Friends, I am not satisfied that I have made my point. The only way I think I can do so, make the idea crystallized and concrete, is to give a direct, personal example. I don't like to do this, I prefer to remain remote. Believe me, I do not intend to make a habit of blubbering on about my personal minutiae.

Okay, I have found that throughout my life I always "got on," as they say in Britain, best with either the very old or the very young. I do a bit of substitute teaching and I always prefer to run a class of first, second, or third graders, ideally third grade and below. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I have always had the greatest affinity for senior citizens.

I have come to believe this is due to the structure of my basic INFJ personality type: introverted, intuitive, feeling, judge; and as such, I am what is called a dominant intuitive. This means that my primary conceptual and perceptual approach to understanding the world is intuitive, a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative, five senses-based,"just the facts, mam," methodology.

To my way of thinking, both youngsters and seniors - structurally, as communities - they are primarily intuitive based. Youngsters come before the need for practicality (sensing, (S) as it is designated in Personality Typing) and seniors come after the necessity for practicality.

If my skill with computers were greater I would provide a link to another website where you could read all about Personality Typing, which is fascinating stuff. But I don't so let me just say that, according to the system of Personality Typing, there are sixteen personality types based on four questions.

Where do you use the majority of your energy? the inner world [introverted (I)] or the outer world [extroverted (E)]?

What kind of information do you naturally perceive? Objective facts, details, things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched [sensing (S)] or patterns, implications, abstractions, and the like [intuitive (N)]?

How do you make decisions? [based on your personal feelings about a situation, personal values [feeling (F)] or logical, impersonal analysis of facts and data [thinking (T)]?

How do you prefer to live life? a spontaneous, open-ended way, leaving your options open [perceiving (P)] or in a more structured, systematic, formatted way [judging (J)]?

There's much more of course, but the relevant part for our purposes is the fact that I am a dominant intuitive and what I think that means for my relatability to youngsters and senior citizens. Over the years, these interactions have produced aggregate tendencies in my personality, or aspects within which I think of as the 'Little Boy' and the 'Old Man,' both of the INFJ variety, of course.

These, the old man and the little boy, I think of as my avatars. Certain kinds of women bring forth my little boy aspect - expressed through a thirty-something adult but of the INFJ variety. Other kinds of women bring call out the old man in me - as expressed through an adult not yet reached middle age.

I think of them as the maximum concentration of some of my best traits, tendencies, and characteristics. I love those guys, my avatars, and I love it when I get the chance to be those guys. Therefore, I am prone to fall In-Love with women who summon those avatars.

Now we see that if you flip a coin and it lands on its edge, one can see how a man might find himself in the position of actually being In-Love with two or more women at the same time. Leaving aside morality, we can infer that this is the ontological dilemma bigamists often find themselves in.

So, none of the women with whom Narcissus came in contact with summoned his avatar(s). What he was looking for in the lake is the avatar of his Self that remained locked within him, tragically unexpressed. What does it mean when singers sing of being prisoners of love, when they say that you have the "key to my heart," and so on and so forth. They are unconsciously expressing the truth of this, that all of us, in a sense, must remain a prisoner within ourselves until the right person comes along and releases us, summons forth our avatar, making me love her because and as she releases an aspect of my-Self, which I love.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

And now let us continue with the Myth of Narcissus, which we will use as a launching board from which we'll pursue our investigation of the nature of love. As I mentioned before, I'm talking about the In-Love state, which causes to stangers to become attracted to one another, bond, and then marry, as opposed to platonic love, or the love of relatives. In my last post I called the Myth of Narcissus ridiculous - if we are to accept it at face value.

So what was poor Narcissus supposed to do? Marry one of the women, none of whom he loved just to avoid scandal and perhaps, scurrilous speculation? Should he have had a tumble in bed with one or two of them just to be sociable? Is there a question of his sexual preference - in a negative connotation? Do the women that presented themselves to Narcissus represent the very totality of femininity, such that because he romantically rejected all of them mean that there is something "wrong" with him?

I know what you're thinking: Now, now, wingedcentaur, you know we must remember not to project our values on societies of the past. But one can look through the history and literature of 2009 B.C.E. and find sentiments expressed that would strike us as belonging to the cutting edge of progressive social and political thought of today. Similarly we hear people saying and writing all kinds of things, which would seem to us, today in 2009 C.E., to more properly belong to 2009 B.C.E. Therefore we must give ourselves permission to interrogate the legitimacy of an expressed value, no matter the time period we find it in. After all, this is what Socrates was all about.

Let me suggest something to you. What Narcissus was looking at in that lake was not his own beautiful face and body, simply because he was just too cute. He was looking at and looking for what I call his "avatar," (there is more than one) his best or maximal self (of his Self), which remains unexpressed unless and until it is conducted by the right person. But I am most emphatically not saying that there is only one right person for each of us in the universe.

One can only fall In-Love with someone who summons one of our avatars. What is an "avatar" and how is it "summoned?" Now there is a deep difference in kind between the In-Love state and the In-Desire condition. Desire, as we all know, is not simply raw sexual hunger for a person who is only physically attractive. Desire is sensual and bound up with feelings of admiration for the other person's personal qualities outside and apart from his or her physical attractiveness. Desire can be and is every bit as long-term as love.

So, we are not talking about a case of horny hot pants when we speak of Desire. If the person you desire does not summon one of your avatars, you are not actually In-Love with him or her. For reasons we can't begin to consider here, we often allow ourselves to become confused about the difference between Desire and Love, in practice.

The following discussion is closely related to the ideas I presented about the "accretions" on the personality, earlier.

Existentialism teaches us that we human beings engage in interpersonal relations so that we may outwardly express the inner regions of our Selves, as well engage in the constantly necessary process of accretion assimilation, so that we always reinforce and renew the vitality and dynamism of our Selves. Other people are the conduit through which we manifest and realize ourselves. Therefore we fall In-Love with people who summon forth, literally the "best" in us, our most concentrated, distilled, and most potent variants of our(Selves).

People we fall In-Love with call out our maximum level of being, which are expressed by and through our "avatars." We Love certain people because we love the people (avatars) we get to be when we are with these others.

Suppose we have a man and a woman in a relationship.
Question: Is it ontologically possible that the man is In-Love with the woman, who is only In-Desire with him? In other words, if the woman is only In-Desire of the man, is it possible for the man to be In-Love with her, even if he thinks he is?

I'll go into this in more detail later, but - and I may be wrong - I am inclined to think not. He certainly wants to be In-Love with her and keeps on wanting as long as he can keep up the effort. Why does he keep up the effort? Why doesn't he simply split with her as amicably as possible and try to find someone else?

The answers to these questions are well known to all of us, but not appropriate to this inquiry.

