Besieged With Hoaxes
We are awash in hoaxes and none of them are good for a laugh.
We have had our share of hoaxes in the past. People would either laugh at or gasp over the likes of the Piltdown Man, the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot. They were harmless; sometimes concocted for profit, sometimes just to test people’s gullibility for the fun of it.
But these days, we are awash in hoaxes and none of them are good for a laugh.
There was the Russian dossier hoax, created out of whole cloth by an English con man named Christopher Steele and paid for by Hillary Clinton.
There was the weather conspiracy that started out in life as man-made global warming, but when things didn’t heat up the way that doomsayers like Al Gore and Bobby Kennedy, Jr., had predicted, they gave it a major makeover. They re-named it climate change, which meant that the blame for all the normal meteorological events (hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, forest fires, droughts, tidal waves) could be attributed to a climate that was changing for the worse, all thanks to mankind.
In a sense, nation building, as it was undertaken by the likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama was a hoax. I mean, did any serious person actually believe that we could turn Islamic theocracies into western-style democracies?
Did it not occur to anyone that the U.S., England, France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Canada, Belgium, etc., had been around for a very long time, and that if Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, had any interest in improving themselves, they’d had a lot of role models and ample time in which to perform the transformation?
I would venture that after seeing what transpired in the 2020 presidential election, it’s something of a hoax for us to pretend that we are a western-style democracy. Why would any country look to us as an example of what it, too, could be if they only put in the effort?
Does anyone really think that people living in Cuba, Venezuela or Russia believe that Joe Biden actually received 15 million more votes than either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Believe me, those poor souls know a rigged election when they see one.
We no longer live in a country of laws. Anyone who believes otherwise will have to explain how it is that people like the Bidens, James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Ilhan Omar, Lois Lerner, Pete Strzok, Lisa Page, the Clintons — Bill, Hillary and Chelsea — Mark Milley and Al Sharpton, haven’t been arrested and been indicted for crimes ranging from immigration fraud and lying to Congress to money laundering and treason?
Some, if not the majority of these people, are members of the Deep State. That is a term that’s been thrown around very loosely over the past few years. I think the description that comes the closest to defining it is to be found in the pages of Louise Penny’s novel, “Kingdom of the Blind.”
After dismissing the danger of poisonous plants in a garden because you could see the presence of hemlock, foxglove and hydrangea, she writes: “The real danger in a garden came from bindweed. That moved underground, then surfaced and took hold, strangling plant after healthy plant. Killing them all, slowly. And for no apparent reason, except that it was its nature.”
So much like the creatures that dwell underground in the Deep State, who are slowly but surely destroying America, for no good reason, except that it is in the nature of evil people to commit evil deeds.
As promised, I will now continue my list of favorite movies, these being the ones that don’t fit into those other genres.
Dramas: “Nobody’s Fool” (Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy), “Field of Dreams” (Kevin Costner, James Earl Jones), “Stranger Than Fiction” (Emma Thompson, Will Ferrell), “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed), “The Farmer’s Daughter” (Loretta Young, Joseph Cotten), “Best Years of Our Lives” (Fredric March, Dana Andrews), “Remains of the Day” (Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins), “Hoosiers” (Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey), “The Sweet Smell of Success” (Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis), “On the Waterfront” (Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint), “Sense and Sensibility” (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet), “Wild River” (Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick), “A Winner Never Quits” (Keith Carradine, Mare Winningham), “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (Jimmy Stewart, Jean Arthur), “All About Eve” (Bette Davis, Anne Baxter), “Force of Evil” (John Garfield, Thomas Gomez), “I Remember Mama” (Irene Dunne, Barbara Bel Geddes), “My Girl Tisa” (Sam Wannamaker, Lili Palmer), “Sunset Blvd.” (William Holden, Gloria Swanson), “People Will Talk” (Cary Grant, Jeanne Crain), “Shadow of a Doubt” (Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright), “Marty” (Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair).
“The Pumpkin Eater” (Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch), “The Apartment” (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine), “Charade” (Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn), “36 Hours” (James Garner, Eva Marie Saint), “Godfather” (Marlon Brando, Al Pacino), “Breaking Away” (Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid), “Terms of Endearment” (Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger), “The King’s Speech” (Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush), “The Upside of Anger” (Kevin Costner, Joan Allen), “The Matador” (Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear), “Mumford” (Loren Dean, Hope Davis), “Silver Linings Playbook” (Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence), “The Queen” (Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen), “The Blind Side” (Sandra Bullock, Quinton Aaron), “About a Boy” (Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult), “L.A. Confidential” (Russell Crowe, Kim Bassinger), “Silence of the Lambs” (Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins), “Dead Again” (Emma Thompson, Kenneth Branagh), “Falling Down” (Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall), “Fargo” (Frances McDormand, William H. Macy), “The Firm” (Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn), “The Woman in Gold” (Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds).
That should hold you for a while. I’ll let you know about my favorite comedies at a later time.
It occurred to me that with millions of illegal aliens swarming across our border and being flown in from Afghanistan, it’s inevitable that some of them will be committing acts of terrorism in the new future. I’m betting that although it will be difficult, it will not be impossible for Joe Biden, CNN, MSNBC and those mental pipsqueaks at the Washington Post and the New York Times posing as journalists, to blame it all on Donald Trump.
Joy Nevin passed a few memes, my favorite of which was defining golf as an Easter egg hunt for grown-ups.
Michael McCaffery shared a self-effacing engineering joke from the 60’s: “I spent six years in engineering school. Before that, I couldn’t even spell ‘engineer,’ and now I are one.”
Speaking of colleges, Mike Niederberger had a bone to pick with universities with billion-dollar endowments not guaranteeing the student loans of the kids they gull into attending. I let him know that I have an even bigger bone. I think they should be done away with altogether.
My own plan, I let him know, called for turning these places with their over-manicured lawns into parks and zoos.
“I would replace them with trade schools for doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, chemists, etc., just as there are for mechanics, plumbers and electricians.”
Those first four years of undergrad classes are solely to suck enough money out of the kids and their parents to pay the inflated salaries of college presidents, deans and professors, and to keep those lawns, hedges and ivy, looking ship-shape.
You can email Burt directly at [email protected].
