Goddamned Sisyphus Again

Note for new readers – auto-estimated reading times are greatly exaggerated (lots of pix/links)

Hey Folks!

Do you remember the story of Sisyphus? He was the founder of Ephyra (which we now call Corinth) and was so tricky that when he made Zeus mad (by telling the river god Asopus, that it was Zeus who kidnapped his daughter), and Zeus sent Thanatos to chain him in Tartarus (the pit of eternal torment), Sisyphus managed to chain Thanatos instead! With the god of death chained, no one on earth could die! The god of war was pissed (because battles were non-lethal) and the other gods all greatly offended, because no sacrifices could be made to them (since nothing could be killed, in their honour).

It is tempting to grab just this one snippet and make him some kind of defiant hero, but like many figures who were both historical people and woven into mythology, he was made a symbol of extraordinary cleverness, but this was in no way morally clean – especially not by modern standards.

He hated his brother so much that he seduced his brother’s daughter, who then killed their children, when she realized he meant to use them to destroy her own father. He also famously talked his way out of Hades and back to life again (several versions of how). As you can imagine, when the gods did finally get their hands on him, they were plenty pissed and ready to make an example of him.

Which is why we know Sisyphus nowadays, for the most memorable and mythic part of his story, his punishment – to spend eternity pushing a heavy rock up the side of a mountain, only to have it roll back down again, just before he gets it to the top. Sisyphus is a symbol of back-breaking endless futility. (And that they made that, the fit punishment for excessive amoral cleverness, is interesting still)

There is a hell of a lot about modern life which feels Sisyphusian, one of the strangest and most spiritually wounding, is that one of the most-difficult least-rewarding ‘lifts’ nowadays, is hope itself.

I will just say clearly to new readers – I am all about real non-delusional hope – and for the university crowd, I will address, then demolish, Camus’ use of Sisyphus also. The key thing here is, I want to talk seriously about empathy and understanding of ourselves and one another, not just depress you!

That being established – let me give you an example that absolutely everyone can relate to. During the pandemic lockdowns, millions of us had our lives turned upside down for what we thought was going to be a short period of time, but then became an indefinite time (and coping with unknowns is many times more stressful, because we can’t budget our patience, because we don’t know the time arc!)

Do you remember how many times you felt, “Hey, okay, they are almost on top of this thing now, and pretty soon life will get back to normal.” And you started exercising again, and wearing pants at home, and generally trying to remember how to fit into civilization, all with the greatest rise of hope – only to be told “BACK INTO THE CAVES WITH YOU – WE’LL SAY WHEN YOU CAN LIVE AGAIN!”

And then came another wave of hope, and you told yourself this time we’ll get back to normal life again for sure, and you might even have felt guilty for doubting that hope was real, only to get the door slammed on your hope once again. Back to cope instead, endlessly (interminably).

And each cycle we felt a little more cautious and guarded, a little more cynical, a little less convinced that we were ever going to see the end of it. And the damn thing is, years later, many are STILL reeling from the impact of this total disruption of normal life, and many others still trapped in fear and lies.

We don’t talk about this honestly (because our communities have all been divided by two flavours of mob madness, very deliberately, to prevent it) but the simple fact is, a whole lot of citizens who never did anything wrong were put under house arrest, for a long period of mental torture by deprivation.

We do very clearly know that lifelong damage was dealt to young people, at a scale never before seen, so the fact that we aren’t talking about it honestly, proves conclusively that our governments are still in the hands of the boomer generation, who never did quite develop enough morally, to understand that harming kids really is truly wrong (or they wouldn’t have done so goddamned much of it, and even shamelessly valorized it for generations to come in art, music, film and pop culture).

Same reason we’ve governed to preserve property values instead of to provide ample housing for a half a century. That shit needs to change, and fast. The kids are not alright, because they know they have been betrayed, and they watched Generation X and the Millennials try to keep things going, with ever diminishing returns, and these Z kids have finally said “ENOUGH” and they are right to. That they are not yet harnessed to a far better alternative is about that alternative not being clear, not their readiness or appetite.

But back to that hope rock, that almost makes it to the peak, then rolls all the way back down again.