Wait, there's more.

wingedcentaur

Friends, what is love anyway? We shall try to investigate that question through the lens of Existentialism. When I use the word 'love,' I will mean the In-Love state unless I otherwise indicate. And I will contrast love with desire, the In-Desire state.

I would like to begin by first referencing the myth of Narcissus. Here it is in summary: once upon a time there was a young lad of astonishing beauty called Narcissus. As he traipsed all around Greece, a bevy of lovely women, in quick succession, threw themselves at him. He snubbed them all. A consensus seems to have developed among the women that Narcissus was stuck on himself, conceited, thought he was too sexy for any and all of them. One of the women prayed to the goddess that "he who loves not" should be struck with unshakable love upon sight of the very first person he sees. Directly after that he caught sight of his reflection in a lake and became hopelessly enthralled and entranced.

Let's keep a few things in mind about this and other ancient myths that we have. I do not speak or write Greek, not even modern Greek. I am not an archeologist, nor a classicist, nor a scholar of any kind. But these myths come to us by way of archeology and are therefore de-contextualized.

If we are to take this story at face value then we must conclude that the tale is absurb, without edifying value whatsoever. How do we know it wasn't part of some ancient, longer tabloid piece? I'm serious. I think it is appalling that poor Narcissus has to take the blame for personifying vanity, conceit, and selfish self-absorption, that from him we get our word Narcissistic.

We have to give ourselves permission, given the origin of the myths we have in western culture generally, and the Myth of Narcissus in particular for our purposes, to say to ourselves 'If this is all there is, this tale is absurd. What if the story means this instead of that? What if things means this instead of that? What if we looked at things this way instead of that way? Where might that take us?'

More on this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur

Friends, what are we to make of bigamy?

I said last time that the Self of the bigamist himself is not trying to split, but he is trying to get two or more other Selves to merge for his benefit. I will amend that somewhat. The Self of the bigamist is, perhaps initially, splitting itself into its constituent parts of his personality, for the purpose of showing the particular face of "the man I fell in love with," to the two or more different, unique women he is married to. The bigamist, uncomfortable with this split, seeks to merge the Selves of the two or more women as quickly as possible, so that he can unify his personality, thus relieving his own uncomfortable internal dichotomy.

Whaaaat?!

*Incoming Star Trek reference

Remember Star Trek Voyager (Captain Janeway)? Remember the episode when the Vulcan First Officer, Tuvac (not to be confused with Tupac) and the ship's cook, a being called Neelix, had an accident with the transporter, and merged to become one being, Nuvac or Teelix or Tulix, whatever? You know, I'm not going to lie to you, I was proud to see a black Vulcan for the first time....

Anyhoo: this is what the bigamist would like to do if it were not scientifically and legally impossible. This is the infinite result that the bigamist is unconsciously groping for. But this aberrant behavior, leaving aside its immorality, begs the question: what is love anyway?

wingedcentaur

Good Afternoon Friends,

Let me say another quick word about Multiple Personality before moving on to something else. Suppose someone presented a video tape to you which documented your life for one year. If any one of you or I really wanted to: you could study that tape and then pick out, isolate, Balkanize, if you will, and individuate (I've just invented the word 'individuate,' I think) specific bodies of accretions on your personality, cohering them into separate "personalities." We all have different modes or ways of being in different circumstances, depending on our mood, with different people, in different venues, and also depending on other things, Jupiter's position in Saturn (just kidding).

The only difference, in my view, is that MPDs individuate these bodies of accretions on their personality, spontaneously as a result of some kind of trauma. The Self seeks relief through oblivion - something like that. Next, a word about bigamy.

wingedcentaur

Friends, what about Multiple Personality Disorder? MPDs seem to be living contradictions to my ironclad rule, you know, my repeated assertion that the Self is indivisible. Sufferers of MPD seem to have successfuly divided their Selves.

Now I don't know what the exact state of the theory of Multiple Personality Disorder is in the psychiatric community. But I do know that from the beginning some psychiatrists believed in MPD and some did not. We don't hear as much about Multiple Personality or schizophrenia as much as we did in the eighties and early nineties, but I don't suppose they have settled the matter.

My question is: Do the proponents of the theory actually mean to say that sufferers manifest several whole, separate, and distinct personalities unrelated to one another? If so - when one thinks about it - this would be the secular equivalent of the spiritual idea of possession, wouldn't it? And if their means of addressing this includes the use of drugs that would eliminate or control chemical reactions in the brain, mitigating certain emotions which might give rise to this or that "personality," then wouldn't that be the secular equivalent of an exorcism?

But if the proponents of MPD mean to say that, in certain individuals under certain conditions, their "accretions," or personality components become semi-detached for some reason, that is an idea I can get behind.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

We come now to the consideration of the Self-In-Isolation. When someone is isolated for a severely extended period of time, without any human contact whatsoever. He may put a sock on his hand and have conversations with it and so forth. His breakdown, I suppose we can say, might look like something vaguely like what Earl Holliman went through in the old Twilight Zone episode "Where is Everybody?"

Why should this happen? And just exactly what is happening?

I would say that what we are looking at is the indivisible Self trying to split itself into two parts or two Selves, trying to create another Self outside of itself, with which the originating Self can interact, and thus sustain itself. Convoluted enough for you? Good. Try saying that three times really fast.

There is no Self without Others. Just as the body must be fed and rested daily to sustain itself, so too must the Self be nourished daily with human contact to sustain itself. With normal nourishment the Self develops or grows all its life, through the assimilation of what I call "accretions," of mannerisms, gestures, facial expressions, preferred rhetorical devices in speech and writing and figures of speech, and vocal intonations and tonal modulations, sayings, jokes, and so forth, that we first filter, select, reject, and edit, coming first from our parents when we are born, then our siblings, then our friends, and then people we are exposed to outside of our circles.

If you think about it, I think you might agree that the components of your personality, falling within the categories I have mentioned, were imported from others with whom you came in direct and indirect contact with, because you liked them, these personality components. I know this is true of me. My writing style and speaking style, things I do with my voice, my face, my hands, in different situations, aspects of which were imported from others starting with my parents, then friends, authors whose writing style I admired, teachers and lecturers whose style of presentation I admired.

And of course, I modified these importations or accretions, putting my own "spin" on them, making them my own. I believe we are all like this. Human beings do this naturally and inevitably and must do this throughout the life of the Self, in order to maintain the Self's vitality.

* Incoming Star Trek reference. You know how the Borg fly around the galaxy in their digital cubes saying to all they meet "You will be assimilated?"

The healthy Self must do something like this throughout its life to remain vital. Perhaps that is why people extol the benefits of travel. They say travel "broadens the mind," and so on and so forth.

