed to charge customers “what the market will bear.” One company, Griddy, had actually warned customers to leave. The first time I’d heard about that story, I thought they were telling people to leave Texas, which is good advice regardless of the weather.

And then on March 2 Texas Governor Greg Abbott (three guesses as to what party he is, and the first three don’t count) publicly announced, as though it were something to be proud of, that he was lifting all COVID-19 restrictions in the state “100 percent.” This was exactly at the point that vaccines were about to roll out, but before the sectors of labor most likely to require contact with the public, such as medical and service workers, were vaccinated. Which sort of defeats the purpose of acting like the pandemic is over.

How is a right-winger, especially a libertarian, going to say that lack of restrictions is necessarily going to lead to good results? You can’t. Which leads to the second lesson I want to impart to the Right. To recall, “The first thing that right-wingers (Republican or Libertarian) have to learn is that the Left is going to call them a bunch of heartless ogres and witches whether they earn the reputation or not. Which is what makes it imperative NOT to earn it.” The second lesson is that the reason we have as much government as we do is that someone saw a need for it, as I’ve also said before. Since the kind of disaster that we’ve seen in Texas can happen if you just let the private sector do as it will, this makes it possible to enact heavy regulations under the impression they’re actually going to help people. I say, “under the impression” because that’s not usually how it works, and that’s really not the reason we have the bureaucracy that we do. In fact, much of the regulation we have is specifically intended to protect the businesses ostensibly being regulated, and is written on their behalf, sometimes actually BY them.

Believe it or not, the best explanation of this point I’ve seen is from leftists on social media.

Here is an example of what would happen if we treated the local pizzeria like we treated health care: https://www.facebook.com/james.gillen.969/posts/3737875906261472?notif_id=1614799095747641&notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif

And then there’s this: (https://www.facebook.com/kirstin.hamaker/posts/3784372801624524)

I wasn’t able to see anything else referring to this tweetstorm on my Internet searches, so I just posted the link.

Even if you see the need for regulations of the dairy industry (in this case) or the corn syrup industry, or whatever, the regulations we have are designed not only to benefit giant industries but to corner out smaller farmers and producers that not only would do things in a more capitalist, competitive way, but would also behave more ethically and follow the regulations and practices that the liberals and socialists actually want.

And in regard to the particular crisis, before Greg Abbott was Texas Governor, he was the state Attorney General, and had taken the (Republican) state government’s position against the Obama Administration that it should be able to operate its power grid independently and not have to enact the winterization procedures that everybody else did. Now he’s calling on the utilities to do so, even as politicians are telling us we need to rescue the people stuck with bills from unregulated companies. The Texas Tribune article: “Lawmakers have demanded that the utility commission roll back its decision to allow the huge rate increases, or suggested cobbling together some package of emergency waivers or relief money to buffer Texans’ from the high bills.

“We cannot allow someone to exploit a market when they were the ones responsible for the dire consequences in the first place,” said state Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa.”

If only they could have guessed that such consequences were possible.

I opened with that particular Ayn Rand quote because it could be interpreted for more than one purpose. With COVID, for instance, is it “initiation of force against dissenters” if the state government imposes laws restricting people’s freedom of action, for example, mandating masks, to stop the spread of the pandemic?

Well, let’s look at it another way. If a storm takes out an old bridge and the state has to put up barriers until a crew can be sent and they have to put up a sign saying “BRIDGE OUT”, is that a restriction of your right to use the roadway? You could interpret it that way. You could just blow past the barrier, go “FUCK you I won’t do what ya tell me” and cross the bridge, at which point, it won’t be the government that’s restricting your freedom. It’ll be gravity.

Pretty much the same point can be made with regard to coronavirus restrictions. We didn’t have to have them, and not every state does. Deciding that your state is “free” of coronavirus restrictions doesn’t make the state free of coronavirus. Plus which, in a lot of cases during the early reaction to COVID-19, private businesses were quicker to create social distancing rules than government, and in the current situation, a lot of places in Texas have announced in the wake of the governor’s decision that they will still mandate pandemic rules, at least for their own employees. (In the case of airlines, they are operating under federal restrictions.) Now surely right-wing followers of Ayn Rand will respect a business owner’s right to dictate the use of their space? Well, we know the answer to that question.

