Most religions believe in some form of reincarnation around the world—where the spirit of an entity returns to the world of the living in some other form, whether it’s a dog, cat, or another human being—it is something that is heavily revered around the world. Even George Patton believed that he was an ancient warrior from days long gone and that he had been on earth before. One of the things I have always liked most about Star Wars is that they took kid’s topics and wrapped them very carefully into modern religion. The nature of the “Force” is an unusual concept that combines many world religions into an updated moral grounding that I have always thought was healthy.
Star Wars for me was the gateway to Joseph Campbell’s teachings which I discovered during my college age days. I was so affected by Joseph Campbell that traditional college lost its meaning and it sent me into a five-year deep dive from about 19 to 24 years of age reading all his books, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God series from his work in Transformations of Myth Through Time. When I wasn’t reading Joseph Campbell I was listening to him. I had about twenty hours of lectures by Campbell on tape which I listened to at my various jobs for several years to the point where I knew the material backwards and forward. For another five years I spent reading all the supplement books which inspired Campbell—books like Finnegan’s Wake and Thus Spoke Zarathustra and studying great artists like James Joyce and Thomas Mann so that I could understand Campbell much better. I did all this essentially because Star Wars had inspired in me a desire to deep dive the material of myth and how it informed the human mind about the world we live in and the world that exists beyond four-dimensional living.
I probably could have become something of a museum curator or some world traveler doing work in this field of mythic interpretation—but instead I wanted to turn even further inward and read more and think more. I took jobs that would give me time to read and write yet still take care of my growing family. For me—for about twenty years—from age 20 to 40 years of age I was in my own version of Luke’s Dagobah—working hard, but intellectually developing myself rather intensely and I loved it. My mother told me that when I was one and two years old that I said strange things about the world around me as I was learning—as if I had always known certain things. I don’t think it had anything to do with reincarnation but instead being able to understand what pours forth from the eternal spring of life essence which is at the heart of everything—call it God, call it the “Force” it is beyond human definition. I’ve described my teenage years as being extremely fearless—because I felt I understood that the universe wanted me to live and I pushed my limits to the extreme to see how forgiving it was—and I turned out to be right—it wanted me to live. This evoked in me a strong sense about individualism because it takes such people to tap that well. So this life spent over the subsequent twenty years was designed to figure out the essence of that well the best I could—mostly through literature and artists from the previous 2000 years and a study through Joseph Campbell of comparative religions around the world. I felt that the Star Wars novels were some of the greatest explorations into the nature of life beyond life that I had come across and they were great contributions to the tapestry of mythology. The plot lines in some cases could have been better but the explorations into the “Force” were important in my view—and it was a shame to eject all that for some Disney commercial tripe.
However, in my view this revelation about Rey is something I think advances Star Wars properly—let me just say that. It’s a fairly high concept that will conceivably provoke in many young people hopefully a similar journey as I have been on over most of my life. I will say that if it turns out to be the case, that I will be impressed—which is likely why the information was leaked in the first place. I have been very down on Star Wars since The Force Awakens. Like I said, I haven’t played any video games, or even watched the television show Rebels since seeing The Force Awakens on December 17th 2015.
The mind bender which is pretty important and contrary to our lives is that a soul in whatever configuration that it entails isn’t necessarily the sex it was while it resided in a body during what we might call “life.” When first thinking about the possible direction of the next Star Wars movie, Episode 8, I thought it was a Disney attempt to appease gay rights advocates. But, it is deeper than that—and that’s important. I think it’s so important that I’d consider giving Star Wars another chance because it just might advance the human race—not into the sexual rolls that we play as human beings but into the essence of what we are all made of in the eternal aspect.
However, the roles we play as a culture is important too. Men are men, and women are women—nobody would think to walk into a Navajo tribe and start telling them to make sand paintings different or to rearrange their culture in some disrespectful way—and nobody should attack traditional American culture in a disrespectful fashion the way that progressives do. I would argue that only American culture could produce something like Star Wars in this modern age—because it requires freedom and financial resources to extrapolate from the depths of imagination and to put it in front of the masses in such a spectacular fashion where literally the Internet was buzzing around the globe at the leak about Rey’s parentage. So forcing gay subject matter down the throats of Disney fans is not what I’m talking about. But a sexless existence that is eternal is something I can get excited about. If Star Wars is knocking on the door to heavy mythic representations—then I will go in the door behind it. If not, I’ll be done with it forever. This news about Rey is encouraging to me. I could get on board with that. There may be hope for Star Wars yet.
Matt Clark needed to head out-of-town so he asked me to host his WAAM radio show at 1 PM on Saturday, which I accepted. For just such occasions I now have a home studio to broadcast from since with my busy schedule, it is nearly impossible for me to actually do so from a fixed location. It had been a very busy Saturday morning—so busy that there wasn’t even time to eat breakfast, so as I was doing show prep about a half hour before going on the air my wife brought me some Chick-fil-A to eat. While I ate I was watching the news on a studio monitor. This is what I saw:
WASHINGTON — Saudi Arabia has told the Obama administration and members of Congress that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets held by the kingdom if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in American courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Once I got on the air I unloaded all the connecting events that had happened just during that particular news week and finished off with the conclusion that America was at the end of its rope. We needed to take action right now to correct our treacherous conditions otherwise we wouldn’t get a second chance. This is what it sounded like. Click the link, sit back and listen—then share it with a friend.https://soundcloud.com/clarkcast/april-16-2016-guest-hosted-by-rich-hoffman-4-16-16-podcast
First I spoke about the Russian jets buzzing American ships in the Baltic. Putin has been openly challenging American interests around the globe. He calculated that under the Obama presidency that the military would not fire on his pilots and that he could flex his muscle in the Baltic region. He was right much to all of our embarrassments. America should have shot down those Russian jets. It is hard to take the life of other people, but the Russians shouldn’t have provoked our military.