Just as a starving body will feed on itself in a desperate metabolic attempt to survive, so does the Self feed upon itself in a desperate attempt to survive. But since the Self is indivisible, the one cannot produce a Self outside of itself that can provide the originating Self with sufficient unpredictability to stimulate it. It would seem that a certain amount of intellectual, psychological, emotional, and spiritual "confusion" is desirable for neurogenesis (development of new synaptic connections in the brain; just as "muscle confusion," so I hear, is the most efficacious way to achieve physical fitness.

So the Self-In-Isolation, the starved Self deteriorates as the component parts of the personality become de-contextualized, atomized, incoherent, and stripped of their personal, historical meaning, absurd.

Good Evening Friends,

In upcoming posts I will talk about the Self-in-Isolation and Multiple Personality Disorder, in terms of the ways in which the Self tries to divide itself. Let me make myself clear that I would not dare attempt to make pronouncements about whether or not MPD does or does not exist, or whether or not the designation is or is not legitimate. I merely wish to understand for myself, from a phenomenological point of view what the Self is trying to do under various circumstances.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1991) describes phenomenology as the discipline of describing the structure of consciousness with the highest possible degree of exactitude short of a brain scan. I thought philosophy was all about offering theories about how the mind works and that different systems of philosophy by different philosophers, were their theories of how the mind works. But apparently, the system of determining the nature of the consciousness was formalized in the twentieth century by a fellow named Husserl...

I will also talk about bigamy. What we have here is not the Self trying to divide itself. But we have a person trying to get other Selves to merge together for his own benefit - which, I think, is deeply emotional and psychological in addition to, and even supervening the merely gluttonously physical and superficially romantic.

Let me say the following in preface. There is a principle in Existentialism which says that actions and activities have purposes far beyond the apparent, obvious object of the project. Otherwise much of what we do would be absurd.

Let's take bodybuilding for example. When you think about it, why do people do it? For fitness? There are many other ways to get fit without paying such minute and exhaustive attention and effort to the maximal development of each and every muscle in the human body. Why do they go through such elaborate training schedules and dietary regimes only for the chance to pose on stage and be judged best of breed, in a sense?

The bodybuilder aspires to the ultimate control of his physicality. Bodybuilding is about making or remaking oneself as a living work of art. The bodybuilder wants to be able to manipulate his own body as easily as the sculpture manipulate the clay on the potter's wheel. This is an example of what I characterize as "groping for the infinite" (but not necessarily divine).

Philosophy and religion and all the humanities and arts are about groping for the infinite and reaching for what is ultimately unattainable. But each of us, in many ways, grope for the infinite, reach for the ultimately unattainable. And that is what I mean when I said that all people, all individuals are philosophers.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

I was talking about the radio play from the forties "Suspense," the crime/mystery anthology series that played on the radio, and briefly and much less successfully on television. The episode, as I mentioned before, was called "One and One's a Lonesome" starring the late former president Ronald Reagan and Cathy Lewis. I was commenting on the dynamic in play concerning motivation. At first, as I mentioned, Ronald Reagan's character, George Belloc, was not enthusiastic about Marie's (Cathy Lewis) murderous plan.

But once on board it is George Belloc, ironically, that seems perfectly capable of living with the crime. As I said before, all that matters to him, more or less, is that he gets all that money from the various death benefits payable to Marie as Henry Grover's widow, plus the money from his illicit gambling operation, and Marie, whom he plans to marry. But, and I cannot stress this enough, it is Marie, the author of the lethal conspiracy, who, paradixcally cannot "live" with the crime.

There is one point when she is convincing George to go along and she says about Henry's death, "It'll be accidental, no murder at all." She has devised a plan to make Henry Grover's death seem like an accident, hopefully putting George and Marie in the clear.

Note that statement; "It'll be accidental, no murder at all."
Not only is that statement a characterization of the plan she has devised.
Not only is that picture of events to be a smoke screen to fool the police.
But that statement is a rationalization, an alternative explanation for the tragic death of Henry Grover, that Marie will work to convince herself of for the rest of her life until she believes it, after the deed is done.

Marie kills George Belloc as well as her husband. Why? Because she could never be clean and innocent again as long as her co-conspirator lived. If George had lived on after they killed Henry, Marie could never forget what she had done. His being alive would always uncomfortably remind her of what she had done. Marie is on a journey from innocence to innocence and the rationalization "It'll be accidental, no muder at all," was to be her passport to the country of another innocence.

This dynamic (am I using the word 'dynamic' too much?) is very much in play in The Godfather. In the second movie, there comes a point when Tom Hagen, the family consigliere, says to Don Michael Corleone, "Why do you feel you have to wipe everybody out?" Michael Corleone cooly replies, "I don't feel I have to wipe everybody out. Just my enemies." But the one person closer to Michael than anybody else in the world believes that the Don is being unnecessarily lethal.

In the third movie there came a point when Michael Corleone said, "Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in."

So, here we have, in the third movie, the answer to Tom Hagen's question in the second film. Michael Corleone is on a journey from innocence to innocence. The reason he went on such a blitzkrieg that Tom Hagen could not understand, was A) he had real scores to settle and B) he wanted to remove associates who might "pull [him] back in."

The risk to Michael is not only, or even primarily, legal, but emotional and psychological.

Alright, that's all I say on this.

Bye now,

wingedcentaur

There was a radio crime/mystery anthology show called Suspense. There was an episode that aired in the forties called "One and One's a Lonsome," starring the late former president Ronald Reagan - obviously long before he entered politics -and Cathy Lewis.

Reagan played a character called George Belloc. Belloc had been hired by a man of late middle age named Henry Grover, to manage his lumberyard for him while he went away for a much needed vacation. Two months later Grover came back with a pretty, much younger bride named Marie (Cathy Lewis).

Grover came back to discover that George had put in some "improvements." Belloc had rigged up a gambling apparatus in part of the lumberyard and this sideline operation had brought in a thousand dollars a week. Straight arrow Henry Grover wants no part of it and tries to throw George out. But George refuses to leave and says that if Henry tries to throw him out or tries to have the gambling equipment moved, George would call the police and turn in Henry for running a gambling operation.

It seems that George had bought all the equipment, as well as ran the lumberyard, in Henry's name. "I'm just a man working here," George says, "and you're the boss like always.' [something like that]

Later Marie goes to see George alone. She flirts with him while conspiring with him to kill her new husband, the much older Henry Grover. Grover has left her well fixed in his will. Upon his death Marie gets everything, all the money, assets, the lumberyard, everything. There is an interesting dynamic at work here.

It is Marie who proposes this scheme and George who is resistant to it at first. He says, "Not on your life. I'm happy with my little racket. I'm not screwing it up by killing anybody." Marie talks him into it. They have an understanding that they will be married afterwards.

