Apocalypse Now?

I don’t pay much attention to the current president’s tweets because:

They’re usually meant to distract from something else much more important.
They’re usually mind-numbingly juvenile and as an “older person” I don’t like to waste my remaining years with stupid.
They’re usually an empty threat or a lie.

But when, on Saturday, he co-opted Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now poster and dialogue to make a joke threat of invading the great American city of Chicago – a town where I went to grad school, lived in briefly in my early twenties, and formed key lasting friendships over more than four decades, he pissed me off.

Royally.

Though royalty is something he will never be no matter how much he tries to act like King George III.

Anyway, I hate to reprint him (Note: POTUS, not the Real King) but desperate times call for desperate measures when you sense danger. So here it is.

Some observations:

When the president of a country thinks it’s cool to declare “war” on an American city – metaphorically, in reality or both – it’s time to stop what you’re doing and pay attention. (Note: You are allowed, however, to watch the men’s U.S. Open’s Final Sunday because we don’t want to ruin EVERYTHING good).

2. This POTUS renamed our Department of Defense to our Department of War by executive order on Friday even though it’s not official and not legal since that power lies with Congress. So clearly he’s signaling how he’s planning to “rule” unless he’s stopped.

3. The ad he’s “parodying” features a black-hearted but fictional U.S. lieutenant colonel during the Vietnam War who famously said, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It was a piece of dialogue illustrating how uncaring, sadistic and morally reprehensible/insane this fictional military man was. So when you are the actual real-life president – and put an image of YOU in place of the colonel – it means either:

a. You want to be seen as just that.

b. You are just that.

You are BOTH a. and b. At least in your own mind.

Totally fine. No problems at all. #yikes

Whichever you or I choose to answer to any of these questions or observations it’s clear that the current occupant of the Oval Office intends to order his battalions of enforcers (Note: ICE Agents, the National Guard from a red state since blue states aren’t playing and, well other masked guys) into the streets of another blue city to round up as many people as possible – much in the style napalm rid Vietnam of Vietnamese of all ages that fictional colonel wanted to exterminate.

Will he do it?

Won’t he do it?

How are these even questions we have to ponder??

That’s the reality show teaser promo this POTUS, a former reality TV show host and life-long bottom feeding huckster who in the last year has made $3-5 Billion in bitcoin selling virtual tchotchkes of himself, wants us to play.

Well, we’re not playing.

But we ARE paying attention.

Because there are 2.72 million people in Chicago, many of them non-white and a lot of them immigrants, who are being threatened. They are threatened not so much by the face of the colonel inserted in the ad, but by someone with the same face acting more like a real life counterpart of the fictional Col. Kurtz that Marlon Brando played in the last third of that Coppola film classic.

And he was plain bat shit crazy.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is clearly treating the situation as such. Over the weekend his response was short and to the point.

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

Tens of thousands of people across the country took to the streets in red and blue cities in the last week, enraged at the militaristic threats, mass raids rounding up innocent citizens and the stripping of rights and legal status.

The current administration is also losing court cases nationwide, most recently from the federal bench, which ruled his deployment of troops in my home state of California was illegal.

And yet the threats continue, often veiled in lame comedy, as do the lies (Note: Crime is down in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles). As does the misinformation and obsequiousness of his cabinet AND his private spray of willingly sycophantic billionaires (Note: Check out Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic serving up embarrassingly servile by watching this four minute segment in its entirety) which has now reached Saturday Night Live level.

It all reeks of either a new Gilded Age or the beginning of a contemporary version of the French Revolution.

Though many people are saying it’s beginning to sound more like Russian oligarchy or the seeds of a late 1930s-style German dictatorship.

Whatever it is or is not any of those, it’s worth paying attention to.

Not because it’s now co-opted imagery and dialogue from one of our greatest American director’s work.

But because it’s more serious than the heart attack lead actor Martin Sheen had that caused Apocalypse Now to famously shut down during filming.

He recovered from that and went on to play the president of our dreams on The West Wing.

But will we?

Let’s do more than hope we can do the same and recast our real life leader in the next election.

One that is not only free but fair.

And take to the streets en masse if the narrative begins to more and more lean towards the apocalypse.

The Doors – “The End” (with scenes from Apocalpyse Now)

01.05.25

by notesfromachair

Sanewashing

A friend sent me this story from The Daily Beast. It’s about the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post refusing to publish a cartoon on its editorial page depicting multi-billionaires like Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as others, kneeling at the altar of Trump and offering up bags of money.

But don’t take my word for it.