One of the best things about being widely curious about the world, is that every area of study we work on, gives us more useful ways of understanding the way things really work. As a cool bonus, we often find oblique insights which apply to other things we are curious about, and help solve problems that we wouldn’t be able to solve, if we stayed strictly within the frame which first presented the problem.

Mind you – even the most grotesquely westernized/simplified version of “Attachment is Suffering” applies, also. The more of an amateur (lover of ideas and techniques) we are, the richer our experience of the world becomes in each and every day of our lives. But also, the more things can hurt us, by threatening riches that we didn’t even used to be aware of.

I’m kind of crazy in this way, so interested in so many things for so long, that I’ve been watching unfolding slow-motion tragedy my whole life, as beautiful things as subtle as social relations and cultural aspirations died off (almost always to make way for corporate consolidation and profit).

I’ve also always framed this quality of tragedy poetically. I don’t mean to say I came to some brilliant synthesis early, but rather that I was fortunate to take the severe psychological punishment of a cult upbringing, and sublimate and metabolize the damage in a way which was of benefit to my mind – relentless study! I’m sure you’ve thought about this yourself – are outliers (in whatever direction) actually well-balanced people? Or did half the sports stars we know only get great in the first place, because they couldn’t stand to be in the house?

Thankfully, I have been blessed with the extraordinary fortune of a loving marriage, to nourish me and lift my funk (repeatedly, not just that cult trauma). So I don’t mean to mope, nor to boast, just to be clear enough to perhaps offer consolation to others presently conflicted (I know I’m not the only one who has faced emotional struggles struggling to harness mental surplus to worthwhile task). Love saved me most of all, because it taught me, and rooted me in, gratitude – the only solid ground there is.

Of course one big boost to my awareness of tragic downfall was watching the commune in which I was raised descend by slow (and yet entirely predictable) degrees into a demented and soul destroying cult. (Is it any wonder Ozymandias was the first poem I memorized, word-perfect? And remember still?)

Reading tons of British imperial history when I was a kid, when the British Empire was clearly an impotent sputtering blowhard version of itself, was another part. So was the American war in Vietnam, which hit me in two strange ways as a small child. I had many brilliant early art-mentors who were draft dodgers from the war (Toronto music culture in particular, flourished for a great many years, as a backhanded consequence of that war, and not just our jazz scene – George Clinton’s “Parliament” is named after Toronto’s Parliament St. where many of the bandmembers lived for several funky years).

But also, I was deathly afraid of helicopters when I was small, and would run and hide from them, seeking any cover I could. I didn’t consciously associate them with news footage from the war, but my young brain definitely made the link, and I knew for sure that “whoop-whoop” sound meant death. (still true)

Now here’s a funny bit of personal witness worth getting on the record, for the way it links so many different ideas. One of my greatest (and sweetest) draft-dodging early mentors was the jazz composer, bandleader, keyboardist and saxophonist Ted Moses. Way back in the 1970s, he was creating a new system for teaching music theory in an especially open, improvisatory and jazz centred way. I was crazy for his music, and would ride my bike across town whenever his quintet was playing a concert in the park. Finally, one night I pleaded successfully enough to get to see his big band live at the Chick’n Deli (where, in those days especially, kids were most strictly verboten).

After the show, I managed to work up the nerve to talk to him. He was charmed and charming, very pleased by my interest. When I saw him again, at another show (at a restaurant where I was working part time as a dishwasher, as a kid) I asked him if he taught music lessons. I was of course incredibly broke at the time, but I wanted to know what I had to aspire to save, to learn from him.

He smiled and said he was working on a brand new teaching system, and he’d love to see what I made of it. I asked him how much it would cost. He, with extraordinary kindness said, “Since you’re doing me a favour, and helping me test out my new system, how about free?” (I’m crying as I write this)

I can remember every lesson we had, few though they were. I had tried piano lessons before, mind you, but gave up in frustration with the inanity of the music you had to work through, to get anywhere.

I was just a wide-eyed curious 13 year old kid, but Ted didn’t simplify anything, instead what he was offering me (I now realize) were the keys to the whole Pythagorean kingdom! We improvised, every single time – but we weren’t just working in C-major, we were going full twelve tones and all modes, from the get-go. Better still, he was pleased that I was interested in several instruments (as was he) so he offered to record one of my songs on his (then rare and expensive) four track open reel tape recorder (a machine I would come to know extremely well, less than a decade later, as an audio technician).

