Month: February 2021

‘The Splitting,’ a Sci-Fi Horror Novel, Book I, Chapter Three

An hour later, Peter had arrived in MedicinaTech, his parents’ pharmaceutical and vaccine-making corporation, and also the seat of government in his district. He waited in his parents’ office for them to arrive.

As he waited, he looked out the glass walls of the office and at all the masked employees rushing about doing this and that. He sneered in disgust at their, in his opinion, thoughtless compliance to all the rules meant to protect us from the viral variant of the time.

He thought about what had been happening over the past decade. Not just about the viruses, but also about how corporations no longer used the government to protect their interests…how corporations gradually replaced governments. It all started with certain tech companies in Nevada creating their own governments, as proposed by a bill back in early 2021. Over the 2020s, this idea caught on little by little as a way for capitalists to cut out the middle-man of the state.

There was some resistance at first, of course, but gradually people became used to the idea, and just passively accepted it. By the end of the decade, pretty much the whole world was being run by corporations as local district governments. No longer was it even pretended that governments looked out for the interests of the people: what had once been only implied was now explicitly understood. Corporations were the government, because they were the only thing the government had been there to care for anyway.

Though Peter benefited from the privilege of being the son of governors of his area, he still sighed, sad for all the people, the vast majority, who didn’t get to enjoy his benefits. When his parents died, and he was to succeed them, he planned to give up the whole MedicinaTech company and give the power back to the people…if he could.

His parents arrived after about five minutes of his waiting. His father followed his mother through the doorway, and they saw Peter sitting by their desks. “Hi, Peter,” his mother said. “What can we do for you?” His parents sat at their desks.

“I heard that Derek Gould died last night,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” his father said without a trace of emotion.

“We need to find a new CFO, and fast,” his mother said with an equal lack of emotion. “It’s going to be a real pain.”

“You two don’t seem too broken up about his death,” Peter said. “He’d only been with this company since it began, hadn’t he?”

“When you run a business, you focus on the business,” his father said. “Not on feelings.”

“And that goes double for governing a district,” his mother added. “Your head has to be clear when dealing with the kind of pressure your father and I have, dear.”

“Yeah, but you’ve never focused on anyone’s feelings here,” Peter said with a hint of aggression. “Not Derek’s or his wife’s, not the workers you overwork and underpay, not–“

“Oh, let’s not start that up again!” his mother said.

“This is the influence of your girlfriend’s family’s liberal newspaper, no doubt,” his father said.

“The newspaper that governs our neighbouring district, and that demonizes our company and all the good we do for the world,” his mother said.

“Yeah, all the profiting off of other people’s suffering!” Peter shouts. “Michelle’s newspaper doesn’t criticize you enough, as I see it. Their writers think these viruses are real. Michelle isn’t influencing me one tenth as much as you think she is. I was just debating her earlier today about whether this new virus is real, which she believes it is. My opposition to what you’re doing here is from my own heart.”

“Yet you hypocritically enjoy all the benefits of being the son of wealthy, politically powerful parents,” his father said with a sneer. “You, as our son, who doesn’t have to wear masks or stay in lockdown.”

“And an ungrateful son, at that,” his mother growled. “Maybe we should deny you those benefits, so you can learn some appreciation.”

“I knew it was pointless coming here,” Peter said, then stormed out of the office, slamming the door behind him.

“Why did I have to have Friedrich Engels for a son?” his father said with a sigh.

The Ouroboros of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

In the third volume of Capital, Marx explains, using a formula, how there’s a tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The numerator is the surplus value (s), and the denominator is the total capital (C) invested. This total capital is the sum of variable capital (v), or wage labour, plus constant capital (c), or money spent on the means of production (machines, equipment, raw materials, etc.–Marx, page 317). The quotient of s over C (or s over c + v) is the rate of profit. If constant capital rises, the denominator rises while the surplus value doesn’t, and there is a fall in the rate of profit.

Sometimes, in order to gain a (however temporary) competitive advantage, a company will invest in higher technology (i.e., new machines) to boost production. This means a rise in constant capital as against surplus value, resulting in a lower rate of profit.

Since value in a commodity comes from the socially-necessary labour time put into it, having a greater involvement of machinery in production means less human labour is going into it, so less value and a lower price. The lower price means people buy this company’s commodity more than that of the competition, hence this company’s competitive advantage.

Still, this advantage is only temporary, since the competition will learn of the new machinery/technology and will soon be compelled to use it in their own production, and the price of all commodities in this branch of industry will go down. With the lowering of the cost price will come a fall in the rate of profit.

Now, the fall in the rate of profit is only a tendency, happening gradually over a period of decades. It isn’t a straight, diagonal drop; there are many small bumps upward that accompany the overall drop. These upward bumps are caused by countervailing factors in the capitalist class’s attempts to reverse the fall in the rate of profit. These countervailing factors include such things as opening up branches in foreign countries, particularly in the Third World, for the sake of exploiting cheap labour.

Nonetheless, the fall in the rate of profit is never fully reversed, and the result of the unemployed and underemployed (because machines are gradually replacing them) not having the money to buy so many commodities means there is overproduction. This problem snowballs into the economic crises that plague us every ten to fifteen years.

Though Marx predicted that one crisis too many would result in a socialist revolution, crises don’t stop capitalists from being capitalists. For all of the blather we hear from right-wing libertarians that the “free market” is antithetical to the state, we Marxists know that the capitalist (not the “corporatist“) class always has used and always will use the state to further their interests. Hence, the bailing out of the banks by Bush, Obama, and Trump, and Keynesian economics‘ use of government intervention and spending to prevent or mitigate economic crises from 1945-1973.

So in these crises, we see a rise in the money of the ruling class along with the further immiseration of the poor. Along with that contradiction come others: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) can be accompanied by a rise in the mass of profit; and the TRPF results from the temporary rise in profits as a result of those boosts in production from the early improvements in machinery/technology.

Thus, the rising vs falling of profits, as well as the accumulation of wealth vs immiseration of the poor, are to be understood in terms of dialectics. If, Dear Reader, you have been following my posts on the symbolism of the ouroboros, you’ll know that I use the serpent’s biting head and bitten tail to represent dialectically meeting extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which in turn is symbolized by the serpent’s coiled body.

So, as profits go up temporarily with boosts in production for particular businesses against their competition, we see a movement along the serpent’s body towards its head. We see similar movements towards the head when companies try to offset the TRPF by keeping wages down, intensifying worker exploitation, ensuring a sizeable reserve army of labour, imperialist inroads into foreign markets, etc.

Still, the reaching of the serpent’s head biting its tail will inevitably come, and the bitten tail of an economic crisis will come. The working of our way to an economic recovery is the movement from the bitten tail to the middle of the coiled body of the ouroboros; then the irresistible temptation to raise profits through increases in constant capital will lower the value of products through a lesser proportion of variable capital, and a move toward the biting head will come again. The cycle, a downward cycle leading to worse and worse crises, always repeats itself.

So, when is that ‘one crisis too many’ going to happen?

The socialist revolutions of the twentieth century happened in backward, pre-industrialized, Third World countries, not in the developed West of Marx’s predictions, where the flourishing of the productive forces were supposed to bring forth such abundance that communist society would be possible. Instead, the scheming capitalist class has figured out ingenious methods to adapt capitalism and help it survive even the most apocalyptic of crises.

