Submitted by Douglas Herman
“The majority of men are not capable of thinking, but only of believing and are not accessible to reason but only to authority.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer Voting is like bungee jumping: it’s for people who like big jerks. If the 2016 US Presidential election seems like a manufactured media circus, perhaps we can blame Hollywood. More precisely, we can blame fictional Senator Jay Billington Bulworth and his bluster for providing the blueprint.
In books and movies, Life often imitates Art. I know from personal experience, having penned a historical fiction novel, The Guns of Dallas, that apparently came true two years after publication. When an old CIA operative named E. Howard Hunt made a deathbed confession to Rolling Stone magazine about the JFK Assassination, he echoes a similar confession my protagonist made in my novel a couple years before.
But they give no prizes for such prescience. Instead they give Pulitzer Prizes and Nobel Prizes to liars and war criminals. They give Presidential Medals of Freedom to corrupt, incompetent or deceitful career public servants who do a huge disservice to the public and endanger the Republic. They give Oscars and Emmys and glowing accolades to filmmakers who create violent movies based on fantasies and fabrications that prop up the deep state. But they give no awards for speaking truth to power. Often only a bullet awaits those who do.
Long before Donald Trump uttered his first shocking statement, a fictional Hollywood politico named Senator Bulworth spoke truth to power and shocked a nation. So much so that the movie lost money, was critically panned and may have gotten the iconic actor and producer, Warren Beatty, blacklisted from Hollywood.
Why? Truth is a dangerous weapon. More dangerous than a thousand light sabers. But sadly, Truth is the First & Last Casualty in America’s Penultimate War.
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Some people think that truth is relative. At least my relatives do. Try telling your friends and family that all truth passes through Three Stages, from ridicule to violent opposition to eventual acceptance, according to that guy Schopenhauer again, who must have been a lot of fun at parties. My friends and family remain at stage one.
In an essay called Bulworth In 2013, artist Jim Kirwan remarked: “Warren Beatty made Bulworth in 1998 to warn America about what this country had become . . . The film is about a disillusioned Senator who tires of the lies and begins to tell it like it is. No other major filmmaker has dared to produce, much less chosen to put these topics before the public.”
Bulworth quickly insults or provokes everyone he meets, from Black civic leaders to Jewish movie moguls to a roomful of the Senator’s corrupt corporate donors. While on a fundraiser, Senator Bulworth visits the home of some Hollywood heavyweights and is asked bluntly by one of them: “Senator, do you think those of us in the entertainment business need government help in determining limits on sex and violence in today’s films and television programs?”
Bulworth replies: “You know the funny thing is, how lousy most of your stuff is. You make violent films, you make dirty films, you make family films, but just most of them are not very good, are they? Funny that so many smart people could work so hard on them and spend so much money on them and, I mean, what do you think it is? It must be the money, huh. It must be the money, it turns everything to crap you know. Jesus Christ how much money do you guys really need?”
And that is how you get black-listed from Hollywood, despite all the Oscars you have won in the past. Talk truth to power and damn if they don’t try to ruin you.
Bulworth continues on in his suicidal mission. Warren Beatty is masterful and marvelous, like Trump on truth serum or steroids. Intoxicated with his candor, Senator Bulworth begins to rhyme, to a roomful of stunned corporate backers. “And over here, we got our friends from oil/ They don’t give a shit how much wilderness they spoil/ They tell us they are careful, we know that it’s a lie/ As long as we keep driving cars, they’ll let the planet die/ Exxon, Mobil, the Saudis and Kuwait, if we still got the Middle East, the atmosphere can wait/ The Arabs got the oil, we buy everything they sell/ But if the brothers raise the price, we’ll blow them all to hell.”
Imagine Trump saying something like THAT?
So ask yourself this, dear reader: When has ONE candidate managed to provoke and then UNITE the hysterical Left liberals and the entrenched, super rich & powerful oligarchs of the Extreme Right against him? Not to mention uniting the puppets and pundits of the mainstream media? Has that ever happened in American history? Before Bulworth? Before Trump?