We’re talking 1978 here, and my chorus was:

“Oil crisis, raising prices, everywhere a thief or crook

You don’t have to tell me ‘bout pollution, all I gotta do is look.”

So, when people get angry at me for not showing the right level of emotional panic, I can only point to an especially long engagement on the Sisyphusian plane. Not a lack of heart, just a learned stoicism.

It is also worth saying that I remember reading about child soldiers my age in Lebanon, and during the worst of the cult madness, I was so paranoid and purpose driven I felt quite confident “I could do that.” (certainty really is dangerous stuff).

Those life-changing music lessons ended abruptly when the cult headmaster became jealous that someone else was having a profound influence on my life and banned the lessons, and me from music, for one full year (just as he banned my film-crazy roommate from cinema). So, yeah – hope and Sisyphus.

It isn’t just that kids were hurt and no one can afford housing anymore (and pointing that out is somehow racist, now? WTAF?) a whole bunch of precious stuff that many relied on got smashed, and we’re still looking away.

I wish I had tuned-into the brilliant economist and social critic Fabio Vighi years ago. As I have mentioned, I studied a lot of things but long disdained economics, only to find more recently that economics stitches them together, or at least gives insights into problems which were impenetrable, when I still pretended I could understand the world, without carefully studying the economic dimension. Mind you, I still wish I could! I really did used to use the standard textbook in Economics as a sleep-aid, when I had insomnia. (and it works great – try a page of ‘Samuelson’ sometime, yourself!)

But the structures which govern our lives, are shaped by economic actors who have got so far out of scale and control, that national governments are weak players, by comparison (always behind the curve, pathetically playing catch-up – with great and obvious incompetence, just to make it all infinitely more frustrating).

I’ve talked a lot about how this came to be, historically speaking, but trying to figure out what is actually happening right now, is the most pressing challenge for anyone crazy for history, social analysis or politics, and it isn’t easy (never has been, but the storms of dangerous bullshit come from all sides now, and are so many and so loud!)

So now the thing about the thing. COV2 has one unique feature not found anywhere in any natural variation of the coronavirus, a “Furin cleavage site” which is also what makes it so contagious and dangerous. We know for sure the US government funded research to insert a Furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, just to see how dangerous it would be if someone did that (and then to develop a cure, to the problem which never existed, before they dreamed it up and paid for it). All with an eye to a future war on China, mind you (how people get things funded these days, is beyond crazy).

We also know for sure that Fauci knew it wasn’t natural, because he said so in his own freakin’ diary! But more to the point, he is definitely on the decision making chain which paid the lab in Wuhan to work on that little Frankenvirus, for future war in China purposes (all so very responsible).

So – if you want to believe that they were actively funding and making it – but then it just happened to spontaneously evolve in nature, at exactly that same time, and everything you have been told since was true and responsible, well, I have a whole bunch of bridges I can offer you, at a really great price!

More tragic still, Fauci’s diary shows he understood natural immunity was real, and so people who had it, had established resistance already, and there was no need to keep them away from loved ones, so cruelly (so many people I know, died alone in hospital, with all relatives and comfort forbidden). All for no scientific value whatsoever, it was political, the whole damn time. Fearmongering, to make over-action seem more responsible than under, which, it turns out, it absolutely was not. (or did you already forget the part where every single one of our young people was dealt lifelong harm?)

Masking never worked, and masking kids never could work – the whole world was yelling at young people for years in a row, about being mindful (something kids just aren’t) about constant FEAR. This years long mental torture to all kids, all being directed by the exact same crowd that would call for the instant prosecution of anyone seen spanking a kid, even if the kid was being really really bad.

What happened was that all the kids got it and cleared it handily, just as many renowned epidemiologists (who were brutally silenced, again, on purely political grounds) had predicted at the start of the whole mess.

