Melissa McCarthy, in what must be her least repugnant role to date, plays the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed misanthrope and literary forger Lee Israel in this amusing movie for booklovers. After publishing biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Estée Lauder, Israel fell on hard times and, in order to make ends meet and keep her cat alive, took to forging and selling letters that purported to have been written by the likes of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward. McCarthy, who is fatter but still way more attractive than the actual Lee Israel, manages to make an almost lovable character out of “a 51-year-old woman who likes cats better than people.” Suspenseful, involving, and often funny, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is forgivably watchable if you don’t have to pay for it.
4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Can You Ever Forgive Me? is:
4. Pro-gay. Israel is a lonely lesbian and her partner in crime is a charming British homosexual, Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant), who tragically comes down with a case of the AIDS at the end of the movie after “fucking [his] way through Manhattan.” Hock appears with a bloody face in one scene as a reminder of the perils of being a fruity fop in a cold and insensitive world. Israel’s forging of letters by Noel Coward, too, furnishes a pretext for a history lesson about how, during the benighted first half of the twentieth century, gays still had to hide their orientations and carry out their forbidden amours in secret.
3. Anti-drug. Israel’s drinking is a barrier to healthy relationships. Cocaine, meanwhile, is associated with homosexual excess and irresponsibility. After going away and leaving Hock alone to look after her apartment and cat, Israel returns to find that her friend went on a coke-and-sodomy spree and that the cat has died. It is unclear, however, whether the cat has actually died because of neglect or simply succumbed to old age, considering that it was already sickly. In any case, Hock’s life of doping and diddling eventually leads to his demise.
2. Anti-family. “Maybe she didn’t die,” Hock reflects, trying to recall what became of a mutual acquaintance. “Maybe she just moved back to the suburbs. I always confuse those two. No, that’s right. She got married and had twins.” “Better to have died,” quips Israel, who has no interest in family life.
1.Philo-Semitic and anti-white.Can You Ever Forgive Me? takes place in a New York of the imagination in which plucky underdog Jews struggle to make it in a WASP-dominated world. “Did you hear,” bookseller Anna (Dolly Wells) asks, “that Tom Clancy is getting paid $3,000,000 to write more right-wing macho bullshit?” “Are you kidding me?” Israel objects. “That blowhard’s gettin’ $3,000,000? Oh, to be a white male that doesn’t even know he’s full of crap, right?” To her credit, Israel’s literary agent Marjorie (Jane Curtin) advises her to become “a nicer person” because “you can’t be such a bitch” and make it in the publishing world. Israel, however, accuses Marjorie of benefiting from (an implicitly WASPish) privilege and wealth. (Deleted scenes include a vignette in which Israel takes a job as an assistant to a rich blonde lady with the nakedly symbolic surname Whitman. The viewer, of course, is encouraged to find Israel more likable, cleverer, and more deserving of comfort and success in life than the prim and tedious Whitman.) Probably to counter the bad-optics spectacle of a slovenly character named Israel engaging in theft and fraud and generally being antisocial, screenwriters Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty throw in references to Adolf Hitler and “terrible old fart the tyranny addict Joe Kennedy” to remind viewers of Jewish suffering during the Second World War. In truth, however, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is, all things considered, a celebration of balls-out chutzpah and Jewish talent at snookering the gullible goyim.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.
If someone knew nothing about life on earth, and gleaned all they knew about the New York Police Department from watching Reinaldo Marcus Green’s bitch-burn-downer Monsters and Men – or, as I am dubbing it, Dindus and Dems – that viewer could hardly be blamed for believing that the NYPD exists primarily for the purpose of persecuting innocent people of color. The film is a bit reminiscent of Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004), but updated for the angrier decade of hands-up-don’t-shoot hoaxery. In a story inspired by the death of Eric Garner, a racist white police officer shoots a po innocent brotha jus tryna sell some loosies on the corner – and witness Manny (Anthony Ramos) must now decide whether to keep his head down to protect his family or release his camera phone footage to the internet and risk the repercussions. In another of its threads, Dindus and Dems traces the turmoil experienced by aspiring baseball star Zyrick (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) who, after experiencing police harassment, finds himself attracted to a troublemaking BLM-style organization despite the expectations of his more conservative father. Thirdly, Dindus and Dems follows black police officer Dennis (John David Washington, who has inherited father Denzel’s voice), who finds himself torn between his loyalty toward the force, his firsthand knowledge of discriminatory policing, and his fellow blacks’ perception of him as a race traitor. It’s worthwhile to watch trash like this once in a while, if only to see just how far removed from reality liberals’ understandings of race relations are to the extent that they take their cues from corporate media messaging – and, as Dindus and Dems makes abundantly clear, we appear to be inhabiting entirely different planets.
2 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dindus and Dems is:
5. Anti-drug. After being stopped and searched by police officers, Zyrick goes home and flushes a packet of weed down the toilet, presumably because he realizes the trouble he would have been in had the police found the pretext to arrest him. Drug use is also mentioned as a potential barrier to professional athletic success.
4. Pro-AIDS. The community organizing horde that Zyrick joins focuses on black grievances but also advocates for “trans women”.
3. Pro-family.Dindus and Dems presents more than one example of caring fathers. As Zyrick’s trajectory illustrates, however, fathers do not possess ultimate moral authority and are subject to rebellion.
2. Anti-capitalistic – but only disingenuously so. “Look around. Just turn on the TV,” insists a black street corner poetess. “KKK walkin’ ‘round here free. No white sheets. White shirts and ties, all lies. Wall Street lookin’ far too familiar like the cotton fields of Virginia,” she conjures, equating the world of finance with southern plantation culture – rather than, say, kibbutzim. Wall Street would look “far too familiar” to writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who, according to Filmmaker Magazine, slaved “for five years as a director of talent acquisitions in diversity on Wall Street.”
1.Woke.Dindus and Dems is set in the “tight-knit” Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, which also served as the setting for Spike Lee’s similarly provocative but rather more honest Do the Right Thing (1989). Ironically, this is also the neighborhood where police officers Wenjian Liu and Raphael Ramos were murdered “execution-style” in their patrol car by angry black psycho Ismaayil Brinsley in 2014. As Dindus and Dems would have it, though, it is innocent black men just trying to get home from baseball practice or cruise around listening to Al Green who are hunted by Nazi cops with impunity. “You got a hoodie on, for chrissake,” Zyrick’s father objects before his son heads downtown to participate in a protest – the implication being that this increases the chances that some white person will shoot him a la Trayvon Martin. Inspiringly, the end of the film presents sportsball as a safe and productive means through which blacks can voice their gripes.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.
I have mixed feelings about Allan Konigsberg. Revelations about his sexual proclivities as well as my own awakening to the director’s participation in a massive tribal project of hostile culture distortion make it impossible for me to like “Woody Allen” the way I did when I was younger; but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that his body of work did not influence my intellectual development. Coming from a blue-collar Midwestern background, Konigsberg’s stories of New York sophisticates were exotic and illuminating. His movies made me want to become a literate person so that I could be witty and impress complicated women. And – as much as I dislike to concede it – he has continued to produce worthwhile entertainment well into his decrepit years.
Wonder Wheel is no exception, and offers exactly what those familiar with the writer-director’s filmography have come to expect. Its tawdry tale of two shiksas – older, married woman Kate Winslet and naïve stepdaughter Juno Temple – who both fall for sophisticated and handsome Jewish aspiring playwright Justin Timberlake contains a great deal of Hebraic wish-fulfillment, particularly with Jim Belushi portraying the boorish and slovenly goy alternative. Set in the bustling Coney Island of the 1950s, Wonder Wheel is both a rather painful melodrama and a comfortable nostalgia piece, evoking fondness both for America’s past and for Konigsberg’s, so that the whole experience seems like old times.
4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Wonder Wheel is worth seeing if viewers can do so without putting any money into the filmmaker’s probably candy-filled pockets. Also:
4. Anti-drug. Looming over Ginny (Winslet) and Humpty (Belushi) throughout is the specter of alcoholism which threatens to reassert itself over their wills in times of stress. Ginny embarrasses herself in a drunken state at the end of the film.
3. Borderline pedophiliac. Juno Temple, like previous Konigsberg muses Mariel Hemingway and Christina Ricci, evinces a childlike presence despite her experience. The word “Toys” is visible in a shop window in a scene in which Mickey (Timberlake) picks up Carolina (Temple) to give her a ride, slyly emphasizing her youth.
2. Anti-family, anti-marriage. “Don’t ever have kids,” Ginny advises. Marriage, too, is “scary”. Ginny is only “going through the motions of lovemaking” while she has “so much to give” to a smart and beautiful Jewish boy. Ginny also insinuates that Humpty has incestuous inclinations toward his daughter when she accuses him, “You treat her like a girlfriend.”