In the Dallas Morning News article, the CEO for the Texas Association of Business said in response to Abbott’s announcement that “The association believes businesses understand the protocols needed to ‘function safely’ and that ‘Texas companies will operate responsibly’.” But if we could trust businesses to operate responsibly, you wouldn’t have the situation you do in Texas with the power grid and the other utilities. At the same time, like I said, businesses on the whole have been more responsible about pandemic restrictions than certain state governments or American Presidents. As I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time. On a case by case level, I can trust people to do the right thing, but not as a rule. There has to be a default standard. THAT’s why you have a government.

But what if the local government is less responsible than the public at large? Ay, there’s the rub.

Part of the problem is that invocations of “freedom” versus “socialism” are not only dodging common sense, they’re using deceptive political labels. The most officially socialist country in the world is the “People’s” Republic of China, which is no less socialist in its desire to have one party control all aspects of the country, they just figured after a few decades of Leninist/Maoist ideology that they wouldn’t get to run it for much longer if the masses were starving and near revolt. So they incorporated just enough capitalism, under strict controls, to keep the structure going. So you have one country that apes a leftist ideology but really has a bunch of guys in business suits in control.

Meanwhile here you have a bunch of professional Christians and ostensible conservatives who want to preserve a nationalist and capitalist system but are finding themselves increasingly unpopular – since after a few decades of ideology the masses are starting to starve – so in order for the guys in business suits to stay in control, they increasingly ape the posture of a one-party socialist regime that among other things says that only people the ruling party deems “patriots” can get to run for a local government. Where have I heard that one before?

That would be the danger to the American experiment even if the Republican faction of the duopoly were competent. As it is, the real danger from a right-wing (or non-socialist) standpoint is that the only alternative presented against the Democrats is a bunch of bad-faith culture war initiatives that are not taken seriously and really are not intended to be taken seriously. Now, if you’re to believe the polls, three out of four Americans approve the $1.9 trillion “Rescue Plan” passed by Congress and signed by President Biden March 11, including at least half of Republicans. The actual Republican Party isn’t even trying to compete with that, even though they still have the numbers to do so. Instead they’re using their media to read Green Eggs and Ham.

So from a right-wing standpoint, the longer these guys are the official NotDemocrat Party, the less likely it is there will be any serious resistance to genuinely bad left-wing ideas, especially when the Party of Trump took the real bipartisan concerns about “the swamp” and used them to promote incompetence, corruption and spite. The only opposition to an open borders policy is internment camps and separating families. The only plan for balancing our trade deficit was a tariff war with China that simply let them expand their trade with everyone else without benefiting us, and shutting down some of our retailers in the process.

And from a left-wing standpoint, a “conservative” party that doesn’t even try to represent its voters is just there. Like a lump. Or an obstacle. They are serving literally no purpose in the government other than to make the Democrats negotiate everything amongst their “progressive” and centrist wings. That does serve the moderating function that a multi-party system would otherwise create, but again that merely emphasizes the twin points that the more the Democrats are expected to absorb every voter and faction that is NotRepublican, the more they have to do everything themselves, for people who are not their natural constituency (if they even have one), because the Republican Party is worse than useless.

If you expect politics to get anywhere and you expect elections to be taken seriously, the Democrats are going to need competition. Do you seriously want that competition to be the Republican Party?

So that’s why I’m going back to the Libertarian Party. There needs to be something else. And please don’t tell me their ideas are horrible and they can’t be taken seriously. You HAVE one faction of the duopoly that has truly horrible ideas that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and yet are. The matter, bluntly, is whether the ideas have any support, and it looks like Republicans are starting to lose that support. Which leads to my third lesson for Libertarians in particular. We’re already against government. But assuming we DO want to get elected, we have to take government seriously. You’ve already got the people who are against government IN government and making a mess of it. You’ve already got the Merry Pranksters. As long as they’re there, they’re going to be making the Right worse and the country as a whole worse. It can’t be that hard to present a constructive alternative to them. You just have to be the grownups in the room, and the fact that Libertarians can be the grownups compared to Republicans shows where we are now. This is a real opportunity that I think must be taken.

Mind you, I will probably be voting Democrat in several elections simply because the Libertarian Party doesn’t post candidates for those races. But you have to start somewhere. I already know there’s no point in trying to change anyone’s mind in the Republican Party, and there’s really no point in trying to sway Democrats either.

I want to have a party for the rest of us.

