“Death” Celebrates the American Establishment
“Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you. But don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again. Ever.” – Michael Corleone, The Godfather (Fredo ended up supine beneath the fishes in the 1500 foot depths of Lake Tahoe.)
A Legacy of Thuggery
From time to time I give in to my addiction for the Washington D.C. melodrama, now featuring DJT, Fred’s boy from Queens, who arrived at Little League games in Daddy’s Limo. Later, thanks to Dad’s money and the tutelage of McCarthy’s fixer and Black List agent, Roy Cohn (right), the Donald grew into a Reality TV star even as he modelled “marketing” and created his own crime family. Now he serves as the Black Sheep chair of America’s first families but his betters aren’t pleased by his behavior: they have sent the Deep State FBI agent and former U.S. Marine, Bob Mueller on the final errand.
DJT represents a Jungian shadow of America’s Presidents, the sullen child routinely suffers the slings and arrows of progressive media because of his bad manners (despite his contributions to the industry’s bottom line). Never have the MSNBC bunch seemed so smug as they recall the wonders of H.W.’s conciliatory notes, cross aisle dialogue while mentioning less about the wonders of Willie Horton racism and the prior bully’s adventurism in Grenada and Panama. Nor do they say much about H.W.’s Desert Storm progeny, the shock and awe birthed by W that destabilized Iraq and led to endless war in Afghanistan and genocide in Yemen.
Today Senator Graham (a closeted Roy Cohn knock-off) gets his knickers in a knot about the unfortunate butchery of “Khashoggi” in Turkey but nobody mentions the Bush, Bush, Obama Inc. deaths of Houthi men, women, and children in the Saudi-American Yemen genocide. We all remember how Bushmen James Baker and Dick Cheney’s relationship with Saudi fixer, “Prince Bandar,” and how the Saudis were given special dispensation as the “Bin Laden” family, the day after 9/11, so the perp’s primos could exit on the family jet, while not another civilian aircraft was permitted the freedom to fly the American skies.
The supporters of Grandpa H.W. Bush, W, Obama and Michelle, Hill and Bill, Jimmy represent the alleged civility of the American political class but seem more reminiscent of the Five Families. Though Don Corleone (Brando) distraught over Sunny’s death in “The Godfather” tried to call off the war, the savage younger generation, Michael Corleone, had other plans.
At the baptism of his child and in one of the greatest closing scenes in cinema, one sees the dagger aimed at the heart of America, the dagger that stimulates endless conflict. Between Catholic benedictions hit men, like special forces, retaliate against the objects of revenge. Like Israel’s attempt to wipe out Palestinians, the results backfire and the intifada is permanently instituted (abroad, in Congress, in the heartland).
Al Pacino-Corleone stoically consolidates his grip on the future id of Freudian America while celebrating wishful family values embodied by the carnival in Las Vegas just as the model “thugs” above at the funeral represent their deathlike grip on the miasma of murder…but they have such good manners as they politely snub the Donald and his imported Slavic eye candy.
El Caudillo
So Bush 1’s Operation Desert Storm, which led to Bush II’s Shock and Awe in Iraq, continued under Obama I despite his lovely phrase about “hope and change.” (Who’s the con artist?) Now comes the crass and grotesque progeny from Rosemary’s Baby, one DJT who makes hash out of the “covering up” the establishment’s suave “politesse”: see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.
Comes now Mr. Mueller and the Marines, his FBI team of prosecutors and jail house snitches to undo the man who aspires to be El Don. DJT may find himself, impaled, like Richie Cusack (William Hurt) on his own revenge plot in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” another American epic. For Joey (Viggo Mortensen on right) like Michael, washes away the blood and righteous murder of the bad guys in transubstantiated holy water at the end of the film and the family who “kills people” is reunited.
Villalobos: Day of the Dead
Lest you think the above are Freudian-Jungian-Christian fantasies from the dream factory, remember this quote from Phillip Caputo’s nonfiction account about Vietnam in “A Rumor of War.” The old sarge, a Korean era vet, tells the narrator, “One of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy.” Trump, the bully, never found that 19-year old boy (due to bunions). But H.W. and Bob Mueller volunteered for duty and lived to embody it. Like Joey some folks are natural born killers. If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out. Trump’s in trouble. (And so are we.)