I mentioned this before, but it needs to be here again (because so many millions are still drunk on lies, even though those lies destroyed their grandkids future, and are coming for their own pensions, too!) Ivermectin won a lawsuit for defamation against the freakin’ FDA! Which was forced in the terms of the settlement, to post a public apology and retraction on their website for (I think) one year. (I saw it)

So, all those reports which kept coming in from poor countries around the world which said “Hey, we have something proven, tested, safe and cheap which totally works,” were true. You might recall some of the hilarious contortions taken here, to explain away these studies from afar.

I especially enjoyed this knee-slapper, “Well, you see, those poor faraway people probably had so many other diseases, that the ivermectin must have cured the other diseases they had, and that’s what made them recover from covid.” (As if that explanation is saying anything bad at all about Ivermectin).

Remember “Horse Paste?” remember how funny it was to laugh at stupid people who believed in it? Well I have news for you, buddy, you were saying “Screw the poor, let them all suffer and die, if they can’t afford to rapidly increase the shareholder values for our big pharma conglomerates!” Turn-in your “left card” now, please.

Okay but, each of those are Sisyphusian struggles on their own. Harm to kids, reliable (and generic) cures suppressed, to favour profit and experimental medicine, even with insane levels of harm per capita?

Bad enough. Millions of lives scarred or destroyed, bad. But if the people who were lying to us, knew all that stuff, right at the beginning (Darpa emails show they knew ivermectin effective in 2020) why the hell did they lock everyone down? Why not just thoughtfully sequester the vulnerable, and let the rest of us clear it with natural immunity, as was clearly happening, before the jab ever arrived on-scene. (Kids were literally four orders of magnitude less likely to have problems with it, than the elderly).

Fabio was saying it way back then (why I feel frustrated, for only tuning-in to his perspective now, rather late in the day). The financial interventions we all came to think of as Covid bailout packages, started before Covid hit! No really, our markets were so badly screwed in that moment, governments around the western world were quietly freaking the fuck out. Panicking, and reaching for any fiscal tool they could find, including some which used to be considered wildly reckless and unsound.

Now – the questions about 9/11 will never be answered (the exact reason they killed Bin Laden), no one has shown clear proof that the military industrial complex was involved in the act itself, only that they derived insane amounts of power and money, very shortly after the event, and still have it, today.

What we can say for sure is that a very well funded and organized group “The Project for A New American Century” was waiting and ready. They even wrote a paper, shortly before the event, saying that what they really needed was a Pearl Harbour moment. Something to make everyone so mad, they wouldn’t be able to think straight for several years afterward – and during those years, many big changes for the worse, were made to the state (and absolutely zero lasting wins for normal people).

When it comes to the way we were treated as if all of our rights were suddenly conditional, during the extended and wildly politicized covid emergency, that wasn’t by accident. It also wasn’t what previous generations of public health (and civil rights) experts prescribed, as a sound response to such an event.

But there were a series of very expensive “War-game” scenarios mounted and played out, to perfect coordinated state responses to viruses, in the year before the emergency hit us all. Results still secret (but you knew that already, without me even having to tell you).

More to the point, while each of us was pushing our own personal rock up the mountain, during lockdowns, the owners of the theatre changed the scenery, props and scripts, while we weren’t looking.

To grossly simplify Fabio’s point, they had to lock us down so they could inject emergency lifeblood into the economy, without causing hyper-inflation, as we felt the new flood of cash hit street level.

A Self-Fullfilling Prophecy - Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation - by Fabio Vighi - writing for “The Philosophical Salon”

“You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

And here is where we get into how weird propaganda and our delusions really are. When a lie is big enough, some people will never ever be able to believe it was a lie. No matter how much evidence you give them (or how much comes in via their own eyeballs!) they just switch to emotions and reject the conclusion because the implications are too uncomfortable. No, they just wouldn’t do that.

Tribalism is especially dangerous, because it is so emotional, it overrides reason (and obliterates principle and fairness entirely in the process, every freakin’ time).

Tribalists on the left were so addicted to thinking “Trump is Putin’s stooge” (which was absolutely always a political and intel agency hit-job fiction) that they still haven’t noticed they’ve been backing extreme right-wing ethnic cleansing nationalists, this whole time, as a consequence of their own unrepudiated racism!