Donald Trump is about to win New York big, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Running a populist campaign Trump is at a severe disadvantage to other political candidates who know the system better than him, because they helped create the rules. Trump needs a very dominating victory in New York otherwise this whole election process will linger on needlessly. Kasich is going nowhere, and neither is Cruz. For the sake of the Republican Party, it needs to get behind Trump. Otherwise Trump will need to start his own party so that the focus can shift to a general election victory instead of all the party oriented politics.
Hillary Clinton is running for president even though she’s under investigation by the FBI. Think about how amazing that is—we actually have the first woman running for president with a barrage of scandals on her coat tails—and she’s the expected front-runner. This would have been the story of the decade in the 80s or 90s, but with all the topics of our day, it’s just one element that is almost background noise.
We have over 19 trillion dollars in national debt which to me is the biggest story of all. We are actually talking about 21 trillion dollars within a few years of now, and that is unfathomable. On the radio show I proceeded to talk about all the regions of the country planning to file for bankruptcy to get out from under all this massive debt—but there is nowhere to run. At the current 19 trillion-dollar deficit it exceeds our national GDP and is big trouble for having any hope at actually paying it off in our lifetimes. This is the clear exhibition of incompetent management of our government and it demands immediate action to avoid default. The only way out is massive economic expansion of 7% to 10%–to have a chance at surviving with our national sovereignty.
Socialists around the country are demanding $15 dollars an hour for minimum wage which is insane. Money is a measurement of value—if money is just handed out indiscriminately, it loses its value and inflation is invoked. It is truly pathetic that more people do not understand basic economic concepts. Fast-food workers are not worth $15 dollars an hour by market measurement. The government backed increase will only cost jobs because it will force companies to automate their processes to cover their margins. To the socialists that are causing all these problems globally, they just don’t understand that money is a measurement of values which they don’t see or understand because their emphasis is on equality—which essentially is a unit of measure that throws out all judgment. You can’t have any kind of functional society without human judgment. One thing I do on this site is write abundant articles on archaeology, as I am pretty obsessed with the causes of demise regarding ancient cultures. I would attribute this tendency of demise to the Vico cycle which is a recurring theme given to human inclination hard-wired into our brains. It is up to us to rewire ourselves to think differently and to make a conscious decision to step away from that destructive cycle. The $15 dollar an hour minimum wage proposal is a promise to destroy our economy—which has always been the goal of socialists.
John Kasich is an unmitigated, delusional idiot totally out of touch from reality. Watching him run for president makes you wonder if that guy has actually retained his sanity. I think he has lost it somewhere over the last few years—he is certainly not the same person I knew back in 2010. He sounds like a babbling fool and he’s just embarrassing. He has no moral platform to even consider being nominated for president and he’s functioning under the assessment that he does. I get messages from his campaign every day talking about how he’s the only guy who can beat Hillary in a head to head election. Give me a break. I don’t think he could win at anything against anybody. He’s a buffoon obviously surrounded by complete idiots. His type of politician is exactly what has screwed up our government in the first place. It’s hard to believe that people like him are out there until you hear him talk and realize that he has so much support from the establishment. No wonder we are in so much trouble.
Bernie Sanders is actually beating Hillary head to head as a socialist—and that points to a radical shift in our country. Young people like Sanders, they are ready to embrace socialism because we’ve allowed the concept to be taught in our public schools and colleges, and now they are voters. As of now there is a strong chance that he could be the Democratic nominee and he has half the country at his back. Remember when Mitt Romney received all types of flack, which probably alone destroyed his 2012 campaign for president when he made the 47% comment? What he said was true and now just four years later those 47% are looking at an open socialist like Bernie Sanders and thinking hard about voting for him just so they can get free stuff. That is a serious problem—economically, and ethically.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asked his employees this week if they should publicly denounce Donald Trump. I see Zuckerberg as just a stupid kid—a little midget boy who is about the same age as my kids who got lucky with some code that he wrote. His politics are consistent with other Millennials taught progressive ideology in public schools and George Soros activism from publications like MoveOn.org and Think Progress. Those publications then inspire more mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone and The Huffington Post. Zuckerberg even though he’s a billionaire is an open border socialist and he is the next great threat to our American Republican after George Soros finally dies off. The problem with Zuckerberg is that he has name recognition and a product that most everyone in America is using and loves. He is the Lex Luther of our real world—and he has to be stopped. For that reason, I am not on Facebook. As I explained on the radio, the people helping me with my book projects created Facebook accounts for those novels, but I personally don’t have anything to do with them because I reject Mark Zuckerberg in every way shape and form. He is an American villain.
The Ohio legislature is ready to throw in the towel to pro marijuana activists early in the fight to legalize medical pot before there is a vote in November. Again, as I explained on the radio, I am against pot in every way shape and form. I don’t take drugs, not even aspirin, so I’m dead-set against more drug legalization—especially medical marijuana. In Ohio, the legislators want to get their hands on the tax money that pot could bring to the state, because they are so miserably hungry for another revenue stream which will allow them to redistribute more tax payer money to people who don’t deserve it—that they’ll do and say anything—even create a marijuana bill avoiding tax payers at the ballot box in November. They are all villains as well, and they are selling out their state because they are lazy fools guilty of mismanaging our government.
