The story follows Brett McBain as he purchased a plot of land in the middle of the desert which nobody otherwise wanted to sink his hopes into real estate that he plans will make him gloriously wealthy. This isn’t the typical story of gold digging or cattle rustling that are so typical of American westerns—this is actually a very intelligent story about something we can all relate with. McBain has made a very calculated risk much in the way that Donald Trump became wealthy—the land he has purchased is sitting on top of a nice aquifer full of fresh water and he knows that steam locomotives need water to run. So he gambles that the railroad will come through his property, and a town called Sweetwater will form around his home making his family rich. This is a very capitalist thing to do and the movie never demonizes that action—in fact it is central to the entire plot.
The value of the railroad itself is provided by the tycoon Morton. Without Morton nothing happens, McBain’s property is just another patch of desert land. The value for the land is provided by Morton’s desire to build a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Without that intention, McBain’s purchase would be meaningless. However along the way to help make it possible to see his dream, Morton hired Frank—a thuggish gunman to eliminate opposition to his plans. In this way the good intentions of Morton become the bad intentions of the crony capitalist which seeks to destroy their competition with force. Along the way, Frank picked on the wrong guy who comes back from the past to face down Frank along the backdrop of the Sweetwater land deal. The avenger of justice in this western is played by Charles Bronson known as Harmonica.
However Morton is sick and Frank fancies destroying his mentor so he can take over his empire, but he doesn’t quite have the business sense that his boss had. Frank learns too late that he’s really only good as a thug and does not have the sweet touch to walk the fine line between good honest business in a capitalist society and a corrupt regime of crony capitalism. He learns this through his failures invoked throughout Once Upon a Time in the West. Frank decides he wants to stop McBain’s deal to build his contractually obligated station for the railroad so that he can complete his part of the fairly complicated business transaction with Morton. Frank kills off McBain and his entire family to essentially stop them from building the proposed train station. Before that killing McBain was feeling pretty good about his life. He had a good business deal and celebrated it by marrying a first class prostitute from New Orleans. Jill didn’t really love old McBain as she had been emotionally hardened after years of prostituting herself but McBain was offering her a second chance at life. In exchange for whoring herself out to one man instead of many, she was getting an instant family and a prominent social place in a growing town. But when she showed up by train to meet her husband and his family she was horrified to find that they had been slaughtered by some gunmen dressed up as known bandits working for an outlaw by the name of Cheyenne. Of course Cheyenne had nothing to do with the killing; Frank simply dressed up his own railroad men to look like those of the recognized bandit. Cheyenne gets blamed for the killing; Frank destroys the ability of McBain to fulfill his contractual obligations to the railroad allowing Frank to sweep in and swipe up the land at an auction making himself rich in the process.
Jill however decides to keep the land which throws a wrench in Frank’s plans. Harmonica steps in to help Jill deal with what Frank is up. He outbids Frank for the land by using the bounty money on Cheyenne’s head to pay for it. Of course Harmonica made a deal with Cheyenne ahead of time to free him before he gets to jail so that the bandit can be a part of foiling the plans of Frank who was the instigator in the set-up. Harmonica then befriends Frank somewhat to get close to him and helps the villain survive an attack by his own. Morton had hired Frank’s gunman as a means of self-preservation because the crippled railroad tycoon realized that he could no longer trust his long time apprentice. Cheyenne escaping from capture then attacked Morton and the rest of Frank’s men as Harmonica and Frank kill off the rest. Of course Jill is considering making Harmonica a sexual mate because he’s strong, mysterious and powerful. But she also has eyes for Cheyenne for the same reasons. She’s angry at Harmonica for helping keep Frank alive but little does she know that the mysterious stranger has been playing Frank the way she attempted to while seducing the killer herself.
Isolated, Frank confronts Harmonica into revealing who he is and what he’s up to. He no longer has any help and the railroad is nearly completed in Sweetwater. So Frank has failed and just wants to know who Harmonica is. That’s when it is revealed that Frank killed Harmonica’s brother many years earlier and the only thing the mysterious stranger wants is revenge. The two fight it out in a classic gun battle where Frank dies. Jill wants one of the two men to stay with her to live out their days together but both Cheyenne and Harmonica leave to avoid being tamed by civilization. Jill meanwhile embraces her role as the matriarch of the town and she gets to live happily ever after with a completely fresh start. Most of the main characters had died leaving only her in the end and the birth of a town that was created under a premise of pure capitalism. It’s actually a very beautiful story that we don’t get enough out of Hollywood.
The central theme throughout the entire film is that the gun is the deliverer of justice. Noticeably not present throughout the whole film are police officers and government officials. The only justice between all the characters is their shared use of firearms. There is no sheriff who brokers mediation between Frank, Morton, or Jill. The only police we see are those taking Cheyenne away when he was turned into the authorities by Harmonica to collect a bounty. But at no time in the whole movie do the police or the government do anything to help solve any problems. All events were driven by the character’s themselves as the highest possible authority of law and order under the drive of laissez-faire capitalism. It is a minimalist tactic utilized by the director, Sergio Leone—but what’s interesting is that it was his Italian interpretation of what the America West was—a free and open land filled with unlimited opportunities. Harmonica enacted his own justice against Frank, in an honorable way. Jill was able to get a fresh start in life because of the capitalist efforts of Morton and McBain. And many thousands of others were employed because of the struggle. It was quite extraordinary to see the train finally coming into Sweetwater carrying hundreds of new workers to relieve the old ones. Without capitalism and the gun to protect it—nothing would be happening in the film Once Upon a Time in the West.
So my ambition to turn back the clock is not to return to slavery, or to move to a time where women couldn’t vote—it is to make the Second Amendment stronger and to invoke a lot more laissez-faire capitalism. When I think of the Old West I think of unlimited opportunities, very limited government, and the honor of equality that guns gave to the people who carried them. The Sergio Leone westerns are not historically accurate, but it is the wishful dreams of a European filmmaker yearning for a place in the world where such dreams were possible. And to his eyes and the large budget provided by Paramount Pictures—Once Upon a Time in the West was an honest philosophic crack at how an example of laissez-faire capitalism could be applied to the world using the American Western as a backdrop of simplicity to tell the story. It is for that reason that it is one of the greatest films of the 20th Century and one of the most underrated enigmas of art to emerge in a free market.
Film schools across the world study Once Upon a Time in the West hoping to recapture that magical movie. But they all miss the point because they don’t understand what the film is really about. They think it’s about Henry Fonda playing a bad guy, or Charles Bronson’s minimalist dialogue. They think it’s about the music and the cinematography, and the ambitious location shooting. Those are all very good things but not the reason it’s one of the greatest westerns of all time and also one of the great movie classics resting alongside Citizen Kane and The Wizard of Oz as an all time great classic. It’s because the movie was about laissez-faire capitalism and how to achieve justice in that world when things go bad then make it endure with just a bit of extra sparkle of obscurity. I can’t say that Leone was a remarkable capitalist as a film director during his whole life. I’d say he leaned more and more political left as his prestige in Hollywood increased. But for a time between 1963 to 1968 Sergio Leone offered some of the best arguments in favor of capitalism than any director has in movie history. And he did it with his wonderful spaghetti westerns—most notably, Once Upon a Time in the West. For me, that is a key to strategizing where we need to go as a civilization in the future. And we will.
The people of the world look to America for leadership……………and hope. It’s in the music from the very first video. Watch the faces of the audience. They know it without realizing that the tears that fall from their eyes is to feel again what once happened upon a time, in the west.
Many who read here think that I am anti-government. I am in fact anti-stupid and often when politicians are attracted to government positions for the healthy benefits provided, what you get are the dumbest people in our society signing up for the job because high quality people have better things to do in their life. Government to me is all about management and I expect the best managers available to do the job of government who don’t need to personally enrich themselves in the process. With that said I can say that in my hometown of West Chester, Ohio I personally like four of the five people in the below video—which is a trustee meeting for the local government. One guy, Lee Wong is not one of those four. I remember very well how he behaved for over six years, especially over a sidewalk he was working hard to extort from public funds near his home across the street from Jags—relatively speaking. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. He and Cathy Stoker blocked George Lang from being a part of the voting process until George worked hard to get a partner on the board to serve with him resulting in the election of Mark Welch. When Mark was elected it knocked off Cathy leaving Lee to fend for himself. Now he’s a disgruntled West Chester trustee. His partner was eliminated in an election, beaten by Welch who is now the new President. So congratulations Mark. Watch the first two minutes of this meeting to see what I’m talking about.