1.Anti-white. Carolina rejects the “dull, colorless, boring [i.e., WASPish] guys” her father would have preferred she marry. Instead, she falls in love with a tribesman. There is a sort of malicious glee in Konigsberg’s decision to name the head of the household “Humpty”, presenting the American father of yesteryear as a gruff and abusive but fragile figure destined to fall and never to be restored to his previous station. Humpty distrusts the influence of movies and radio – i.e., the Jewish-dominated mass media – on his family, calls psychology a “phony head doctor” racket, and is probably therefore suspect in Konigsberg’s imagination as a potential anti-Semite. Ginny’s son (Jack Gore), meanwhile, is a little pyromaniac – symbolic of the potential of every goy boy to grow up to perpetrate the world’s next Holocaust. Sadly, waitress Carolina must endure the indignity of serving “redneck clowns” in her clam house – representing the ever-present threat posed by rustic deplorables infiltrating and crudely stinking up the nice, respectable, kosher stronghold of New York City.
Greta Gerwig, an actress for many years, reveals herself to be a talented writer and director with Lady Bird, a standout coming-of-age story starring the excellent Saoirse Ronan as a mischievous, unappreciative Catholic schoolgirl with a “performative streak”. Lady Bird is the rare teen film that will be just as enjoyable, if not more so, to parents as to younger viewers, and the film’s development of its protagonist’s relationship and interactions with her parents, her sweet and vulnerable father (playwright Tracy Letts) and especially her stern but big-hearted mother (Roseanne’s Laurie Metcalf), is finely textured and affecting. Occasional grossness fails to ruin an overwhelmingly touching and funny film experience.
Five stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Lady Bird is:
6. Pro-gay. Lady Bird, at first disgusted to discover that her boyfriend (Lucas Hedges) is gay, ultimately feels sympathy for his situation.
5. Populist. Lady Bird, at first ashamed of living in Sacramento, comes to accept her attachment to “the Midwest of California”. Gerwig set the film in 2002 and 2003, she says during her commentary, to mark the period she identifies as a key moment in “the erosion of the middle class”, with 9/11 and the Iraq War referenced as contributors to middle America’s decline. “Is this a joke?” the protagonist asks on seeing a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging in the home of a more well-to-do family. In a refreshing break from typical suburbs-bashing fare like Todd Solondz’s Happiness, Gerwig concedes that American suburbia is “in my bones”, and this affection communicates itself through the tempered and never obnoxious sentimentalism on display in Lady Bird.
4. Drug-ambivalent. Students share a rumor that their teacher Father Leviatch (Stephen Henderson) had a son who died of a drug overdose, but the overall tone of Lady Bird toward recreational substances is more permissive. “Her mom clearly knows that they’re high,” Gerwig observes of one scene in which Lady Bird’s mother encounters her daughter with a group of her friends. “She’s not gonna do it [i.e., reprimand them]. She’s gonna just leave,” Gerwig approves. Lady Bird’s grandmother, on the other hand, is said to have been an “abusive alcoholic”.
3. Race-ambivalent. Catholicism appears in Lady Bird as a successful model for peaceful coexistence of races, but the existence of sub-rosa racial tensions is also acknowledged, as when Lady Bird suggests that her adopted mestizo brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) got accepted by a competitive university primarily because of his ethnicity and he in turn accuses her of racism. It is interesting to note that Miguel and fellow non-white adoptee Shelly (Marielle Scott) are usually framed separately, so that they never seem to be fully integrated members of the McPherson family. Mild moments of anti-white bias occur in Lady Bird when the protagonist is shown copying answers from an Asian girl during a test and when comparatively well-behaved Miguel and Shelly have to scold unruly white girls for wrinkling the magazines in a grocery store, where Lady Bird is also shown shoplifting. Her Asian boss at the coffee shop where she later gets a job also has to reprimand her for flirting on the clock – a second juxtaposition of oriental seriousness and work ethic as opposed to white American frivolousness.
2. Anti-Semitic! Lady Bird vomits after drunkenly kissing an atheistic New York Jew named David at a party. “We don’t have to constantly be entertaining ourselves, do we?” Lady Bird’s mother objects at her daughter’s fiddling with the car radio. Who but a hate-filled anti-Semite would object to a non-stop saturation diet of popular culture?
1.Christianish. Writer-director Gerwig had a Catholic upbringing and brings both an affectionate familiarity and an irreverence to her depiction of a Catholic high school, acknowledging Catholicism’s “theatricality” and making light of the superstitions associated with transubstantiated wafers and such. At the end of the film, however, the protagonist abandons her concocted identity as “Lady Bird” and embraces her given name of Christine, a marker of her identity as a Christian. In addition, after moving from Sacramento to New York, she feels herself drawn to the comforting beauty of a cathedral service with its choir. She returns, says Gerwig, to “the place that is home to her”.
By the early 1970s, Americans had begun to notice a change in their big cities. After the Civil Rights movement and the 1965 Immigration Act, the multiracial rot – the inevitable by-product of the Left’s ascendancy in the West – began to set in. Cities that were once clean, safe, and orderly became much less so in fairly short order. Americans were not complaining about muggings, rapes, and murders as much in 1960 as they were a decade and a half later. They also didn’t feel as if they were entering another country every time they walked three blocks to buy groceries.
The original Death Wish film, released in 1974, was, on one hand, a way to capitalize on these newfound feelings of insecurity and alienation which were perplexing the lives of millions of white Americans at the time. On the other, it did give legitimate, if somewhat oblique, expression to these feelings, so much so that the film quickly became iconic despite mostly poor reviews, and spawned four sequels over the following twenty years, as well as a big-budget remake that was recently released. The plot is straightforward: A solid citizen discovers that thugs have murdered his wife and raped his daughter in his New York apartment, and he then acquires a gun to take revenge on the streets as a vigilante. Given the film’s success at the box office, it is safe to conclude that many Americans, especially the white ones who fondly remembered a better past, strongly identified with such a character.
I’ve developed such an iron stomach when it comes to digesting rotten movies that it really says something when it takes me multiple sittings to make it all the way through one, as happens to have been the case with A Cure for Wellness. This plodding Judaic dud concerns a corporate creep (Dane DeHaan) who travels to Switzerland to retrieve an insane executive who is reportedly recuperating in a mysterious clinic. Switzerland essentially being a piece of Germany, the place is naturally being run by crypto-Nazi perverts with all sorts of deep, dark European secrets. Boringly perverted director Gore Verbinski and his collaborators are so determined to give the setting and characters an air of coldness and clinical inhumanity that these qualities, unfortunately, end up attaching themselves to the film itself, making it about as appetizing as a gore popsicle. Even the effort to liven things up with would-be shocks like sadistic dentistry, eels in a toilet, masturbation, and incestuous rape only make the movie more of a yawn-inducer. Even the Blu-ray menu is irritating, with its horror movie cliché of a little girl’s monotonous singing. Throw in the fact that this is yet another mean-spirited production of Israeli intelligence asset Arnon Milchan (opening with a shot of skyscrapers, to boot) and A Cure for Wellness goes straight into the biohazard bin.
2 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Cure for Wellness is:
3. Assimilationist, showing the inspiring ability of blacks and Indians to ape European dress and mannerisms.
2. Judeo-capitalist, casting a financial criminal as the protagonist.
1. Anti-white and pro-miscegenation. Early in the movie, a white woman makes a reference to a “twelve-inch” black penis, suggesting congoid sexual superiority. The pathology of a racially homogeneous community is conveyed by icy-eyed Europeans whose sterile paleness is amplified by their all-white wardrobe. National Socialist notions of racial hygiene are parodied as a form of isolationist inbreeding. The protagonist learns that the clinic occupies the property of a nobleman who determined that the only woman pure enough to bear him a child was his sister. Sad to report, we have now actually plumbed the cultural depth at which audiences are sufficiently debased to tolerate the casual horror of a father (Jason Isaacs) sticking his hand up his daughter’s crotch and then sniffing his fingers for the camera. Hitler is never explicitly referenced, but the entire backstory of fiendish medical experiments and fields full of emaciated corpses are intended to evoke the specter of the persecution of the Jews. A Cure for Wellness functions as “Holocaust” revenge porn, with the viewer expected to exult in the sight of a sheltered European girl (Mia Goth) cleaving her father’s skull with a shovel and riding into the night on a bike with the evilly grinning New York crook who has rescued her from the Swiss ethno-dystopia.