The Once and Future Libertarian

And there’s always a place for the angry young man

With his fist in the air and his head in the sand

And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes

So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks

But his honor is pure and his courage as well

And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell

And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man

-Billy Joel, “Prelude/Angry Young Man”

So: February is over. And so is this year’s CPAC. The keynote speaker, of course, was Russia’s Viceroy in exile, Donald Trump, who actually told his crowd that he was looking forward to beating the Democrats a third time, so fat chance that any of these people will see reason. It’s pretty obvious that unless homeboy dies from swallowing a chicken bone whole, the Banana Republican Party is gonna hold the nomination open for him, and if he dies, they’re probably going to pave the way for Junior or Ivanka or one of his other sperm products. I guess it’s easier than coming up with new candidates or new ideas.

The former Party of Lincoln isn’t a political party anymore: It’s a pity party. In 2016, Trump achieved white-trash apotheosis by telling his audience what they wanted to hear (like ‘we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it’) even though they, contrary to image, were educated enough to know this could never be true. Now, these same people, most of whom are old enough to remember when the Republican Party had a reputation for competence, are agreeing with Donald Trump and telling Donald Trump what he wants to hear, knowing now that it’s only lost them the White House and the Senate, not because they believe it, not because he really believes it, but just because it makes him feel better.

What is the alternative to the “alt-right”? The NeverTrump organization, The Lincoln Project, which was already in bad odor with a lot of “progressives” because it was run by exactly the kind of people who were mean to them before Trump took over the Republicans (and therefore, unlike the Left, knew how to fight him with his own weapons) practically disintegrated in the first two weeks of February when New York Magazine and other sources revealed that Project co-founder John Weaver was using his position to pressure young men into sex. I mean, this isn’t the first time that somebody I rooted for turned out to be a creepy sex predator, so let’s just say that February wasn’t a good month for me.

What’s the alternative to the Right? The Democrats, whom the Party of Trump will say are more lefty than Leon Trotsky at a Frida Kahlo party. Try telling that to the Left. Right now “progressives” are mad about at least two events in the Biden Administration, their bombing of Iranian allies in Syria, and their lack of support for Office of Management and Budget Director nominee Neera Tanden, who had to withdraw her nomination this Tuesday. This second issue is that much more rich because Tanden is one of those disingenuous, arrogant establishment liberals who has pulled off the diplomatic feat of pissing off both the woke Left and the Trumpnik Right. Not that it’s in any way hard to piss off either one, but it’s usually for radically different reasons.

It has been pointed out for instance, that Tanden is a Beltway insider and former head of the Center for American Progress, an ostensibly centrist think tank with strong Democratic Party roots, and while managing it catered to wealthy donors, including foreigners. She has also been slagged (mainly by Bernie Sanders fans) for “late-night, out-of-control rage-tweeting”, which is now the stated rationale for cloth-coat Republicans like Mitt Romney to oppose her nomination in the Senate, even though for most Republicans other than Romney that was hardly a disqualification for Trump being president. David Sirota:

“On the left, the Democratic noise machine is calling out the Republican party’s hypocrisy, while wrongly pretending that Tanden is a victim. These self-righteous Tanden defenders have gone completely silent about her actual record.

“Meanwhile, save for a few bits of solid policy-focused reporting, journalists are mostly hounding senators to get their reactions to Tanden’s tweets rather than asking them about her past behavior. Some media folk are even promoting the Neera-As-Victim mythology, somehow disregarding and distracting attention from Tanden’s alleged attack on a union of journalists.

“As evidenced by her record, Tanden is a victim in the same way war is peace, which is to say that she is not a victim, she is a perpetrator. But the Republican party, the Democratic party and the Washington media machine will not allow the record documenting that basic, verifiable, indisputable reality to be reviewed, litigated or considered. …

“Moreover, the Tanden brigade – and their online army now bullying reporters with racist vitriol – are cynically relying on a political and media environment that will allow such memory-holing to take place. They are banking on the brute force of their own denialist propaganda and a miasma of distracting misinformation to make sure that nobody recognizes that they are exposing themselves. They are making clear that their hope for career advancement, their desire for White House access, and their personal connections to a thinktank powerbroker are more important to them than any social cause.

“Taken together, such behaviors represent more than the death of expertise. They signify the premeditated murder of the most basic facts that are supposed to inform democratic decision-making. The motives here are unstated but obvious: nobody in either party or in the Washington media wants to center Tanden’s nomination on her actual record, because if that record becomes disqualifying for career advancement in Washington, it could set a precedent jeopardizing the personal career prospects of every creature slithering through the Washington swamp.”