Lee Wong said some very interesting things in that exchange; one was that he thought the process was “perverted.” Below is the technical definition of perverted and it obviously doesn’t apply.
Medical Definition of perverted
: marked by abnormality or perversion <perverted pancreatic function><relieve concepts or fears of perverted sexual interest—W. H. Masters & V. E. Johnson>
Where Lee is wrong about the process is that voters saw how he and Cathy had been running things so they elected somebody different in George Lang. George then went to work looking for a managing partner on the board to help him with the district—because the previous team of Wong and Stoker were functioning from a much more socialist origin position. You can hear some of that socialism coming out of Lee during the exchange at the meeting with Bruce Jones, the current fiscal officer. Lee cited that he believed the board was unfair and that he should be elected president by proper rotation. For George to agree to something like that it would assume that all the trustees were equal in value, and they obviously are not.
George obviously trusts Mark to be the president, but Lee has shown that his personal values are not aligned with either of the two other trustees. So to allow a seat of power to fall into Lee’s hands just so he could feel “equal” or “fair” is just ridiculous considering the voters just re-elected Lang doing things they way that he has now for a while. Then they voted for Welch who was operating as a companion to George. Between the two West Chester has really sprung into action bringing many exciting opportunities to an already lucrative area. A lot of the very good things currently happening in West Chester right now could be directly attributed to the four people sitting in that video—excluding Lee of course.
The world changed under Lee’s feet and he didn’t adapt to those changing circumstances. All through the last decade progressive viewpoints even among conservatives were fashionable. Now they are not—instead Lang has brought a free market flare to West Chester politics which is allowing economic growth to escalate proportionally. Lee is now a relic of the past and he doesn’t understand why. That is why there was the really awkward silence during the meeting where everyone except Lee understood what was going on. Lee Wong came out sounding like an out-of-touch grandparent demanding that people ride horses instead of cars as a mode of transportation.
Lee also invoked that he was the top vote getter over both Lang and Welch. Well, Bernie Sanders is also very popular—socialism is very popular among lazy people and there are some of those people in West Chester. Government workers and companies that suck up to government workers love socialism. That much was evident on Martin Luther King Day in January of 2016. One of the busiest roads through West Chester is 747 at the foot of Beckett Ridge. On that national holiday the roads were 2/3rds empty as too many people were off work. I couldn’t help but wonder what all those people were doing on that day off if not something productive. How could a vibrant society trying to achieve excellent GDP nationally afford to take off a day for the memory of a civil rights leader? It’s nice to recognize such people with a national day of remembrance, but to take a day off from productive enterprise seems pretty silly. The kind of people who were off on Martin Luther King’s Day are the type of people who voted for Lee Wong—they tend to be lazy, and too addicted to government services—so Lee represents their type of thinking. That does not mean that Lee should be in charge of the board. Competition and the marketplace of politics should do that and George Lang has easily outsmarted Lee to achieve what he thinks needs to happen in West Chester. The voters re-elected Lang’s vision and the businesses who are attracted to West Chester because of the vibrant economic environment that Lang has helped create along with the other four people at that trustee meeting, are a testament to his success.
I’m talking about this because I think every school board and trustee meeting in America should learn something from this form of government that George has envisioned to nurture along—with a lot of help from his friends. If all branches of our government worked as well as George and Welch have helped make West Chester function—we’d all be a lot better off. I don’t do as many local articles as I used to because honestly, I have readers in over a 170 different countries and the daily stats are quite good. The power of the written word is like water—people see it sitting there and in small amounts it looks soothing and docile. But over time it carves many of the rivers, oceans and continental barriers that we see and gives life to the entire planet. So I put an emphasis on fixing the mind of people who are broken by their educations and cultural references and it takes time for them to see the light of day. I write to eat away at what’s wrong, to propose that intelligence can imply on collective stupidity. What good is a large collective mass of rock if water can erode it away into a pebble with a constant presence and pressure to reshape it into something else over time? The written word has that kind of power. But in this case the West Chester trustees and the people behind the scenes that make it work—except for Lee Won–are examples of how all governments need to strive to be. They could take a lesson from George Lang’s playbook.
Lee Wong is lucky that everyone is so nice to him. As a functioning socialist George and Mark put up with Lee because they are respecting the voters—those same slack-jawed, lazy, losers who were off work on Martin Luther King’s Day when there were productive enterprises to embark on. And I think that’s pretty nice of them. They may not agree with Lee, but at least they let him sit at the table and aren’t ganging up on him the way Stoker and Wong used to do against George when he was still new to the board. George is a lot nicer to Lee than he needs to be. Lee’s definition of things needs to change from the kind of East Avenue activity that might actually be considered truly perverted. The government of West Chester is not an example of absolute power that corrupts. Absolute power is in working with another trustee to destroy another person while at the same time hunting for real perversions on the streets of Hamilton late at night. George and Mark aren’t doing that. Lee on the other hand can’t say the same. Yet they treat him fairly—so long as he stays out-of-the-way. West Chester is the example that other governments across the world should be copying. And before it’s too late for them they need to figure out who their functioning socialists are and brush them out-of-the-way so real people can do the real work that government should have always been doing. But they can’t allow people like Lee to be in charge just because it’s “fair.” That’s just not how things work in a capitalist society.
On the Democrats side of the political spectrum, they don’t really have a candidate for president. Hillary Clinton is a criminal and I have serious doubts as of this writing that she will be able to beat the socialist Bernie Sanders for the nomination. Then with that said, I really don’t think America is ready to elect an open socialist. I don’t think in 2016 the nation is ready to accept socialism the way that France has, and many other European countries. A large portion of America has been raised on socialism—especially victims of public school over the last two decades. They have been taught in their educations that socialism is the way to go—especially college graduates. It takes most young people at least a decade to start seeing the reality that they can only get once their parents cut them off from an allowance, and they pop out a couple of kids. Hopefully by that time they aren’t sick with venereal diseases and can actually live moderately healthy lives for two or three decades without overloading the doctor’s office every time they get a sniffle—which is another large contributor to insurance increases—the preponderance of so many people living their life with risky lifestyles—reckless sexual attitudes, chemical abuse through narcotics and alcohol—and high fat diets. What is remarkable however is how stupid most people are these days, and to exemplify it read the comments below from a recent CNN article about health care and the Bernie Sanders socialist approach. We all know they are out there, but it’s another thing to hear them speak so foolishly. Have a look and read the CNN article linked below.
DemandSider12 hours ago
@davidfour @sunny5280
We have let capitalism run rampant, to the point that we borrow money from Communist China, to subsidize the human resource budget of our largest private employer, so that they can profitable import from Communist China. Do you think this is wise?
I’m a Bernie fan but why even get people worked up about this, we all know Congress would never pass 99% of his ideas. What it would cost is irrelevant, he is just getting people talking about it longterm.
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medianone5 hours ago
@hardhatharry You never know…. Conservatives have done a great job of pushing their “anything but Obama” or “anything Obama does it bad, terrible, a failure” to the point that maybe people would consider something different that is not associated with Obama. Maybe?
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QuestionCNN5 hours ago
@hardhatharry What this article refused to mention is that Hillary will do the same thing – increase taxes under the pre-tense of providing Universal Health care, then divert it to pay for her police-state Marxist Utopia. But CNN is in the Clinton camp and is helping her by providing free negative campaign attacks on the other Marxist – Bernie Sanders
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DemandSider5 hours ago
@hardhatharry
This election reminds me a lot of the 1932 election The inequality, the Republican leaning Congress, the economic collapse due to middle class destruction and speculation. With FDR’s election, both Houses switched to heavily Democratic. Sanders’ views are very similar to FDR’s.
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RustyShackel1 hour ago
@DemandSider @hardhatharry Agreed, Bernie does seem like such a believer in the authority of government that he would take actions to throw Americans in imprisonment camps much like FDR did with innocent japanese-American citizens. I wonder who Bernie would target – conservatives? The rich?
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DemandSider1 hour ago
@RustyShackel @DemandSider @hardhatharry
No, you are confusing him with Chewbaca, The Confederate Republican nominee. He’ll probably just put another wing on in Cuba, call it Trumptanomo, and make a killing at tax payer expense, per usual with these “free market” parasites.
