I realize that the anger over Trump and Barr’s militarized goons detaining protestors has given a new impetus to the Oregon street protests, but what kept these protests going before the goon troops arrived?

The coast-to-coast incendies of late May and early June have obviously chilled. BLM-ers in major cities across the nation have decided to downshift for the time being and take a breather.

But not in Portland. Or, to go by today’s reporting, Seattle. So what needs to happen before somebody calls a time out? Or is this a new and permanent way of life?

Do Portland protestors want some sort of no-confidence election? Mass resignations from local white officials? Resignations of the entire Portland police force so the city can be Camden-ized?

Demonstrators marching recently in Portland. [Photo credit: Dave Killen/The Oregonian, via Associated Press.]

NOW: Rioters are looting an Amazon store in Seattle
pic.twitter.com/Eb3IWBgX78

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 19, 2020

Two days ago N.Y. Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel noted that the Portland street demonstrations, ignited by the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd on 5.25, have been happening for 50 days straight. (53 as of today.) Warzel wrote about the stress of being in constant combat, and of likely PTSD down the road. Will the Portland actions still be going after 75 days? 100?

Posted on 6.3.20: “Terrible convulsive traumas have sadly happened to this country from time to time. But they’ve never been long-term. A few days or a week, and then everyone began to gradually emerge and resume basic routines.

“JFK was shot on Friday, 11.22.63 and buried on Monday, 11.25. Four days of emotional gloom and devastation. And on Tuesday, 11.26, the world slowly started again. The grief never went away, of course, but the wheels of commerce and culture began to turn.

“John Lennon was murdered on 12.8.80. The shockwaves of anguish were devastating. Everyone wept. But after a few days or a week, the clouds began to dissipate.

“The Los Angeles Rodney King riots lasted for six days (4.29.92 to 5.4.92). The aftermath seeped and simmered. Nobody ever forgot what happened. But on the seventh day the world began to move on.

Pretzels are junk, of course, but I lived for the damn things when I was a kid. (Along with red licorice, ice pops, Hershey bars and hot mashed potatoes.) Every now and then I’ll buy a small bag for old times’ sake, but they aren’t as liberally salted as they used to be. Without proper salting they taste dull. That all changed two or three days ago when I bought a bag of Good Health pretzels — gluten-free and sea-salted. My first thought was “my God, these are wonderful.” One bite and I was suddenly ten years old again. Not to mention free of gluten, wheat, egg, dairy, soy, cholesterol.

Yes, many older white voters have stopped supporting the Orange Plague, which is one reason why Joe Biden is ahead in national polling by double digits. But a hardcore contingent (roughly 37%) is sticking with this beast, and most of these voters are white. Mostly under-educated rurals but what a legacy for those of European descent. And for this I feel appalled and to some extent tribally ashamed, being a whitebread myself.

What kind of stubborn, intellectually stunted animal would vote for Trump at this stage, a stone sociopath whose denial, stupidity and mismanagement of the coronavirus threat caused or at least hastened the deaths of over 130,000 Americans and who clearly and obviously regards the world like a lying criminal?

The only defense I can offer is that there are millions of decent, fair-minded, well-educated American whites who despise Trump as much as I do. Descendants of decent, fair-minded forebears who lived politely and responsibly, paid their taxes, judged people by their character and mowed their front lawns on Saturday. Urban and suburban X-factor whites who currently watch MSNBC and read books and have visited Venice and Paris and wear Italian-made lace-ups, etc.

TRUMP: “I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election.”

WALLACE: “Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results?”

TRUMP: “I have to see.”

WALLACE: “Can you give a direct answer that you will accept the election?

TRUMP: “I have to see.” pic.twitter.com/mPDPLY9vsr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2020

I haven’t the slightest interest in catching Savage, a New Zealand street-gang drama in the vein of Once Were Warriors. (No mullets.) I couldn’t care less about Spinster, a spirited dramedy about a single woman facing her 40s. Ditto The New Mutants, a long delayed X-Men-related horror flick. No offense but Brandon Cronenberg‘s Possessor will have to wait. If I never see Hard Kill it’ll be too soon. Ditto Brian Skiba and Ryan Phillippe‘s The 2nd, a thriller that I wouldn’t see with a knife at my back. And that’s a double ixnay for Work On It, a dancing-competition flick, and for Words on Bathroom Walls, a coming-of-age drama that costars Charlie Plummer. And I wouldn’t see Project Power, a Jamie Foxx + Joseph Gordon-Levitt action flick about a superpower drug, if I was paid $20 or even $50 — I would refuse to watch it out of principle.

I would, however, pay to see Chris Nolan‘s Tenet, which won’t be opening until…what, mid-fall? Later? And I’d pay to see Unhinged, whenever and however that Russell Crowe road rage film finally streams. And I’m definitely looking forward to the new 4K Spartacus, which will arrive mid-week.

What a miserable time to be alive for film lovers.