By being so outstandingly emotionalist and tribalist, this same exact (fake mob-left) faction won many incredibly important victories for corporatists imperialists and warmongers, over the last few years.

Their insane reaction to the FBI-provoked January 6^th riots finally made protesting into a serious felony (something the state has been trying to find an excuse to do, for more than a century now).

They completely destroyed Due Process and the individual right to a presumption of innocence, by taking a correct complaint (me too) and making it tribal-political, instead of socially aspirational. They destroyed the idea of bodily autonomy (long sacred to this exact same cohort) forever. They did lifelong harm to an entire generation of young people, and they went to war, gleefully, grotesquely eager to mass-murder Slavs! (never once questioning the Biden regime’s refusal to talk with Russia, their whole time in office). What I was saying about your left-card? Turn it the f*ck, in!

These are people who still call themselves anti-racists and peaceniks, mind you (more evidence of a completely mirrorless culture).

What we have to understand is that the whole mess we are in right now – the savage brutality in Gaza, the nation-destroying madness in Ukraine, the disgusting mass murdering war against Lebanon (following on the ongoing tragedy in Syria, which no one wants to look at, because, like the slaughter in Gaza, it is one hundred percent western authored) all of this death, and moral and financial ruin, all comes downstream of first Russiagate (enabling war in Ukraine, to justify blowing-up Nordstream, and cutting Europe off from the cheap reliable energy which ultimately, funded all of their social programs) and then our truly craven response to shrill and narrative obsessed authority, overstepping quite horrifically.

We were supposed to tell them – show us your work. Let us hear the debate. Allow diverse human creativity to respond to the novel problem (which we now see clearly was ultimately created by the very same authorities we relied upon for advice, the whole freakin’ time).

WE PROVED WE WERE SHEEP – HOW COULD WE NOT EXPECT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE?

Now let me add one more dimension of Sisyphusian frustration to all of this, before I move on to Camus. I read a lot a lot, still, but a hell of a lot more of it is online, than even a decade ago (up until which point I resisted social media – then I published some books and needed to flog ‘em – so here I am – driven once again by the atomized freelancer (individual bears all risks) model of late capitalism – cyberpunkalism?)

I have also been writing essays for a decade now, first on a wordpress site, then here on substack. So I think about this oddness both from the perspective of a high volume (and quality) consumer of information, and also as someone who tries to render some insights from that information, usefully.

For a whole lot of people, analysts in ‘alternate media’ have been a precious lifeline for many years. Stalwarts like Glenn Greenwald have been especially outstanding and principled over the long haul, and people like Scott Ritter, whose singular focus is on opposing humanity-destroying war, have done yeoman service, but so have countless smaller names. The best thing about this so called ‘alternate’ media, is that we can hear from people with real hard-earned expertise, who aren’t being filtered by the corrupt academy (to serve the purposes of the state, or corporate domination of citizens and state both).

Thing is, a whole lot of really smart analysts who watch data closely, and understand the parameters of things, have been getting some big estimations wrong, for the last several years, and the reason for this is perhaps the biggest rock to push of all. We really are in a new age, and all of the standard referents of our old world, all the guardrails and guidelines, are being knocked over one by one, by crazy emergency efforts to save a (western) system which we all know perfectly well is beyond saving (not talking about our society, but our economics – which really are murder-based, and thus, unsustainable).

The saddest example which we could most easily see, if we weren’t so addicted to state-narratives, is the war in Ukraine. If you study military history you know at once, they should have settled for peace two freakin’ years ago. (Could have taken peace before the war, but once that chance was lost...)

Power-people in the west keep confiscating billions from their taxpayers, saying “Support Ukraine” when a huge proportion of the people of Ukraine, who voted for Zelensky specifically because he promised peace with Russia, have fled as refugees – rather than stay and fight for their country. Support who and what, exactly?

Ukraine as a nation will not ever recover. We did that, by insisting on war instead of peace. They are grabbing people off the streets, to drag them to the front line. Taking people who are sick, the elderly, people who would not be considered fit soldiers in any other circumstance, and do not want to be there.

Meanwhile, the glorious anti-racists of the European parliament are considering legislation to force Ukrainian refugees who fled the war, to go back and be killed on the front lines of a war they oppose.