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DemandSider7 hours ago
sickforprofit.com/ceos
Stephen Hemsley, CEO, United Health Care, total value of unexercised stock options (Forbes): $744 million
“Hemseley returns $190 million in stock options acquired as as result of practices found to be fraudulent by The SEC” -American Medical News
Edward Hanway, Cigna CEO, total value of unexercised stock options, $28.8 million,five year compensation, $120 million “The family of a 17 year old girl who died hours after Cigna reversed a decision to deny her liver transplant to sue” -Oakland Tribune
Michael McCallister, CEO, Humana, total value of unexercised stock options, $60.8 million, “Humana abandons seniors in Florida; returns after Republicans pass new Medicare law, upping HMO payments by 25%” – NY Times
Has this Bernie Sanders fella no sense of decency??!? Who would hire these, ah, people?
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pulsecolo7 hours ago
@DemandSider Gosh, those salaries could be used to help pay to retrain and pay
all those insurance company employees mentioned earlier….
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@DemandSider ” Bernie Sanders would LIKELY raise taxes,……”
“SOME experts say,…..”
Great journalism Tami
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medianone5 hours ago
@JRCHICT @DemandSider to be fair, or at least in cutting Tami some slack; we do live in a very litigious society.
Plus the article did say, “Sanders’ plan hasn’t been evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office or major think tanks…” which seems to be the standard for vetting candidate tax proposals.
But I agree with your thinking.
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DemandSider1 hour ago
@medianone @JRCHICT @DemandSider
Yes, for a person to have their medical bills reimbursed, they often MUST be litigious. SIngle payer would ease the burden on our courts.
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DemandSider12 hours ago
Insurance stocks rose with the passage of ACA. I don’t think they’ll rise with single payer. Manufacturers should rejoice, however, as their expenses will fall a lot.
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booboospal11 hours ago
Assuming a President Sanders could get his proposal through Congress, how would it affect (adversely?) the 50 million and increasing number of folks now getting Medicare benefits?
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CPR8 hours ago
@booboospal Well it would greatly impact the hundred thousand plus people that work in private insurance or in support of it.
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booboospal8 hours ago
CPR: Do you know the answer to my question?
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pulsecolo7 hours ago
it would do nothing to adversely affect those folks, the only thing that would happen is that the advantage plans would go away. But, there would no longer be a need for advantage plans as better coverage would prevail for all seniors as well as the rest of us with everyone in the pool. Keep in mind, that the Silver exchange plans under the ACA, that most Americans have with the subsidies, have much higher deductibles and out of pocket costs than traditional Medicare does without any advantage plan at all. The insurance industry successfully lobbied and sold America on the “snake oil need” for advantage plans. Advantage plans have a daily deductible for in hospital stays, and do not cover long term care. Plus, when seniors sign up for them, they may actually be paying more in the long run than had they banked the money they are spending for those plans.
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booboospal6 hours ago
pulse:
Would there still be Part B premiums?
Would retiree pension and investment income be taxed more than now to pay insurance costs?
Would there still be a need for supplementary coverage?
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@booboospal all good questions.
I’m pretty sure though that we’ll have many who will expect to be perfect right out of the gate. Find any and all reasons to condemn it as we’ve done w/ ACA
Primarily use it as a political football.
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medianone6 hours ago
@booboospal Again, all good questions. And shouldn’t debate on universal health care also include looking at other countries who’ve successfully implemented such systems? Their costs, outcomes, sustainability, etc?
Seems like this debate has been ongoing for decades, at least since Hillary Care proposals. And if other countries have been successfully operating single payer systems and covering 100% of their populations, it is a wonder our “top men” haven’t been able to track these successes and implement them here.
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@medianone @booboospal I’m not sure our “top men” care more about taking the money from the lobbyists of the health and insurance corporations for same old same old, or they’re interested in doing what’s right for us.
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booboospal10 hours ago
My former employer pays a fixed monthly amount (adjusted each year) toward employee AND RETIREE and dependent health insurance. So far it has been enough $$ to cover a Blue Cross supplemental policy AND the basic tier Medicare Part B premium for both my wife and me. Of course both of us paid for Part A (hospitalization) Medicare coverage by payroll tax while we were employed.
How would the Sanders proposal affect us?
Anyone?
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CNN User8 hours ago
@DemandSider
Republicans: you blame non religions christians, atheists,Muslims, blacks,Hindus, Obama,gays etc. for US weak middle class,but the real problem is no healthcare,expensive college, no paid maternity leave etc. —- -evil socialist countries all rank higher in median wealth(or wealth of the middle class) Source: http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2013/06/us-median-wealth-only-28th-in-world.html
(Before you republicans blame colored people, remember that UAE, Kuwait , Qatar, Singapore have a high percentage of colored folks but still have a richer middle class than us )
If you don’t believe my source just google “median wealth by country” and you will see similar results.
We dont have paid maturity leave, free healthcare or free or reduced college. We are the only developed country to not have this. Thats why we rank so low.
dem. states have a lower percentage of uninsured than republican states
Those are some really poorly educated theories shown above generated by a society raised on a terrible public school system which taught them all the wrong things. The basic instruction was that mixed economies such as what Scandinavian socialism proposes is the answer to equal distribution of resources without considering what the source of the value of what’s distributed entailed. For years the word on the street was that the United States would become more service oriented as other countries would become the producers. Otherwise, China and the Gulf States would make most of our American stuff and we’d have more time to think about things and have service jobs to sustain those “intellectual” pursuits. Well, that plan hasn’t worked out. The “money” jobs are now overseas and socialists think that by raising McDonald’s jobs to $15 an hour that the “middle class” will be sustained. Only idiot academics who live in a campus bubble could have concocted such a stupid notion. Only laissez-faire capitalism will solve our problems. Not crony capitalism which is what the pharmaceuticals and oil conglomerates have—I’m talking about open markets competing with each other to offer the most superior product for the lowest price.
All the countries mentioned above, places like UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Singapore are ultimately servicing the United States demand for products. The United States creates the global demand with their $17 trillion a year in gross domestic product. That GDP in order to survive by the way must increase by nearly double just for us to hope to survive as a country—and for the world in general to even have a chance. Without the United States all those mentioned countries wither away and die. So they are not examples of success or flowering epitaphs to managed economies. Socialism is the tombstone that the epitaph needs to be inscribed upon, because it has not worked. The United States is the only life support the world has. It is sad that more people don’t understand that.
The next president cannot be a Democrat. The House and Senate can’t just have Republicans; it has to have “conservative” Republicans the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Whoever is in the executive branch will have to be willing to fight the world and idiots like those in the comments above from their instructed commitments to socialism and convince them to embrace not just capitalism, but the most open form of it imaginable– laissez-faire. We are no longer at a “theory” phase in this global economic struggle. We are at the rubber hitting the road phase and it’s not the time for games. If the situation doesn’t get fixed right here and now it will be over in the future. Because there are just too many socialists who are having kids and are raising them to be just as stupid as they are—the evidence is right above you—they do exist. Astonishingly they somehow manage to feed themselves, but they aren’t much good for anything else. But they do vote.
Little things matter to me quite a lot. I notice everything and of my many careers over a lifetime, one of them will be a cultural expert where psychology, art, religion, economics and all other forms of unnamed human ambition find their way into every created thing on earth. I grew up for as long as I can remember wanting to be a film director—but not being a very collaborative person—relegated that desire for more inward pursuits. Because of all that I can say with great provocation that the world is in a severe cultural decline. America obviously leads the world in culture—even though many academics might dispute it. The evidence is in our movie houses and our music with great audacious display. So rather than slide my predilections into the direction of the current pendulum swinging culture of global unification I am focusing much more these days on American westerns as a foundation philosophy that stands in contrast to the world currently presented to us.
I was born in 1968 and a few months after my birth one of the greatest films ever made was released—it was a Sergio Leone western called Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone was an Italian director interpreting American westerns for a country trying to fight its way back from cultural decay after World War II. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Leone at the time was best known for his “Dollars” trilogy which made Clint Eastwood into a star. Those films are and have always been fantastic. But for the director Leone they gained him the opportunity to make the western of his dreams off the success of the previous Eastwood films. Paramount Pictures tossed the world to him along with a host of first class stars and Sergio Leone along with his musical collaborator Ennio Morricone spun a masterpiece called Once Upon a Time in the West.