I’ve been to San Felipe twice, once with the kids in the mid ’90s and three or four years before that. One of the tourist attractions is the banana boat rides — inflatable, banana-shaped tubes hauled by a motorboat across the Sea of Cortez. It cost $20 back in the Clinton era. A couple of friends and I were on the back of one, and moving at a good clip — 25 or 30 mph. Then the motorboat driver made a too-sharp turn to the right, and in a flash we all got dumped. Less than a second. 27 or 28 years and I’ve never forgotten this. Ditto the tasty but inexpensive fish tacos they sell on San Felipe’s main drag near the beach.

“A friend got pulled over in Jersey around Halloween. He had a pumpkin in the truck and told the cop that the pumpkin had rolled off the seat and jammed the gas pedal. The cop took his license and registration, went back to his vehicle, returned three or four minutes later and said, ‘Okay, I’m not going to give you a ticket.’ Breathing easy, my friend said, “Thank you, officer…much appreciated.’ And then the cop said, ‘But here’s the ticket for your pumpkin. He has 10 days to pay it.'” — posted on YouTube by “tackless”, sometime in ’17.

A pandemic rages on, cases continue to spike in Nashville .. but by all means, please don’t let that get in the way of going to a Honky Tonk 🤦🏼‍♀️(this video shot last night) pic.twitter.com/IaK9nBj1T7

— Chris Conte (@chrisconte) July 18, 2020

“Getting fired for a headline that says ‘buildings matter too’ is like a scene from George Orwell‘s ‘Animal Farm.’

“The issue here is not about the assertion that racism is endemic in the United States. The issue is the willingness by many to displace [our former] system of free argument with a system of enforced opinion and censorship. Right now we’re at a stage in which writers and media personalities participate in the enforcement effort.” — from “Democracy Dies in Darkness, but Don’t Blame Trump,” a Wall Street Journal piece by Gerard Baker (7.13.20).

A couple of months ago I watched an Amazon HD streaming version of George Stevens‘ A Place In The Sun (’51). It doesn’t look immaculate (some softness, dirt, scratches) but certainly…well, half decent. The image quality is almost secondary to the fact that Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, respectively 30 and 18 years old, were never more beautiful or more perfectly matched.

In any event Imprint records, an Australian label, is releasing a restored Region 2 Bluray on 9.4.20. But what reasonable person would ever consider paying $45.00 for this? Run-of-the-mill, good-enough Blurays are markdowns at best. No more than $15 or $20, if that.

There’s one scene in Steven Spielberg‘s 1941 that I’ve always half-enjoyed, even though it’s technically ridiculous. I’m speaking of the moment in which the spoke hinges of a Pacific Ocean Park ferris wheel are blown off by Japanese guns, and the wheel — carrying Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen and some kind of demonic puppet — rolls off the pier and into the Pacific Ocean.

The error, of course, is that the ocean is never very deep at the end of an amusement park pier, and so the wheel couldn’t sink straight down. The wheel should’ve hit bottom and then flopped over sideways. Then it would’ve been fine.

Stanley Kubrick to Spielberg on the set of The Shining: “1941 was one of the best shot and most beautifully choreographed films I’ve ever seen. It’s not funny but it’s technically brilliant.”

Wiki excerpt: “Spielberg regretted not ceding control of 1941‘s action and miniature sequences (such as the ferris wheel collapse in the film’s finale) to second unit directors and model units, something which he would do in his next film, Raiders of the Lost Ark. ‘Some people think that was an out-of-control production, but it wasn’t,’ he said. ‘What happened on the screen was pretty out of control, but the production was pretty much in control. I don’t dislike the movie at all. I’m not embarrassed by it. I just think that it wasn’t funny enough.”

Team Trump isn’t exactly “rooting for infection and death,” as David Poland put it earlier today, but the administration is attempting to “block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill,” according to a 1.18 Washington Post story by Erica Werner and Jeff Stein.

In other words the Trumpies are trying to cover up forthcoming bad COVID news so they won’t be blamed for it. Less disease data means less finger-pointing by Democrats and less to be accountable for. Does this represent a policy of “unmitigated evil”? Yes, I think it’s fair to say that. Donald Trump is a sociopath. He doesn’t care about fighting the disease, just wants to be re-elected, etc.

“Too often in this country, seeming progress is derailed, reversed, or overwhelmed. Bloody Sunday led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act — and yet suppressing the black vote is a pillar of today’s Republican Party strategy.

“The election of the first African-American President was followed by a bigot running for election, and now reëlection, on a platform of racism and resentment. The murder of Jesse Thornton has its echoes in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and many others. Indeed, to this day, the bridge where Lewis nearly lost his life is named in honor of Edmund Pettus, a U.S. senator who was a Confederate officer and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

“And so there were times when Lewis, who died on Friday, at the age of eighty, might have felt the temptation at times to give up, to give way. But it was probably his most salient characteristic that he always refused despair; with open eyes, he acknowledged the darkest chapters of American history yet insisted that change was always possible.

“Recently [Lewis] took part in a Zoom town hall with Barack Obama and a group of activists, and told them that he had been inspired by the weeks of demonstrations for racial justice across the country. The protesters, he said, will ‘redeem the soul of America and move closer to a community at peace with itself.'” — from “John Lewis’s Legacy and America’s Redemption,” posted by The New Yorker‘s David Remnick on 7.18.20.