And finally Puerto Rico wants to file for bankruptcy, it is $70 billion in debt and there is no hope of coming out of it. Democrats are against the proposed bill which is in front of Paul Ryan because it prevents a raise of the minimum wage in that territory as they push for socialist increases across America. If Puerto Rico is granted bankruptcy protection then following will be states like California and cities like Chicago who are all on unsustainable economic paths. So house Republicans have a major problem on their hands far worse than whether or not Donald Trump is their nominee. We have major, major, major problems and nobody is talking about it—because the consideration is so unpleasant.
So it was a busy one hour broadcast that rivals anything that you can hear on talk radio. Since Matt gave me an open opportunity on WAAM’s airwaves and I already had the hour blocked off, I took the time to make the case in a way that connects the dots for everyone listening not only to the live broadcast, but the podcast later. It’s valuable information that nobody in the mainstream news is able to provide to their supporters, because the complex nature prevents a correct understanding. But I have a unique background and an ability to tie it all together so I did. Hopefully you will enjoy the broadcast and will take the time to share it with someone you care about. Because we all have some hard decisions to make and we need good information to help us make them.
There was a lot not to like about Quentin Tarantino’s latest film The Hateful Eight. I personally didn’t see it when it came out in theaters around Christmas of 2015 because of Tarantino’s political activism against police, but I put it on the checklist. It was sold as a western shot in 70mm traditional wide—just as Ben Hur was many years ago—so I figured it would be worth watching. My chance came once it was released to the home theater market and I was a little excited about it. But after two hours of movie realizing that the whole thing was going nowhere, I was very concerned that if Tarantino was the best that Hollywood had to offer—that they consider him a “modern” Shakespeare–that there is no wonder their movie industry was in trouble. At that point there was still about 45 minutes of movie left to show and I was ready to turn it off—but didn’t because I already had too much time invested.
This is what happens when someone becomes so full of themselves—and have been told by hundreds of aspiring actors and progressive movie producers that they are the greatest thing to arrive since fire. They forget that people actually will see their movies and that those people think very differently about the world than those tucked up against the mountains of California and the Pacific Ocean. The only good characters in The Hateful Eight was the Kurt Russell character. Samuel Jackson wasn’t the greatest and once he revealed an oral sex scene with another guy—I decided I didn’t like him and didn’t want to invest any more time into learning about him. Most of the movie took place inside a cabin getting to know all these characters who were telegraphed very early to being all completely killed off. There was no point to their stories or the interaction between them because it all led to one place—death.
The Hateful Eight is like a person being walked to an execution getting to know all the people spitting on him along the way. It just doesn’t make any sense because that person was going to be dead soon—so why waste the time? It was just horrendously stupid. Beautifully photographed, good soundtrack—most of the time—but just a stupid story—I can’t believe anybody read that script and thought it the work of a genius—and I can’t believe anybody gave Tarantino money to make that movie.
Coming from a guy who shares with me a love for the great movie, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Tarantino obviously isn’t at the same level of Sergio Leone, and I went into The Hateful Eight hoping sincerely that he was. Not even close—not even close to the sincerity of a spaghetti western, which I thought was the point of The Hateful Eight. It ended up being just another sign of a broken and declining culture that doesn’t make anything original anymore—even though all the tools were provided. To suggest that The Hateful Eight is anything close to the masterpiece Hamlet, just because everyone ended up dead in the end is ridiculous. There weren’t any sympathetic characters for which to hang a morality on in Tarantino’s movie. All the characters were villains and none of them were people I’d want to get to know if they sat down next to me at a bar.
Even using the barroom metaphor with The Hateful Eight seems underwhelming. Typically when a man wants to pick up a girl in a bar he engages in small talk to get her to reveal bits about herself. Once she decides to talk about herself the conversation evolves into more personal matters. Then as a climax and some trust won, the girl decides whether or not she wants to sleep with the guy. It’s a little mating game that our species plays to make the experience not seem so cheap. The Hateful Eight is like walking up to that girl and just flatly saying, “Let’s have sex.” Then spending three hours talking about all the things you should have talked about before blurting out the obvious. It was just despicable as a story—pathetic at every level.
I have liked other Tarantino movies—I thought Pulp Fiction was clever, and I enjoyed his work in other things—but I wouldn’t say he’s a master of anything. He’s only smart compared to the very stupid people who now make up the Hollywood industry which these days are just a few rungs above raw porn in its creative impulse. I am really glad that I did not go to see this Tarantino western at the theater because I would have been angry at wasting the money. The Hateful Eight wasn’t a western; it was a monstrosity of undeveloped ideas from a director who obviously has personal problems holding back his artistic ability.
As an example of how all westerns should be presented these days, The Revenant is still the featured example. If you are going to make a western, at least put in the work. So what if someone stole the script to The Hateful Eight and that’s why Tarantino made it into a feature film. The material wasn’t so good that an eight year old child couldn’t have written it—so whatever provoked big money donors to give Tarantino money for that piece of crap sadly overrated the ability of the troubled, progressive filmmaker. The movie wasn’t just bad enough to write a poor review about, it was bad enough that I personally feel like I was robbed just by watching it, because I can’t get back my time. It would have been a much better movie if Samuel Jackson hadn’t forced a naked man to perform oral sex on him, because in the last dying moments he was the only one left and I couldn’t help but think that he was the last person I wanted to see on the screen in the end. Given that, he was the best character in the movie after Kurt Russell’s character died of poisoning. The Hateful Eight was horrendous filmmaking and storytelling at its absolute lowest. Sadly, it represents a new generation that thinks it’s the work of genius—because people are now so stupid and have such a low opinion of themselves that they don’t know any better. People now can actually relate to these despicable characters. And that’s the real problem with The Hateful Eight and the filmmakers who put that trash on the screen.