Just when you thought the movie industry had hit rock bottom, along lumbers White Girl with its Jewish jackhammer to get at the rock beneath the rock. Following on the heels of American Honey (2016), White Girl exemplifies a long tradition of cinema that seeks to shock the sensibilities with its exposure of the wild rites of the rising generation – a genre that stretches from the earliest juvenile delinquent pictures up through the likes of Over the Edge (1979), River’s Edge (1986), Kids (1995), Bully (2001), Spring Breakers (2012), and Heaven Knows What(2014).
White Girl is yet another foray into the demimonde of ugly people in ugly clothes engaging in ugly, loveless dances and lewd acts to ugly, afro-degenerated soundtracks – with the difference that this entry makes its anti-white agenda totally explicit. Purporting to tell the true-life experiences of some lowlife named Elizabeth Wood, the story follows an Oklahoma City slut (Morgan Saylor) after she moves to New York – ostensibly in order to “study” – but instead uses her parents’ money to buy drugs and get into trouble.
Gazing longingly out the window of her apartment at a group of loitering mongrels, White Girl announces, “I’m gonna go get some” and so sets out on an odyssey of debauchery that will occupy the next eighty minutes or so. White Girl falls hard for hat-backwards barrio banger Blue (Brian Marc), who tenderly screws her against a wall. After Blue gets arrested, he trusts her to get his supply of dope back into the hands of his ruthless supplier; but, being the stupid White Girl that she is, she instead hopes to raise money for his legal defense by trying to move the powdered product herself – with inevitably catastrophic results.
Not worth watching more than once, White Girl is a nihilistic film that thrives on shocks and not much else.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that writer-director Elizabeth Wood should be institutionalized for her own protection and that White Girl is:
3. Media-skeptical. At the very least, White Girl presents a sobering picture of the species of undesirables who seek employment in the media. The idiot protagonist, the sort of lout produced by a lifetime’s ingestion of mainstream media poison, has gone off to New York to study writing and the “liberal arts”. White Girl’s sleazy magazine editor boss (Jewish actor Justin Bartha, playing a character with the distinctly goyische moniker Kelly), meanwhile, hopes to inflate the value of some worthless artwork he bought by spotlighting the artist (“Rambo”) with a special profile.
2. Pro-drug. The script halfheartedly makes a distinction between marijuana and harder drugs – “We just smoke weed every day, all day,” explains one of the mutts – but all drugs are inextricably linked with sex in the film. The title character falls in love at first sight with a street pusher, and plying women with cocaine or alcohol comes across as an expeditious means to satisfaction. Kelly gains instant access to White Girl’s orifices when he lays out some lines of cocaine and essentially rapes her with little resistance and no consequences. The movie appears to want to dissimulate about its intentions and provides a couple of scenes of morning-after horror and vomit for plausible deniability; but the association of sex with drugs is undeniable in the face of such moments as a young woman snorting a line of cocaine from a man’s penis.
1. Anti-white. Whatever claim White Girl might have to being a cautionary tale is forfeited by the flippant choice of celebratory ape music about pimping white flesh to play during the closing credits. A Jewish triumphalist proclamation of victory in the face of ubiquitous European degeneracy, White Girl is nothing if not an expression of ethnosadism. Zio-prostitute Chris Noth of Sex and the City infamy puts a gentile face on the sleazy lawyer archetype in his role of George, the unscrupulous attorney White Girl hires to represent Blue. In one telling moment, a drop of wine trickles like blood from the corner of George’s mouth – a projection to the effect that whites, not Jews, are the vampires that prey on America. “It’s a really fucked up system,” this character explains. “You could have a white kid stab someone to death and he’ll get less time than a black kid caught with a miniscule amount of drugs. This is the way it is.” One of the movie’s objectives is to get across the propaganda meme of “white privilege”, with White Girl seen to escape unharmed, suffering no repercussions after precipitating what is likely the end of Blue’s career. He goes to prison while she, unperturbed, is accepted back into the fold of the “college” life. White Girl, unsurprisingly, was produced by a rats’ nest of ethnics including Ariel Schulman, Orlee-Rose Strauss, and Gabriel Nussbaum – all of whom, one can only imagine, are deeply concerned about the plight of white girls worldwide. Another producer, Christine Vachon, made The New York Observer’s list of “The New Power Gays” – homosexuals being Jews in spirit and politics.
Was this movie made for the Jewish community and all our Gastrointestinal issues? I'm going to say, yes. http://t.co/qXdu6EAd5D
One of the many unusual figures whose life trajectory intersects with the Manson Family saga is Laurence Merrick, an Israeli Defense Forces veteran who, as critic Bryan Thomas relates at Night Flight, was sent to the U.S. in 1960 “to speak in support of Zionism, and while he was fundraising in New York City, he met his future wife, a dark-haired aspiring Broadway showgirl and wannabe actress named Joan Huntington.” From there the pair “came out to the west coast, and set up the Merrick Studio, located at 870 N. Vine St. in Hollywood, California, and for a time it was an inexpensive place for actors” – including Vietnam veterans – “to learn lessons about their craft.”
The Merricks were subsidized by the government, too, which enabled them to make a lot of money running the school. They bought a nice house in Beverly Hills and then decided to put their studio profits towards making their own movies, which they could then cast with students from the school, a win-win situation for everybody.
Merrick, Thomas writes, is “probably best known for co-directing the legendary 1972 documentary Manson with Robert Hendrickson, which […] ended up garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Feature-Length Documentary.” The Israeli “was also well-known in Hollywood […] for the fact that one of his students, Sharon Tate, would later be killed by members of Manson’s Family, during August of 1969, the same year he spent fourteen days directing [the biker film] Black Angels.” Note the interesting choice of words, too, when Thomas relates that Huntington viewed her husband’s movies as “training exercises”.
A 1977 UPI article states that “Merrick became interested in the Manson Family because actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered with four friends by the group, had been a student at his school” – implying that Merrick only took an interest in Manson after the killings had taken place; but Merrick and Hendrickson had begun conducting interviews with Family members “before and after the shocking murders that rocked the nation in 1969,” Thomas indicates (italics added). As his account of the making of Black Angels tantalizes, the totality of Merrick’s involvements with this movie, Tate, and the Manson Family strains the limits of what can be dismissed as mere “synchronicity”:
In fact – in yet another example of the parallels that existed between Southern California’s biker and hippie countercultures – members of Manson’s Family would occasionally drop by Paramount Ranch, located at 2813 Cornell Road, in Agoura, California, and visit the set while Merrick and his cast and crew were filming scenes. […]
Merrick’s script focuses on two biker gangs at each other’s throats, a white motorcycle gang called Satan’s Serpents — led by Chainer (once again played by Merrick’s favorite leading man, Des Roberts) — and a black motorcycle gang, called the Choppers (their leader was played by Bobby Johnston, whose biggest role previous to this one was as a prison guard in In Cold Blood).
The film’s title, Black Angels is actually the name attributed to the highway patrolmen who observe the two rival biker gangs from a distance, waiting for the race-motivated war for turf to explode.
Merrick recruited a real black biker gang to play the Choppers in order to provide authenticity.
The main plot concerns one “Black Angel” in particular – a lieutenant for the highway patrol named Harper (Clancy Syrko, who also edited the film) – who wants to see all of the biker gangs wiped off the face of the earth, and he plots to pit the two gangs against each other so they will end up in a race war leading to both of them being destroyed. […]
It’s interesting to note that this film’s concept of pitting white against black in a race war, in the year 1969, is very similar in some respects to Manson’s concept which he called “Helter Skelter”, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and white, which he believed was foretold in Chapter 9 of the book of Revelations in the bible (as well as hidden messages he believed he heard in the Beatles’ “Revolution #9”).
Makes you wonder what kinds of conversations they were having at Paramount Ranch between members of the cast and crew and some of Manson’s followers.
There were also many interesting cameo appearances, including a real member of Charles Manson’s gang, Mark Ross (he plays “Singer”), who later claimed to write a theme song for the film that was never used […]
The film’s tagline “God forgives, the Black Angels don’t!,” incidentally, was borrowed from the hugely successful 1967 Italian spaghetti western, God Forgives… I Don’t.
Another tagline – and perhaps another reference to Manson? – was “A portrait of the family.”
Speaking of Manson and his family, again, it was during the film’s production that Merrick was invited to head over to Spahn Ranch, with a 16mm camera, in order to film the Manson family on their own turf.
Merrick also shot footage of them at Devil’s Canyon, their Barker Ranch hideout in Death Valley, and then later – during the Manson trial – at the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles, in addition to other locations.
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who did as much as anyone to shape the public’s perception of the Manson Family mythos, participated in the production of Merrick and Hendrickson’s documentary and appears onscreen.
Des Roberts as Count Adrian in Merrick’s Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?