Some of my very first television memories were these spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone replaying on Channel 19 in Cincinnati. My grandfather loved westerns and whenever I was at his farm-house he had them on, so my mother also watched them all the time as well because it reminded her of her dad. Of them the Sergio Leone westerns reflected my own observations about people even when I was very young—and I soaked them up. Before I was ever in the kindergarten I was a fan of Once Upon a Time in the West. I often confused all Leone’s westerns together until I was just shy of ten and it was then when I began to appreciate Once Upon a Time in the West as something of its own. The Leone films had hard-wired themselves into my consciousness. My very first time in front of a television camera was when I was sixteen during “tough guy” week on Channel 19. “Tough guy week” was a ratings grab at Channel 19 so they ran Steve McQueen movies along with a lot of Clint Eastwood to bump up their winter numbers. At a young age I had evolved into having a “reputation” and I was sitting at the dinner table of a prominent Sharonville judge, his wife and the biggest criminal of Northern Cincinnati at the time. The event was a Chinese New Year advertisement for a restaurant that I worked at. One of the owner’s sons was a guy who liked to dip his feet into that type of world where justice sits at dinner tables with known criminals and he used me even at that young age as one of his “heavies.” I enjoyed the experience because I was essentially living the life of the protagonists in Sergio Leone’s westerns and I discovered by living those characters in real life that one of my favorite film directors was in fact a genius. As I sat at that table during that day long commercial recording talking to the judge and the crime lord obviously working together with me in the middle and being told by that same judge that when I got into trouble—he’d take care of it–I knew for me there was no going back. At too young of an age I knew way too much about the way the world worked. I was then and still am about 60 years ahead of myself and it does really go back to Leone’s westerns and my young introduction to them. When the commercial aired on television my family was one of the first people back then to have a VCR so I was able to tape it. My television appearance aired with the judge and the criminal seated on either side of me during a showing of For a Few Dollars More. During that same Channel 19 “tough guy” week Once Upon a Time in the West was shown again and I was able to see it as a 16-year-old actually doing in real life much of what the Charles Bronson character was doing in that film and I watched it with new understanding for the first time. It was as real and honest of any motion picture I had ever seen—it was to my eyes much better than The Godfather which was still making cultural waves in that year of 1985. A month later I was involved in a fight with a bunch of people which led to a tragic situation and if I had not been sitting at that table with that judge on that particular day for that commercial, I’d probably have a much different life than I do now and my freedoms would likely be greatly restricted.
I felt it was important for my wife to be to watch Once Upon a Time in the West to understand more about me, so I tried to show it to her early in our relationship. At the time she was a country club girl so she wasn’t ready for movies like that—where the opening was so strange and dramatic. She made fun of it heavily after the first seven minutes and I never tried again to show it to her until January of 2016. I had meant to show the movie to my children at some point so given all my history with it I felt that they should see the movie. I bought the cut of the film that had been restored to 165 minutes as opposed to the version I had seen as a kid, the 145 minute version which was a bit more confusing, and relished being able to finally show it to my wife and at least some of my kids. It was a great experience. The music from Ennio Morricone was so good in that movie that I have used it often to raise my mind above times of incredible stress. Even though my wife didn’t like Once Upon a Time in the West at first I still loved it and thought of it often to carry me through tough times. I was 25-years old and in deep trouble. I had more legal problems and had law suits directed at me from several directions and I had to tap into that raw, primal civility that I had refined when I was 16, where I could walk into any situation and just take care of things no matter how bad the guys on the other side of the table were—or who hid in the shadows where you parked your car. I had for the first time a CD collection of Ennio Morricone’s music which featured a scene on the front from Once Upon a Time in the West. By the 1990s the film was considered an obscure classic and nobody remembered it much except for filmmakers and people who were particularly fascinated with cultural phenomenon. In the hardest days of my life I listened to the music from Once Upon a Time in the West to serve as my moral compass—and it has always worked for me. I sat in my office back then with the world coming down around me and would listen to those Morricone soundtracks and think of “The Man with the Harmonica”—that haunting melody which spoke of revenge, perseverance, and the growth of a human into an Übermensch (German for “Overman, Overhuman, Above-Human, Superman, Superhuman, Ultraman, Ultrahuman, Beyond-Man”; German pronunciation: [ˈˀyːbɐmɛnʃ]) As readers here know I think a lot of the concept which is from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. It is a work of philosophical allegory, with a structural similarity to the Gathas of Zoroaster/Zarathustra. I learned later that my love of Sergio Leone had more to do with the concept of the Übermensch than of the westerns themselves—but I can say that there is an honesty in Once Upon a Time in the West that is not present in any other form of art and it should be experienced—especially these days.
After directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone decided to retire from Westerns and desired to produce his film based on The Hoods, which eventually becameOnce Upon a Time in America. However, Leone accepted an offer from Paramount Pictures to provide access to Henry Fonda and to use a budget to produce another Western film. He recruited Bertolucci and Argento to devise the plot of the film in 1966, researching other Western films in the process. After Clint Eastwood turned down an offer to play the movie’s protagonist, Bronson was offered the role. During production, Leone recruited Donati to rewrite the script due to concerns over time limitations.
The original version by the director was 166 minutes (2 hours and 46 minutes) when it was first released on December 21, 1968. This was the version that was to be shown in European cinemas and was a box office success. For the US release on May 28, 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was edited down to 145 minutes (2 hours and 25 minutes) by Paramount and was a financial flop. The film is considered by some to be the first installment in Leone’s Once Upon a Time Trilogy, followed by Duck, You Sucker!, called Once Upon a Time… the Revolution in parts of Europe, and Once Upon a Time in America, though the films do not share any characters in common.
The film portrays two conflicts that take place around Flagstone, a fictional town in the American Old West: a land battle related to construction of a railroad, and a mission of vengeance against a cold-blooded killer. A struggle exists for Sweetwater, a piece of land near Flagstone containing the region’s only water source. The land was bought by Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), who foresaw that the railroad would have to pass through that area to provide water for the steam locomotives. When crippled railroad tycoon Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) learns of this, he sends his hired gun Frank (Henry Fonda) to intimidate McBain to move off the land, but Frank instead kills McBain and his three children, planting evidence to frame the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards). It appears the land has no owner; however, a former prostitute (Claudia Cardinale) arrives from New Orleans, revealing she is Jill McBain, Brett’s new wife and the owner of the land.
Meanwhile, a mysterious harmonica-playing gunman (Charles Bronson), whom Cheyenne later dubs “Harmonica”, pursues Frank. In the film’s opening scene, Harmonica kills three men sent by Frank to kill him. In a roadhouse on the way to Sweetwater, he informs Cheyenne that the three gunfighters appeared to be posing as Cheyenne’s men.
Back at Sweetwater, construction materials are delivered to build a railroad station and a small town. Harmonica explains that Jill will lose Sweetwater unless the station is built by the time the track’s construction crews reach that point, so Cheyenne puts his men to work building it.
Frank turns against Morton, who wanted to make a deal with Jill; Morton’s disability makes him unable to fight back. After having sex with Jill, Frank forces her to sell the property in an auction. He tries to buy the farm cheaply by intimidating the other bidders, but Harmonica arrives, holding Cheyenne at gunpoint, and makes a much higher bid based on his reward money for delivering Cheyenne to the authorities. Harmonica rebuffs an offer by Frank to buy the farm from him for one dollar more than he paid at the auction. As Cheyenne is placed on a train bound for the Yuma prison, two members of his gang purchase one-way tickets for the train, intending to help him escape.
Frank’s men betray and ambush him, having been paid by Morton to turn against him, but—much to Jill’s outrage—Harmonica helps Frank kill them, intending to kill Frank himself. Frank returns to Morton, only to find that he and the rest of Frank’s men have been killed in a battle with Cheyenne’s gang. Frank then goes to Sweetwater to confront Harmonica. On two occasions, Frank has asked Harmonica who he is, but both times Harmonica refused to answer him. Instead, he mysteriously quoted names of men Frank has murdered. This time, Harmonica says he will reveal who he is “only at the point of dying”. The two men position themselves for a duel, at which point Harmonica’s motive for revenge is revealed in a flashback:
A younger Frank, already a cruel bandit, is forcing a boy to support on his shoulders his older brother, whose neck is in a noose strung from an arch. As the boy struggles to hold his brother’s weight, Frank stuffs a harmonica into the boy’s mouth and tells him to play. The brother curses Frank and kicks his brother away, and dies.