Interestingly, once on board with the plan it is George who gives every indication that he will be able to live with the crime. All that matters to him is the money, the lumberyard, the gambling racket, and the lovely Marie. This is emphatically not the case with Marie.

You know what? I'll continue this tomorrow.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

Hi, everybody!

Suppose we have gentleman A who desperately wants to kill his wife lady B. A is a professional man firmly ensconced in the upper middle class. Yet he has ruled out hiring an assassin. He doesn't want to run the risk of unwittingly conspiring with a person who might turn out to be an FBI agent undercover. He is determined to do the act himself.

Why? It could be anything, I suppose. Let us say that she is carrying on an affair; and while not to excuse her behavior, we might be looking at a case, here, where the motive for it is the husband's emotional unavailability due to excessive focus on his career. We might cite the film noir picture "Dial 'M' for Murder (Ray Milland and Grace Kelly) as well as "Secret Window."

While the Ray Milland/Grace Kelly movie was my favorite version, by far, I also enjoyed the remake with Michael Douglass and Gwennyth Paltrow "A Perfect Murder."

Even though he is determined to do the act himself, the act does not fit in with his self image. From his perspective the murder is a one-time means to solve a problem. He will commit murder but doesn't want to think of himself as a murderer. He does not want to live in the state of crime.

Suppose, through some kind of science fictional device, he could create an actual doppelganger of himself, who, at his direction , would commit the act of murdering his wife. Suppose that he had control over the doppelganger, could tuck him away somewhere, and if and when he needed to do so (when suspicion against himself became overwhelming) heroically hunt down and bring in the "real" killer a la The Fugitive.

Now, the doppelganger should not look exactly like the perpetrator because then when and if he is produced, people would only think that the two of them had been in collusion. The doppelganger should be the issue, if you will, of Gentleman A, but should not physically resemble him. Ideally the doppelganger should look as monstrous as is feasible (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

In this way the gentleman can have both the benefit of having his problem removed without being, himself, "guilty" of it, having plausible deniability, and if need be, being the "hero."

By the way, if anyone has ever watched the original Star Trek (Captain Kirk),l remember the episode in which Captain James T. Kirk had a transporter accident and his personality was split into its "good" half and "evil" half?

Since it is not possible to create actual doppelgangers, the sociopaths I alluded to previously try to come as close as possible to this ideal with the means available to them. That is the goal of the psychological contortions they go through in order to displace their guilt.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

Secret Window based on a Stephen King short story

Starring: Johhny Depp (Mort Rainey) and John Turturro (Shooter)

This was an underrated film in my opinion. But we will confine our discussion, here, to the part that is most relevant to our purposes.

Near the end of the film Mort Rainey has a bit of a breakdown. He says "What's happening to me?" Then Shooter comes down the stairs saying "Oh, I think you know, Mr. Rainey. I think you got a real good idea."

Rainey turns to him and says "You're not real."

Shooter says "Me? I'm real. I'm real cause you made me. You thought me up, gave me my name, told me everything you wanted me to do. I did them things so you wouldn't have to."
Shooter is revealed to have been a part of Mort Rainey. Shooter did things that Rainey wanted done but did not want to actually be associated with.

There is an old Metallica song, "Sad But True," that evokes a similar theme (only in reverse), as well as a Harlan Ellison short story called "In the Fourth Year of the War."

In the movie Mort Rainey (Depp) is a writer who is ostensibly being terrorized, intially, by a mad Quaker (Turturro), who knocks on his door one day and declares "You stole my story!"

But what were the "things" "Shooter" did so that Rainey wouldn't have to?

He burned down the house that Rainey's ex-wife got in the divorce.
He killed Rainey's dog, in a graphic and dramatic fashion, so that Rainey could convince, and the local sheriff, that he is being targeted and victimized by an outside, malevolent force.
He killed the private investigator (palyed by Charles Dutton), whom "Rainey" had hired to protect him.
He also killed an old man, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Shooter/Rainey or Rainey/Shooter (such a designation is appropriate because by the time of a later series of events Rainey and Shooter are beginning to fuse and reintegrate or integrate - Mort Rainey is beginning to accept the "Shooter" aspect of his personality).
He kills his ex-wife during an extended violent attack. She calls out to him by name "Mort?" to try to get through to the gentle man she had married, to try to get him to stay stop scaring her before he actually begins his attack.

But Shooter/Rainey says something interesting. He says that Mort is no longer home. He says that he, presumably "Shooter," never laid a hand on him, but "He ["Mort"] took the coward's way out." He did this in the way I have described, Mort Rainey created a doppelganger to do what he wanted done and at the same time try, I say, try to preserve within himself his innocence. He had been so successful at this initially that Mort had burned down his ex-wife's house, killed his own dog, killed the private investigator and the old man - and had literally forgotten about it.

But you can't run from yourself forever. The Self is indivisible.

One or two more posts on this before we move on to something else.

Good Day,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

To continue with our theme of separation of the Self, the attempted separation of the Self. The Self is indivisible and therefore this is ultimately impossible. Yet this does not stop people from trying to do this everyday.

Remember back in the ninties and early two thousands, I think the period was, when a spate of people - sociopaths as it turned out - went on television crying 'Woe is me! What evil fortune has befallen me! What chaos and destruction has descended upon my house!'

We won't mention any names but they said things like: a tall black man carjacked me and drove away with my small children in the back seat of the car; I just innocently came home and found my wife and a male friend of hers lying in a pool of blood, looking like they'd both been stabbed dozens of times; we just came home and found our parents massacred, their bodies riddled with bullets; my wife went on a business trip and she never returned, I never heard from her again; I returned home from a wonderful night out with my parents and the rest of my family and we were attacked by murderous burgulars whose plundering we inadvertently interrupted.

The whole family was, of course, killed except for the lone survivor, apparently suffering from survivor's guilt. He then brandished his wound, barely more severe than a paper cut and said 'look, see how I too have been traumatized.' They went through their ostensible grief cycles (or perhaps the grief was real even though they killed them? - a character in a Dean Koontz novel, a cop called Vanadium made a similar thesis involving a psychopath called Enoch (Junior) Cain.

Anyway, they went through their grief cycles and made public appeals. Please Mr. Tall Black Carjacker let me speak to my children to at least know they are safe and well. Drop them off at a church, or a hospital, or a school, or a public library. Do The Right Thing!

They went on television and offered rewards to anybody that provided information leading to the arrest and conviction of the "real" killer(s). At first they cooperated with the authorities. But as time went on and their stories deteriorated under scrutiny, they clammed up and lawyered up. All of these people were eventually convicted of these crimes.