Merrick’s previous movie, Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, concerns the occult, mind control, and, at least subtextually, acknowledges Jewish power in Hollywood – and it only intensifies the Tate-LaBianca resonance of Merrick’s work, even featuring a minor character named Sharon. Thomas continues:
The movie featured several of Merrick’s students in key parts, and chiefly concerned what happened to Dracula’s son, Count Adrian (Des Roberts, who plays the vampire while sporting a wicked John Carradine-style goatee). Roberts and his musical partner, Andy Wilder, also provided the film’s musical score.
The film was shot at the Magic Castle in the Hollywood Hills, a mansion built in the 1920s which had been renovated for performances by magicians.
One of Merrick’s students owned the place, and had invited Merrick and his wife over for dinner, which left a lasting impression, and when the couple began thinking of locations where they could shoot their Dracula movie, they both remembered the Magic Castle, which was just about to undergo a renovation. […]
The movie also contains a subplot straight out of the then recent box office smash Rosemary’s Baby, when one character — an actor named Guy (just as John Cassavetes’s character was in Roman Polanski’s film), played by John Landon — is all too willing to sell his soul in return for being given a successful acting career.
It’s also interesting to note that Merrick’s film features a “surprise” ending that was clearly inspired by Polanski’s previous film, 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, when Polanski’s future wife Sharon Tate sprouts fangs in the film.
According to Horrorpedia, “more obscure X-rated edits of the film [Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?], with an emphasis on male gay sex, were released as Does Dracula Really Suck? and Dracula and the Boys.”
Adding to the mystique of Merrick’s Manson documentary is the fact that it features Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme caressing a rifle and explaining, “You have to make love with it; you have to know it […] so that you could pick it up any second and shoot.” This interview took place several years before Fromme was convicted of (supposedly) having attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento. Merry Prankster and founding Yippie Paul Krassner claims that Manson sent him a letter instructing him to get into touch with Fromme around 1971:
I called, and we arranged to meet at her apartment in Los Angeles. On an impulse, I brought several tabs of acid with me on the plane. […]
The four of us [Krassner, Fromme, and her roommates Sandra Good and Brenda McCann] ingested those little white tablets containing 300 micrograms of LSD, then took a walk to the office of Laurence Merrick, who had been associated with schlock biker exploitation movies as the prerequisite to directing a sensationalist documentary, Manson.
Squeaky’s basic vulnerability emerged as she kept pacing around and telling Merrick that she was afraid of him. He didn’t know we were tripping, but he must have sensed the vibes. He may even have gotten a touch of contact high. I engaged him in conversation about movies. We discussed the fascistic implications of The French Connection.
Was Fromme “afraid” of Merrick from the effects of the LSD – or did she have other reasons? This brief encounter, whatever its meaning, in combination with Fromme’s participation in Merrick and Hendrickson’s Manson constitutes another Israeli connection to an eccentric piece of American political assassination drama following the various Jewish and Zionist intrigues surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Bizarrely, Merrick himself was murdered in an outrageous episode further dissolving any distinction between reality and theater. Bryan Thomas relates the bizarre incident:
Then, in 1977, Merrick’s life would intersect fatally with a potential acting student named Dennis Mignano, who – much like Manson himself – had really wanted to have a music career, but when that didn’t pan out, the struggling rock singer decided to take acting lessons.
That decision had led him straight to Merrick Studio – which by now was teaching classes in acting, directing and cinematography – where he applied to be a student.
He believed that Merrick – due to his association with Manson, bikers, and magic – was the perfect person to help him launch a successful acting career (Mignano had reportedly been obsessed with magic as a child).
Mignano filled out an application to be a student, and then was told he was eligible for government assistance to pay for his tuition, but he had to wait for three weeks for the application to be processed.
Mignano grew irritated and felt like the delay was yet another setback and a disappointment, but he waited, and while he did so he watched episodes of a 1976 TV mini-series called Helter Skelter, which just happened to be re-airing on TV.
The TV series may have played a small part in reminding him that his life was now intertwined with Merrick’s and he then became obsessed with the idea that Merrick had actually placed a curse on him.
On January 26th, 1977, he went to the school and waited in ambush for Merrick to appear in the parking lot for a few hours and then pulled out a pistol and shot 50-year old Laurence Merrick in the back.
Mignano then fled the scene, and much like the opening scene of Richard Rush’s 1980 action film The Stunt Man – which, and get this, starred actor Steve Railsback, who had played Charles Manson in the Helter Skelter mini-series – he, by pure chance, happened upon a movie being shot mere blocks away, on Willoughby Ave., and the killer blended in with the crew (just as Railsback’s character did), pretending to be part of the film production team.
Merrick, meanwhile, staggered into his office at the studio, telling his students “Some son of a bitch shot me and I don’t even know why!” Some of the students thought they were witnessing an impromptu acting exercise, but quickly realized that their teacher was dying in front of them.
Merrick was rushed to Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, but he was pronounced dead within an hour. Students at the Merrick Studio Academy of Dramatic Arts said that Mignano had been hanging around the building all morning, asking them questions about Merrick and his Manson documentary.
Mignano confessed to the crime in 1981 and was confined to a mental institution. Six months after his murder of Merrick, Mignano’s sister Michele, a topless dancer, was also murdered – a case that remains unsolved. Questions about Merrick remain, as well. Why was his actors’ studio receiving government funding? Did his work on behalf of Israel end after he left New York for Los Angeles – or did it continue in some capacity as he interacted with the Manson Family and completed his films?
The Woodstock and Altamont concerts of 1969 are widely and rightly regarded as epochally emblematic events and both have been the subject of studies into the sociological, occult, and even the possible mind control significance of each of these programmed mass experiences. The Concert for New York City staged at Madison Square Garden on October 20, 2001, has received much less scrutiny but is no less worthy of investigation on similar grounds. It is interesting to note that, with the inclusion of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the Who, the lineup at Madison Square Garden would feature personnel from each of the previous countercultural extravaganzas, inviting comparison between the events. In the case of the Concert for New York City, however, the rock icons who had previously heralded the arrival of an ostensibly freer and more open society valuing peace and love would instead lend whatever remained of their revolutionary prestige to the entrenchment of an authoritarian establishment determined to intensify the drive for war and Zio-corporatist global domination.
The program was orchestrated by the Robin Hood Foundation – ostensibly as a fundraiser for the families of the heroic firefighters and law enforcement officers who had suffered tremendous losses during the rescue efforts in Manhattan on September 11th. Celebrities in attendance begged the viewers at home to donate. Susan Sarandon, making what she characterized as the “money pitch”, assured the audience of the benevolent intentions of the organizers: “Let’s give it up for the Robin Hood Foundation, I can personally vouch for them.” What is the Robin Hood Foundation? Lynn Parramore characterizes the initiative as “Robin Hood in Reverse”:
America’s parasitical oligarchs are masters of public relations. One of their favorite tactics is to masquerade as defenders of the common folk while neatly arranging things behind the scenes so that they can continue to plunder unimpeded. Perhaps nowhere is this sleight of hand displayed so artfully as it is at a particular high-profile charity with the nerve to bill itself as itself as “New York’s largest poverty-fighting organization.” […]
The Robin Hood Foundation, named for that green-jerkined hero of redistribution who stole from the rich to give to the poor, is run, ironically, by some of the most rapacious capitalists the country has ever produced – men who make robber barons of previous generations look like small-time crooks. Founded by hedge fund mogul Paul Tudor Jones, the foundation boasts 19 billionaires on its leadership boards and committees, the likes of which include this sample of American plutocracy […]
By occupation (the more useless and parasitical the better), it comes as no surprise that 12 of the 19 men in leadership positions at the Robin Hood Foundation happen to be hedge fund managers. […]
The mission statement of the Robin Hood Foundation brays about all the funding it provides for school programs, generating “meaningful results for families in New York’s poorest neighborhoods.” Soup kitchens! Homeless shelters! Job training! The tuxedoed tycoons throw money at all these causes “to give New York’s neediest citizens the tools they need to build better lives.”
How far does this largesse actually go toward ameliorating New York’s poverty problem? Unsurprisingly, not very far at all. In fact, as Hedge Clippers points out, the poverty rate in the city has grown over the course of the Robin Hood Foundation’s history, from 20 percent in 1990 to 21.2 percent in 2012.
Guess what’s also grown? The bank accounts of 19 billionaires on the Robin Hood Foundation’s boards, which have ballooned 93 percent since 2008.