Harmonica draws first and shoots Frank. As he lies dying, Frank again asks who he is, whereupon the harmonica is placed in Frank’s mouth. Frank nods weakly in recognition and dies. Harmonica and Cheyenne say goodbye to Jill, who is supervising construction of the railway station as the track-laying crews reach Sweetwater. Cheyenne collapses, revealing that he had been fatally shot by Morton during the fight with Frank’s gang. The work train arrives, Jill carrying water to the rail workers, while Harmonica rides away with Cheyenne’s body.
Leone’s intent was to take the stock conventions of the American Westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks and others, and rework them in an ironic fashion, essentially reversing their intended meaning in their original sources to create a darker connotation.[22] The most obvious example of this is the casting of veteran film good guy Henry Fonda as the villainous Frank, but there are also many other, more subtle reversals throughout the film. According to film critic and historian Christopher Frayling, the film quotes from as many as 30 classic American Westerns.
The major films referenced include:
High Noon(1952): The opening sequence is similar to the opening of High Noon, in which three bad guys (Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley and Robert J. Wilke) are shown waiting for the arrival of their leader (named Frank, played by Ian MacDonald) on the noon train. In the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, three bad guys (Jack Elam, who appeared in a small part in High Noon, Woody Strode, and Al Mulock) take over and wait at a train station. However, the period of waiting is depicted in a lengthy ten-minute sequence, the train arrives several hours after noon, and its passenger is one of the film’s heroes (Charles Bronson) rather than its villain. The scene is famous for its use of natural sounds: a squeaky windmill, knuckles cracking, and Jack Elam’s character trying to shoo off a fly. According to rumor, Leone offered the parts of the three gunmen to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly stars Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach.[23]
3:10 to Yuma(1957): This cult Western by Delmer Daves may have had considerable influence on the film. The most obvious reference is a brief exchange between Keenan Wynn‘s Sheriff and Cheyenne, in which they discuss sending the latter to Yuma In addition, as in West the main villain is played by an actor (Glenn Ford) who normally played good guys. The film also features diegetic music (Ford at one point whistles the film’s theme song just as Harmonica provides music in West). And the scene in which Van Heflin‘s character escorts Ford to the railroad station while avoiding an ambush by his gang may have inspired the ambush of Frank by his own men in Leone’s film.
The Comancheros(1961): The names “McBain” and “Sweetwater” may come from this film. (Contrary to popular belief, the name of the town “Sweetwater” was not taken from Victor Sjöström‘s silent epic dramaThe Wind. Bernardo Bertolucci has stated that he looked at a map of the southwestern United States, found the name of the town in Arizona, and decided to incorporate it into the film. However, both “Sweetwater” and a character named “McBain” appeared in The Comancheros, which Leone admired.[24])
Johnny Guitar(1954): Jill and Vienna have similar backstories (both are former prostitutes who become saloonkeepers), and Harmonica, like Sterling Hayden‘s title character, is a mysterious, gunslinging outsider known by his musical nickname. Some of West’s central plot (Western settlers vs. the railroad company) may be recycled from Nicholas Ray’s film.[24]
The Iron Horse(1924): West may contain several subtle references to this film, including a low angle shot of a shrieking train rushing towards the screen in the opening scene, and the shot of the train pulling into the Sweetwater station at the end.[24]
Shane(1953): The massacre scene in West features young Timmy McBain out hunting with his father, just as Joey does in this movie. The funeral of the McBains is borrowed almost shot-for-shot from Shane.[24]
Vera Cruz(1954): In both films, Charles Bronson’s character plays a harmonica and is known only by a nickname.
The Searchers(1956): Leone admitted that the rustling bushes, the silencing of cicada chirps, and the fluttering pheasants that suggest a menace approaching the farmhouse when the McBain family is massacred were all taken from The Searchers. The ending of the film—where Western nomads Harmonica and Cheyenne move on rather than join modern society—also echoes the famous ending of Ford’s film.[24]
Warlock(1959): At the end of this film, Henry Fonda’s character wears clothing very similar to his costume throughout West. In addition, Warlock features a discussion about mothers between Fonda and Dorothy Malone that is similar to those between Cheyenne and Jill in West. Finally, Warlock contains a sequence in which Fonda’s character kicks a crippled man off his crutches, as he does to Mr. Morton in West.
The Magnificent Seven(1960): In this film, Charles Bronson’s character whittles a piece of wood. In West, he does the same, although in a different context. The Magnificent Seven was based on Seven Samuraiby Akira Kurosawa, whose film Yojimbo (“The Bodyguard”) was the inspiration (and later, litigation) behind Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Winchester ’73(1950): It has been claimed that the scenes in West at the trading post are based on those in Winchester ’73, but the resemblance is slight.[24]
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(1962): The dusters (long coats) worn by Cheyenne and his gang (and by Frank and his men while impersonating them) resemble those worn by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his henchmen when they are introduced in this film. In addition, the auction scene in West was intended to recall the election scene in Liberty Valance.[24]
Duel in the Sun(1946): The character of Morton, the crippled railroad baron in West, was based on the character played by Lionel Barrymore in this film.[24]
Sergeant Rutledge(1960): This John Ford Western, featuring Woody Strode as the title character, has a scene in which Constance Towers falls asleep in a chair with a rifle in her lap, just as Jill McBain does in Leone’s film.
My Darling Clementine(1946): In the trading post scene, Cheyenne slides Harmonica’s gun down the bar to him, challenging him to shoot – much like Morgan Earp (Ward Bond) sliding his weapon to brother Wyatt (Henry Fonda) in the Ford film when the Earps meet Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) for the first time. Also, a deleted scene in West featured Frank getting a shave with perfume in a barber’s shop, much like Fonda’s Wyatt.
Once Upon a Time in the West was itself explicitly referenced in The Quick and the Dead, when John Herod (Gene Hackman), faces Ellen (Sharon Stone), better known as “The Lady,” in a climactic gunfight. Ellen’s identity is a mystery until the end, when the audience sees Ellen’s flashback to Herod lynching her father, a sheriff. The sadistic Herod gives Ellen (then only a little girl) a chance to save her father by shooting through and breaking the rope wrapped around his neck, but Ellen accidentally kills her father by shooting him in the forehead. As with Frank, Herod yells “Who are you?”, and the only response he receives is an artifact from the earlier lynching—in this case, the sheriff’s badge that Ellen has kept all these years. The Quick and the Dead has another connection to Once Upon a Time in the West: It was the final film for Woody Strode, who died before it could be released.
Many other films have paid tribute to Once Upon a Time in the West over the years: Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds opens with a lengthy sequence entitled Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France (a phrase also used as a tagline for the 2009 film) which introduces the film’s primary villain and features the mass shooting of a family at a farmhouse; Tarantino’s Kill Bill films utilize snatches of Morricone’s harmonica and guitar soundtrack; Back to the Future Part III recreates the station rooftop scene from Once Upon a Time in the West; Baz Luhrmann‘s Australia features several nods to Leone’s film, including a homestead with a squeaky windmill, an almost-identical funeral scene, and an antagonistic relationship between the film’s villains; and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End features a parody of the “Man With a Harmonica” theme on the soundtrack, as the film’s protagonists parley on a sandbar before the final battle.
A lot of people I think have the same reaction my wife had to Once Upon a Time in the West the first time they see it. Let me tell you that 25 years after she laughed at it the first time, she wasn’t laughing any more. Nobody is laughing any more, I can say that. She had grown to appreciate what the film had been saying for decades. She had learned by middle life what I had known as a 16-year-old, and once you know those types of things there is only one place for your mind to go. You either become an Übermensch of some kind or you go insane. There are a lot of characters in the world like Henry Fonda’s “Frank.” And there is only one way to deal with them and Sergio Leone knew how to capture that conflict on-screen like no other person I’ve ever seen in film. A lot of film makers have tried to capture the magic of Once Upon a Time in the West, but they never get it all. Now, nearly five decades later the extremely bright international culture that produced that great film is nearly vanished. It’s not a great film just because it’s a western—but because of the metaphors presented in the seemingly simplistic tapestry of the western—as it was invented in America.