I was not a fan of The Force Awakens. I still think it was a rip-off fan film and it wasn’t very good. It’s obvious to me that Star Wars saw its best days under the control of George Lucas and that it will forever be in a declined state. I was a tremendous fan of Star Wars because under Lucas they had established a nice storyline that embodied several video games, novels, comics and of course the movies themselves into on giant mythology—and that mythology had a conservative lean to it—rooted in Ayn Rand oriented individualism. Now it is clear that when Lucasfilm under Kathy Kennedy released The Star Wars comic series about two years before the release of The Force Awakens that they were telegraphing what they were going to do with the many novels that had been written after The Return of the Jedi in 1983—they were going to rip them off and retell many of the stories because they thought they needed to be more Huffington Post oriented progressive stories instead of Ayn Ran. In that comic series Lucasfilm took George Lucas’ original screenplay and turned into a comic to show how rough the story had been compared to what ended up on screen—as a ploy to justify what they were about to do to the Extended Universe. Well, that’s all water under the bridge and Star Wars is forever ruined for me—because I had stayed with them through many years—and they let me down. Now that I know that, I can at least appreciate what telling some of those old stories from the books to cinematic vision can do for a new generation desperate for some positive mythology and after seeing the trailer for the new Rogue One film by Garth Edwards, I am encouraged. Lucasfilm might earn back a little respect with it because it looks nicely done.
The sad thing about that movie and premise is that it is essentially a retelling of the story of the video game Dark Forces and the name of the female lead is essentially a take on Kyle Katarn’s trusted ship captain. Dark Forces was the first video game I ever played with my oldest daughter and it was a special story for us, and now Lucasfilm is going to screw that up too—but I think Edwards will do the story justice. I suppose the sad thing for me is that there won’t be any new ideas coming out of Star Wars. But the value of what has been told is important and to a new generation that is seeing some of this stuff for the first time—these movies are good for them. This is consistent with the Disney Company that has taken stories told over time and put a modern take to them for their movies. There is value in retelling a story, so to that extent I’m glad to see Star Wars doing what it’s doing.
It gives me hope that the future stand alone films featuring Han Solo and Boba Fett will be very good and dramatic—even though the topics have been covered in the novels of the past. It is still fun to see these things put into a movie even if the story is better in the original novelizations. Let’s face it, not many people read any more, so at least these stories will get told. Rogue One, I would say will arguably in that case will be better than the original story of Dark Forces. So if that’s what Disney is going to do, I suppose it’s better than nothing. I see Star Wars as just another remake the way that Godzilla was recently retold with an updated spin on a classic story. I am looking forward to Rogue One because it tips the hat toward the spirit of the original trilogy and I trust that director to do a good job. It will be fun to visit that universe again by someone who obviously loved the original film as much as I did—if not more.
Still, I can’t help but think how special Star Wars could have been if they had stuck to the carefully planned books. But Hollywood in general has lost its creative impulse—very few filmmakers these days have any imagination and those that do can’t get funded for their projects because backers are caught in a static pattern that is dangerous to their own industry. All of Hollywood is stuck in this creative vacuum of copying off old books and comics to update stories for a more visual format. I had the benefit of seeing Star Wars when everything was truly new and original and I wanted that freshness for this new generation. But it can still be good. Just not as good.
Since The Force Awakens I have been pretty staunchly anti-Star Wars. My brother and kids have been a little sad that I can’t share my enthusiasm for it as I once did. To me the death of Han Solo was essentially the death of Star Wars. It will never mean the same to me, especially with the progressive direction that they are going. I don’t care about the minority roles or the strong female characters—but the collectivism push is something I just can’t get into—stories where the individuals take a backseat for the collective benefit of everyone. With Han Solo, everything was better, his selfishness epitomized Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy wonderfully. It may have been unintentional by George Lucas, but it was very pro capitalist leaving A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back the best two movies likely to ever be made for the Star Wars saga. It was exciting to see images of costumes, ships, sounds, and other elements of those two movies in the Rogue One preview—so I’m sure it will be enjoyable. I may not enjoy it as much as I otherwise would, but Lucasfilm has a chance to win me back just a little.
To put things in perspective, since I was like 10 years old I bought every single video game that was ever released for Star Wars the first week it came out. I loved every one of them, particularly the Dark Forces games, Force Unleashed, and Rebel Assault. That lasted until essentially The Force Awakens. I dropped Star Wars like a rock and pushed it out of my mind completely. It was so bad that when we finally bought a Playstation 4, I had the option of buying one with the Star Wars: Battlefront option, or with the Call of Duty bundle—I picked Call of Duty. I don’t want to play that game because I don’t want to play as a bad guy—because they force you to if you want to play online. And I refuse to play any game that makes me shoot at the Millennium Falcon or Han Solo flying it. So Battlefront is the first Star Wars video game that I haven’t bought. I’ve even bought game systems to play specific Star Wars games. I would love to play Battlefront as the rebellion. But I have absolutely no interest in playing as the Empire. To my mind, George Lucas was treading on shaking ground when he attempted to humanize the bad guys in his prequels. But I thought there were good points to make, and I personally liked Obi-Wan enough to hang with Lucas through those stories. But without a good guy to hang morality onto, Star Wars falls apart and becomes just another average story.