A look at Robin Hood’s directors reveals such worthies as Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, pioneer of toxic mortgage-backed securities trading, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Also sponsoring the Concert for New York City was Bear, Stearns, Inc., which, according to a study by investigators Mathewson and Nol, was one of the companies engaged in suspicious trading activity during the days leading up to the destruction of the World Trade Center. There “investors traded 3,979 contracts from Sept. 6 to Sept. 10 on September options that profit if shares fall below $50. The previous average volume for those options was 22 contracts” according to Mathewson and Nol. Clearly, these were people gravely concerned about the welfare of the city’s firefighters and police.
The program opens with David Bowie performing the Simon and Garfunkel song “America” to a montage of historic images of Manhattan and newly arrived immigrants. Bowie, not himself an American – and who, just a few years previously, had declared “I’m Afraid of Americans” – would seem at first glance a peculiar choice to perform this particular number and to open the show. However, even this, as with much of the evening’s symbolism, was very deliberate in design. Bowie would be but the first of several British performers to take the stage, reinforcing the coupled commitment of the United Kingdom and the United States in pursuing the newly minted “War on Terror” agenda. Curiously, “America” contains a bizarre and seemingly comical reference to espionage and deceptive appearances. “She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy. I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera.”
Odd, too, is the fact that the montage of shots of New York City skyscrapers includes a clear image of the old International Telephone and Telegraph building on Park Avenue. This is an unexpected choice for inclusion considering that the company is most notorious for its instigation of a CIA-managed coup to install Augusto Pinochet as dictator in Chile on September 11, 1973. Bowie, backed by Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra from the Late Show with David Letterman, next performs “Heroes” – a song with an arguable 9/11 resonance owing to its inclusion in 1998’s Godzilla, a film depicting apocalyptic havoc in New York City and featuring the Twin Towers prominently. “We can beat them forever and ever,” Bowie vows, stirring the men in the audience to warlike enthusiasm.
Next the comedian Billy Crystal – not to be confused with decidedly unfunny PNAC signatory Bill Kristol – takes the stage to make some goofy jokes about the then-current anthrax scare. “You know who I’m worried about?” Crystal begins. “My relatives. I mean, my relatives are Jews, they smell everything that looks suspicious.” Crystal perpetuates the theme of paranoia and introduces the evening’s concern with the fate of the Jews. He continues, bringing out the concert’s symbolic involvement with the uniform-oriented regimentation of spectator sports:
Somebody said that this is bigger than Woodstock […] and music brings everybody together. And it’s all about togetherness tonight. We’re here tonight, we are alive in New York, the Yankees are kickin’ ass, the Knicks will kick ass. Alright, we’ve been hit, we’ve been a little down, but we are not out, we are still the greatest city in the world […] and we’re a better New York. We’re a better New York […] and we’re a compassionate nation. We’re a compassionate nation. While we’re at war. We’re at war but we’re also dropping food on Afghanistan. […] Now tonight is important, just to have fun and get away from the news for a while, it’s okay. I can’t watch the shows anymore with the ticker tape going at the bottom of the set, it’s driving me crazy. My neck hurts. […] Get away from the news. And you hear the same things over and over again. […] It’s not the good old days when the only guy we hated was John Rocker. This is a different thing. Now we can have fun. We can make fun of the Taliban. And when they’re together, don’t they look like ZZ Top? But let me ask you something. We have learned something in all of this mess. We have to be kind to people who are different than us, who look different, who talk strange, who have different beliefs. I’m talking ‘bout people from Jersey. We should learn and whether we are Christians or Jews, or a Muslim, we all have to agree on one thing. We can never, ever again let Mariah Carey make a movie. Please.
Crystal makes clear that Muslim terrorists are not the only enemy America faces. The Concert for New York City is also haunted by the specter of the angry white bigot – the old American type personified by Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker, who in 1999 had said of New York,
It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing. […] The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?
The War on Terror, while rallying westerners to slaughter the inhabitants of distant and easily misrepresented foreign countries, would also pressure Americans and Europeans to find within themselves the capacity to accept an increasingly alien presence in their midst. As Crystal suggests, the 9/11 attacks have metamorphosed the citizens into “a better New York” and “a compassionate nation” that is also “dropping food on Afghanistan”. The obedient open-mindedness demanded of the audience extends beyond the mere acceptance of immigrants from foreign cultures. They must also accept the sexual other, as represented on the concert program by David Bowie, Melissa Etheridge, Elton John, Rudy Giuliani, and Hillary Clinton. The pedophile demographic is also represented, with Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Pete Townshend in attendance, and Allan Konigsberg, known to the world as Woody Allen, contributing a short film to the show.
“These colors don’t run” reads an American flag sign hoisted among the audience. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, whose office received one of the anthrax letters five days before the concert, reinforced the bellicose mood of the night, declaring that “America will never be defeated!”
A firefighter then introduces Bon Jovi, with the Jersey boys performing a somber rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer” – significantly, a song about economic hardship made bearable by a faith in the irrational. The theme of a necessary sacrifice would be repeated in the calls for viewers to donate money and in Jim Carrey’s assertion that “freedom comes at a terrible price.” Bon Jovi next performs “Wanted Dead or Alive”, which, in the context of the Concert for New York City, is cleverly metamorphosed into a song about war and the bravery of soldiers, cowboys on steel horses, riding off to fight in “another place where the faces are so cold.” If the lyrics are honest about one thing, it is that they “might not make it back.” Ironically, Bon Jovi’s drummer beats on a set adorned with images of the American flag and the Statue of Liberty, the effect being that Lady Liberty takes a pummeling throughout the patriotic performance.
Jay-Z grabs the mic to deliver the drug-slinging anthem “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, its title a reference to the Israelite god Jehovah. This selection might seem out of keeping with the evening’s festivities if not for the fact that U.S. forces were then in the process of seizing Afghanistan for the reclamation of its poppy fields. The Goo Goo Dolls next invade the stage to rock a cover of Tom Petty’s “American Girl”, with frontman John Rzeznik parading around in camo pants to show his solidarity with the mission of “Operation Enduring Freedom”.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro then introduce Martin Scorsese’s short film “The Neighborhood”, which concerns itself with the demographic changes reconfiguring the director’s old stomping grounds on Elizabeth Street in Little Italy. “Today, on the surface,” Scorsese begins, “it seems obvious that the neighborhood’s changed. I mean, it’s Asian-American. It may be Chinese now. But it’s not that simple.” He visits a Mr. De Palo, the proprietor of a cheese shop, who gives the audience a lesson in diversity and social change:
People today say “This is not Little Italy anymore.” And I tell them “You’re wrong. You’re wrong. The spirit of Little Italy, the immigrants that came here […] and you look down the street and you see this whole group of people.” I said “That’s the same exact thing as my grandparents and great-grandparents. This neighborhood hasn’t changed.”
“Wow, look at that cheese, eh?” Scorsese enthuses before treating the audience to a historical lecture that utilizes the themes established by Billy Crystal’s deprecating remark about John Rocker earlier during the show.
There were groups of bigots called Know-Nothings. They didn’t want the Irish in America at all. This was back in 1844. They gathered together to march down Prince Street from the Bowery to burn and destroy St. Patrick’s, but when they got to the corner, they saw that the place was defended not just by Irish men, but by Irish women and by Irish children, too. […] And that was the beginning of the end. The change. The change over acceptance about what America’s supposed to be. Letting in the immigrants, letting in other cultures, other religions, other races, and everybody living together – in freedom […] I had this thing that happened to me […] by 1979 I […] developed dyslexia. Invariably, I want to say “right” but “left” comes out. I want to say “left” but “right” comes out. And, uh, when I think of New York I want to say “New York” but “America” comes out. And that’s real. That’s true.
This will never be the country of the ignorant Know-Nothings again, Scorsese suggests, so nativists are advised instead to learn to love and live with the multicultural gaggle of schoolchildren who traipse across the screen during his diatribe. After all, just like the Italians, they will acculturate and eventually be transformed into real and fully assimilated Americans.
Billy Joel shows up to perform “New York State of Mind” and “Miami 2017” – an upbeat tune that, oddly enough, seems to revel in imagery of New York City’s destruction.