It doesn’t matter that Sergio Leone took an American hero like Henry Fonda and made him into the villain—it’s that Leone knew how to take the strength of his characters whether it be Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood and turn them into Übermenschs to deal with overwhelming evil captured quite accurately. I always think of that dinner table during that filming of the Chinese New Year commercial and how it reminded me so much of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But even more than that it reminded me of Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West. When Jill gets mad at Harmonica for helping keep Frank alive—it is for the reasons provided that many of the mysteries of our lives go unfulfilled. And yes I’m talking in a bit of a riddle here, but to get the answer watch the movie and remember the line, “time flies.” Knowing what to do with an enemy after you’ve identified them as such is what I have always found valuable about westerns. To understand that you have an enemy is to have a set of values that an enemy fights against and in Once Upon a Time in the West that conflict is poetically displayed in ways that no film has ever mastered as well. Many have tried but nobody has been able to hit it as well as Sergio Leone. Time does fly, whether it’s a 16 year old discovering the truth of how a childhood movie favorite applies to the real world of politics and intrigue and how rivers are often polluted with the remains of politics washed off the parking lot after a strong rain—with the personal stamp of approval from a kindly old judge—or a wife who had grown over the years to see something totally different from her young 20-year-old eyes were ready to appreciate. Some movies reflect culture—others like Sergio Leone’s films make it. And that is why I think so much of him and his films—particularly, Once Upon a Time in the West. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Because “time flies” and so do good ideas—you have to hit them when you get the chance for the motivations only you know about—even if the morality for it only exists outside of time and space in a mythical realm where justice truly does rule—not with blinders—but a six-gun and a lot of tenacity.
I really want to like Quentin Tarantino. I am actually thankful that he has resurrected some fresh music out of the great Italian musical genius of Ennio Morricone in his films Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. I really enjoyed Django Unchained, parts of it, but found the politics distracting. His obvious hatred of the South was too much to fully enjoy his attempt at a western—and I have skipped The Hateful Eight at the box office because I know that Tarantino and his producers at the Weinstein Company are hopeless leftists. Obviously, there are a lot of people who feel the same way as I do. While watching The O’Reilly Factor recently I noticed that The Hateful Eight was under performing at the box office which surprised me. I have been tempted to see it basically to witness that magnificent 70 mm lens Tarantino shot the film with along with an original score by Ennio Morricone. But the politics of Tarantino is just too much to really enjoy his movies completely. With everything that’s good, there are equally bad points politically motivated. But, one thing I do have in common with him is a love of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns. I don’t take pleasure in watching The Hateful Eight fail at the box office. I’d like to see it do well because Hollywood producers will blame the loses on the western genre and not on Tarantino himself, but it is clear that one of the most studied film directors in the world presently is just a second-hander from Knoxville, Tennessee named after the Burt Reynolds character in Gunsmoke. He is not capable of creating from scratch the wildly imaginative stories that Ennio Morricone produced music for as seen below by the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. I must warn you dear reader that some of this is very strange, but as a human achievement applied to the western genre, it was wildly innovative and distinct—and is the reason that a video store clerk like Tarantino wanted to get into film to begin with. Unfortunately the young man missed most of the message and lost sight of the Cowboy Way as a key element to the story. If The Good the Bad and the Ugly is Tarantino’s favorite film, he has grown as a filmmaker into making movies like it, but he obviously forgot to include the good in this plots. And that is ultimately why The Hateful Eight is failing.
I have offered to help modern Hollywood with their problems several times. But I have not been willing to compromise my essential conservatism to do so. To me the Cowboy Way is a very real thing and I live it not just in writing and being in front of the camera—but off-camera as well. I am quite certain that John Wayne would not be able to make films in modern Hollywood—and because of that—I stopped worrying about contributing to the industry to make it better. Many fans of westerns think the many hundreds of Italian westerns called the “spaghetti western” were not a proper reflection of the American western because they often featured “anti-heroes.” It is that aspect that Quentin Tarantino seems particularly obsessed with. Spaghetti westerns often featured complex characters that didn’t always seem so bad or so good, but were sometimes blended together as a kind of gritty combo that made the viewer question the nature of morality. However, I disagree. I think Sergio Leone and his musical collaborator Ennio Morricone were reflections of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch” and that is the key to understanding the morality of the best spaghetti westerns. They aren’t just revenge pictures, they are about the characters overcoming their human limitations to rise above their competition—such as Clint Eastwood surviving gun shots to the heart to beat his rival in the climax of A Fistful of Dollars, or Charles Bronson facing down death and all its possibilities to kill the man who tortured and hung his brother in Once Upon a Time in the West—a wonderful movie. Tarantino understood the revenge, but he missed the “Übermensch” aspect of the characters.
At least at the end of Django Unchained the hero rode off into the sunset with his girl—and I thought that was good. Unfortunately the character succeeded not because he was an Übermensch” but because his rivals were stupid Southern slave holders which of course cheapened the essence of the story. That made Django Unchained a lot of fun and it was truly enjoyable to hear Ennio Morricone again in a western (or what looked like a western) but it lacked the punch of the classic Sergio Leone westerns which is sadly unfortunate, because obviously Tarantino was shooting for that. If I thought he had made an inspired picture uniquely produced by Quentin Tarantino motivated by Sergio Leone I’d go see The Hateful Eight in a second.
I love the spaghetti westerns because of what they represented as an export of American value. Italy was suffering a huge cultural emptiness after the failures of World War II, just as the Japanese had, and they turned to American cinema as a way to lift themselves out of the dust. The Japanese made samurai films based on American westerns and the Italians made westerns for the same reason—so it makes me feel good that America was able to help those two fascist cultures re-invent themselves after their failed insurrections during a colossal world war. Their interpretation of the American western involved a little bit of Nietzsche along with some very innovative music and to me that’s inspiring. America and its values were able to help the world heal after a terrible tragedy and allow them to contribute aspects of their society applied to an American invention and I think that was a very healthy thing for their nations. I love “spaghetti westerns” for that reason. That is my idea of culture—where America exports an idea based on freedom and other societies use that art to lift themselves up to a higher level of thought. The Good the Bad and the Ugly is one of those types of films, it yearns to define a confusing world where good guys and bad guys weren’t so obvious but in the end there was no question. Clint Eastwood could have taken all the gold at the end, but he didn’t. He left his partner with a fair share even though that partner had tried to betray him many times throughout the movie. The “ugly” represented in that classic film could have easily been Italy itself after the war with the old guard of fascism being the “bad.” The “good” was obviously the United States who won World War II and could have taken all the gold, but they didn’t. They took their share of the spoils, but left plenty for everyone else, which is the metaphorical reason that the Sergio Leone movies have so much meaning even now. The Ennio Morricone music simply captured that ambition with extremely creative endeavor that was very unique at the time induced from risk.
Quentin Tarantino missed a lot of these points and all the filmmakers studying him are also going to make the same failure. Tarantino would argue against it, but a movie audience requires a moral tapestry to hang their belief system against—and if that audience has lost that system, they require the filmmaker to give it to them. If neither the audience nor the filmmaker is offering that tapestry, then the project will fail. American westerns helped pull Italy out of the fascism of Mussolini—which was wonderful for their culture. The cinematic western was big enough to even allow other cultures to add their imprint, which Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone was able to apply through art. Tarantino as a filmmaker is missing the essence of his favorite films. He makes movies that look and sound like his favorites, but they lack the punch of those classics because Quentin himself is still trying to figure out what they meant to him. His foundation philosophy is in conflict. He was raised by a guy who loved Burt Reynolds so much that the film director was named after the Gunsmoke character. Now, as a big time Hollywood director surrounded by leftist filmmakers and knuckle dragging slobs— Quentin thinks he’s the standard of filmmaking regarding modern art. Unfortunately, he’s not acquired the mentality of Sergio Leone or Akira Kurasawa yet—and based on his present trajectory, he won’t get there by age 60—and likely never will. So I’ll wait for The Hateful Eight to come out on video and I’ll watch it on my nice television. I may even buy it if Wal-Mart offers it in their $5 bargain bin. But that’s all it means to me, and that fault is Tarantino’s. I get the feeling it wouldn’t take much for Quentin Tarantino and I to be good friends—there is a lot that we both like in common. But he is stuck creatively by the Hollywood priority to have him remain a second-hander to the past instead of doing as a human being what Ennio Morricone did so many years ago—and that’s take a wild chance on a uniquely individual artistic endeavor built by a lifetime of experience.