Ursula fond o’ lyin’ wants somebody else’s Ted Moses to go and die, so she can keep hating, racist and righteously, instead of saving the economy of the Eurozone (by resigning, and taking Kalles with her).

So – as my dear walking friends will tell you, I have predicted the end of the Ukraine war several times over the last couple of years, because by all sane measures, they have no hope of anything but more and still more national destruction, if they continue the war further.

Arestovich (one of Zelensky’s friends and key advisors, early on) said it quite clearly a couple of years before the war began. The deal was, Ukraine had to fight a war with Russia, maybe even two wars, and in exchange they’d be accepted into the EU and NATO. It is now very clear that neither one of those rewards will ever come, so why are they still fighting? Because this isn’t and never was about Ukraine fighting Russia, it is the whole west fighting Russia, using Ukraine to take (and dish out) the punishment, of the whole grand mass-murder plot for capital and energy.

When you hear a Ukrainian politician talking, you are hearing someone who is willing to destroy his nation and his people, in exchange for continued western patronage and bribes. Simple as. If they were representing the interests of Ukraine itself, the war would have been over for more than a year now.

But it isn’t just there, where our frames are going wonky. I mentioned the gaming of oil prices in my last piece, and I should add, this is of course being played on all kinds of levels simultaneously (totally irrational short positions with suspicious slow-news-cycle timing, very much included).

But along with AI games and futures market manipulations, they also keep doing totally weird stuff like saying “Empty isn’t empty anymore” Changing the long established ‘floor’ of how much may be drawn out of the US strategic petroleum reserve, without causing permanent damage to the storage caverns, by many hundred of millions of barrels, just so the gas gauge doesn’t read empty (even when we actually are coasting on fumes already – and headed for much weirder, sooner than we think).

All of which means honest and sincere analysts have been caught out again and again, over the last few years, as parameters which we have long considered fixed constants, suddenly became crazy variables!

Don’t be a Manichean, in response (everything either black or white). Don’t reject all future insight from someone who was wrong, unless they try to deny they were ever wrong at all in any way (which says things about character, which do call their analysis into serious well founded doubt).

What you want to look for is sincere interest in learning more, each time they are wrong, and trying also to analyze the new variable, so that we too can watch for clues about the big obscure rock we’re all stuck pushing, even though no one has articulated a credible plan for the west in fifty freakin’ years!

That is, like the tortuously indeterminate ‘who knows how long’ coping of the lockdowns, we are all a lot more dispirited and frustrated by the very invisibility of the plan, for which we bear this load. Can we say for sure the plan is evil, without seeing it? Yes we can – just count bodybags, and it’s obvious.

Now let me finish with a little rant about one of the most dangerous books that young people are still given to read in University, “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. I should begin by saying I think Camus was interesting and courageous, just not always well grounded in his humanity. (You want a courageous French Author to get excited about? – try the much under-read Andre Malraux, instead).

I did outright suggest Camus’ “The Rebel” in one of my recent booklists, and many of his books are worth reading, because he took on truly challenging questions, repeatedly. The reasons I object to “The Myth of Sisyphus” being given as University reading in particular are very specific.

To simplify to an extreme (and yes, unfair) degree, Camus spends the first half of the book making a fantastic intellectual case for Nihilism. Showing from several angles that there is no such demonstrable and provable thing as real objective meaning, truth, good, or hope. He spends the second half of the book, struggling in vain to refute his first devastating proof, and fails, utterly, finally coming to the conclusion that the only way we can believe in happiness, in a world of suffering pain confusion and chaos, is through an act of creativity “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Ouch! No really, this is one of the all-time great rug-pulls in the world of books and philosophy – he completely fails to balance his case, because he completely fails to recognize his frames are wrong.

The reason I get outright angry that this book is still offered to young people, is because they already have more pressures toward self-harm and suicide than any generation yet – not just crazy theories they’ve been bombarded with since young, but also objectively maddening conditions.

So – who exactly thinks it is helpful to give them even more great reasons for suicide?