Will Ferrell next appears in the role of “W” in a comedy segment celebrating the popular myth of the cowboy adventurer Bush administration and trivializing the horror of the invasion of Afghanistan by turning it into a stupid cartoon:
I wanted to give y’all an update on the current proceedings. Let me take a second to give you my own little Behind the Music on the Artist formerly known as the Taliban. Earlier today I met with the U.S. Senate in their chambers. And then I met with the House of Representatives in their new offices, which are in the basement of an abandoned Sam Goody’s in eastern Maryland. We discussed our plan […] to bomb the Taliban into the Stone Age. The problem is […] they don’t seem to notice the difference. So we had to come up with a new plan. And right now we are focusing our attacks on all the major cities under the Taliban, or as I call them, the Evil Doers. We’ve just started attacking Mazar-i-Sharif. And you know what? Sharif don’t like it. Rock the casbah, rock the casbah. You know, Sharif don’t like it. Now, as many of you know, we’ve had to change the name of our military campaign several times […] but I’ve talked to some of the people here tonight and they’ve given me some new ideas. Paul McCartney said, “Why don’t we call it Taliband on the Run?” I thought that was good. Destiny’s Child suggested “Operation Bootylicious”. Macy Gray, she said somethin’ to me, but I couldn’t understand a word she was sayin’. […] Well, whatever we call it, the mission is clear. The Evil Doers are in their caves. And we’re gonna smoke ‘em out of their caves. And then we’re gonna smoke ‘em back into their caves just for the heck of it. And then out of their caves and then back in. And why are we gonna do this? I can do anything I want, my approval rating is like 106% right now. And since I can do whatever I want, I’m gonna sing a song tonight.
“W” then launches into a rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” only to be interrupted before he can get to the telling line “The piper’s calling you to join him.”
Chris Kattan introduces Destiny’s Child, who treat the crowd to a song titled “Emotion” (“emotions takin’ me over”) followed by a gospel medley to shut down rational thought and give God’s sanction to the new age of international interventionism. An apparently inebriated Harrison Ford thanks the Robin Hood Foundation and Bear, Stearns for their generosity, after which the audience is further distracted with a feel-good “Lovely Day” video with smiling babies, interracial couples, and dogs.
Eric Clapton and Buddy Guy, continuing with the transatlantic theme, collaborate on “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” with backing from Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra.
James Lipton from Inside the Actor’s Studio provides a distinguished introduction for Adam Sandler, reprising the role of his Saturday Night Live character Operaman in order to honor the fallen firefighters and other heroes with novelty songs about consumerism, homosexuality, and Jewish erections. “I got a bone-ah! A Jewish circumcised bone-ah! Can’t get rid of this bone-ah! Operaman wish he was alone-ah!” Generous as his performance has already been, the virtuoso cannot bring himself to leave the stage without first directing the audience’s thoughts to excretions and bestiality:
He no let women read. He no let women vote-ah!
That’s why the only love he gets is from a mountain goat-ah!
He want to spread disease-oh in our mailbox.
For he himself suffers from a case of smallcox!
Osama kiss my ass! Osama bite my dink!
Osama go to hell! Osama get a shrink!
Osama says he’s tough, Osama says he’s brave.
Then tell me why Osama is shitting in a cave!
The Backstreet Boys, tasked with the difficult chore of following Sandler’s triumph, sing “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)” – again, an ironic selection in consideration of what the concert has been designed to do. David Spade and Melissa Etheridge put in appearances, after which Halle Berry makes another “money pitch” and introduces a Spike Lee tribute to the New York Yankees. Visible over a doorway in the film is a quote from General MacArthur: “There is no substitute for victory.” This conveniently frames the necessity of the “War on Terror” through the collective memory of the “good war” America fought against fascism. MacArthur, of course, commanded American forces in the Pacific theater opened after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The “War on Terror” had similarly been launched by a “New Pearl Harbor” event as predicted in PNAC’s “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” document. Paul McCartney would also draw a parallel between the Second World War and the “War on Terror” by mentioning that his father served as a firefighter during the Blitz.
John Cusack introduces the Who, who storm through “Who Are You” with a Union Jack projected onto a screen above the stage. An American flag replaces it during “Baba O’Reilly” with its assessment of a generation “all wasted”. “Behind Blue Eyes” cranks up the anger with its “vengeance” that is “never free”. American flags symbolically flank a Union Jack for the final song of the set, which, in the Concert for New York City’s greatest irony, is “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Images of the Twin Towers appear on the screen to remind the audience why the war drums have been beating all night.
Governor George Pataki puts in his two cents with some “God bless America!” tripe, after which Cusack introduces Konigsberg’s short “Sounds from a Town I Love”, which spies on neurotic New Yorkers as they kvetch into their cell phones post-9/11. Two of the overheard conversations warrant special attention. “This is the greatest city in the world,” one man says. “Where else can you be paranoid and right so often?” The New Yorker’s paranoia takes on particular meaning in consideration of another character’s restaurant review: “Hey, we went to Balthazar last night. Oh, it’s fantastic. At the table next to ours was Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Marlon Brando, Tiger Woods, Tony Blair, the president, and Osama bin Laden. I am telling you, that is the in place to be.” The idea that George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden might be having a business lunch together is only intended to be a joke, because only Allan Konigsberg could imagine something so silly happening – right?
The home viewer’s attention is more than once redirected to a Bud Light banner as well as to a bimbo in the audience showing off her ample cleavage, keeping the people’s collective consciousness squarely planted between their legs, which is where it stays as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards take the stage. The pair sings “Salt of the Earth” as an excuse to get in “a prayer for the common foot soldier”, after which Mick hoots his way through “Miss You”. Matters only get grubbier from there, with Howard Stern trotting out and showing the crowd his buttocks.
Hillary Clinton put in a brief appearance behind the microphone and was reportedly booed, but this audience reaction was allegedly edited out of the concert as presented on DVD. Bill, after referencing the Oklahoma City bombing, bubbas his way through a creepy speech in which he says, “We hope we can make your children our children. We hope your future will be ours.” He then finishes with a statement reinforcing the multicultural theme established by Billy Crystal and Martin Scorsese: “Just one last thing I want ‘em [i.e., al Qaeda] to know: in America, you can have any religion you want, you can be from any race or background […] you can do anything you want [i.e., what thou wilt] and still be part of our crowd, if you recognize that our common humanity is more important than all of our interesting differences. That’s the big difference between us and them,” he declares. To fight against terrorism, then, and to be a true American patriot, is to view the racists and the religious bigots as enemies of the state.
James Taylor sings “Fire and Rain” and “Up on the Roof”, followed by Michael J. Fox – another interesting piece of booking for the program – introducing a firefighter who angrily brays: “Osama bin Laden, you can kiss my royal Irish ass!”
Rudy Giuliani puts in a good word for New York tourism, after which Jimmy Fallon gives vent to his poor taste by singing a comic rendition of “(I Just) Died in Your Arms” to a room full of people whose loved ones had, in fact, just died. Jon Bon Jovi introduces a foul-mouthed Kevin Smith short, followed by John Mellencamp doing “Peaceful World” and “Pink Houses”. Hilary Swank brings out Vladimir Ondrasik, whose stage name, “Five for Fighting”, slyly reinforces the hawk objective.
Natalie Hershlag next pops out to sell the alliance with Israel with sex appeal. “Hi, everybody, I’m Natalie Portman. I was born in Jerusalem, but I am now a proud resident of New York and I want to wish peace to everyone who is a human being [i.e., Jews] everywhere.” Hershlag smooches a fireman and teases the crowd, “I would kiss all of you if I could. Thank you!” Yes, thank you, goyim. Thank you for fighting Israel’s wars. Israel had nothing to do with 9/11, by the way. Check me out, you goyim. I’m totally hot!
Richard Gere, the only performer who seems to want, however timidly and ineffectively, to oppose the rampant warmongering spirit of the night, receives a negative reaction to his embarrassed message of peace:
This is the moment when we need to be healed and when music showed us the way. Music does what it does best, it helps us to heal. And I think in the situation right now, when we have the possibility of taking this energy, this horrendous energy that we’re all feeling – and the possibility of turning it into more violence and revenge – we can stop that. We can take that energy and turn it into something else. We can turn it into compassion, to love, into understanding. That’s apparently unpopular right now, but that’s alright.
An excerpt from a Ric Burns documentary has journalist Ray Suarez spouting more multiculturalist rubbish and hammering into Americans’ heads how brown they have to become and how Jews are eternal victims:
I would submit at the beginning of the twenty-first century that New York is one of those places that you can use to understand the entire American experience, from a string of Indian villages out on the tip of the eastern seaboard to a place where blacks and Dutch and Jewish refugees and people from the four corners of the earth came in – to the America factory […]
Salma Hayek calls out Jim Carrey to do a clown routine before he composes himself and gets serious. “It is the end of a selfish and cynical age,” he proclaims, reinforcing the notion that a new nation has come into being. The heroes of 9/11, he says, “have reminded us who we really are.”