It is a small radio station but it is doing some of the best work in talk radio that’s out there. I used to do a lot with WLW radio in Cincinnati, but over time I’ve found WAAM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan to be much more positioned to do the good work of conservative contemplation. I’d say it is far superior to 55 KRC in Cincinnati largely because WLW and KRC are both Clear Channel stations run by a large corporate board and WAAM is still family owned and managed by good, solid people. Of course I have been complimentary of The Blaze Radio but I have stopped listening to them because of their anti-Trump stance. That has left me guest hosting and serving as a guest on WAAM nearly exclusively, because I like the owners. It’s not so much the initial broadcast that matters these days, it’s the international reach that comes from the podcasts. People are able to listen online months after the original airing, and more people listen that way these days than they do live. So given that as the factor in a changing marketplace, WAAM is a considerable heavy hitter nationally as they carry Glenn Beck in syndication and Alex Jones—but they have legitimate on air talent like Matt Clark and Steve Crowder who are young guns that show great promise for the future. I’ve talked a lot about Matt, but if you’ve never listened to WAAM you should check out a contemporary of his, Steve Crowder. He has a unique comedy conservativism that is very unique and specific to his generation empowering him to do work like he did below in Detroit. Watch this.
Without people like Crowder, and talk radio in general, nobody would really know the truth about what’s really going on. Regarding Detroit—which used to be one of the most successful cities on earth—television used to be a big exporter from that city in the Midwest. Now it looks like the ruins of an ancient Mayan civilization. It is literally a city of an ancient past. Crowder exhibited this fact by driving into the center of the downtown area and driving out into the outer parts of the city to show how quickly things degraded. It truly is a shocking video shown above to see the facts as Steve Crowder presented them. By turning on the camera and just letting it run until they were in the slums and areas so depleted with population that there was already grass growing where there used to be buildings, Steve Crowder proved his point. The modern city of Detroit is already looking like a lost city in need of archaeological discovery. It is truly amazing to see the effects of a bankrupt city and its impact on the world around it.
As vibrant as Chicago looks today—it is headed in the same direction—as is the United States in general. Two decades ago only the most conspiratorial science fiction writers predicted that Detroit would become a bankrupt city hemorrhaging population and selling homes at a price of $100 dollars. Just one mile out of downtown the once great city of Detroit looks like the ruins of Troy or Giza—only a few religious monuments and fortunate homes have survived the vandalism and destruction of a declining population. You can’t operate at a deficit for so many years and expect to hold value for property. The United States at a nearly $19 trillion deficit as of this writing is where Detroit as a city was two decades ago. It wouldn’t take much for the United States at this phase to resemble Detroit within a decade of now. Nobody back in the heyday of Detroit ever believed it would look the way it does today. They assumed that all the prosperity would go on forever—but it didn’t.
I have a fascination with old western towns. At the time of their construction the residents could never imagine that those towns would ever become in decline. Yet most of them did. Residents of Rome and Egypt during the days of their powerful empires felt the same way; they never could imagine that there would ever be a society where their city or country was not the supreme in the world. The same could be said of modern England which only one hundred years ago had an empire across the whole of the world. Now they are a fraction of their former power and teeming with socialism as a changed society with only their roots into history as mere sympathy. Nothing stays the same if bad management is applied to the maintenance of it. In a car, if it is not maintained properly, it will decline in condition rapidly. In a marriage, if care is not given, it will die. Children require love and attention. Companies require good management to maintain their status as job creators. And for cities to survive, they must have good management.
Most of the failing cities around the world are run by liberals, because the demographic circumstances of mass populations make it so through democratic elections. Needy, dependent people tend to migrate toward each other as rugged individualists like elbow room. So cities tend to have people conglomerated into small areas who all share a level of human bonding and collective social services—and they elect people into office who think the way they do. Now that liberalism is a proven intellectual failure regarding proper management of resources and people—there is a track record to identify—whereas a few decades ago, there wasn’t. Detroit is the evidence of that failure—dramatically. But it’s not alone. As Steve Crowder drove the lonely crime ridden streets of Detroit in the above video, where a vast amount of the population was functionally illiterate—in spite of the free education provided to them—liberalism and its effects were on prolific display. Years ago I wrote a screenplay that made several Wilshire Blvd agents very animated with anger called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia. That script featured a modern horror adventure story about discovering the mysterious reason that the ancient city just outside of St. Louis was suddenly abandoned of its culture and resources. The story was fiction but the premise of the characters was based on my observed opinions. My reason of course was one that certainly went against the Hollywood mentality and just about every academic back then. My proposal was that it was a form of liberalism that destroyed Cahokia and many other ancient cities from Chichen Itza to Ankor Wat. Liberalism centered on self-sacrifice for the greater good in whatever variation of it was presented was my proposal for the destruction of most ancient cities. Detroit is only the modern version of that destruction. Washington D.C. is headed along that path as is all of the state of California. They are on unsustainable paths that are closing in on them rapidly.
Many around the United States however don’t know much about places like Detroit. If they visit, they only see the immediate downtown and not what’s one mile outside the city. So radio guys like Steve Crowder are doing a great service to all of society and their political spectrums. Detroit is a disgrace and people really need to see it, because those problems are coming to a neighborhood near you dear reader. And if you really love something like I think Steve Crowder really loves Detroit—because he was born there—then the best way to save it is to tell the story in a truthful way—not just in tight television shots during a Detroit Lions football game. People need to see what’s just beyond downtown—artificially propped up by federal money and corporate sponsorship to attempt to not make things appear as bad as they really are. That’s the story in Chicago right now. It’s a dead city with only the mask of a living entity on its face. If you want to prevent further casualties from the same fate, it’s time to identify the liberalism that has caused those deaths. And if you want to hear Steve Crowder live on WAAM radio, check him out from 6 am to 9 am on Friday mornings.
I challenge anyone reading this article at any point in the future to give me one example of a liberal society that is successful. And that includes Scandinavia. Give me one example of success. I bet you can’t. They are all future Detroits in the making.
I’ve been saying it for a long time; socialism is the basic philosophy of the Democratic Party. People used to think I was being an extremist when I stated that teacher unions expected socialism from voters and school boards essentially teaching it to students in public education. Most labor unions are functioning socialist enterprises which of course leads directly to small “c” communism. Worse than socialists are “progressives” who have a strong belief in communism as a foundation principle to their style of governing. Most progressives will deny it, but if you placed their belief system on a social scale next to the Bolsheviks of 1919 they would be indistinguishable from each other. There is a reason that progressives and other liberals don’t want people to read Ayn Rand, who as an American novelist wrote quite passionately about communism in her very good book, We the Living. I have known this for a very long time because I am an avid reader, and I understand history so I have been able to function from a position of knowledge and not just the marketing of ideas proposed in what people think is modern times. That’s why it was so ridiculously stupid of Hillary Clinton when pressed by Chris Mathews—who is a fan of the Democratic candidate for president, to declare that she was a progressive Democrat. That is equivalent to saying about herself under a proper definition that she’s a communist socialist.
I don’t have much patience for stupid people—I’ll have to be honest. When I had this education debate years ago within the media, at school boards, in education reform groups—and with other politicians I thought people close to the situation already knew what I was saying, that the essential product of public schools was socialism. I had known it for years, so I assumed that we could have a conversation from a reasonable vantage point. But the mad mothers and fathers angry at me for proposing to take away their tax money for essentially a day time socialist training center—which is what every public school is—provoked a lot of anger which I had no tolerance for. Those idiots thought they would harass me online, come to my house, and attack me through social networks with all the socialist flair utilized in that novel, We the Living and that for some reason I’d just take it. No, that’s not how things work.
This charade has went on for a long time largely because members of the media, like Chris Mathews accepted the revisionist definitions of a party he obviously supports—the Democrats whom he probably believes is still the party of JFK or LBJ. The truth however is that Republicans like Jeb Bush and John Kasich are the new Democrats by proper definitions because the political lens of perception has been moved so far to the political left. So it appears that Chris Mathews and others like him are having a real debate within themselves about the differences between socialists and Democrats or even communists and progressives. The answer has always been there no matter how painful it might have been, or inconvenient.
I said it during many public education debates that if people wanted socialism and voted for it, then so be it—but they better know what it was they were voting for. It’s really not a firm indication of public sentiment if Democrats avoid the proper definition for what they are doing just to win support of the public hoping slowly to cook the American public from capitalism to communism with changed terminology. Democrats and progressives have arrived at this political climate by deceit, not by actually selling who and what they are. What provokes the debate even now is that Bernie Sanders as a president is openly calling himself a socialist which then forces Hillary Clinton to name the difference. Which of course she can, so she did the worst thing she could have done—she called herself worse—essentially a communist. But she hoped that nobody understood the definitions and would bother to look. Of course that doesn’t fly with me.