So what was all of this performance art the public was subjected to? A ploy to divert suspicion from themselves, of course. But I believe these theatrical displays also represented desperate attempts to deceive themselves, by splitting their Selfs into two parts, as I have described elsewhere, the inncent part and the dirty, guilty part, which they hope against hope to slough off like a snake's skin..

This is a dynamic we see in play over and over again in the five Patricia Highsmith novels featuring expert mimic, art forger, and frequent improvisational murderer, Tom Ripley. The difference between The Talented Mr. Ripley and these real-life people I have alluded to is that Tom Ripley had never been caught. But if he had his reaction would have run true to form, I'm certain.

Let me rest my finger a while. Be back in a bit.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning friends,

When we survey crime/mystery literature we find, not surprisingly, that the most ruthless criminals are those for whom crime or the state of crime is a transitional state. They do not want to live in the state of crime. They wish to streak through the state of crime like a meteor on their way to wealth and prosperity in the "lawful" world and to recover a state of Existential innocence. They want to use crime as a springboard.

For example, take the James Patterson novel, Beach Road. The primary villain, code named Boy Wonder or BW for short, was a murderous, drug-dealing man called Tom Dunleavy, also a lawyer by the way. His partner, code named Loco was also known as Sean Dunleavy, Tom's nephew. There is one scene where "Loco" is sitting in a parked car, in the rain, waiting for "Boy Wonder."

"Loco" reflects on the past eight years and as he watches BW "ambling through the rain as though it's exactly waht he needs to wash himself clean," he begins to understand and he works out that washing himself clean is exactly what BW intends to do. Those two had been clandestinely working together for eight years, with BW doing the thinking and Loco doing the "heavy lifting," dominating the Hampton drug trade and stashing the proceeds offshore in bank accounts in Antigua and Barbados.

Loco comments on how "transformed and remote" BW looks as he is walking to the car where Loco is waiting. This is because BW/Tom is preparing to enter his new persona that he has been preparing. Tom, a lawyer, as I mentioned has gained notoriety for successfully defending a young African-American male called Dante, for a series of murders that he, himself, The Boy Wonder and Loco had actually committed.

It seems that Tom Dunleavy is an international celebrity in legal circles and a big Hollywood producer/director wants to make a movie about his life, and so on and so forth. Tom can write his own ticket. What he wants is to be a rich lawyer with a prestigious firm, perhaps one day becoming a partner, married to Kate, the love of his life, and another lawyer who helped him defend Dante. He wants to have children and teach them how to "dribble with both hands." Tom was a former pro basketball player.

Tom reasons that if he can pose as an upstanding citizen and civic-minded lawyer and all that he can pose as a husband and father. "It's all acting, right?" Loco expresses astonished admiration at BW's ruthlessness and cagey thinking, which eclipses his own - which is really saying something. Loco expresses amazement at the things BW can do and live with. But BW/Tom does not plan to "live with," these things, per say.

Tom ends up shooting Sean and burying him in a shallow grave. Tom sits in his car and says that he loves sitting in a parked car in a rain storm and as the rain washes the grime off the windshield "just like I wash Sean off me." However, Sean proved to have been wearing a bullet proof vest. He climbed out of his grave, made his way to the authorities, and told them everything.

What we have with Tom Dunleavy, Matty Walker (Body Heat), and Mrs. Dietrichson (Double Indemnity) [Vito Corleone and Domenico Clericuzio do not try to personally discharge their guilt on an individual basis so much as seperate their family name from the "sins of the past."] are people who try to seperate the Self into two parts, the innocent part and the dirty, guilty part, which they try to slough off like a snake sheds his skin.

But ultimately this project is futile because the Self is indivisible. Still, people try to do it all the time and in various ways.

Next time I will discuss two things: the spate of sociopaths we saw on television, in the nineties, tearfully and loudly proclaiming 'Woe is me! Who could have done such a thing?!' when they themselves were the authors of these various tragedies; and the movie "Secret Window," based on the Stephen King short story.

I love the part when Shooter says: "By the way, you talk to that Sheriff of yours again or you don't show up at four o'clock, I will burn your life and every person in it like a cain field in a high wind."

Good Day,

wingedcentaur

Where was I? Oh yes, I remember. Why did the femme fatales in Body Heat and Double Indemnity - who had conspired with their lovers to kill their rich husbands - turn on said lovers and try to kill them? Also, we want to know what this has to do with Vito Corleone (The Godfather) and Domenico Clericuzio (The Last Don)? You will recall that I found conventional reasons such as "greed" and opportunism as unsatisfactory. To my way of thinking, the key lies in the knowledge that there are certain criminals who are not comfortable with the life of crime, that is they are restless to escape the life of crime (I'm not talking about "going straight"). I'm talking about reclaiming an Existentialist innocence.

Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner in Body Heat) and Mrs. Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity) did what they did because, for them, the way their particular personalities were constructed in such a way that, allowing Ned Racine and Walter Neff, respectively, would have meant that they could never feel good about themselves again. They had to kill Neff and Racine to feel clean and innocent again. This may sound counterintuitive but Neff and Racine could live with what they had done, paradoxically Walker and Dietrichson could not. The latter tried to reclaim their innocence by killing Neff and Racine, their co-conspirators.

Remember Vito Corleone was a reluctant gangster. His first involvement with criminal activity came sometime in his mid-twenties when he was somewhat compelled to hide a cache of guns for a neighborhood tough named Peter Clemenza. Later Clemenza offered Vito a gift for his service. How would his wife like a nice rug?

Vito thought that he and Clemenza were just moving it. He was surprised to learn that they were actually stealing it. Now, Vito Corleone nay Andolini, was an Italian immigrant during the very end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. As such he faced discrimination and marginalization.

Vito's son, Michael told his fiancee, Kate, that the reason The Godfather had turned to crime as a young man was because society had condemned him to live a "defeated life." Vito's goal was to take the Corleone family from the brink of extinction in Sicily - remember? - through the phase of the most powerful in American organized crime to being a powerful, wealthy, and triumphant clan in the lawful world.

This is why Vito Corleone refused to do business with Sollozo and get involved with narcotics. Whatever his ethical objections - which may have been considerable (relatively speaking)- these and whatever his adherence to a supposedly purer, nobler mafia tradition, which may have been sincere, these things had to be outweighed, by far, by strategic considerations of Vito Corleone. He believed that eventually legal society would embrace the Corleones, "a trailing cloak of gold wiping away the sins of the past" (rough approximation of quote from The Last Don novel).

But not if the Corleone name is associated with drugs and prostitution.

I'll pick this up next time.

wingedcentaur

So why did Barbara Stanwyck's character in Double Indemnity and Kathleen Turner's character in Body Heat turn against their lovers, their murderous co-conspirators played by Fred MacMurray and William Hurt respectively, and try to kill them?