Fortunately, it looks like Garth Edwards understands what makes Star Wars good, so I am encouraged, and will likely see the new Star Wars film when it comes out in December. I’ll give it a second chance to win my respect. I think it was pathetic that The Force Awakens only made a bit over 2 billion dollars—it could have made more. I’m sure Disney executives are happy, but they are obviously unaware of their short-sightedness. So we’ll see. We were so serious about Star Wars that my family had been planning to go to London this upcoming summer to attend the Star Wars Celebration there in 2016. Those plans changed after Force Awakens quickly. We’re not going. It remains to be seen how good Rogue One turns out to be. If it is respectful to Dark Forces, then I might be able to like it. If it craps all over it, then that will likely be it for me. My opinion is pending successful implementation.
This might seem strange to some, but I love the concept of Pee Wee Herman. It was quite a lot of fun for me to watch the first Pee Wee film in over twenty years on Netflix called Pee Wee’s Big Holiday. It’s an exclusive for Netflix but has shown in a few theaters across the nation. Pee Wee to me is such a wonderful character. I get a lot of joy out of watching Paul Reuben play an adult who essentially never entered puberty. His Pee Wee character is a fantasy look into what we all might look like if we never stopped being children—which most of the time I think is a shame—that we all do grow up. I can say that my first daughter was literally born while watching Pee Wee’s Playhouse at the hospital in 1989, which my wife and I never missed together. We looked forward to every Saturday so we could watch it together. During that particular episode she laughed really hard. There were no doctors in the room at the time as they were waiting for her to dilate, and my daughter was born. I actually had to hold my daughter’s head to keep her from falling out into that little bag that is supposed to capture all the afterbirth. Ironically it was that same daughter who was doing a photo shoot of me and we were finished for the day and had a rare afternoon together with only me, my daughter and my wife all in the same place when I noticed a Hollywood Reporter article about the new Pee Wee movie. So we sat down and literally watched it the moment that Netflix put it on their site. It was one of the rare joys I have had in a number of years, I simply loved it!
I suppose this little proclamation requires a back story. It has become a consistent observation that when a major social character who has the public eye out-lives the requirements of whatever system they are a part of, strange stories emerge to destroy their careers. For instance, when Brett Favre was having a hard time retiring from professional football, stories about him sending pictures of his penis to females emerged to force him into retirement following a scandal to knock him off his pedestal. Payton Manning was going through something similar; he was on the fence as to whether or not to retire when a story emerged from his college days attacking his squeaky clean image with sexual imposition. The clear message to Payton was, “get out while you are on top so we don’t have to tear you down.” The college story which had been kept under wraps for over two decades was a warning shot, and Payton wisely listened. Paul Reuben had dominated 1980s comedy during a vibrant Reagan era and had outlived his shelf life. This will just let you examine how much things have changed in just a few decades dear reader.
After the movie that essentially got Tim Burton his big directorial break, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure came out in 1985 both Paul Reuben and Tim Burton launched themselves into successful careers that were wildly imaginative—and boyishly playful. Reuben from 1986 to 1990 did a children’s show on Saturday mornings called Pee Wee’s Playhouse which featured Laurence Fishburne and many others on the smash hit—which was the show that my first daughter was born to. In 1991 Paul Reuben was noticed by a sting officer masturbating at an adult movie theater and was arrested. Paul Reuben offered to do a charity spot for the local police to make the whole incident “go away” but the press got a hold of the story and it essentially destroyed the career of Reuben and his Pee Wee character thereafter.
Toys “R” Us dropped the Pee Wee Herman toy line and CBS stopped airing immediately Pee Wee’s Play House and the character was effectively wiped off the map. Within months Paul Reuben was forced into hiding disgraced. Of course over the next ten years as the Clinton’s moved into the White House that same media effectively destroyed the office of president by letting out all the sexually charged secrets of Bill and Hillary Clinton. By the end of the 1990s masturbation in a movie theater was the least of our worries and with the advent of the Internet and home video markets, pornography exploded into virtually every home. Masturbation was normalized and no longer taboo—in fact it was encouraged by teachers of progressive society. If Paul Reuben had been arrested just five years later, his story would have died before it ever got started, but forever after Pee Wee Herman had been established as a pervert dangerous to children.
Boldly Reuben appeared in Batman Returns which of course was one of the original superhero films that launched this modern era we see today from Warner Bros and Disney. Tim Burton loyal to Reuben because of their friendship from the set of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure cast the actor to play the father of the villain “The Penguin.” Ironically on the modern television show Gothem, Reuben reprised his role from that 1992 film playing the father of the modern Penguin. One thing that I greatly admire about Reuben is that he has been very tenacious—he has stuck around and fought his way through obvious discrimination to make a living for himself—even though the parts offered to him were greatly limited ever since that original arrest. Reuben tried for years to get his Pee Wee character up off the mat and back out into the media world and he just couldn’t get any takers. Nobody would touch it.
However, in 2015 because of the wild success of video streaming to give Hollywood a run for its money in production values, Netflix announced that they would take on the Pee Wee character once again giving Reuben a second chance. They shot the short picture which I’d call essentially a remake of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure—only without all the special effects—and it was released in 2016 as an exclusive on Netflix. So I was quite proud to be one of the first to sit down and watch it. I have not laughed that hard in a long time. Even at 63 years old Reuben played the eternally youthful Pee Wee perfectly. It was a wonderfully innocent film full of fun and laughs.
There is nothing wrong with looking at the human species and criticizing its evolution—we have minds and were meant to think and question the nature of things. Saying that, I think it’s a mistake to surrender our innocence as children to the barrage of hormonal ineptitude that we find after puberty—where biology takes over and we become a sexually based species. I can’t help but think that this world would be so much better if we just took sex out of it and could interact with each other the way children do—innocently and full of inquisitive playfulness. For context, I approach everything I do in life with playful optimism. I just steered a multimillion dollar project to completion using a playful approach that kept everyone’s creative juices flowing without pretension through a very hard project with lots of technical complications. So I clearly understand the benefit of Pee Wee Herman as a cultural character in our complex society and there is something very important about him—which was an invention of Paul Reuben. We should all thank him for his philosophic contributions to the essence of our very foundations as human beings.
If you get a chance to watch Pee Wee’s Big Holiday, you should do it! Its great fun, wildly original—and innocent. I don’t think there was one sexually provocative innuendo within the entire story. It was very much the kind of movie a 6-year-old child would have made, and I mean that as a compliment. I wish more youthful innocence would find its way into the adult consciousness because when I look around at my contemporaries I see defeated people—people who gave up their childhoods and retreated into biological entities of procreation and easy marketing for product placement. What Reuben has done with his Pee Wee character is very hard—he has maintained a youthful playfulness that most people lose at age 11 and kept touch with it well into his 60s. And I admire him for it. Now, if you don’t mind “I’m going to let you let me leave.”
It was just a few years ago that the Chicago Teacher’s Union had a strike that lasted for quite a while and now those radical, socialist, ungrateful, overly paid baby sitters are at it again walking off the job completely for one day to protest state funding—which does not exist—and giving 400,000 students no place to go but libraries, churches and other “contingency sites,” while their parents slaved away at a job to pay for college which is often the intellectual final nail in their youthful coffins. Sadly, as much as teachers—especially those protesting in the streets of Chicago stopping traffic and being an extreme nuisance and burden on society—the kids were let down by every adult in their lives. Their teachers were socialist activists, their parents too busy to stay home and care for them, and the media missed the entire point of the whole matter. People wonder why kids grow up so stupid, why they become activists themselves for Bernie Sanders socialism—well, they learned it in their public schools—socialist brothels of intellectual destruction and left-winged propaganda. The March 2016 one day strike by the teacher’s union in Chicago was one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen this year—and it should be a lesson to all what we’ve allowed to happen.
I say it quite a lot and have for quite a number of years—children would be far better off if parents just left them alone at home playing Playstation or Xbox all day instead of going to the socialist oriented public schools that our nation has given us. It’s a hard reality most people can’t get their minds around—because it’s such an inconvenient truth—but we should have always known what was coming, as the whole operation was ran by a giant public sector labor union. The only real goal of the teacher’s union has been to make students into left-winged radicals. Luckily, not everyone grows up to become a socialist, and not all teachers individually are bad people. There are many in that Chicago protest crowd who likely have no idea what socialism is, or understand what their role in this whole debacle has been—but history defines it for us and shows the direction we are all headed.
As this protest raged there were some startling statistics about the demographic nature of a future America by 2050 which came out. Leftists are absolutely addicted to diversity implementation—mixing different cultures together to change the nature of constitutional law within the United States which is how labor unions and other progressive groups always intended to overthrow America without firing a single shot in a second, un-named revolution. So their emphasis has been on skin color, sex, sexual preference and lots of other superficial aspects not even encompassing the essence of what makes a human being human. They see public schools as melting pots of diversity raising children to have no barriers to sexual attitudes, acceptance of those who “look” different than they are, and completely ignoring actual behavioral characteristics because they have misidentified the key ingredients of a successful society.
Even though I have said many good things about the filmmaker George Lucas he obviously has lost his way over the years—probably because he attended too many democratic fundraisers and the politics of San Francisco liberalized him over time—but the “bearded one” has called Chicago his adopted second home. He loves the progressive nature of the city which he considers doing important work toward achieving a more “fair” society. This is one of the main reasons I no longer like Star Wars. When Lucas made the first films—back in the 80s, they were quite good and had characters that would have been most at home in an Ayn Rand novel. This is partly because Lucas believed much about the world at the time that I do now—best exemplified by his truly great film, THX-1138. But after a divorce that he never really got over, hanging around democratic socialists within the Hollywood community that finally embraced him after many years of trying, then biologically changing in his later years becoming increasingly liberal as his testosterone levels dropped off—he is unrecognizable now and his films reflect his mental status. Now Star Wars is about “diversity” more than it is about throwing off a tyrannical regime hell-bent on destroying individualism. As great as Lucas was as a businessman and filmmaker, he now fails to identify attributes that have contributed to the complete failure of Chicago to operate as a responsible city. As a city it is unofficially bankrupt, living off tremendous debt. When the current mayor finally leaves—who has been extremely progressive all along—the next person will have a huge mess to clean up and that will likely lead to a similar fate as has been witnessed in Detroit. The lines between a capitalist society and a socialist one have been blurred to the point that nobody any longer understands—even our most “educated” and most artistic—like Lucas.