As for the Syria bombing, I have to agree with a summary in New York Magazine’s website: “Biden has much more regard for constitutional checks and balances than Trump ever did, but the legal basis for Thursday’s action remains thin. To his credit, at least he attempted to make an argument on the basis of self-defense, and perhaps the threat the target posed was more imminent than we know. But most likely, the administration proceeded with the strike without asking Congress’s permission simply because the defense and national security brass knew they almost certainly wouldn’t get it and wouldn’t face any real consequences for acting without it. Dropping bombs in the Middle East without congressional approval has become a humdrum exercise by now.”

In other words, Democrats don’t seem to have learned anything either. And half of the reason we had the last four years is that America was sick and tired of Beltway business as usual no matter how obviously unqualified the alleged alternative to the swamp was. Biden won because Trump made the swamp that much more murky and vicious, but the reason bad politicians continue to win elections is because Americans have a notoriously short memory for what happened two to four years ago, and it’s that much easier to fleece an audience like the current Republican Party, which doesn’t want to remember what happened even yesterday.

On MSDNC in December, (before he was called to account over John Weaver) Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt told one of the talking heads that he’d officially switched to the Democratic Party. He said, “At the end of the day, there’s now one pro-democracy political party in the United States of America and that’s the Democratic Party. And I am a member of that party because of that. I’m a single issue voter. I believe in democracy.” Problem is, it’s a bit hard to present yourself as a defender of democracy if you’re actively working to reduce, not expand, the number of choices in the system. (It’s also possible that Schmidt’s claim of being a Democrat wasn’t on the up-and-up.) It may in fact be the case that there is only one practical choice, but again, America as a political consensus has a terrible memory, and when it is fueled primarily by negative partisanship, that means that there is always a chance that people will vote for the not-incumbent member of the duopoly no matter how objectively terrible it is. People apparently need to be reminded that that is how Trump won last time.

I keep seeing all these liberals and centrists tell me that a serious political system needs two parties to work, but I don’t know how serious they are when they say that. Basically they want the illusion of debate with a “Democrat Lite” party that is more generically conservative than they are. That’s half of why the Party of Trump is such a radicalized personality cult, because they really don’t like the Republican Party establishment either. And why should they? They’re just as much swamp creatures as Neera Tanden.

The problem with that zombie party is not that they disagree with Democrats, but that they disagree with reality. They are a malignant organ in the body politic. And frankly, I don’t see why the entire country (many of whom would still be Republican, except that they believe in heresies like that Earth-revolves-around-the-Sun thing) has to get swallowed up into the Democratic Party just to oppose the anti-reality insurgency, when that party isn’t even a good fit for the Left.

One of the better burns I’ve seen recently was somebody on social media pointing out that all the stuff they told us would happen under socialism is in fact what’s happening now under capitalism. “There will be lines for food! They won’t be able to keep power on! Medical care will be rationed! You won’t have real choices in elections!” Yes indeed. And I’m still not socialist, because all that stuff that socialists tell us is happening in this country IS in fact still happening in Venezuela, and if anything pissed me off about the Party of Trump winning Florida last election it was all the people who fled Cuba and Venezuela who were willing to vote for a corrupt thug to create a one-party regime. I guess it’s okay if you pay lip service to religion or something.

The problem in both cases is not whether the country is socialist or capitalist. The problem is whether public affairs are accountable to the whole community or merely to an elite (whether that be a political party or a business elite). And that is never going to change as long as the only alternative to the Republican Party is the Democratic swamp, and the only alternative to the Democratic Party is… what we saw at CPAC last weekend.

And I am not bringing up Democratic malfeasance to engage in whataboutism, because the premise of whataboutism is somewhere between “X is morally superior to Y because no matter how bad X is, Y is always worse” and “X doesn’t need to be better than Y because the two are morally equivalent.” The Right can’t play that game any more because after years of history it is too obvious that Republicans go out of their way to be more immoral and corrupt than Democrats when they get real power, escalating all the traits that they rightfully attacked when Bill Clinton was president, and combining them with incompetence to boot.

What I am saying is that if Y is going to be better than X, that has to be proven by action. You can’t just give one side a pass because you have good reason to not want the Republicans back in charge. The only way to break the cycle is to have something that is better than X or Y, and right now, the Libertarian Party ain’t it. However it has more potential to be “it” than anything else in America.

It’s pretty Goddamn obvious now that the Republicans not only will not learn anything, at this point they may not be able to. If Democrats expect me to vote for them again, they need to demonstrate that they’ve learned something after all this.

To Be Continued…