As David Harvey said, ‘Capital is not a fixed magnitude!! Always remember this, and appreciate that there is a great deal of flexibility and fluidity in the system. The left opposition to capitalism has too often underestimated this. If capitalists cannot accumulate this way, then they will do it another way. If they cannot use science and technology to their own advantage, they will raid nature or give recipes to the working class. There are innumerable strategies open to them, and they have a record of sophistication in their use. Capitalism may be monstrous, but it is not a rigid monster. Oppositional movements ignore its capacity for adaptation, flexibility and fluidity at their peril. Capital is not a thing, but a process. It is continually in motion, even as it itself internalizes the regulative principle of “accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production.”‘ (Harvey, page 262)

With the Great Depression came FDR’s New Deal and the beginning of the dominance of Keynesian government interventions to save the capitalist system from itself. Many desperate people at the time were considering communism. A lot of people confuse the ensuing post-war capitalist accommodations (strong unions, high taxes for the rich, extensive state regulation of the economy) with socialism (rather than associating it with social democracy and welfare capitalism). On the contrary, the idea was to keep the Western working class from sympathizing with Marxism-Leninism by making capitalism seem ‘more comfortable.’

At the same time, a ruthless anti-communist propaganda campaign was going on during the Cold War, manifested in such varying forms as the spurious writing of ‘historians’ like Robert Conquest, books like The Black Book of Communism, the CIA‘s infiltration of the media, Ayn Rand‘s hack writing, and the Austrian School of economics.

So many people don’t realize how thoroughly they have been brainwashed with anti-communist propaganda, and this is especially true of those who grew up during the Cold War years, having heard, as naïve, impressionable children, about how ‘evil’ and ‘tyrannical’ the Soviet Union and Mao‘s China were. It’s gotten so bad that many today equate any kind of political corruption with some form of communism.

The political right extended their notion of ‘toxic socialism’ to include any form of government intervention, particularly those involving social programs and welfare, but in the context of a capitalist state. Hence such right-wing libertarians as Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, etc., started recommending a rollback of those left-leaning programs in favour of the “free market” around the time of the oil crises of the 1970s.

Whenever times are difficult, one tends to want to change from the hitherto dominant system; in the case of the 70s, it was a change from the Keynesian/welfare capitalism to what would become our neoliberal nightmare today. Sadly, far too few people were well-versed enough in history to know that what Rand, Friedman, Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek were espousing was simply a return to the Gilded Age capitalism that had started the chain of events that ultimately led to the Great Depression in the first place.

The changes were small at first, since the focus of the 1970s and 80s was dissolving the Soviet Union and making all the socialist states return to capitalism. Reagan busted unions in the form of firing striking air traffic controllers, and he and Thatcher cut taxes for the rich and deregulated the economy. None of this constituted the ‘small government’ that libertarians fetishize, since Reagan bloated military spending at the same time. It’s not ‘big’ vs ‘small’ government; it’s government for the rich vs for the people.

Meanwhile, the Soviet/Afghan War that Brzezinski, during the Carter administration, had goaded the USSR into fighting was bleeding the Soviet economy dry. This problem, combined with the weakness of Gorbachev, means the Western imperialists knew what was coming; hence George HW Bush’s speech on September 11th, 1990, that we were entering a “new world order”…not that of the conspiracy theorists, since “new world order” can mean many things to many people, but the heralding of our post-Cold War, neoliberal, “free market” era.

Funny thing: around this time came another recession, which should have reminded us of the unstable nature of capitalism, and of the TRPF. But the fall of global communism was seen as a triumph for ‘freedom and democracy’ over ‘tyranny and totalitarianism,’ even though Russians unsuccessfully tried three times to save/restore the Soviet system, first through a brief coup ousting Gorbachev, second through an uprising against the Russian parliament, repressed by Yeltsin’s tanks, and third through an attempt to elect the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 1996, but through the Clinton administration’s machinations, the extremely unpopular Yeltsin was reelected.

Isn’t democracy a wonderful thing?

Polls have since consistently shown that not only Russians but also East Europeans and East Germans, in large numbers if not majorities, have been nostalgic about the socialist systems of government that they lost over three decades ago. While things were generally bad throughout the twentieth century (and obviously throughout all of history, for that matter), if you were paying attention, Dear Reader, you’d have noticed that things started to get really…really shitty around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Without much of a major socialist alternative in the world to challenge global capitalism, the neoliberals knew they could do anything they wanted…to anybody. Accordingly, Clinton introduced NAFTA, he gutted welfare, ended the Glass-Steagall legislation that many think was a huge factor causing the 2008 financial crisis, enacted the Telecommunications Act that allowed mergers and acquisitions in American media, leading to most of it being owned by only six corporations, and had NATO bomb Kosovo, leaving a huge US military base there.

9/11 was a dream come true to defence contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed-Martin, since the US needed a new enemy, after the fall of communism, to justify the inflated budget of the military-industrial complex. Such is the logic, however diabolical, of capitalism: production and sales have to be kept up to counteract the TRPF. World peace? Ecological health? Social justice? All of these things be damned if they disrupt the steady flow of profit. Opposing those good things, for the sake of profit, may be evil, but it isn’t irrational.

The promotion of perpetual war, against Al Qaeda and ISIS, and threats of war against Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, has come to such a point that the American army has become a huge refuge for the unemployed, all for the sake of keeping defence contractors’ profits up. Not that the ruling class cares about the needs of the unemployed, of course.

What is particularly galling about not only the 2008 financial crisis–the worst since the Great Depression–but also the current financial crisis, surely an outright economic meltdown, is that while millions of people are being plunged into poverty, homelessness, and despair, the ruling class is doing better and better. The billionaire class grew tremendously in the 2010s, while for the rest of us the economy only ever so slowly pulled itself out of the mire. The same has been happening over this past year.

This is what I mean when I speak of the ouroboros of the TRPF: the problem moves in an endless downward spiral. There’s the reckless, unrestrained pursuit of profit, whose rate falls, resulting in a crisis (movement along the serpent’s body to its biting head). The crisis plunges us all into misery, but the capitalist class is bailed out by the bourgeois state instead of punished for its excesses, so it’s free to resume its rapacious pursuit of profit (movement from the serpent’s bitten tail along its coiled body towards its biting head once again). There is no learning from mistakes, only continued, unchecked greed.

This lack of learning, however, doesn’t mean the capitalist class isn’t getting nervous about the rising anger of the people. Our overlords have used one devious tactic after another to distract us and goad us into fighting with each other instead of fighting them. These tactics range from resorting to fascism (Bolsonaro, the far-right in Ukraine, Anez in Bolivia, Trump’s tendencies, etc.) to exploiting the Covid-19 pandemic to isolate (lockdowns) and alienate people from one another (social distancing) on the one hand, and to generate profits from it (the sale of masks and repeated vaccinations) on the other.

Regardless of where we, as leftists, stand on the coronavirus controversies (yet another way for the ruling class to divide us)–Do we believe it’s real, or a rebranding of the flu?–we should at least agree that the capitalist class and their media are exploiting the issue for their own private gain. From Pharma man to ‘farmer,’ Bill Gates, who has no background in medicine, way too much money, and therefore way too much influence over the WHO, CDC, etc. shouldn’t be trusted. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are losing their jobs (and with that, their already-shitty-as-it-is medical insurance), their homes, and their already teetering mental health.

Are we going to allow yet another movement along the ouroboros’s body until it reaches its biting head again? Will this or the next crisis lead to “the Great Reset” of what suspiciously sounds like a return to some form of feudalism, or will it lead to a socialist revolution? This bullshit stops when we all put our feet down and say, “Enough!”

‘The Splitting,’ a Sci-Fi Horror Novel, Book I, Chapter Two

Peter Cobb-Hopkin was on the other side of town in the early afternoon of the next day, reading an online newspaper article on his phone about the incident in the park the night before. He was with his girlfriend, Michelle Buchanan, in a Starbucks. She was wearing a mask, pulling it down occasionally whenever she took a sip from her coffee. He wasn’t wearing one. Only two other people were in the Starbucks, masked and buying coffees to take home immediately, out of compliance with the lockdown.

“Oh, look at this bullshit that your parents’ newspaper is publishing!” he said. “Apparently, there’s a new disease for us to be worried about. ‘Something the likes of which has never been seen before’.”

“What’s that?” she asked, her hand darting out of the way of a droplet from his mouth. “And watch your spitting.”

“They’re calling it, check this out, ‘The Splits’,” he said with a chortle. “When you catch it, you may show no symptoms, but still be a carrier. Haven’t we heard that old line before.”

“And if you do show symptoms?” she asked.

“Oh, here’s where it gets interesting,” he said, snorting and chuckling. “Your body tears itself to pieces. Splits apart.”

“What?” Her eyes widened.

“According to the article, Derek Gould, the CFO of my parents’ company–which has governed this municipality for the past four years, as we know–was taking a walk with his wife, Hannah, in Queen’s Park last night…because ruling class privilege means they don’t have to comply with the lockdown.”

“Like you and me, who have the same privilege, through our families.”

“Yes, of course, I wasn’t denying that,” he said. “Anyway, Derek Gould suddenly became infected with something, he fell on the sidewalk, shaking and screaming in pain, then his body cracked open into many pieces…with no blood spraying anywhere, oddly…and then he died.”

“Wow.” Michelle said, then pulled her mask down to sip her coffee. “What else does it say?”

“The infection spread to her, but she hasn’t shown any symptoms. When the paramedics arrived, they found her sitting on a bench, just zoned out.”

“How do they know she’s infected?”

“They gave her tests at the hospital. Also, one of the paramedics got infected, and his body split into pieces in the same horrific way, hence they’re calling it ‘The Splits.’ Small, white dots of light flew from Hannah’s body into his.”

“I see. I guess we’d better be careful.”

“I guess it’s just more mainstream media bullshit.”

“Come on, Peter. You’re always saying that.”

“Because I’m always right.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” Michelle said.

“I never wear masks, and I haven’t caught anything…over ten years.”

“You’ve been lucky. You’ve also been lucky to have parents who rule over this municipality, so they can bail you out when the cops give you a hard time for not wearing a mask.”

“Your parents could bail you out for defying this b.s., too, if you had the guts to, like me,” Peter said. “The media corporation they’re a part of governs your neighbouring municipality, too. We’re not like the unlucky poor people who don’t have family in the corporate city governments. And I’ve been lucky not to get sick? I’ve had my eyes open! All these viral variations of Covid we’ve had over the past decade. It’s just seasonal flu.”

“Oh, not this again.”

“What ever happened to seasonal flu, Michelle? People used to die of it yearly by the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, prior to 2020, then the global financial crisis hit in early 2020, and the capitalist class needed a distraction: the flu rebranded as a global pandemic. Millions of people plunged into poverty, while the billionaire class, now directly our cities’ governments, have made billions more over the years, and everyone’s misery and loss of freedoms can all be conveniently blamed on a virus.”

“The flu disappeared because people, unlike you, were masking up, social distancing, and taking fewer flights.”

“Assuming the flu and the ‘rona are separate diseases, those preventative measures might reduce the flu cases, but we’re talking about a virtual disappearance of the flu, while the pandemic remains unabated, even stronger. I’m not buying it, and I’m not buying into this new one, ‘The Splits’.”

“Fine,” Michelle said, rolling her eyes. “Believe whatever you want. As soon as we’re done here, I’m going over to Mississauga District to talk to my mom and dad about this new disease.”

“Same here,” Peter said. “I’m heading right over to MedicinaTech.”

Analysis of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’

Napoleon Dynamite is a 2004 comedy directed by Jared Hess, and written by him and Jerusha Hess. It stars Jon Heder in the title role, with Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Aaron Ruell, Jon Gries, and Diedrich Bader.

The film is based on Hess’s black-and-white short film Peluca, which also stars Heder, though his character’s name is Seth in that film. What it shares with Napoleon Dynamite is the opening scene with the bus ride to school, his friend (Giel, instead of Pedro) shaving his head, and them buying a wig (‘peluca‘) for him.

Hess insists he got the name ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ from someone he met in Cicero, Illinois around 2000, and not from what Elvis Costello equally insists that Hess–consciously or unconsciously–must have got it from: something written on the cover of Costello’s 1986 album, Blood and Chocolate, which includes the song “Poor Napoleon.”

This song, at least by its title, would seem an appropriate one to include in the film’s soundtrack, for the title character is in a pitiable situation. He is a socially-awkward nerd, breathing through his mouth, and living in a small town in Idaho. Constantly bullied and socially excluded, he finds his sole escape in fantasy: drawing ligers, mythic animals, etc.

A link to quotes from the film can be found here.

The film opens with the credits presented on–usually–plates or trays of food: tater tots, a burrito and rice, egg slices, a steak, chips, a school cafeteria lunch, a peanut butter sandwich and banana, and a burger and fries. The credits are presented in other things, too, like school stationery, school library books, ID cards, chapstick, and Napoleon’s fantasy drawings. Taken together, all of these things are commodities of one kind or another, representing needs to be fulfilled: hunger, education, escape into fantasy, and a sense of identity.

While we’re seeing these things, we’re also hearing the song “We’re Going to Be Friends,” by the White Stripes. This song is as important for establishing theme in the movie as is the presentation of all that food and those other commodities during the opening credits. This is a movie about the beginning of a friendship between Napoleon, Pedro Sánchez (Ramirez), and Deborah ‘Deb’ Bradshaw (Majorino).

So, how do we satisfy needs? Being fed is a need, of course, but should we expand this to a buying of things in general to satisfy such needs as improving our sense of self-worth? Or should we simply make friends? Do we reinforce the compulsion to shift back and forth between money and commodities, or do we strengthen solidarity among people?

We see Napoleon get on the bus for school one morning. He sits at the back, and after snapping at a boy who was just trying to make conversation, he takes out an action figure of a muscleman with a long, thin string attached to it, opens a window, flings the doll outside, and with the string, drags it on the road behind the moving bus.

Since Napoleon is being bullied at school, his dangling of the muscleman action figure can be interpreted as a symbolic fantasy of his; it’s him getting revenge on his tormentors, who are of course bigger and stronger than he is.

Escape into fantasy is a huge part of his life. Apart from his drawings of mythical animals, Napoleon speaks of magic and the Loch Ness Monster as if they were real. Instead of focusing on real people and things, he has his mind split between exciting fantasies and hated people that he rejects, and who reject him.

Because of the family and school environment that he is stuck in, one that largely lacks empathy, Napoleon reacts to the world in what WRD Fairbairn called the schizoid position. Instead of having a predominant Central Ego (similar to Freud‘s ego) related to the Ideal Object, which is a healthy, ideal object relationship between the self and other people, he is split between phantasy relationships of the Libidinal Ego (similar to Freud’s id) and Exciting Object (Napoleon’s mythical animal drawings, Nessie, his belief in magic, ‘medieval warriors,’ and his choice of high school princess/mean girl Trisha Stevens [played by Emily Kennard]) and of the Anti-libidinal Ego (vaguely comparable to Freud’s superego) and Rejecting Object (i.e., everybody towards whom Napoleon has such a sullen attitude).

This social dysfunction, however, is going to begin to fade when he meets Pedro and Deb. His growing friendship with them will bring his Central Ego out of its diminished, dormant state by strengthening it with his Ideal Object, in the forms of these two new friends of his.

Unable was N. ere N. saw Deborah.

…and Pedro.

(OK, I haven’t mastered the art of making palindromes.)

A similar transformation occurs in Kip, Napoleon’s even wimpier older brother, who communicates with “babes all day” on his computer (Libidinal Ego linked to the Exciting Object), and who fancies himself an aspiring cage fighter. When one of the hot babes, LaFawnduh, meets him and returns his affections, Kip builds the self-confidence he needs and goes from being abrasive with Napoleon to being nice to him.

Though similarly timid socially, Pedro is ideal for helping Napoleon to come out of his shell, for Pedro comes from a far more loving, empathic family. Indeed, having such a good family can make the suffering from bullies at school much more bearable. Though we don’t see Pedro getting bullied, his very association with Napoleon will ensure that he won’t be included among the “cool” crowd; on the other hand, he has those cousins in that car to help him, Napoleon, and another bullied kid.

Prior to this build-up of friendship, these characters have tended to resort to buying or selling things to boost their self-esteem; hence my reference to commodities (use-values and exchange values), especially food, during the opening credits, things that satisfy needs. The point of the film is that it’s the nurturing of relationships, not the buying and selling of things, that boosts our self-esteem and fulfills emotional needs–though what we buy and sell can help with such needs, provided we use our purchases well, and sell commodities and services with a good heart, as Deb does.

In his fantasies of becoming a “cage fighter,” Kip shows interest in what Rex (Bader) is offering in his “Rex Kwon Do” course, in a commercial on TV. This teaching of self-defence is one of many examples in the film of selling self-esteem. It is capitalism exploiting our insecurities. Kip comes to the conclusion–after being humiliatingly smacked around by Rex in his appropriately obnoxious American flag pants–that the course is a ripoff. Of course it’s a ripoff: we can’t buy or sell self-love–that comes from people, not money.

Elsewhere, Deb is trying to raise money for college by promoting glamour photography and selling handwoven handicrafts. Again, she’s shy, and a success in sales would boost her self-confidence, just as her failure to sell to Napoleon and Kip at first frustrates such hopes. The glamour photography, like “Rex Kwon Do,” would be an example of the profit motive taking advantage of people’s insecurities; but Deb, unlike Rex or Uncle Rico (Gries), hasn’t the narcissism to capitalize in such a way. When she takes pictures of people, she really wants to help them, including helping them to relax while posing, as she does for Rico.

Uncle Rico is the most blatant example of someone trying not only to sell people self-esteem (the breast–enhancing herbs), but to use capitalism to boost his own deflated self-worth (in the form of a get-rich-quick scheme, employing Kip). Rico’s narcissism is a front he uses to hide the disappointments in his life: no longer the football hero of his youth, his girlfriend leaving him (which he thinly disguises by claiming he’s dumped her).

Rico’s pretence at still supposedly being a great football player is particularly pathetic, with his video recording of himself tossing a football around by the camper-van that is his home, and such nonsensical claims as his eligibility for the NFL and throwing a football over some mountains. He lives in as much of a world of fantasy as Napoleon and Kip do, and he is as much of a loser as those two start out as…until his girlfriend comes back to him at the end of the film.

Pedro imagines he can get Summer Wheatley (played by Haylie Duff), the snobbish school princess and head mean girl, to go out with him to the school dance by making a cake for her. Of course she won’t go out with him: even if she didn’t have sneering Don (played by Trevor Snarr) for a boyfriend, or such a bad attitude, she wouldn’t. Commodities in themselves don’t build love.

Napoleon thinks buying a suit decades out of style will give him cool points at the school dance; but even Pedro’s cousins giving him and Trisha a ride won’t make her like him. Even if he lived in a larger city, with better quality clothes to buy, he still wouldn’t be able to win respect at school. That can only come from making real friends.

Other examples of capitalist exploitation can be found in a job Napoleon gets: putting chickens in cages, for which he makes only a dollar an hour, paid to him in coins, symbolic of how low the pay is. The job is as unpleasant for him to do (i.e., his fear of chickens’ “talons”) as it is for the chickens themselves (Imagine being stuck in a cage so small that you can’t even turn around…before the farmers kill you.). Of course, his boss is kind enough to give his employees lunch: tiny sandwiches, egg slices, and a drink of raw egg yolk. Yum.

A turning point in the film happens at the otherwise depressingly dull, small-town school dance. Pedro sees a sign about the upcoming election for class president, inspiring him to run. The funny thing about such school elections, though, is what they have in common with political elections: they’re all popularity contests.

It makes no difference what a Trump or a Biden administration would do for the people (in both cases, virtually nothing for, and besides that, much against the people). It was only their levels of popularity, among shady liberals or far right-wing whack-a-doos, that determined the vote results. Both men have worked, with only slight variations between them, for the ruling class.

Summer Wheatley’s run for class president represents this kind of shallow appeal to popularity. Though what Pedro offers to improve things in their school (holy santos to guard the hallway and bring good luck? continuing the FFA competition?) can hardly be taken seriously, he as the underdog represents the wishes of a defeated people in the political world. Summer, on the other hand, offers commodities (two new pop machines in the cafeteria [and no more “chimini-changas”], glitter Bonne Bell dispensers for all the girl’s washrooms, new cheerleading uniforms).

The problem with the commodity fetishism that we see pervading this film in its various forms is how it reinforces alienation–relationships are replaced with things. We see the product in its finished form on the shelves of stores, ready to be bought or sold; we don’t see the work exerted in making it, the value put into it by workers. The commodity thus is like an idol to be worshipped, rather than a piece of wood, metal, etc. shaped into the ‘divine’ form we see in stores.

Small wonder Napoleon marvels at the “awesome” suit he’s about to buy for the dance. Small wonder he thinks the woman’s wig they get for Pedro makes him look “like a medieval warrior.” Small wonder Napoleon initially imagines Uncle Rico’s “time machine,” “bought…online,” could be anything other than a conductor of electricity.

The low quality of the commodities that are the only things available to people in this small town is symbolic of the hollow worth of commodities in general, taken for their value in themselves only. The struggle and irritation Napoleon goes through in caging those chickens–to produce the commodities of chicken meat and eggs–are a clue as to how we should think about commodities…rather than fetishizing them.

When we see how commodities can be used to help people, however, we start to see their potentially greater worth, symbolic of the value workers put into them when they make them. Pedro may look silly in that woman’s wig, but the point is that his friends, Napoleon and Deb, are helping him in picking it out. It’s the thought that counts.

Similarly, one day while Napoleon is in a store fetishizing such commodities as a fork-shaped, trident-like toy sword of some kind, he also finds and, on a whim, buys a video tape teaching dance moves. He puts his heart and soul into learning how to dance, and he’ll use this new skill to help Pedro in the nick of time.

Meanwhile, Pedro as the representative of the ordinary, not-so-cool crowd of their school (representative, in turn, of the common people of any country), has a piñata made of an effigy of Summer, who represents the popular, “cool” crowd of their school (representative, in turn, of the ruling class of any country). The smashing of the piñata, therefore, represents the revolutionary wish to defy the ruling class; and the principal’s punishing of Pedro, by removing all of his fliers to promote voting for him, represents the repression of the defiant people by the powers-that-be.

Summer and her group of “Happy Hands Club” girls dancing to the Backstreet Boys’ song “Larger Than Life” is peak superficiality in popularity, the top of the school’s hierarchy of “cool.” Not knowing until the last moment that Pedro has to have a skit ready, too, Napoleon has to think fast; fortunately, he has the mixed tape that LaFawnduh gave him to practice dancing to.

What Napoleon is about to do is a great sacrifice for a friend. With his reputation as a mega-nerd, Napoleon is taking a huge risk in front of his entire school by dancing in front of all of them on the auditorium stage, shaking his booty to Jamiroquai’s song “Canned Heat.”

Even if he’s to fail in doing his dialectical antithesis of a nerd dance, Napoleon will still be earning respect for risking being the school’s laughing stock; for the point is, he’s helping Pedro in his time of need. The smiles on Deb’s and especially Pedro’s faces show the value of what Napoleon is doing. The school’s standing ovation, another defiant rising-up against the dominant “cool” crowd, is a bonus. Don’s and Summer’s reaction–his sneering and her ‘How dare you peasants prefer Napoleon’s skit to mine?!’ frown–adds to the pleasure in its Schadenfreude.

Because of what Napoleon has done for Pedro, Deb forgives him for the “Bust Must” outrage (which, of course, wasn’t even his fault, but rather Rico’s); and Napoleon finally has someone to play tetherball with. The addition of a friend in his life spurs him to hit the ball with a skill he hasn’t generally shown up to this point.

Napoleon is late for Kip’s wedding to LaFawnduh, but for good reason: he dramatically enters the scene riding a horse, his gift to the newlyweds. Neither he nor Kip are anywhere near cured of their geekiness, but the point of the movie is that they don’t need to be. All they need is the love of their friends, and their awkwardness will fade sufficiently in time, replaced with a self-confidence that no mere commodity can give them, or anyone.

Another message of this film is that, if you’re feeling like a geek or a loser, do nice things for people. As the angel Clarence Odbody tells George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, “no man is a failure who has friends.” Kindness kills the loser, or nerd, in us in a way that making billions selling commodities, exploiting people in the process, can never do.

‘The Splitting,’ a Sci-Fi Horror Novel, Book I, Chapter One

[I have just republished an expanded version of the entire novel, with added scenes and further character development. Instead of publishing it chapter by chapter, which would have been too much of a pain, I did it book by book. Here are links to the four books: I, II, III, and IV. As you can see, I’ve also left the original, shorter versions published, because replacing them all with the expanded version would also have been too much of a pain. So I leave you, Dear Reader, with the choice of the shorter versions or the longer ones. You are free to choose whichever ones you prefer: a quicker but less-developed read, or a longer and fuller story. Either way, I hope you like my story.]

2030, a summer night in Toronto

Mr. and Mrs. Gould looked up at the stars as they were walking on a walkway towards the 48th Highlanders Regimental Memorial at Queen’s Park.

“What a beautiful night,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Especially with it so quiet, with nobody else around.”

“Thanks to the lockdown.”

“Yes.” He smirked as he looked at her.

“It really isn’t fair, you know. Everyone else stuck inside their homes like prisoners, except for ‘essential people,’ and even they are usually out only to work or to buy what they need.”

“They aren’t of the same quality as we are, Hannah.”

“I don’t care about people’s ‘quality,’ Derek,” she said with a frown. “They have to wear those uncomfortable masks, just to go outside, and we don’t have to? They’re fined if they don’t comply?”

“Peter Cobb-Hopkin’s lucky,” he said. “He refuses to wear a mask or obey the lockdown, and his dad squares it with the police.”

“That’s because his dad is your boss, Derek.”

“Because he’s of our quality, Hannah.”

She sighed. “Those not of ‘our quality’ have to be given shots of that vaccine your company makes, while we’re given their money, and we don’t have to take the needle in our arms? It isn’t right.”

“You enjoy the benefits of getting that money as much as I do. Why are you complaining?”

“I just feel…badly for them. You know the side effects of the vaccine: the way it makes people more passive and lethargic. And everybody knows it doesn’t guarantee protection against viruses. Sometimes I think it’s designed deliberately to keep the people under our control.”

“Now you sound like one of those conspiracy theorists. And why do you care? I say if it’s true that they’re designed on purpose to make the poor passive, that’s a good thing. We don’t have to worry about them rising up against us. That’s for your benefit, too. How could you be against that? Enough of this silly talk. Let’s just enjoy the walk, OK?”

“OK,” she said with a sigh.

He looked up at the night sky again. “Wow,” he said. “Look at those beautiful stars.”

She looked up. “Oh, yes,” she said, her eyes and mouth widening. “They’re really glowing.”

“Yeah, especially that cluster just to the left of the moon.”

“Shooting stars? They seem to be coming here.”

“Yeah, they seem to be racing at us.”

She frowned. “I…don’t like this.”

“They…aren’t getting any bigger…as they get…nearer,” he said with a frown of his own. “I don’t think I like this, either.”

“Those aren’t stars, Derek,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I feel…like I can’t.”

A cluster of about a dozen dots of glowing white light flew right at him, staying at about the size of the smallest of pebbles. They seemed to go right through him…but they didn’t.

She shrieked on seeing the impact.

He fell to the ground, shaking as he lay there on his right side in the fetal position. He grunted and groaned as he felt something inside him begin to tear him apart.

“Derek?…Derek!“

She saw fiery red lines all over his skin, like cracks in wall paint. His grunts and groans changed to screams as those red cracks thickened.

“What’s happening to you?!”

His body was beginning to rip apart at those cracks; the rips would widen, showing off internal organs, then they would narrow, as if he was struggling to heal himself.

“Help!” she screamed. Why am I not seeing any blood? she wondered. And why am I even screaming? There isn’t anybody out here to hear me.

Finally, those cracks ripped right open. Her next scream was ear-piercingly shrill. The pieces of his body, what looked like about twenty of them, lay fidgeting on the ground, as if each had its own consciousness. The severed internal organs were showing, such as the heart, stomach, lungs, brain, and intestines; but the blood was somehow kept from flowing out.

The openings in those internal organs, where the severing had been done, were now moving like mouths. Grunting noises came out of them, what sounded like an unintelligible, inarticulate language. Eyes agape, she grimaced at the surreal sight.

After a minute or so of these movements, the pieces dulled in colour and lay still. Now, the blood poured out in ever-widening lakes. Her high heels dodged the flow of red.

She was too distracted by the blood to notice what happened next. The dots of white light came out of the lifeless pieces of what had been her husband and flew at her.

She looked up at the glow. “Oh, God…NO!“

She felt them vibrating inside her. She was now shaking more than he had been. She twitched about spastically, as if that would help her get them out of her.

Then she stopped moving.

She still felt their warm glow inside herself.

But there was no pain.

She stood there, frozen still. Only her pounding heart was moving.

Her panting was the only sound.

Still nothing.

Just the inner warmth.

Her eyes darted around in all directions, as if something out there would tell her what was going on inside her body.

Finally, her heartbeat slowed down, her breathing grew softer, and she walked over to a nearby bench and sat down. She’d waded in the puddle of blood, not caring about the red she got on her shoes.

She sat there for several minutes, just staring straight ahead, as if in a trance.

She’d never been so calm.

She took out her cellphone and dialled 9-1-1. “Hello?” she said in a soft, monotone voice. “I’d like to report an accident.”

Analysis of ‘On the Waterfront’

On the Waterfront is a 1954 film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, based on a story of his. It stars Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint, with Martin Balsam (uncredited), Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle (uncredited) in minor roles.

The film received twelve Academy Awards nominations, of which it won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Director for Kazan, and Best Supporting Actress for Saint. It is considered one of the best films of all time, ranking at #8 (later #19) on the AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list.

A link to famous quotes from the film can be found here.

This is a film about the exploitation of workers; but in this case, instead of just being exploited by capitalists, these longshoremen are exploited, and downright bullied, by the very people who should be helping them–their union.

Corrupt union boss, Johnny Friendly (Cobb) has connections with the mafia; as I’ve argued in many other blog posts, the mafia can be seen to represent capitalists, so Friendly and his muscle are class traitors representing not their workers, but capital. Such betrayal has been common throughout the history of class war between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, manifesting itself not only in corrupt union bosses, but in left-leaning political parties that make concessions to capital and stave off revolution.

Many sit on the fence, unsure of whether to commit to the workers’ struggle or to sell out to the ruling class. Friendly and his muscle have chosen which side of the fence to be on, and Terry Malloy (Brando) has been leaning towards their side…but a girl is about to make him go the other way.

In fact, speaking of selling out and being a class traitor, as is well known, Kazan himself was guilty of ratting out his fellow leftists to the HUAC. Indeed, before I carry on with my analysis of this film, I must be blunt in my assessment of Kazan: for all of his talents, he was–like Orwell–a snitch and a reactionary piece of shit.

By unrepentantly ratting out eight former Group Theatre members who he said had been communists (as he himself had once been), including Clifford Odets, Kazan doesn’t deserve to be forgiven. He ruined these people’s careers when a blacklisting of himself (via “d and d”) wouldn’t have harmed his career all that badly (he could have continued work in the theatre in New York).

When Kazan received an Honorary Academy Award in 1999, some in the Hollywood glitterati refused to applaud. Now, these were bourgeois liberals who disapproved of him, so that should tell you what real leftists should think of him!

With all of this justified condemnation of Kazan, you, Dear Reader, must be wondering why I’m doing an analysis of one of his films, implying an endorsement of what he believed. After all, On the Waterfront was his attempt at justifying his squealing. I will argue instead that, in spite of Kazan’s conscious refusal to admit to any wrongdoing, his direction (and the writing of Schulberg, who was also an ex-communist and a fink to the HUAC…as was Cobb) unconsciously reflects his conflict and guilt over what he did, expressed through unconscious defence mechanisms, including rationalization, projection, reaction formation, denial, and turning against oneself.

Kazan’s guilt slips out in parapraxes in the film, as for example in the way the villain is named Johnny Friendly, just as Kazan, Schulberg, and Cobb were friendly with the HUAC…and as mentioned above, Cobb plays Johnny Friendly.

Kazan rationalized his guilt by imagining he was helping protect the US from ‘the Red menace,’ which I’ll bet he imagined Friendly and his corrupt union thugs to be representing. Indeed, Arthur Miller, the writer of the original version of the script (named The Hook) was asked by Harry Cohn to make the antagonists communists instead of a corrupt union, something Miller refused to do; he later refused to rewrite the script after learning of Kazan’s testimony for the HUAC.

It’s best that Friendly and his muscle be taken literally, as actual corrupt union thugs; or they could be seen to represent the anti-communist left of which Kazan himself was so obviously a part…and who should be ratted on—exposed–for the traitors to the working class that they are.

This leads us to Kazan’s next handy defence mechanism: projection. He projected his own betrayal of the working class onto those who he imagined to be the betrayers–the American Communists of which he had once been a member, then grew disenchanted with; later, he came to dislike the Stalin-led USSR, claiming the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a legitimate reason for his disillusionment, instead of coming to understand the political pressures that led to the USSR’s agreeing to the pact.

By imagining the communists to be the bad guys in the Cold War, Kazan rationalized that ratting them out was the noble thing to do, something he dramatized through Terry Malloy’s shouting, “I’m glad what I done to you, ya hear that? I’m glad what I done!” to Friendly after informing the police of his guilt in the murder of Joey Doyle (played by Ben Wagner). On the other hand, going “d and d,” or “deaf and dumb,” is considered cowardly in the film. Not informing is represented as cowardly and weak: this is Kazan making use of reaction formation; oh, it’s so cowardly not to talk! No, Mr. Kazan, it would have been brave not to talk.

Kazan wasn’t putting himself in danger of a group of Soviet agents abducting him and throwing him in the Gulag for finking on Odets et al. He wasn’t threatening high-ranking members of the Communist Party; he was selling out fellow writers and actors, people with little political power, people he should have thought of as comrades. The American capitalists were the ones with the power, and Kazan knew that all too well.

He could use his film to deny his guilt all he wanted, but it was true: he was a snitch. Deep down in his unconscious, Kazan knew he was guilty, so the scene in which Friendly’s men beat Terry Malloy half to death can be seen as a fantasy dramatizing Kazan’s turning against himself, him taking on the punishment to assuage his guilt, since he saw himself as personified in his hero, Terry.

When we see On the Waterfront in this light, we can begin to appreciate the film’s artistic and dramatic virtues on their own terms and in spite of its director’s moral vices. Yes, it’s a film made by a class traitor about class treason; but instead of exculpating Kazan, as he’d consciously intended it to do, the film displays his betrayal of the left, however unwittingly and unconsciously. For as much as Kazan would have liked to have seen himself in Terry, his real nature is shown in Johnny Friendly, who’s friendly with the capitalist mafia, not with the ‘Stalinists.’

There’s a considerable amount of Christian symbolism in this movie, much of which is in the service of trying to justify Kazan’s naming of names. An example of this symbolism is a pigeon motif (i.e., ‘stool pigeon’), or the idea of a canary that can sing, but can’t fly (Joey Doyle); these birds can be seen to represent the Holy Spirit descending like a dove onto baptized Christ (Mark 1:10).

Joey Doyle is tricked by Terry into leaving the safety of his apartment and going up to the roof to receive a lost bird of his from Terry, who claims he’s found it. Instead, Friendly’s men throw Joey from the roof to his death. Terry, imagining they were “only going to lean on” Joey, is already feeling a pang of conscience, as if falling Joey (and not the bird) were the Holy Spirit descending on Terry, the Christ-figure of the film.

Joey’s sister, Edie (played by aptly-surnamed Saint), being pretty in a wholesome way, is the Mary-figure of the film, since it is she, in her righteous anger over the murder of her brother, who inspires Terry to do the right thing and stand up to Friendly. She symbolically gives birth to the Christ in Terry by arousing his guilt over the matter.

Edie, in her innocence, has never drunk beer before, an inexperience symbolic of virginity (i.e., the Virgin Mary). Terry, growing romantically interested in her, takes her to a bar and buys her some beer; but when her suspicions grow that Terry knows about the circumstances leading to her brother’s murder, yet he won’t talk, she leaves without drinking the beer, retaining her virginal innocence. Her piquing of his guilt is causing his ‘Virgin birth.’

Father Barry (Malden) adds to the Christian symbolism by saying to the longshoremen that each killing of those who stand up to Friendly (Doyle and Kayo Dugan [Pat Henning]) is “a crucifixion.” This is significant when we come to the beating of Terry that almost kills him, yet he rises up, is ‘resurrected,’ if you will, and saves the workers from Friendly in this act, not in his squealing.

Terry’s Christ isn’t that of the Gospels, in which Christ is the pre-existing Word from the beginning of time (John 1:1); nor is he the Christ of the Virgin Birth (Matthew 1:20-25, and Luke 1:35), nor even the Christ of His baptism (Mark 1:10), on whom the Spirit descended like a dove, and God says, “You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11) Terry’s Christ is that of Paul‘s Epistle to the Romans, in which He is declared to be the Son of God through the power of the Resurrection, but born of the seed of David according to the flesh (Romans 1:3-4).

Put another way, Terry doesn’t save the workers through his word (i.e., his squealing on Friendly). He doesn’t save the workers merely through Edie’s influence; he wasn’t born a good man–he’s done many bad things in his life, and he’s had to redeem himself through his struggle and suffering, and rising up again after his beating–his own “crucifixion.”

The priest would have Terry help the workers through non-violent means, but this of course will never work. In Friendly’s bar and brandishing a gun after his brother, Charley (Steiger) has been killed by Friendly’s men, Terry is approached by Father Barry, who’d have him get rid of the gun and fight back by naming Friendly to the police. A former boxer, Terry tells the priest to “Go to hell!”, and is punched out by him; this parapraxis shows that even Kazan knew that violence is sometimes necessary, that turning the other cheek isn’t good enough.

Indeed, Father Barry’s not wanting Terry to fight back with violence, an unpleasant but necessary ingredient of socialist revolution, is analogous to having Terry ‘turn the other cheek.’ Another turning the other cheek, of sorts, was required of him by Charley when Friendly fixed Terry’s boxing match against Wilson. They wanted Terry to let Wilson, a man he could easily beat, win the fight.

In all of these things we see Kazan doing a kind of Freudian slip, revealing his real motives. Ratting on fellow leftists to the HUAC was a kind of turning the other cheek to the capitalist class. As a result of finks and traitors like Kazan, the working class has to give up on their dreams of bettering their lives, just as Terry has given up on his dreams of being a prize fighter.

Terry is a “bum” because he caved in to these phoney leftists, his corrupt, mafia-linked union. Friendly et al do not represent communists, as faux leftists like Kazan, Cobb, and Schulberg would have us believe; the corrupt union represents those three men and their loose-lipped ilk. It wasn’t the communists, Kazan; it was you.

Recall when Terry finally tells Edie what he knows about Joey’s death; it is significant that we can’t really hear his words. This not hearing the confession suggests that a part of Kazan’s unconscious didn’t want to talk, to name names, but the unwillingness has been displaced to confessing to her, just as Kazan didn’t want to confess his wrongdoing to his fellow leftists, but rather remain impenitent until his death. This scene can be seen thus as another Freudian slip of Kazan’s, for deep down, he knew, but wouldn’t consciously admit, that his squealing was a shameful thing to do.

Even if we were to ignore Kazan’s subtext about justifying being friendly with the HUAC, if we were to imagine Terry’s ratting out of Friendly as only representative of speaking out against corrupt unions, such talk is hardly a substitute for revolution. Lots of left-wing media (TruthOut, MintPress News, the Jacobin, the WSWS, DemocracyNow!, the Guardian, CounterPunch, etc.) exposes the crimes of the ruling class (and many of those just mentioned, among others, are guilty of being compromised by liberalism, Zionism, social democracy, and Trotskyism in a way comparable to Friendly’s being compromised by the mob). I write about capitalist crimes…but it’s all just writing.

The only real change to improve people’s lives is through revolution and the building of socialism. Raising awareness of the injustices caused by capitalism is a necessary, but insufficient, condition. Complaining to the bourgeois government, as Terry does in his testimony, and expecting that government to make reforms and nothing else, are typical tactics of liberals and social democrats. Committed socialists want more than that: we want to smash the entire system and replace it with something of lasting worth for workers.

This is why Terry’s testimony may hurt Friendly, but it doesn’t ultimately stop him at the end, as even Kazan and Schulberg have to acknowledge in their story. Friendly and his men have to put away their guns and be “a law-abidin’ union,” but they can still bully the longshoremen. Friendly just has to be patient and ride out all this pressure he’s getting from the police; once he’s off “the hot seat,” he’ll be back to his old dirty tricks.

An analogy can be made here between Friendly’s temporary capitulation to the police and the welfare capitalism of 1945-1973, meant to appease workers and dissuade them from adopting the Marxist-Leninist threat to capital that existed in the USSR, the Soviet Bloc, Mao’s China, the DPRK, North Vietnam, and Cuba. If the Western working class could be reconciled to capitalism by making it more comfortable, while the ruling class continued to loot the Third World and sabotage and undo the socialist states, then when those states were dissolved in the late 80s/early 90s, welfare capitalism would be replaced with neoliberalism.

That the anti-communist left helped the capitalists in their machinations against the global poor is what I mean by class treason, and Kazan and Schulberg were a part of that.

No, the only way to defeat Friendly and his thugs is through force…and solidarity among the longshoremen, with bruised and beaten Terry; and even Kazan and Schulberg knew this. Hence, I consider this climactic ending to be yet another parapraxis, or Freudian slip, on the moviemakers’ part, revealing that revolution, not ratting, is how you help the working class.

After Terry’s nonsense speech about being glad about ratting, his real fight with Friendly begins…an actual fistfight that makes nonsense out of Father Barry’s wish that Terry turn the other cheek and embrace the uselessness of non-violence. We can’t overthrow the capitalist class by asking them nicely to step aside. A revolution is not a dinner party.