Your first response might be to name greed. These particular women wanted the money, all of it, for themselves. But unless these women intended to remain alone for the rest of their lives, they would have to "share" the money with someone. Also, remember that greed always comes from fear. It is not the opportunistically sinister emotion that we usually think of it as.

Greed always comes from fear. It is the fear that if I fall face first into the gutter, there will be nobody who will pick me up. Therefore I must pile dollars on top of dollars because goods, money, assets, wealth is the only thing I can trust. People desire to "have more money than God."

And this is understandable because God, presumably, is not poor and therefore they reach for that "perfection" (this is a point I will revisit in different forms, something I call "groping for the infinite," and it is related to the remark I made in the beginning that every man, woman, and child, is, in his own way, a philosopher). But let us move on now. Greed always comes from fear.

If this were not so, then why does the United States of America, in various global studies of national happiness, consistently rank at the top in the various anxiety and despair indicators?

Next you might say that Barbara Stanwyck and Kathleen Turner's characters were being practical. If they let their co-conspirators live, there would always be the possibility of blackmail. But I don't think these women seriously thought that their lovers would betray them. Such a frantically opportunistic, desperate dynamic was never in play. And not all murderous lovers/co-conspirators lethally turn on each - if all the true crime narratives are to be believed.

Generally to murdering lovers, who have both found their true soulmates this time, plan to live happily ever after until exterior events outside their control interfere with their tranquility. I think we can best understand these two women's betrayal by understanding Vito Corleone, and to a lesser extent Domenico Clericuzio. Remember that Vito Corleone was a reluctant gangster and he only turned to crime, as his youngest son, Michael, said, to avoid living a "defeated life."

Time to go to work. I'll pick this up later tonight.

wingedcentaur

I will have more to say about this tomorrow and the next day, but I would like to begin relating The Godfather as well as The Last Don to two film noir movies: Body Heat starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner and the older, black and white movie, Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray (My Three Sons and Flubber) and Barbara Stanwyck. Body Heat and Double Indemnity are two movies about two pairs of lovers who conspire and carry out the murder of the rich, older husbands for their money.

Just when it seems like the star-crossed lovers have gotten away with everything and are about to have it all, the woman turns on her lover and tries to kill him. I believe that the same basic drives (hang on, this might not be as simple as you think) motivate Vito Corleone, Domenico Clercuzio (apart from most other mob leaders), Kathleen Turner's and Barbara Stanwyck's femme fatales in Body Heat and Double Indemnity, respectively.

Some criminals are comfortable with the "life of crime." And other criminals are not comfortable with the life of crime or living in crime, or living in the state of crime. For these latter, crime is a means to an end, but they do not want to wallow in crime. They desire to transcend it.

Let me just say that I consider myself an adherent to the philosophy of Existentialism, more or less the way Jean-Paul Sartre laid out the theory. Now I don't want to suggest that I am an expert in Existential philosophy. I am not but I think the most important thing to remember with this approach is that consciousness is not what it is but what it is not. And, the consciousness cannot apprehend itself as an object.

A Buddhist would say that all things are in flux, including and especially mental states.

The example I like to use is the following. Suppose you were sitting in the lotus position, in yogic meditation. Suppose that you were psychically taking an inventory of all that you are. Suppose you could do this and wrap up the whole thing in a nice psychic package with a nice psychic bow around it. Suppose you said 'This is me.'

Now suppose a fly landed on your nose before you got to the word 'me.' The 'me' you were about to declare yourself to be never was. This is so because that 'me' is a projection of you into the future. And this 'me' was envisaged without the fly on your nose. And if it wasn't a fly it would be something else, a breeze, a disturbing loud noise, anything. In fact, and to oversimplify, you have changed from the time you said 'This' to the time you 'me' without any outside interference. You can never caputre yourself in the moment. It's like trying to nail jello to the wall.

Alright, I'll pick this up tomorrow.

Good Night

wingedcentaur

Friends, remember the part in the Godfather novel just after Vito Corleone killed Fanucci? Vito Corleone became known as a "man of respect" in his neighborhood and reputed to be a member of the Mafia in Sicily. He began to deal in the commerce of favors, various services for vulnerable and needy people, in exchange for their "friendship." One signora Columbo came to him for help one day.

She was being thrown out of the tenement house where she had spent the better part of her adult years - her and her two children - by a heartless landlord called Mr. Roberto. Mrs. Columbo's son had gotten a dog which he loved with all his heart. But Mr. Roberto had gotten complaints from his other tenants about the dog barking at night. He had told Mrs. Columbo to get rid of the dog. She had pretended to do so.

Mr. Roberto found out about the deception and in his anger ordered her to vacate the premises. Mrs. Columbo pleaded with him, promising to really get rid of the dog this time. But there was no forgiveness. Roberto told her to get out or he would call the Sheriff and have her thrown out. Mrs. Columbo asked Vito Corleone to talk to Mr. Roberto, to get him to let her stay.

Vito Corleone stopped Mr. Roberto on the street for a word one day. Mr. Roberto was brusque 'not rude since any one of these southerners might stick a knife into you if rubbed the wrong way.' The landlord was generally dismissive but Vito Corleone had dropped one or two verbal cues which seemed to suggest that it would not be healthy for Roberto to refuse him this "favor."

Mr. Roberto made inquiries around the neighborhoo about Vito Corleone and learned that he was a "man of respect."

.... He knocked on the Corleone door that very night and accepted a glass of wine from signora Corleone. He began by saying that it had all been a terrible misunderstanding, that of course signora Columbo could stay in her apartment, of course she could keep her dog. Who were those miserable tenants to complain about a poor animal when they paid such a low rent? At the finish he threw the money on the table and said, in the most sincere fashion, "Your good heart in helping this poor widow has shamed me, and I too wish to show that I have Christian charity. Her rent will remain the same."

All concerned played this comedy prettily. Vito poured wine, called for cakes, wrung Mr. Roberto's hand, and praised his warm heart. Mr. Roberto sighed and said that having met a man like Vito Corleone restored his faith in human nature. Finally they tore themselves away from each other. Mr. Roberto, his bones turned to jelly for fear at his narrow escape took the streetcar to his home in the Bronx and took to his bed. He was not seen in his tenements for three days.

That is how the passage went, more or less. Every time I go to the library to check out the book from my local library, it's always gone, checked out. Confound it! Always!

But anyway, you get the idea about the rhythmic, lyrical quality of Mario Puzo's writing, that makes reading his books (Omerta, The Last Don, The Sicilian, The Family, The Fourth K, and there are two others I haven't read, Dark Arena and something else) so much fun. And of course, just about everything he wrote was thick with irony.