Consider the growing list of powerful, special interests arrayed against Donald Trump. Billionaire corporate heads oppose Trump. Dozens of them flew down to Sea Island, Georgia to devise ways to remove Trump from the Republican ticket. “”What we see at Sea Island is that, despite all their babble about bringing the blessings of democracy to the world’s benighted, AEI, Neocon Central, believe less in democracy than in perpetual control of the American nation by the ruling Beltway elites,” wrote Patrick Buchanan. “If an outsider like Trump imperils that control . . . the elites will come together to bring him down, because behind party lines, they’re soul brothers in pursuit of power.”
Speaking of soul brothers, another billionaire, and self-confessed Nazi collaborator, George Soros backs BlackLivesMatters. Soros provided in excess of $30 million in “seed” money to BLM. Tweeted top BLM activist and rapper Tef Poe: “ If Trump wins, young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go.” Billionaires bankrolling ghetto brothers to burn and riot? And NO outcry from the American media, naturally. Soros also backs unlimited immigration with his Open Borders group, the same people responsible for blocking a state highway in Arizona. Again not a peep from the mainstream media. But a cabal of connected newspaper columnists, who style themselves “National Security Leaders,” many who pimped for the endless wars in the Middle East, including such aptly named warmongers as Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Chertoff and Robert Kagan oppose Trump. Likewise billionaire Jewish movie moguls, many of whom have donated millions to Hillary Clinton, oppose Trump. Billionaire Chinese oligarchs and manufacturers, with factories filled with low-paid workers and fearful that tariffs may curtail their obscene profits, oppose Trump. Pop political celebs such as Elizabeth Warren and RINO relics Mitt Romney and John McCain oppose Trump and urge voters to reject him. Every one of these outspoken opponents of Trump was represented in the Bulworth movie in some fashion, especially the network talking heads. In the movie, Bulworth finally confronts the media. The American mainstream media hates and fears Trump, I mean Bulworth. He knows exactly what kind of prostitutes they are. But the media realizes Bulworth is hot news. So they have to cover him. They are forced to cover him, against their will. Exactly as they are forced to cover Trump.
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“You know the guy in the booth who’s talking to you in that tiny little earphone,” says Bulworth to some bimbo who reminds me of Meagan Kelly. “He’s afraid the guys at network are gonna tell him that he’s through/ If he lets a guy keep talking like I’m talking to you/ Cause the corporations got the networks and they get to say who gets to talk about the country and who’s crazy today/ I would cut to a commercial if you still want this job/ Because you may not be back tomorrow with this corporate mob/ Cut to commercial, cut to commercial, cut to commercial. Okay Okay I got a simple question that I’d like to ask of this network/ That pays you for performing this task/ How come they got the airwaves? They’re the peoples aren’t they?/ Wouldn’t they be worth 70 billion to the public today?/ If some money-grubbin Congress didn’t give them away?”
Bulworth, like Trump nearly 20 years later, seems to present the people, the voters, with a fresh perspective. Even if the apparent fresh perspective is a fraud or a mirage. But to the Powers-That-Be, any courageous man who speaks truth to power presents a fearful challenge: How to rein in this dangerous man, before he does any more damage? Easy enough. Whether a Bulworth or a Trump, similar wild card candidates who have suddenly become the newest darling of the public, they must be taught to toe the party line, or be removed from the picture. Simple.
How? Assassination or electoral fraud.
In the movie, Bulworth is eventually removed, at the height of his fame and popularity with the voters. In reality, so is anyone else who dares to challenge the status quo. JFK and RFK most recently. I imagine the powerbrokers are devising a scenario as I write this. Perhaps a disgruntled bus boy with three names, a troubled sort who keeps a diary and owns a handgun will ambush Trump. Naturally the media presstitutes will gloat in private but pretend a somber sorrow. And Hillary will be selected, or someone suitable to Wall Street and the police state. Hardly matters who.
As our empire erodes, and overseas tyranny evolves into full moral meltdown at home, and the economy becomes a series of bubbles, the sociopaths in charge resort to more inventive and draconian measures. Trump is neither the solution nor the answer but more like another symptom. A long simmering effect of a longer lingering cause. The cause and effect of bad governance, of corruption without any consequences.