What’s the point of teaching children anything if what they are learning in public school is socialism? The argument is from the left that compassion for others is the most important thing in a human society. They believe as many of those Chicago protesting teachers do, that social equality is more important than individual gains—which is why the teachers are protesting the state to bestow upon them more tax money extracted from private property and thrown in their direction. They have become happy little socialists in the same way that Bernie Sanders has gained in popularity. Kids supporting the socialist presidential candidate will tell you that their reasons are to gain access or debt relief from their college tuitions—which they have been told will be free. Yet the teachers and professors within those professions often push up and over the six figure salary territory after obtaining tenure. The left-leaning advocates for public schools, including college, have signed up their lives to the cause of socialism because the pay was so extraordinarily good. Average people like these teachers couldn’t hope to make so much money anywhere else than they do in the teaching profession. Yet the debate against my position has always been that teachers are valuable people giving wisdom to the next generation and that without them society crumbles. Well, I’d say with them society is guaranteed to fail—without teachers—strictly on their own—kids have a better chance of succeeding in life. That is how destructive socialism is to individual minds.
The belief in public schools is that individual achievement is vile and that group associations are vastly more important because equality between all parties is utilized—and taught. The position of the “left” is that individual conquest is only for the physically, and intellectually strong and that it is a “caveman” mentality which society should overcome. What they forget is that advancements in society are not induced by “fairness” but by hunger. For instance, with as much money as our American civilization has poured into public schools and colleges, kids have not statistically become more intelligent. If you talk to anybody under 30 years old today—you’ll see quickly what I’m talking about. Most young people have been deliberately intellectually handicapped by the public school system to make the best and brightest no better than the sluggish and stupid. When you build your society around the weakest links, you obviously will get a weak society—which is why socialism is so detrimental to any civilization. Teachers have been unable to increase their effectiveness around the world no matter how much money has been spent on them essentially because their emphasis is on “equality and group assimilation” as opposed to individual achievement. In a capitalist society, not everyone can be rich, smart, and powerful—but everyone has a chance to if they work at it. The net result of that effort and success then benefits all of society. There is no way to blend the two together. George Lucas tried with his Jedi concept in the Star Wars films—but had to rely on mythical superpowers to blur the lines of what any human could possibly achieve. Essentially Lucas like most on the political left turned toward Plato’s Republic as justification for their philosophic society—in the case of Star Wars, the Jedi are the council of wisdom that governs society without any individual desire. If a Jedi does let personal desires drive their needs, then their superpower attributes become dangerous to society at large and the organized mass of collective consciousness will desire to have a rebellious overthrow of the renegade individual—that is essentially the message of the movies without the Han Solo element added to the plot. I always liked Han Solo because he was an Ayn Rand conservative that functioned so well to keep saving everyone and advancing the Star Wars story. But without Han Solo, Star Wars is just another examination into Plato’s Republic—which is the opposite side of the coin of Aristotelian logic for which Ayn Rand associated and evolved her thoughts on the matter.
All this contemplation about how we arrived at National Socialism without realizing it is good for understanding how a bunch of overpaid and ungrateful teachers from Chicago ended up in the streets demanding even more money than they are already being paid to essentially destroy the lives of the students they were supposed to be teaching. Politicians looked at that protest and shuddered at all the voters who had nowhere to take their children because nobody does the job of parenting anymore—leaving the task of raising children to the state. So when the teachers wanted to protest to show the world how much power they had through “collective bargaining” they had a monopoly on the children and used them as extortion pieces. That is the “compassionate” side of George Lucas’ ideal society, and the ultimate failure of the entire political left—especially those who have bankrupted the once great city of Chicago. I’d encourage you dear reader to watch all the videos shown above for more information and proof. It’s not an easy admission, but it’s one that we all need to grapple with. Public schools are not good for our children. They might someday become that way if the right market forces were applied, but in the state they are now, they are detrimental to our children. Kids would be safer and their minds kept more intact if we left them alone at home with just a T.V. and a video game system. They’d learn more about capitalism there than in school, and in American society—that is what they should have always been striving towards. These problems will continue until our society recognizes the source of the problem—that it is socialism that drives these large teacher unions and they do not have our national sovereignty or our American economy in high regard. By contrast they wish to continue to extract wealth from the haves, and redistribute them to the have-nots as if the mechanisms of productivity were a finite resource not driven by capitalist invention.
To prove it, each one of those teachers should have been fired from their jobs and replaced. Children would not notice, and the parents would see no drop in scholastic performance, and that is the big secret that the teacher unions are terrified of. It’s only a matter of time before we have to call their bluff—because the money isn’t there for them. Chicago isn’t alone in their debts—most of America is going through the same crises. Only when we finally do—and break the back of the teacher’s union and get their left-leaning political influence out of our schools and the Department of Education can we hope to reverse the trends we are seeing today—a nation slipping into socialism at an alarming rate. Personally, I’m not willing to fund our own destruction. How about you?
I was not surprised that Donald Trump won in New Hampshire. I’m happy to see that the polls were correct, and with that measure, Trump shouldn’t have any trouble in South Carolina or Nevada either. I have stated many times why I support Donald Trump for President, so I am glad that he is beginning to pull out ahead from the pack, and that the reality of that is beginning to set in. I know there are many of my liberty fighting friends who don’t understand why a guy like me would support Trump, but they will in time. Some were beginning to understand after Trump’s acceptance speech in New Hampshire, seen below. The world is beginning to see what a Trump White House would look like, and they are starting to see the big picture.
The first sign of this new era, which is great for those who truly love America, could be seen in the melt-down that the left-winged web sites spewed upon realizing how strongly Trump finished. I truly enjoyed the Huffington Post diatribes given how they behaved at the start of his campaign. It is for all the reasons that “they” hate Trump that I support him. He is a conqueror, and that’s what we need right now. We don’t need a Constitutional attorney or a sweet talker; we need a tough guy who can beat up on the insurgents. Trump is that kind of guy.