I have a question. Could someone please explain to me exactly why Don Michael Corleone found it necessary to have poor Fredo, his own brother, killed? Sure poor Fredo made a mistake but he only wanted a little action for himself. He was tired of being overlooked, ridiculed behind his back, and underestimated. Poor Fredo only wanted to make his mark.

Did Don Michael actually think poor Fredo was one of the conspirators in the assasination attempt on the Don at his Lake Tahoe house (movie)? Surely not! Poor Fredo is no Dante Clericuzio (The Last Don). That guy was actually a cancer who had to be removed for the self-preservation of the Clericuzio Family.

Dante's existence was began in tragedy. He was the spawn of the hated Santadio. The Santadio killed the gentle, bookish Silvio Clericuzio, who was not even in the family business. He was going to be a biologist. This act was the straw that broke the camel's back, from the perspective of Don Domenico Clericuzio, whose many proposals for sharing the power, were rejected out of hand by the recalcitrant Santadio.

Dante was a psychopath who had killed Pippi Delana, the beloved nephew of Don Domenico, The "Family Hammer." He had entered into a treacherous secret alliance with Jim Losey, a corrupt Los Angeles Cop already on the Clericuzio Family payroll. He planned to kill Crucificcio (Cross) Delana, the son of Pippi, and the future of the Clericuzio Family. Dante probably would not have stopped the carnage until he killed all of Don Domenico's children, the heart of his blood family and mafia organization.

Don Domenico had wanted the disappear the Clericuzio Family into the "lawful world," where they could enjoy their wealth without fear. But Dante wanted nothing of legitimate society. He planned to live like a Roman emperor. But no Julius or Augustus Caesar would he be. His model would be Nero or Caligula. Dante would "... lead the family back to its glory" (movie). He would "never give up the power of life and death" (novel).

There was no choice. Dante would ruin everything the Clericuzios, and especially Don Domenico, had worked so hard for. Poor Fredo is not in Dante's league. Any moves he made against Michael were purely accidental and, as Nick Geracci pointed out in the second Godfather novel The Godfather Returns, poor Fredo even thought he was helping Michael. Why did poor Fredo have to die? Why couldn't Michael have sent him into exile for a period in Sicily or something like that?

Philosophy

Friends, have you ever read the novel, The Godfather, by the late Mario Puzo? This is a minor creative preoccupation of mine. And this is one of the few cases in which the movie was actually as good as, if not better - which is really saying something - than the original book, which was brilliant, in my opinion.

The fact that the movie was so good is not hurt by the fact the Mario Puzo co-wrote the screenplay along with Francis Ford Coppola. It seems to me that most times the book to movie transfer does not work, but occasionally it does. Why is that? Well, I'll address that in later posts.

But one of the elements that made the novel so good was that it was easy to read without insulting one's intelligence. What I mean is that Mario Puzo was a literary stylist. The way he put words on the page pulled one through the story just as much as the plot itself. Most fiction writers I've seen are not stylists. For some of those, reading their works of fiction feel too much like work.

John Grisham is another great stylist, as well as Elmore Leonard. These are writers whose very word selection and prose process is an understated event in itself.

But anyway, there's so much I can say about The Godfather, and which I shall say in upcoming posts. But for now, let me just cite one example, from memory, of the jazzy, lyrical quality of Mr. Puzo's writing.

This passage comes from the part of the book when Puzo is talking about the early years in the rise of Vito Corleone. He gets off several, lyrical, rhythmic, riffs, as I call them. Okay.

"... With these men Vito Corleone threw up his hands in despair and sent Tessio to Brooklyn to set up a headquarters and solve the problem. Warehouses were burned, trucks of olive green oil were dumped to form lakes in the cobbled waterfront streets. One rash man, an arrogant Milanese with more faith in the police than a saint has in Christ actually went to the authorities with a complaint against his fellow Italians.

"But before the matter could progress any further the wholesaler disappeared, never to be seen again, leaving behind, deserted, his devoted wife and three children, who, God be thanked, were old enough to take over the family business and come to terms with the Genco Pura Oil Company.

"But great men are not born great, they grow great. And so it was with Vito Corleone that by the end of prohibition and the start of the depression, Vito Corleone took the final step from a quite ordinary, somewhat ruthless businessman to a great don in the world of criminal enterprise. It did not happen in a day, it did not happen in a year, but by the end of the Prohibition period and the start of the Great Depression, Vito Corleone became The Godfather, The Don, Don Corleone."

To be continued,

wingedcentaur

Philosophy

Welcome to my blog, which I call Philosophy. The intended ranged of discourse includes the totality of all that the word philosophy suggests, that is philosphy proper, you might say. Let me also say that I use the word 'philosophy' to encompass all the arts and humanities. I include music, painting, sculpture, all of popular culture, literature of all kinds, psychology and religion, of course, in my particular understanding of "philosophy."

Let me say this about Philosophy: to me philosophy is the unmanned space probe of concrete knowledge. The speculative and imaginative probe of "philosophy" eventually discovers exotic insights which are transmitted back to "earth," if you will, thus ennabling humanity to move forward with greater confidence deeper into the realm of space and time and infinity and eternity.

This has always been the role of philosophy. Philosophy is the exuberant imagination harnessed, honed, and disciplined. There has never been and can never be progress in any of the fields like science, engineering, medicine, or mathematics, or any of the fields that are thought to be purely quantitative in nature, without it. "Knowledge," per say, or "certainty" always trails behind speculation, imagination, theory, and introspection, which is what philosophy is all about. Not only that, but every man, woman, and child who has ever lived and is alive right now, has been and is a philosopher.

These are two points I will flesh out and work to persuade you of, as we move forward, if, indeed, persuasion is necessary.

We won't be able to avoid politics and economics, I'm afraid. Since philosophy is the never ending search for truth, the meaning of life, and more specifically, what it means to be human, one runs into implications about the strengths and weaknesses of various means of organizing society, as well as possible sign posts to improvement.

Let's get started. I would like to talk about the movie G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra, as a piece of cinema and political commentary. Yes, there was actually political commentary. If you blinked, you missed it, but it was there. As a piece of cinema I thought the effort was fair to middling. It was actually better than I thought it would be.

When it finally came to the discount theater near my neighborhood, I felt I could risk my four dollars and seventy five cents to see it. There's a movie theater in Teaneck, New Jersey, on Cedar Lane showing movies, all seats at all times for $4.75, seven days a week.

So the movie was not a cinematic catastrophe in my opinion. I had braced myself for far worse. Let me say that I believe that the quality of the movie was largely bound by the nature of the material itself. G.I. Joe is a two-dimensional cartoon made into a three-dimensional live-action film, and there are certain structural problems inherent in such a transfer. Not every story is readily translatable into every medium or format. I won't go into detail here, but this is a point I will revisit again and again in subsequent posts on different topics, I think.