Finally, to bring the Concert for New York City to a close, the oligarchs trot out their ultimate showstopper, decrepit old beetle [sic] Paul McCartney, who, trashing his stature as the author of “All You Need Is Love”, reveals himself to be a prostitute of the military-industrial complex by unveiling what is positively the stupidest song of the long and depressing decrescendo of his career – and all for the benefit of some parasitic bankers and Zionists. “I tell you what,” the cute beetle announces after playing “I’m Down” and “Yesterday”. “We wrote a new song, um, the day after the attack, and it’s about freedom. That’s one thing these people don’t understand,” he challenges, raising his fist in a martial gesture. “It’s worth fighting for.” McCartney finally launches into the idiotic “Freedom”, instructing audience members to stomp their feet and clap their hands for percussive entrainment similar in its effect to that heard on John Lennon’s record “Give Peace a Chance”. “I will fight for the right to live in freedom,” the song states repeatedly, zombifying the listener.
After the rest of the stars on the program join McCartney for “Let It Be” – another signal to viewers’ brains to shut down logical thought processes and take refuge in the vague and pastel – McCartney again insists on subjecting the audience to another run-through of “Freedom”, this time with all of the other stars taking part and thereby endorsing its insipid neoconservative messaging. “I want to see everyone joining in this time,” McCartney commands, intending that those who sing along will become complicit in the sanction of war and have an emotional investment in the project. Amusingly, McCartney wears a firefighter’s T-shirt that says “Chinatown Dragon Fighters” – as apt a label as any for a charlatan energizing a nation to wage a war against a foe that only exists in a culture’s imagination.
I’ve never been much of a U2 fan, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the group’s song “Beautiful Day”. Upbeat and uplifting in a generic, innocuous way, the track could hardly have been more perfectly engineered for distracting the public with pleasant reflections during some of the darkest days in the history of the United States. Was this the intention?
Curiously for a single offering such a positive message, the album from which it was lifted, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, was released at the end of October 2000, with E! News announcing the album as a “Halloween offering” for the band’s fans1. In retrospect, there is a creepiness to the music video for “Beautiful Day”, which features the band cavorting and performing at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. The video, in addition to showing Bono running about and behaving like a child or a madman, contains a scene in which the group’s luggage is scanned by airport security – did anybody suspect U2 of being terrorists? – and later has them playing a gig on some Persian rugs laid out on a runway. Less than one year later, the unfortunate associations of aircraft, airport security, and the Middle East in conjunction with the stuck traffic and other details referenced in the lyrics would conjure anything but the idea of a “beautiful day” – for most audiences, anyway. The events of September 11th were, of course, highly profitable for many – perhaps even “beautiful”.
Was All That You Can’t Leave Behind designed as a cryptographic soundtrack to 9/11? To ask such a question, of course, sounds foolish, as would any suggestion that Bono or any other members of U2 had anything to do with the terrorism experienced in New York City and Washington, D.C., that day. There are, however, several compelling precedents for an intelligent discussion of popular culture artifacts as possible evidence of cryptically indicated foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Coup’s Party Music cover depicting the remotely controlled demolition of the World Trade Center being one of the most familiar of these. Are there any circumstances, apart from those listed above, that might lead a person to suspect more than a quasi-synchronicity at work between the perpetrators of 9/11 and All That You Can’t Leave Behind?
The cover of the album itself, also photographed in a terminal of Charles de Gaulle Airport, invites interpretation with its superimposition of the code “J33-3”, a reference to Jeremiah 33:3, which Bono has described as “God’s phone number”2. The biblical passage, which itself refers to mystery, reads, in the New American Standard Bible translation, “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” In the King James version, it says, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not”, while the English Standard version renders it more interestingly as, “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known” (italics added). The Darby Bible and the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh of 1917 also favor the use of the word “hidden” in this passage. Is Bono, who as a young fellow in Ireland belonged to a prayer group called Shalom3, suggesting that something or other has been “hidden” or encrypted in the album’s contents?
The context of the quotation from Jeremiah may be instructive in view of the music’s hypothetically posited relevance to the events of September 11th, which infamously prompted Benjamin Netanyahu to observe that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “very good” for Israel4 and to concede years later, “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.”5 Here is what Jeremiah goes on to say after 33:3.
For this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the houses in this city and the royal palaces of Judah that have been torn down to be used against the siege ramps and the swordin the fight with the Babylonians: “They will be filled with the dead bodies of the people I will slay in my anger and wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness.
“Nevertheless, I will bring health and healing to it; I will heal my people and will let them enjoy abundant peace and security.I will bring Judah and Israel back from captivity and will rebuild them as they were before. I will cleanse them from all the sin they have committed against me and will forgive all their sins of rebellion against me. Then this city will bring me renown, joy, praise and honor before all nations on earth that hear of all the good things I do for it; and they will be in awe and will tremble at the abundant prosperity and peace I provide for it.”
After the promised revelation of the “hidden things”, the “God of Israel” talks about demolished buildings and war against the enemies of the Jews in connection with the restoration of Israel. A few verses down, Jeremiah even mentions “burnt offerings” and “sacrifices” with reference to Israel’s ascent. For those with an interest in the occult significances of 9/11, the number 333 is also associated in Aleister Crowley’s Thelema system with a destructive force called Choronzon, a “demon of dispersion”, illusion, and hallucination which Aleister Crowley claims to have summoned. This, however, is probably straying too far afield for the purposes of the present essay, possible indications of Crowleyite mysticism at play on 9/11 and Bono’s reputed sartorial dabbling in the Jewish occult notwithstanding (“When he’s going cycling, he likes to dress up as a Hassidic Jew,” the Edge revealed of his bandmate after Bono injured himself in a bicycle accident in 20146).
Returning to “Beautiful Day”, the song informs listeners, “You’re out of luck,” and goes on to intone, “Sky falls, you feel like / It’s a beautiful day.” It goes on, “You’re lovin’ this town / Even if that doesn’t ring true / You’ve been all over / And it’s been all over you” – as, perhaps, material from the combusted skyscrapers would be “all over” the people in the streets of lower Manhattan? Niall Stokes, in his book Into the Heart, notes that Interscope Records executive Jimmy Iovine made a special visit to the Dublin studio where U2 was hard at work on “Beautiful Day” with “co-conspirators” (i.e., producers) Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. “It wasn’t finished at the time,” Stokes writes, adding that “the lyrics were only half-crafted when Iovine heard the track”7. He goes on to give this interesting account of one member of the production team’s experience of the song:
Daniel Lanois, sitting in the control room also had that [“Beautiful Day”] feeling [expressed by Bono]. “The track at that point was really pumping,” he remembers, “and the mix that we did had the power of shattered metal. You don’t know where it comes from – I think it was a lot of processing. And I had this image of Bono, singing about beauty in the midst of flying pieces of metal and mayhem.”8
What “flying pieces of metal and mayhem” have to do with a “beautiful day” is beyond me, but apparently it meant something to U2. Another song on the album is titled “New York”, referencing the target of the attacks explicitly, and name-drops Jews and, in the following line, “political fanatics” – although it’s unclear from the context whether or not the Jews are the fanatics in question. Other lines in “New York”, heard post-9/11, could easily be construed as alluding to the chaos of that day if somebody didn’t know better: “Voices on a cell phone / Voices from home / Voices of the hard sell / Voices down a stairwell / In New York […] You can’t walk around the block / Without a change of clothing / Hot as a hair dryer in your face / Hot as a handbag and a can of mace / New York.”
Other songs on the album, whether intentionally or otherwise, carry similar 9/11 resonances, with imagery evocative of air travel (“Man dreams one day to fly / A man takes a rocket ship into the skies”; “Explain all these controls”; “You’re packing a suitcase”; “you’ve got no destination”; “You make me feel like I can fly / So high, elevation”; “The only baggage you can bring / Is all that you can’t leave behind”; “Who’s to say where the wind will take you”), death and loss (“I wasn’t jumping / For me it was a fall / It’s a long way down to nothing at all”; “They left you with nothing”; “a star that’s dying in the night”; “You lose your balance, lose your wife / In the queue for the lifeboat”; “I’m not afraid to die”), and explosions (“scatter of light”; “fireworks”; “star lit up like a cigar”), and other catastrophes (“All that you wreck / All that you hate”; “I hit an iceberg in my life”). “When I Look at the World”, meanwhile, in lines that could very easily refer to the “Chosen People”, gripes, “I can’t see for the smoke / I think of you and your holy book / When the rest of us choke.” Another of All That You Can’t Leave Behind’s tracks is titled “Kite” and might be of particular interest to those familiar with accusations of esoteric significance to the children’s reading demonstration for President Bush on September 11th. “There’s a kite blowing out of control on a breeze,” the song warns, adding, “I wonder what’s gonna happen to you.”