It seems many missed the story prior to the New Hampshire primary, that Trump had received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize:
Kristian Berg Harpviken, a Nobel watcher and head of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, told Agence France-Presse that he received a copy of the nomination letter sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee that selects the recipient.
According to the letter, the author of which was not disclosed, Trump deserves the prize for “his vigorous peace through strength ideology, used as a threat weapon of deterrence against radical Islam, ISIS, nuclear Iran and Communist China.”
This is just one example of how Trump is changing the very definition of things, and the longer he continues, the better things get for traditional America. With each state that he wins, the radical leftist utterances we’ve all had to endure for years swings back in the proper Constitutional direction. When people wonder if they can trust Trump or to know if he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, just study his children and his personal wealth. You can tell a lot of things about a man by the type of lifestyle that he lives. Trump doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, and he has never done drugs. He’s rich and beyond financial influence, he’s smart and leans more toward Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones than Glenn Beck. And his kids are better than him in morals and ethics. He can outsmart the political left with a wit none of them embody and is the best man for the job of president at this particular point in history.
So it’s on to South Carolina. I am looking forward to watching him uncover more of America state by state. If he can redefine the trend of the Nobel Peace Prize, he can do just about anything—and for them, those who love the American flag; they have a lot to look forward to. To those who hate that flag, they hate Trump and everything that is coming.
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.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, started out in business not long after turning 6, selling oranges and soft drinks. By 15, he said in an interview conducted in a jungle clearing by the actor and director Sean Penn for Rolling Stone magazine, he had begun to grow marijuana and poppies because there was no other way for his impoverished family to survive.
Now, unapologetically, he said: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”
Though his fortune, estimated at $1 billion, has come with a trail of blood, he does not consider himself a violent man. “Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more,” he told Mr. Penn. “But do I start trouble? Never.”
The seven hours Mr. Guzmán spent with Mr. Penn, and the follow-up interviews by phone and video, which began in October while he was on the run from the Mexican and American authorities, marked another surreal turn in his long-running battle to evade Mexican and American authorities. Mr. Guzmán, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, who had twice escaped jail, was captured in his home state of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico on Friday after a gun battle with the authorities.
The interview with Rolling Stone, believed to be the first Mr. Guzmán has given in decades, was conducted over several sessions. It was scheduled to be published online Saturday night.
The interviews were held in a jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico. Surrounded by more than 100 cartel troops, and wearing a silk shirt and pressed black jeans, Mr. Guzmán sat down to dinner with Mr. Penn and Kate del Castillo, an actress who once played a drug kingpin in a soap opera.
Even though Mexican troops attacked his hide-out in the days after the meeting, necessitating a narrow escape, Mr. Guzmán continued the interview by BlackBerry Messenger and in a video delivered by courier to the pair later.
Mr. Penn’s account is likely to deepen the concern among the Mexican authorities already embarrassed by Mr. Guzmán’s multiple escapes, the months required to find him again and his status for some as something of a folk hero. Mr. Penn describes being waved through a military road checkpoint on his way to meet Mr. Guzmán, which Mr. Penn suggested was because the soldiers recognized Mr. Guzmán’s son. Mr. Penn said he was also told, during a leg of the journey taken in a small plane equipped with a scrambling device for ground radar only, that the cartel was informed by an insider when the military deployed a high-altitude surveillance plane that might have spotted their movements.
Mr. Penn and Mr. Guzmán spoke for seven hours, the story reports, at a compound amid dense jungle. The topics of conversation turned in unexpected directions. At one stage, Mr. Penn brought up Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate; there were some reports that Mr. Guzmán had put a $100 million bounty on Mr. Trump after he made comments offensive to Mexicans. “Ah! Mi amigo!” Mr. Guzmán responded.
He asked Mr. Penn whether people in America were interested in him and laughed when Mr. Penn told him that the Fusion channel was repeating a documentary on him, “Chasing El Chapo.”
It is widely considered to be against the basic principles of journalism to grant a subject such authority over a piece.
Rolling Stone’s journalistic practices have been criticized since its publication of a now discredited gang-rape story at the University of Virginia.
A representative for Rolling Stone did not immediately reply to The Blaze’s request for comment Saturday night.
Guzman was captured by Mexican marines early Friday in a coastal city, and the attorney general says the drug boss was tracked down partly because he was making a biographical movie.
I don’t know who the hell Kate Del Castillos is, nor do I care. I want to see Mexico get Sean Penn and throw him in one of those crappy Mexican prisons. Give him a taste of what Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressi, Sean Penn is scum, and is the face of the progressive liberal Democrat party. Throw the book at him Mexico! Force the US to extradite him. Use the Affluenza kid as bait.
Conchita Alonso — known for her role in “The Running Man” and “Predator 2,” and who once acted in a 1988 film with Penn — had previously written an open letter criticizing him for his support for the Venezuelan dictator. Spotting the actor, who was also waiting for lost luggage, she approached him. When the “Milk” star recognized her, his smile disappeared: He told her he didn’t want to talk to her and accused her brother of trying to assassinate Chavez.
In an interview with WMAL, the actress said she told Penn, “You are in favor of Hugo Chavez and [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad.”
When Penn denied he supports Ahmadinejad and called Conchita Alonso “a pig,” she replied, “And you are a communist, Sean Penn! … You’re a communist asshole!”
To substantiate what I have said, click all the links in the text above and you will find dear reader enough free information to fill several books. Then watch all the videos and you will discover enough evidence to last a lifetime, and it will change how you see everything. I promise–all you have to do is look and read for yourself. The evidence is more than abundant.
The Overmanwarrior 