Now – I do understand it is audacious for a nobody like me to claim to have effectively refuted a great and famous mind and work like this one book of Camus. I struggled for years, even after seeing the clue, to figure out how best to encode this insight, until I finally realized, this proof isn’t an essay, but a poem. I’ll share it here, and please do feel free to leave a comment, if you think I failed to indicate the fatal framing problem, or to put the great (but imperfect) man in his place at last!

Quod Erat Demonstradum, mothafucka

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

First off, here’s an extended lovely and trippy piece from the much missed Ted Moses

And here’s something a bit more ‘radio’ and kick-ass, from his big band (I wish I also had access to the recordings of the contemporary ballet he composed)

Now you tell me, would the world be a better place if he was made a soldier?

I will return to ‘the eccentric’s bibliography’ next time (bookstores remain temples!) But for today I thought I’d offer films of particular weight, much worth looking for.

The Battle of Algiers – 1966

This film is unique in movie and political history. It was paid for by the people of Algiers, as a clear message and method, for how they managed to kick the Imperial French out of their country. Even curiouser, both radical cells and intelligence agents study this film to this day, and discuss the basic template presented endlessly. Even more impressively, it is outstandingly shot, acted and edited – and OMG, the soundtrack will stay with you forever, glorious monophonic notwithstanding!

The Cradle Will Rock – 1999 (and Bob Roberts – 1992)

I am not a big fan of Tim Robbins as an actor, but as a writer-director I think he is in the top tier of American cinema, and these two films, both written and directed by him, will convince you too.

Bob Roberts is a very dark comedy about a rock-star conservative American president stocktrader. Robbins deliberately recorded the (way too catchy) songs in segments, so they couldn’t become hits on conservative radio (sans ironic context). Giancarlo Esposito as “Buzz Raplin” is breathtaking.

The Cradle Will Rock depicts the Works Projects Administration on several levels at once, with a rollicking good story around it all (no dry history lecture). Most daringly he uses both Orson Welles and Diego Garcia as characters, and totally pulls it off (Garcia versus Rockefeller, especially memorable).

Syriana – 2005

Is one of very few American films which portrays how crazy American empire, intelligence operations and hyper violence for the sake of energy hegemony have got. It still retains some naive features typical of American film (and refreshingly absent from most film elsewhere) but it not only delivers a very heavy punch, it was loosely adapted from the memoirs of CIA agent Robert Baer, and so, way less fictional in quality, if not specifics, than any of us would like it to be. Wright and Plummer amaze!

Brazil – 1985

This film, more thoroughly than Orwell’s “1984” or Huxley’s “Brave New World” brutally nails the soulless bureaucratic concrete dystopia toward which the western world has been heading an awfully long while (yes, we really could see it coming, forty years ago). Terry Gilliam’s greatest masterpiece, and also the smartest and most devastating film writing the brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard (as close as we moderns got to an Oscar Wilde) ever did in his life. Unique and unforgettable. Make sure to see the real ending, not the cop-out “happily ever after” bullshit ending added for American audiences!

A Thousand Clowns – 1965

Is, to both my wife and I, very simply the most perfect screenplay ever, and one of the most perfect movies also. It was originally a broadway play, and Jason Robarts, who also stars in the film, did the part on broadway for years first – if ever we have seen a perfected, and truly genius piece of acting! The reason we so adore the screenplay is not just that it is clever (though it is) but that the funny story revolves around the question of the meaning of life and art and work and integrity and heart, and does not come to easy (false) answers, but does reminds us of so much of precious value, as it goes. The humour here is not just funny, but heart-achingly or heart-soaringly so, astoundingly humane.

Modern Times – 1936

Citizen Kane is prettily shot, but this is the single best movie of all time (silent, so “clowns” still wins, for words). Many forget just how much of a phenomenon Chaplin was in his time, but his portrayal of a sympathetic down on his luck everyman was infinitely more effective than Orwell, at stirring public sympathy (more on Charles Dickens’ level really. Mass, rather than just intellectual, appeal).

What will amaze you afresh, every time you sit with this movie, is just how fresh and modern it remains (the poor sap even accidentally does cocaine, while in prison!) especially the surreal and dehumanizing ways in which workers are treated by insane, tech-empowered overlords.

We will know we have had a revolution that worked, when this film looks finally like history – instead of the evening freakin’ news!