Notwithstanding the highlighted lyrics, it must be noted that Bono and his bandmates have provided perfectly plausible explanations for the genesis of each of the songs on All That You Can’t Leave Behind – each of which is detailed in Into the Heart. Bono has claimed the death of INXS frontman Michael Hutchence as the inspiration for “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of”9, while “Elevation” purports to convey “a combination of primordial lasciviousness, ecstatic spirituality and soulful need”10 and “Walk On”, according to Bono, was inspired by Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese academic and leader of the National League for Democracy11. As for the album’s travel motif, Stokes makes the observation that Bono is “a man who has spent a substantial part of the last 25 years living in hotels.”12 On the origin of “In a Little While”, Stokes offers the following:
Around the turn of the year, Bono had been thinking Millennium thoughts, watching old clips of the Apollo moon landing on TV and experiencing again the sense of awe that he’d felt when he saw those pictures for the first time as a kid, the ecstatic realisation of how tiny and insignificant we are as individuals – and as a race – in the grand scheme of things. It was a mood that fed into “Beautiful Day” with its vision of Bedouin fires, the Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon and other earthly phenomena, as seen from above, the narrator cocooned in the bosom of a space ship orbiting the globe.13
In addition to the “Bedouin fires” and “oil fields” – clearly references to the Middle East – the line in “Beautiful Day” that goes, “See China right in front of you” is, perhaps, and to force a point, interesting in view of this assertion by geopolitical commentator and former U.S. Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts: “The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the ‘war on terror’ is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.”14 But, again, such a reading would constitute something of a stretch.
The song “Peace on Earth”, meanwhile, is acknowledged to have been inspired by a terrorist event – but one that took place in Ireland, not New York. Stokes explains:
[…] a bomb went off at 2:30 in the afternoon, on 15 August 1998, in the town of Omagh in County Tyrone. There had been an advance warning. But it was inaccurate, and instead of clearing the area around the car containing the bomb, it drove the crowds of people milling around the town on a busy Saturday afternoon towards the danger zone. When the bomb exploded, the resulting carnage was the worst in the bloody history of the Northern troubles with twenty-nine killed and dozens more scarred, maimed and wounded.15
Finally, “New York”, according to Stokes, consists of “the cool pulsing groove acting as a backdrop as the narrator confesses quietly to the terms of the mid-life crisis afflicting him” until “halfway through it explodes in a grungy mess that’s impressively appropriate to the theme of the song.”16
In spite of the flimsiness of the case to be made for All That You Can’t Leave Behind as a cryptographic foreshadowing of the World Trade Center attacks and the coming of the War on Terror, there is an undeniable and consciously cultivated connection between U2 and these events. As The Daily Dot’s Nico Lang recounts:
Their 2000 record, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, not only sold a staggering 12 million copies, but it gave the band a renewed relevance in the wake of 9/11, when songs like “Walk On” came to symbolize an America figuring out how to pick up the pieces. Songs like the anthemic “One” had always found a universal relevance, but this was a reminder of exactly why U2 was so popular: It united the types of people who would normally never agree on liking anything.17
Whatever the group’s intentions in crafting each of the particular songs, fans have made connections between the group, All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and contemporary events in history. One uploader to YouTube has even dubbed “Stuck in a Moment” a “9/11 Song” despite the fact that it was released almost a year before that date.
More intriguing than fans’ perceptions of the band’s intentions, however, are Bono’s unexpected involvements with the neoconservative Blair and Bush administrations. “Among liberals there was, it is true, some grumbling when, from 2001, Bono’s friendly persuasion started to provide ‘caring’ cover for a Republican White House rather than a Democratic one,” writes Harry Browne, author of the scathing study The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power). “But such grumbling is a mere artefact of the partisan divide in the US, where the distinction between the two parties hides the fact that they have few substantial differences.”18 He continues:
It was reported that he would hop on a plane immediately after a gig and dash to Washington for meetings first thing in the morning. The Bush White House increasingly liked the cut of his jib. […]
The White House was pleased that Bono was on board with the sort of “conditionalities” on aid that First World governments and institutions had been demanding from developing countries for decades.
After 9/11, it perhaps became a little harder to sell development assistance in Washington. However, [Condoleezza] Rice and secretary of state Colin Powell were keen to ensure that US foreign policy was seen to have a non-military dimension, and Bono and others were frequently heard to conjoin the “war on terror” with a “war on poverty”: as the New York Times put it, paraphrasing Bono’s argument, “fragile states could not be allowed to become failed states, as Afghanistan had been.”19
Bono does not seem to have had much of a problem with Bush’s interventionist foreign policy, and the singer was disgustingly reported to have “clicked” with Paul Wolfowitz when the pair met20. At the very outset of the War on Terror, he gave his implicit blessing to the American invasion of Afghanistan. “Bono would not always be so sensitive about the dangers of associating ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with nationalism, even violent nationalism,” Browne recalls. “On stage in Madison Square Garden in October 2001, as the US dropped bombs on Afghan cities, during that song he ‘embraced the Stars and Stripes’ and otherwise ‘reverently’ handled the US flag,” he continues. “He didn’t tear it apart.”21 A few months later, at E-Trade Finanacial’s Super Bowl Halftime Show of 2002, U2 performed “Where the Streets Have No Name” as, ironically, the names of the 9/11 dead were projected behind the band. At the close of the show, Bono opened his jacket to reveal the American flag in its lining, appearing to give the crowd a demonstration of his solidarity with America’s warlike response to the terror attacks.
“Such is Bono’s special status among the elite globalist sets of Bilderbergers and Trilateralists that he has, inevitably, come to the attention of American conspiracy theorists, who incoherently (even by their own standards) paint him as a knowing ‘frontman for genocide’ through his connection to an obscure but deadly eugenics agenda that appears to be run by Bill Gates,” Browne observes. “As usual,” however, “such ravings distract from serious consideration of Bono’s place in the world and the service he provides to the powerful by dressing their work, individually and collectively, in humanitarian garb – a relationship that is right out in the open and can be viewed clearly without resort to conspiracy.”22
Inevitably, not every questioner will be satisfied by Browne’s dismissive sarcasm – particularly when Bono conveniently pops up at the recent ISIS Nice truck attack (!).
Jesus-believing U.S. Constitutionalist EXPOSING Satanic globalist SCAMS & TRAITORS in Kansas, America, and the World at-large. Jesus and BIBLE Truth SHALL PREVAIL!
Then, in 1977, Merrick’s life would intersect fatally with a potential acting student named Dennis Mignano, who – much like Manson himself – had really wanted to have a music career, but when that didn’t pan out, the struggling rock singer decided to take acting lessons.
What “flying pieces of metal and mayhem” have to do with a “beautiful day” is beyond me, but apparently it meant something to U2. Another song on the album is titled “New York”, referencing the target of the attacks explicitly, and name-drops Jews and, in the following line, “political fanatics” – although it’s unclear from the context whether or not the Jews are the fanatics in question. Other lines in “New York”, heard post-9/11, could easily be construed as alluding to the chaos of that day if somebody didn’t know better: “Voices on a cell phone / Voices from home / Voices of the hard sell / Voices down a stairwell / In New York […] You can’t walk around the block / Without a change of clothing / Hot as a hair dryer in your face / Hot as a handbag and a can of mace / New York.”
In addition to the “Bedouin fires” and “oil fields” – clearly references to the Middle East – the line in “Beautiful Day” that goes, “See China right in front of you” is, perhaps, and to force a point, interesting in view of this assertion by geopolitical commentator and former U.S. Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts: “The Western peoples are so dimwitted that they have not yet understood that the ‘war on terror’ is, in fact, a war to create terror that can be exported to Muslim areas of Russia and China in order to destabilize the two countries that serve as a check on Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic power.”14 But, again, such a reading would constitute something of a stretch.
It was reported that he would hop on a plane immediately after a gig and dash to Washington for meetings first thing in the morning. The Bush White House increasingly liked the cut of his jib. […]
Bono does not seem to have had much of a problem with Bush’s interventionist foreign policy, and the singer was disgustingly reported to have “clicked” with Paul Wolfowitz when the pair met20. At the very outset of the War on Terror, he gave his implicit blessing to the American invasion of Afghanistan. “Bono would not always be so sensitive about the dangers of associating ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ with nationalism, even violent nationalism,” Browne recalls. “On stage in Madison Square Garden in October 2001, as the US dropped bombs on Afghan cities, during that song he ‘embraced the Stars and Stripes’ and otherwise ‘reverently’ handled the US flag,” he continues. “He didn’t tear it apart.”21 A few months later, at E-Trade Finanacial’s Super Bowl Halftime Show of 2002, U2 performed “Where the Streets Have No Name” as, ironically, the names of the 9/11 dead were projected behind the band. At the close of the show, Bono opened his jacket to reveal the American flag in its lining, appearing to give the crowd a demonstration of his solidarity with America’s warlike response to the terror attacks.
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