The bloody beating Terry gets, which almost kills him, is a symbolic crucifixion, to recall Father Barry’s words. Terry’s getting back up on his feet is his resurrection, so to speak, and these heroic actions are what get the longshoremen to stand by him–just as the Church believed in Christ through His Passion and resurrection, not merely through His sermons.

Similarly, just as the New Testament writers warned against following a false Christ, or believing in false prophets and deceivers, so do Kazan and Schulberg–in spite of themselves–warn against following false socialists like Friendly. The media publications of the faux left, the anti-communist left, mix truth with falsehoods, as this movie does by mixing the legitimate struggle for workers’ rights with rationalizations for squealing against communists. When reading such writing, as with watching this film, one must have the wisdom to separate the leftist wheat from the chaff.

Remember, talk is cheap.

My Last Five Pop Songs

Photo by Snapwire on Pexels.com

That wonderful friend of mine, Gerda Hovius, who helped me gain access to most of my pop song recordings and classical music compositions from the Jamendo website (which won’t let me play or download them, for some reason), has pulled through for me again. She emailed me those last five songs I didn’t have as of my last post of pop songs, so now I have them all at last! Thanks again, Gerda! I owe you big time!

In fact, she sent them to me just after I’d published my blog post of most of the rest of my pop songs. I could have simply updated that post to include the five songs, but I decided to publish them separately instead, in order to stretch out and extend interest in my music a little further.

As I mentioned in my last post, four of these pop songs were originally published on my second Jamendo album, Meeting Places. These were “Meeting Place,” “Better,” “‘Til Divorce Do Us Part,” and “Lethargy.” The fifth track was originally published on my third Jamendo album, Infinite Ocean. It was “Moonlit Strolls.”

The album title, Meeting Places, was in plural because, if you were to hear all the tracks of that album in order, you’d notice common musical ideas, or ‘meeting places,’ that linked the first track to the second (an electronic synth sound), the second to the third (the gamelan-like sound I discussed in my previous song post), the third to the fourth (recorders and tuned percussion sounds), etc.

The song “Meeting Place” is in the singular because it’s about finding the one common unifying idea in the entire universe. Does such a unifying principle (Brahman, the Tao, the “Infinite Ocean“) exist, or is it just a figment of my imagination?

Musically, the song combines the electronic synth and drums dance sound of “Blow” with the gamelan imitation sound of songs like “Grateful,” “Freedom,” and “Regrets?” To expand my musical range, I added recorders and a harmonica solo at the end.

“Better” has me playing ascending melodies to symbolize a striving for self-improvement. I do this tone painting in my singing and playing of the recorder. In the lyrics, I make an allusion to the Beatles song, “Getting Better.”

Throughout the recording of Meeting Places, I had difficulty keeping the recorders in tune. I’m not 100% sure about the last recorder notes I play on “Better,” so I hope, Dear Reader and Listener, you’ll forgive me if those notes sound a bit off.

“‘Til Divorce Do Us Part” is a satirical song in 5/4 time about people who marry for superficial reasons (sexual attraction, money, social status), then get divorced soon after. The music was inspired by a Nonesuch recording of an African tribal wedding song, though I added the gamelan imitation sound, bongoes, a steel drum sound for a keyboard solo, recorder, and an acoustic guitar solo. The juxtaposition of lyrics about superficial, loveless modern marriages in the West, with music inspired by that of a traditional African wedding (presumably for marriages that are far more enduring) was meant to be ironic.

“Lethargy,” also in 5/4 and immediately following “‘Til Divorce Do Us Part” on Meeting Places (and therefore, in sharing the same time signature, have this in common as their ‘meeting place’), is a 12-bar blues/jazz song I composed at the acoustic guitar. The song is about my constant drowsiness and lack of energy, something that’s predictably gotten worse as I’ve gotten older.

I added piano and harmonica licks at the beginning and ending of the song, as well as a jazz electric guitar solo and an electric piano solo, the former of which I’m particularly proud, even if I do say so myself.

“Moonlit Strolls” is a sentimental song composed at the acoustic guitar in an old-fashioned, 1930s and 1940s jazz style, like “The Happy Song,” which it follows on Infinite Ocean. The chord progressions make extensive use of the diminished seventh chord as a passing chord.

Lyrically, the song is about walks at night that I used to take with my then-girlfriend, now my wife, about twenty years ago. I have pleasant memories of that simpler time in my life, which I tried to give a sweet kind of expression to in this song.

The one thing I don’t like about this recording is my annoying falsetto, meant to represent her voice as a stereotyped imitation of a woman talking. I hope you, Dear Reader and Listener, won’t be as irritated by it as I am.

Anyway, that’s all five of the last songs. I hope you like them and will be more forgiving of their imperfections than I am. Cheers!

‘Critical Parts,’ a Poem by Gerda Hovius

Here is another poem by my dear friend, Gerda Hovius, who’s helped me gain access to my pop songs, and an example of whose own musical talents can be heard here on YouTube. As with my discussions of other poets’ work, I’m putting her poem, “Critical Parts,” in italics to distinguish it from my own writing. Here it is:

For the love of me.
Where was I, where am I?
What is occupying me?
Do I listen to this inner voice, that is reasoning with the other parts of me?
Parts forsaken, parts withheld, parts afraid of love untold.
The rejected in me still 
Bares their love.
Will it shut me down, or am I 
Able to stand up?
Words are spells so use them well.
I am beholding myself.
I just want to be true tears and all, I may rise and I may fall.
As I rise some days are filled with Paradise,
As I fall I witness the darkness of the all.
My need to connect is real, I am allowed to state how I feel.

And now, for my analysis of the poem.

The poet has felt disoriented for a long time. “What is occupying” her are all her internal objects, particularly those of her parents. These are internal, mental images of all the people she’s made contact with in her life; we all have them, and they haunt our minds like ghosts in a house, influencing how we think and interact with others.

Often this “inner voice” is the censorious inner critic, reminding us of our faults, but sometimes it’s doing good, “reasoning with the other parts of” us. Tracing the voice back to its origin, we find it can be that of Klein‘s good mother or father, who give us what we want and need, or the bad mother or father, who frustrate us.

Afraid of the feelings we’ll find, we repress the “Parts forsaken, parts withheld, parts afraid of love untold.” There is ambivalence in the poet over the split parts, the good and bad mentioned in the previous paragraph, the wish for reparation; for “The rejected in me still/Bares their love.” She feels rejected and loved by those voices at the same time; to sort out this ambiguity is difficult and painful.

The poet doesn’t know if confronting these voices will be good for her, or bad: “Will it shut me down, or am I/Able to stand up?” Will the confrontation harm her, or will she be able to face her feelings, and carry on if they hurt?

“Words are spells so use them well.” Words can be therapeutic in expressing feelings to heal trauma, but they can also be harmful, in the form of gaslighting. We must be careful how we use them.

“I am beholding myself.” She sees herself, as in a mirror. Is this really her, or someone else? She “just want[s] to be true, tears and all,” not some phoney person trying to look happy all the time just to please everybody.

Her moods go up and down, sometimes “Paradise,” sometimes more like hell. She needs to connect with others, and to express who she really is. She should be allowed to be her real self, happy or sad. Her critical parts shouldn’t be inhibiting her free expression, as they shouldn’t be inhibiting that of any of us. Pain must be felt and expressed freely in order to heal.