Here’s the cartoon:

It is well known both men, as well as many others in the M-Billionaire class, have donated $1 million apiece to the president elect’s inaugural fund and jetted down to Mar-A-Lago to spend time with him doing…stuff.

As for the cartoon, it was drawn by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who’s been employed at The Post since 2008.

But not anymore.

She quit in protest because in all her time there never once had the paper refused to publish one of her drawings. Tweaks, yes. Out and out refusal? Never. Here’s a link to her Substack with a more specific explanation:

One nixed cartoon is not necessarily concerning. But this is part of a clear trend. Just a few months ago Mr. Bezos overruled his own editorial board and refused to allow The Post to publish its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. In His own piece on His opinion page, he stated, seemingly out of nowhere, that the centuries old tradition of newspaper editorial endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”

Two editorial board members who resigned, as well as a slew of other reporters who also left or spoke out against his new policy, disagreed. As did, well, about 200,000 readers who cancelled their subscriptions.

But this was not limited to The Post.

L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, another M-Billionaire who was also pictured in Ms. Telnaes’ cartoon, similarly blocked that paper’s endorsement of Harris weeks before the 2024 election. Predictably, several members of his board, as well as two of its Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writers, resigned.

Not that it any of this ruffled the feathers of the aforementioned M-Bs, or as I now think of them – the new AOCs.

That would be – Aspiring Oligarch Class.

To whit:

Since P S-S’s announcement at the Times, he fired his entire editorial board, noting he plans to replace it with a new team of “more conservative voices ” that will make the publication he’s owned since 2018 a more “fair and balanced newspaper.”

To that end, he announced in December he’d be injecting an AI-powered BIAS METER into its coverage.

Because what could go wrong with that?

On one level, all of this is hilariously unfunny. On another, the Chair (Note: I defer to the third person when my blood begins to boil), who went to grad school in journalism at Northwestern in the post-Watergate era, has to marvel at the chutzpah.

For the one or two of you out there who don’t speak Yiddish or never went to the house of a Jewish friend or met one of their older relatives, chutzpah means extreme self-confidence or audacity.

The coincidental timing of both major newspapers suddenly deciding not to endorse, the large money contributions, and the total lack of concern of what the trained journalists they have working for them and, in many cases have long employed, have to say, IS a THING. It’s what they teach us in journalism school to sniff out (Note: That’s the technical term). In court, it’s called evidence. And when there are enough examples of it in enough places and at enough places, it’s called a trend. And if you google any of this subject matter, or even political contributions among billionaires, you will come upon numerous stories from REPUTABLE news sources (Note: Not “fake.” And not from a random podcast or on TikTok) with much more evidence.

Now of course, there is going to be blow back. Like David Shipley, editor of the WaPo’s opinion page, who stated re: the cartoon nixing that “not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force” and that HIS decision (Note: Bezos’ name was cleverly not mentioned) was made because a previous column had covered the subject and another satirical column was scheduled.

But is a cartoon a column? And what is the limit on covering a subject like a coterie of potential U.S. oligarchs being lined up among the billionaire class all across the country for the first time in history?

Imagine if Watergate had been covered that way? Or the existence of concentration camps during World War II? On second thought….

I often ask friends this rhetorical question re: money and power and the wealthy who wield them as a way to expand both with no real regard for the preservation of democracy, personal freedoms or even the mere existence of a habitable planet –

When is it enough?

The answer is also rhetorical but I’ll state it anyway. There aren’t enough billions in the world to make a scared individual secure, or an insatiable person filled up, or a person who is bottom line obsessed with their own self-interest suddenly become someone who will put you or anyone else in the word before themselves.

Money doesn’t do that. Nor does extreme, outsized power.

It takes a village of relentless truth sayers to hold them accountable.

Loudly and unrelentingly.

Like the people of Bedford Falls vs. Mr. Potter

The biggest note of hope in all of this is that The Daily Beast story linked above was written by an intern named Liam Archaki. He’s a rising senior at Amherst College with a double major in English and philosophy. Not even a journalism major. Also, he interns at The Christian Science Monitor – not one of those fake news, left wing rags the MAGA movement uses to describe credible – meaning vetted – sources of actual news.

See, like other credible online sites, The Daily Beast picks up stories from other reputable bureaus and syndicates. This is even something The Washington Post does. At least at this writing. Who knows what Bezos and some of the other guys have in store for us over the next four years. We could very likely see sources like the One America News morning show hosted by Matt Gaetz in an effort to cover “both sides.”

Sanewashing the most outrageous statements by publishing them in the name of a balanced agenda.

Travie McCoy ft Bruno Mars – “Billionaire”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: meta

Apocalypse Now?

Sanewashing