Hundreds of thousands of people read this blog site every year from countries all over the globe. Most of those people disagree with me about one thing or another. Sometimes they get so angry they call me names which always starts a small war of words. Over the course of the last six years that I have been writing at this site—every single day in voluminous amounts—nobody has been able to dispute my claims factually. Even the worst of the teacher’s union radicals within the state of Ohio could dispute it when I called them all socialists—sometimes quite publicly. I have talked about it on the radio and written about socialism in public schools and most government offices extensively, and nobody at any academic level has been able to dispute it under any circumstance. And believe me, the radical loser professors who call me an anti-education radical gun-nut would love to beat me intellectually if they could—but they can’t. The reason they can’t is for the same reason that Hillary Clinton couldn’t provide a different definition of socialism in comparison to a typical member of the Democratic Party. When the Party’s top voices cannot give a single instance of how Democrats are different from socialists, the truth is staring you right in the face dear reader. And I have been telling you that for a very long time. Once again, people should have listened.
First of all, the crying bastard President Obama does not represent my views—he is not “my” president. I say bastard of him for two reasons, he is obnoxiously disagreeable toward traditional American views, and he was born to unmarried parents as there is a lot of questions regarding his father. So he fulfills the appropriate definition of a bastard by most accepted definitions—so it’s not a derogatory term. Regarding the crying, I said the same thing about John Boehner. In spite of what modern feminists and other progressives say, it’s not alright for a man to cry over stupid things. Gun violence and mass shootings are nearly exclusively the result of mismanagement by the government. Government in most cases has created the violent communities that shootings occur in, like Chicago. Or they have let terrorists fester within our borders without acting before terror activities have occurred. Americans have given up a lot of freedoms supposedly for the sake of security and that has turned out to be a stupid thing to do. Government has failed to do its job and now they want more power to do an even worse job—and to get it, the president resorted to crying like a child and that is pathetic.
The video above is a warning from Canada where their gun laws are pacing themselves to the rest of the so-called developed world—the kind of world the crying Obama referred to. It is the direction America is heading so pay attention to it. In it a gun rights supporter was condemned by the government every way they legally could for defending his property from some assailants launching firebombs at him. The Canadian government did not want him to defend his property especially with a firearm, so they did worse to him personally than the fire bombers. It is a very sad case and is the direction that gun laws in America by cry baby politicians want to take our society. It’s the wrong direction and should be reversed immediately.
The attack on that individual gun owner has the very subtle inclination that property rights are not the value of any individual possession, so there should never be an instance where an individual should have to defend themselves or their possessions. To the progressive descendant of communism individuals should surrender themselves to criminal intent for the benefit of the greater good. If a criminal wants something you have, they should have the right to it under the umbrella of wealth redistribution and no individual should feel compelled to take a life for the protection of a possession. The same mentality resides within the realm of a spouse—this is why progressives seek to demean family value with gay rights and welfare programs—to weaken individual input. Therefore, guns should not be allowed to protect an individual from criminal intent because to their view as a mass society of collectivism, collateral damage is perfectly acceptable—if the greater good is placed as a value over individuals and their possessions.
But that is clearly not the type of society that we have in the United States. Our politicians do not currently represent the type of people who currently make up most of the American population between city areas. Most of those politicians manipulated their way by default into positions of power only to turn their eyes toward Europe for guidance and that’s not acceptable—especially when people like Obama standing in our White House cry to the world about how he wants to stop gun violence on a mass scale but fails to shed a tear when a white woman is gunned down by an illegal alien in San Francisco for no reason at all—but mass government mismanagement. The tears are only shed for the collective entity of our global population, not the rights of one woman, or her father when a cold-blooded killer took away from them the love they shared as a possession of emotion.
That is just how sick progressives are in their views of the world. They will support the mass extinction of babies through abortion, and support the terrorism in the Middle East but will take a hard stand against the rancher who wants to protect their grazing rights or an individual gunman who protects their wife or home from an assailant. Their broken philosophy is always an emphasis on mass collectivism as opposed to individual integrity. That is why so many progressives have mental illnesses—where their values are not reflected in their daily actions—because they associate behavior by the values of the collective as opposed to their own private behavior. So if everyone is acting poorly, whether they are drunken losers or a mob rioting in the streets they can justify the morality of bad behavior by the measurement of the group association. If everyone is doing wrong, then it’s OK to also do so—so long as a majority is in agreement.
That in essence is the largest problem that there is in regard to Obama’s executive orders against personal firearms issued on January 5th 2016—because it gives those same masses the ability to define sanity. On the surface the proposals sound reasonable, background checks strengthening, gun show restrictions, and attempting to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally deficient. The trouble is that the door is now open for the government to determine that every person on some sort of pain medication or depression illness is subject to the interpretation of being mentally unstable to purchase or own a firearm. Additionally, the slippery slope of judgment for sanity will be interpreted by government with the same rationalization that we see among the current masses—the depraved lunatics of urban riots, public schools, and open socialists—the Bernie Sanders type of supporters. Mental acuity will then be determined by the victor of whatever political party holds the White House at any particular time which would be bad for both sides. With that additional interpretation the same government that decided that it was alright for the IRS to use a tax status to badger Tea Party groups will determine what constitutes mental health.
For the family that believes that a housewife should watch over the children at home in a very traditional way, and has a personal history of protesting Smart Meters—a progressive run federal government would likely view that behavior as insane and would prohibit those citizens from owning firearms. A similar family that has a Twitter history showing strong conservative views would likely put those citizens on a watch list banning further purchases of guns. It would be as simple as that. The pattern around the world from Canada to Australia is already in place, we have the fortune in America to see what our current politicians are up to, because they are copying those fools from Europe and other places on removing firearms from their society to make way for some strategy that certainly works against individual liberty. If allowed to feaster, Obama’s path would certainly lead to a similar letter as those proposed in Canada—be prepared to surrender firearms of a certain make and model until they are all gone from society and confiscated by the government. They never do things in swift strokes, but over a long period of time gradually wearing down resistance to their diabolical utterances.
I’ve had a Federal Firearms License before, so I know what it’s like for them to demand to see your paperwork in the middle of dinner, or on a Friday afternoon while you’re sitting naked in your hot tub with your wife just enjoying the day in your own backyard. When given the right for some pin headed bureaucrat to harass an individual, they nearly always do. Because their value system is not based on individual integrity, but mass approval—so if their peers approve of their behavior of harassment, then they feel validated to do so—they use government coercion to exert force on individuals so to preserve the collective masses and their whims of necessity.
Guns were always meant to protect the individual against mass tyranny and to guarantee that private property would remain valuable in the course of American history. Confiscation is the path to losing all freedoms and giving the drooling mouths of bureaucrats all the power they need to exact tyranny upon individuals and their possessions. Hidden behind the government and their global backers is the long diabolical yearnings of communism which fuels their effort, the Karl Marx war against individuality and personal property. So it is behind that premise that governments are at war with firearms and what drives Obama to cry in front of the world because deep down inside his essential being, he has a lot more in common with Karl Marx than he does Thomas Jefferson. It is because of menaces like Barack Obama and all his progressive friends that Jefferson uttered……………“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” You can’t very well do that if they are armed, and you’re not. Hence, the reason for gun control around the world.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s do-it-himself plan for keeping guns away from those who shouldn’t have them falls far short of what he’d hoped to accomplish through legislation after a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School shook the country in 2012.
Yet even the more modest steps Obama will announce Tuesday rely on murky interpretations of existing law that could be easily reversed by his successor.
Obama’s package of executive actions aims to curb what he’s described as a scourge of gun violence in the U.S., punctuated by appalling mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tucson, Arizona, among many others. After Newtown, Obama sought far-reaching, bipartisan legislation that went beyond background checks.
At that late hour with my gun fixed, talk radio broadcasting interesting debate, I felt wonderful not just for repair job successfully performed, but because the gun as a hobby was a reminder that in America I don’t have to worship at the feet of any aristocrat or noble character of any kind. If the President walked up to my home at that moment there wouldn’t be any bowing or pandering going on. I’d simply look at him like some little girl selling Girl Scout cookies—since he likes to cry so much. I’d listen to what he wanted then decide to help him or not. But I wouldn’t be compelled to do anything—and it is the gun that gives me that freedom and keeps us sanctimonious even as radical politicians create executive orders to make America into something they are more comfortable with—because they were essentially too lazy to embrace our culture and do the work themselves of adopting its values into their lives. That is why Obama’s executive orders are such an insult and why Brownells continues to be one of my favorite companies on planet earth. I just love those guys!
