Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Part two.   Donald Trump’s racism was publicly demonstrated in 1975 when he lost a Federal Housing Discrimination case after a wasteful two-year court battle. His love of vigilante violence was demonstrated when calling for the death penalty for not-yet-convicted, under-aged defendants, in the Central Park Rape case in 1989 (the defendants were ultimately, definitively, exonerated, but even decades later, Trump still wanted them lynched). His hatred of Democracy was demonstrated when he Tweeted a call for violent revolution on Election Night 2012 because the Electoral Vote wasn’t going the way he wanted it. He repeatedly expressed open contempt for the Constitution during his own run for President in 2016 and before that election night he proclaimed that any conclusion other than his victory must be viewed as fraud -- the phrase most associated with Trump-inspired violence in 2021, “Stop the Steal” was, in fact, coined in 2016 by his close advisor Roger Stone.   ...

  In the Spirit of Jefferson Davis   Part one.   A January 6 th , 2021, text from Stephanie Grisham to her boss, then-First Lady Melania Trump:   “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness & violence?”   Melania Trump’s reply (complete text):   “No”   At this point, if you still support Donald Trump, if you continue to espouse mythologies about a stolen election, if you describe the Jan 6 th Insurrection as anything except what it was -- a violent, incompetent, attempted Coup (technically an “Autogolpe”) -- then your heart has gone black with the stain of Treason. You have no love for this Country, its Constitution, or its People. You’re a resentment-driven thug, a coward, and a bigot.   Too many of us are deliberately turning their eyes away from mountain of evidence that a violent, neo-Confederate, philosophy, has achieved near-dominance ove...

  The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)   You’ll love this film … also, it’s terrible.   Once it was one of the biggest successes in Hollywood history, this film is now mostly forgotten, or if its remembered, it’s only for people to mock it. “The Greatest Show on Earth” combines a remarkable joyousness with truly thunder-headed stupidity, terrific documentary footage and FX sequences with sappy and unconvincing melodrama, and it will simultaneously make you glad the fifties are over and wish you could have them back.   Legendary Director/Producer/Actor Cecil D. DeMille, one of the founding fathers of US cinema. His first released film, “ The Squaw Man” (1914), also happened to be the first ever USA-made, feature-length, film. He was almost seventy-years-old when “The Greatest Show…” was released, and by then had about seventy features under his belt. During pre-production he over-worked himself, there were disturbing incidents where he looked as if he w...

  The Joneses  (2009)   Critic Stuart McGurk totally nailed it, “’The Joneses’  sounds like a great film, until you have to watch it. That’s when it becomes a distinctly average one.”    It’s a perfect expression of “high concept,” so it would behoove us to actually share the definition (from Wikipedia), “a type of artistic work that can be easily  pitched  with a succinctly stated premise. It can be contrasted with  low concept , which is more concerned with  character development  and other subtleties that are not as easily summarized.” Therein lies the rub, because everything was said in the poster, and Writer/Director Derrick Borte clearly struggled to squeeze even one additional idea out of the story after he stated the first idea quite well.   Here, the concept is that the old adage, “Keeping up with the Joneses” has been literalized, and, in fact, turned into a conspiracy, as sinister marketing company is pe...

    "Glaucon" is a Greek name, derived from the  adjective   glaukommatos  (γλαυκόμματος) meaning "bright-eyed", "owl-eyed", or "grey-eyed." It’s not usually meant as a physical description though, its associated with devotion to Athena , the  goddess  of both wisdom and war, and used as a nickname meaning "looking for wisdom." The most famous Glaucon is a perfect example, as he was both a philosopher and soldier.   Glaucon was the brother of Plato and a student of Socrates. In addition to philosophy and martial pursuits, he studied music, and was under the great mathematician Pythagoras. Today he is known almost entirely though his brother’s writings, but by the company we knew he kept, he most've been a figure of some of significance during his lifetime, though nearly forgotten now. About all we know of his personal life is an admiring observation by Socrates than Glaucon, an aristocrat and lover of finery in a culture that ...