I believe the film was executed as skillfully as was possible given the nature of the material. So full marks, as they say in Britain, to the screenwriters, directors, producers, crew, and cast for putting the project together as well as it was. In more ham-handed hands the movie could have been truly dreadful.

Look, none of the performances made me vomit in disbelief - and that's something. Funny man Marlin Wayans pulled off a convincing action-hero performance as the comedically inclined G.I. Joe codenamed Ripcord, expert marksman and ace jet pilot. The most outstanding performance, I think, came from the actor who played the character who would become the Cobra Commander. The interpretation had a Phantom of the Opera feel to it.

G.I. Joe is a top secret, highly interdisciplinary, covert operations strike force. As Dennis Quaid, who played General Hawk, put it, "When all else fails, we don't." Cobra is a domestically spawned but global terrorist organization. The mandate of the former is to save the world. The mandate of the latter is to take over the world - by any means necessary. It is a never ending struggle between good and evil and so on and so forth.

Forgive the irony but the plot was ironic, and it would have been funny if it had not been so karmically tragic (I have just invented the adjective 'karmically'). This is because the G.I. Joe team, that emblem of the very best of the western but especially American military, particularly Special Forces, skill, pride, honor, and tradition, is called upon to resolve a crisis that was directly and unequivocally caused by the western powers, NATO.

The film opens with the CEO of Mars Industries, a man named McCullen, giving a presentation at NATO command. He is telling them what they have bought. Mars Industries research in this particular area was financed to the tune of thirteen million euros, supplied by NATO.

Nano technology. Nannites that had been previously designed to isolate and destroy cancer cells, have now been programmed to do "almost anything." They can consume anything from a tank to a city and they will not stop. "Ever!" until the "kill switch" is activated, so that unwanted destruction is avoided. The nannites are packaged in the form of four "warheads" that fit onto shoulder rocket launcher devices.

McCullen ends the presentation by telling the assembled military brass, as well as, presumably, the defense officials from the various member nations of NATO, that the warheads are ready and will be shipped to them from his factory immediately. Then the audience claps. I didn't like that. What was there to clap about? The clapping seemed grotesquely inappropriate.

What we have here is nations, in this case, western nations yet again pulling out all the stops to pursue innovation relentlessly, in the science of death.

McCullen is an interesting character. He comes from a long line of Scottish arms dealers and double dealers, you might say. He is dealing with both NATO and Cobra, or the organization that would become Cobra. Mars Industries seems to be the nucleus of Cobra or the organization that would become Cobra. As the CEO of Mars, he was therefore, the head of all villany. He was giving the orders, even ordering around the man who would become the Cobra Commander.

McCullen is the man who would become Destro "The Destroyer of Nations." Later there is a power shift, and where McCullen had been the "top dog," and Rex (the future Cobra Commander) was the second in command, the science officer, not unlike Spock on Star Trek, Rex becomes the chief and McCullen becomes the subordinate.

The parallel is not precise but the power shift reminded me of Vince McMahon's transformation in the World Wrestling Federation (Now the WWE). Remember? First McMahon was just a mild-mannered, somewhat nervous, and befuddled announcer. But then sometime in the nineties we learned that he was the owner and he seemed to undergo a personality transplant to say the least.

And this transformation reminded me of the character metamorphosis that the actor Larry Hagman underwent when he moved from playing that sweet man, the gentle but very manly, astronaut and Air Force Major Anthony Healy on the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie with Barbara Eden as Jeannie, to playing the dastardly J.R. Ewing on Dallas.

Nannites have two other purposes for the organization that would become Cobra. They are used in a revolutionary "plastic" surgery procedure, and also as a mind control/mind warping apparatus.

One has to hand it to Cobra, the organization thinks long-term. Going back to the early days of the cartoon, one finds that Cobra has always planned and acted in a long term way. Whenever they went out on an operation, it was never about the operation. They suffered tactical setback after tactical setback against G.I. Joe. But they always managed to do one thing, plant a deadlier seed that would set them up for ultimate victory.

This time has been no different. Things look bad for Cobra right now. The Joe team has managed to harmlessly destroy all of their precious warheads. Storm Shadow, the evil ninja, their most powerful operative, has been lost, killed by the good ninja, Snake Eyes. The Baronness, who it turns out only did the nasty things she did because she herself had been controlled by mind warping nannites, another skilled operative and source of funding for the operation that would become Cobra, has been captured by the good guys. Slim hope is even held out for her rehabilitation.

The Joe team has thoroughly routed the forces of Mars/Cobra. The Cobra Commander and McCullen/Destro have been captured and are being held in a secret military facility without access to legal counsel or other visitors. There can be no doubt of this since G.I. Joe is a secret organization that does not officially exist. Cobra Commander and Destro are probably being tortured. At very least, as one of the last scenes shows that they are being held in such a way that their handcuffs are never removed and they would have to literally sleep standing up.

It's worth noting that there are parallels between the G.I. Joe team and Blackwater private mercenary force. You think that unfair? The Joes are a team with noble purpose and the stamp of U.S. federal government sanction. They are not out for profit. There saving the world.

According to Jeremy Scahill, the investigative journalist, who brought Blackwater to the public's attention, that private paramilitary group has employees from all over the world - some coming, significantly, from countries in South America, that had refused to cooperate with the United States in the Iraq war, which therefore is a subversion of those countries's sovereignty.

Now it was explained that in the first year of the Joe team, ten countries "signed on," "sharing intel, working together," and so on and so forth. Very sweet. But that was thin gruel and Dennis Quaid/General Hawk barely seemed to believe it even as he was saying it. It's also worth remembering the innovative legal approach they tried to escape all accountability. They said that they should escape all liability for collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths because they were part of the American total force, the government. But they didn't want to be subjected to the Uniform Code of Military justice because they were civilians.

Anyway, things look bleak for Mars/Cobra. But - wait for it - Zartan is President of the United States of America. They got him in there. They replaced the president with Zartan.

Who is Zartan? From the cartoon tradition Zartan was an evil master of disguise, the leader of a small clique of motorcycle riding desperados called the Dreadnaughts. As president now Zartan is now in position to be very helpful in rebuilding the fortunes of Mars/Cobra. The ways are endless. No bid contracts anyone? President Zartan can pardon Cobra Commander and Destro or otherwise facilitate their escape in innumerable ways.

Just one more thing, as Lt. Columbo used to say. The plan of Mars/Cobra is simply to create terror in the heart of every man, woman, and child. When this happens then the people of the world, would slavishly turn for leadership and guidance to the most powerful man on the planet - the President of the United States.

Now, there are many who would say that the previous administration to occupy the White House used the fear of worldwide terroristic Islamofascism to make runs at the Constitution and augment their power.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur