alias Bruce.

Reset: Progressive is the new normal.

Sometimes we reach the point where we just have to start hearing and speaking what is real in spite of the insistent stories we are told.

So:

Forget the underlying narrative of nearly every important story you’re told by The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN or NPR or other media that almost never utter the word “capitalism.” The inaudible but invariable message in their avoiding that single word is that capitalism is not a mere option on a varied menu of possible paths for democracy, but a default mandate for modernity and prosperity. It is time for you and me to lose that lie. In a monopolized world where alleged economic meritocracy behaves exactly like monarchy, the myth of productive competition is theirs to sell, not ours to buy.

Forget the Democratic Party’s quadrennial ad jingles, the latest of which was “stronger together.” The Democratic Party and its leading lights lost their ability to speak for American democracy through a long series of heartbreaking cave-ins, most recently when the party sabotaged the full-throated progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The Democratic Party will not lead us. But perhaps, when we and some rebellious progressive Democratic candidates start winning battles in the streets and at the polls, they will follow us.

Forget, of course, President Donald Trump’s addled impersonation of populism to a wickedly conned white base, made possible by the lack of even the sorriest semblance of a believably reality-based Democratic presidential nominee, let alone a Republican one.

Forget the fantasied wish that a blockbuster Hollywood superhero film – say, Black Panther – will carry a message of “revolutionary” or “radical” change. It can’t and it won’t. It is not built to do so. I’ve written about this on Truthout. I wept at this film. Black Panther is a brilliant, gorgeous, and powerful inspiration to African-American kids (and we black adults) who desperately need affirmative and potently imaginative antidotes to the lethal ordeals of life in a 500-year-old white supremacist regime. But the Black Panther film is not and will not be a revolutionary act. Reserve that term for acts and ideas that overturn and replace entire societal ruling systems. Then see and enjoy the film, brought to you by the sponsors of the default capitalist narrative, for what it is.

It is time we hit reset. Reality is not news media messages that refuse to name capitalism, or movies that purport to be about liberation while cementing a cruelly inhuman system of life. Reality is a progressive narrative that speaks aloud the names of prisons – including modern corporate monarchy – and that offers thoughtful ways out and tangible paths into healthy and sustainable systems of kindness, fairness, and freedom.

For a creatively-inspired and reality-based take on one potential human future, try this interview with novelist Kim Stanley Robinson.

Trump won with an audaciously fake, racist, and misogynist nod to what most Americans of all backgrounds already know: The system is rigged.

Imagine what we progressives can do with an audaciously passionate and truthful treatment of that reality.

Two questions: 1.) Why is it hard to get American white people

to go see a movie starring black people, completely about black people, and made by black people, while black Americans will flock to a movie that is completely about white people (sometimes with no black characters at all)? 2.) For the multitudes of black (and other mostly poor) women who have put their lives and dreams on hold in order to wait years for husbands or boyfriends who are doing major prison time, how much of the waiting is a self-determined choice and how much is plain old self-effacing misogyny? Director Ava DuVernay, whose new film Middle of Nowhere is about a young black woman living this vigil, has plenty to say about both of these questions and more. I have thoughts, too, but better that you listen to DuVernay (pictured below) speak up about all of this in an interview, and that you see a clip from her film, which won Sundance's best directing award this year.

Ava DuVernay   (Photo: Liz O. Baylen/Contour by Getty Images)

Part of what captivates me about the mob

is that it is tribal. It has clans. Members have codes and taboos that cannot be bared in public. And they take on street names drawn from a more natural and gutturally symbolic world than tags like "Michael" and "Jerome" -- say, for example, "Big Tuna" and "Joe Bananas," both of whom were real-life mob figures. Or my all-time favorite, which actually comes from a film: "Jimmy the Cheese Man" from The Pope of Greenwich Village.

Youth gangs, similarly, dig into symbolism for identities that mean something beyond the often-disposable sound-gaming of American naming. Kids caught in a void of violent nihilism take on vividly personal handles for themselves and others: "Teeth," "Big Eye," "Snapper," "Sleepy." Names that say something about the bearer. The way that, say, some West African names do.

I think one of the most eloquent movie scenes ever is from the film Pulp Fiction, when Bruce Willis's fugitive boxer character tells a cab driver who remarks on his name, "I'm an American. My name doesn't mean shit."

Part of what mobs and gangs do is fill this selfhood void -- but with reactionary, racist, misogynist, fake "outlaw" outlets for American males, especially angry young males, for whom the vanilla concoction of shrink-wrapped American male identity means exactly nothing. Patriarchal capitalism has succeeded in alienating them from essence. Their substitute version of rawness, a kind of kamikaze fraternity, is their attempt at medicine for their ailment. It's a sick manifestation of a real desire.

None of that is the least bit funny. Still, there is something about the following rendition of Sesame Street's Ernie and Bert doing the classic Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro desert scene from the Martin Scorsese film Casino that paints a perfect, hilariously absurd picture of this kind of cartoon barbarity:

 

(The trolls at YouTube have blocked direct embedding, but when "watch on YouTube" pops up, click it and you can watch it.)

If you loved Felix the Cat, don't miss an essay about cartoons and racist archetypes that will

both piss you off and intrigue you. On the one hand, one feels, Is there anything safe from racism? (The answer is no.) On the other hand, it is great to see a piece that dives head-first into what the styles of cartooning to which we become accustomed as kids actually mean.

I'm talking about an essay I stumbled across on the Sans Everything blog, by journalist and cartoon aficionado Jeet Heer, titled Felix the Cat & Blackface. Heer looks, fascinatingly, at the striking visual similarities between early cartoon characters -- such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse -- and the blackface style of racist stage portrayal of black people that was all the rage for decades. Heer argues convincingly, too, that the personalities of animated characters such as Mickey and Felix were almost the exact cartoon analog of the popular white image of black Americans: randy, fun-loving tricksters who were haplessly reckless but blessed with the good fortune of their ignorance. Heer also quotes, at length, a brilliant John Updike riff on the brazenly race-colored jivey, elastic jazziness imparted to such characters as Mickey and Felix by white cartoon studios. And Heer quotes, as well, a riveting explanation by cartoonist Art Spiegelman about the stark racial message he saw in the cat-and-mouse cartoons and why he ultimately chose that metaphor to portray the Nazis and Jews in Maus, his devastating book-length comic-style story of the Holocaust.

You owe it to Felix to read Heer.

"You're a Bunny Guy."

A 30-second re-enactment of the film Goodfellas performed entirely by animated bunnies? Life just got a little better. But you needn't be a mob film nut like me to get a kick out of Angryalien.com, a site I learned about just today. It has 30-second bunny parodies of a slew of famous films, including Borat, Casablanca, Alien, Brokeback Mountain, and Kill Bill, among others. Who knew? (Spoiler alert: if you don't want to know how a film ends, don't watch the bunny version.)

Thanks to Cat.

Who's Afraid of...?

A couple of nights ago I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the movie version of Edward Albee's eyebrow-frying play, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton scorching their way through the Marriage From Hell and Sandy Dennis adding heat as an innocent bystander who gets raked into the coals. It's a pleasant little film if you don't mind clinging to the earth's crust for two hours to avoid sliding down into the magma. The film won five Oscars, including Best Actress for Taylor. I think it deserved at least one more, for Burton, who underplayed the steamrollered but knowing husband like a force of nature. Somehow I had managed to miss seeing this film, as I've missed a long list of classics. If you haven't seen it, I suggest you correct that quickly. I'm no movie maven, but it's certainly the best film about the lies of love that I've ever seen. You can find details here, but beware the painfully-complete plot summary if you plan on watching the film.

Anyway, I mentioned the movie to some friends, one of whom emailed me an excerpt about playwright Albee, who has managed to be ruthlessly honest AND to win every dramatic award in the universe at least once. He's the kind of informed bigmouth we need more of in the age of Small Change. The excerpt, from a 2008 interview in the Gay and Lesbian Review, dates from the last of the Bush years, but you'll want to read it anyway:

AMERICA’S leading playwright provocateur, now an octogenarian, Edward Albee—whose plays include the scalding Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Three Tall Woman, and the taboo-smashing The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?—is hardly resting on his accumulated laurels (three Pulitzer prizes and three Tony awards). In fact, the playwright is now directing new stagings of two of his one-acts, “The American Dream” and “The Sandbox,” with the assistance of a hearing aid, and is proving as durable as his work. When his The Play About the Baby ran at New York’s Century Center in 2000, he underwent an operation to have two stents inserted to bypass a 95-percent blocked artery to his heart, and stayed conscious to observe the entire procedure. He gamely recommends that “life should be lived at the precipice, so that we don’t come to the end of our life with regret for what we have not done.”

An ardent Democrat, he laments the Bush regime and its current “destruction of democracy in this country,” and observes: “I don’t know a single artist today who doesn’t believe this administration is terrible...that it was not elected, but was put in power by a coup d’état. It worries me to see that it believes the only way to save democracy is to repress it at home, by silencing journalists and writers.” There is still evidence of the angry young man who penned “The American Dream,” willing to call things as he sees them. A recipient of Kennedy Center honors when Bill Clinton was in office, Albee has refused to attend any Kennedy Center ceremonies under George W. Bush. “One doesn’t like some presidents,” he remarked, but “this is the first president I’ve despised. What’s worse is the fucking passive American people. Remember what Adlai Stevenson said? In this country we can still have anything we want—but we’re going to end up with what we deserve.”

Thanks to Laurie.