.
Dr. Strangelove versus Failsafe

In 1964, within two years of the Cuban Missile Crisis, two Hollywood movies were released telling the same story of “accidental” thermonuclear war. Two of the truly great movie talents of all time created Failsafe, director Sydney Lumet and movie star, Henry Fonda as the President of the United States. Produced as a traditional thriller about a technological glitch that mistakenly sent an Air Force plane into the Soviet Union to blow up Moscow, Fonda spends the movie in a bomb shelter far below the White House along with his translator, who later grew up to be J. R. Ewing on Dallas.

Fonda’s President was the perfect embodiment of what we, the audience, want in a national leader. All he cares about for the entire movie is stopping nuclear war before it goes to its only logical conclusion. With movie star gravitas, he talks on the “hotline” with the head guy of the Soviet Union convincing him, first, that the attack was accidental, and, second, that the two of them had an obligation to their respective populations -- and to all the rest of the world – to end the insanity of nuclear weapons.

It ends with a gut wrenching solution that I will not spoil. Lumet and Fonda deserve consideration as one of the greatest films of all time – except that it was released the same season as Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Instead of Lumet as Director and Fonda as President providing straight ahead drama and pathos, this surreal comedy offered the explosive craziness of Stanley Kubrick as director and Peter Sellers as POTUS. To add insult to Hollywood injury, Sellers also played the science guru and Nazi holdover, Strangelove. (And Group Captain Mandrake of the RAF, to add yet another layer of fuck you to Lumet and Fonda.)

It was no contest. Kubrick’s take on nuclear war as farce resonates with audiences to this day. I saw it again recently on Turner Classic Movies, and it is scarier today than it was 60 years ago. At the time, it looked like comedy and it was funny as hell, which took the sting out of the horror of the end of all life that does not hide for a hundred years at the bottom of a mine shaft.

This week the “news” has been even more insane than the Covid Crap Fest of the last two years as “our” media provide a breathless account of the struggle over Ukraine. The US Government has hoked up the silliest rationale ever – sillier than, “We’re fighting them there, so that we don’t have to fight them here,” or “We are stopping the spread of communism in Vietnam.” The current rationale is that “Putin” wants to expand the borders of Russia – because he is that way.

The only coherent response to the idea that Putin wants to swallow up Ukraine, is SO FUCKING WHAT? It happens to be nonsense, too. But that is beside the point. Now the US is fucking with Russia for no comprehensible reason – but if you disagree, you better get your money out of the bank while you still can.

Too many internet voices assume that there is no connection between the lies about vaccine mandates and the lies about Russia. Both are just about money in this take – Big Pharma makes it off the vaccine lies; Big Arms Merchants make it off of stupid wars.

I think this separation of issues is just like the Blue and Red divide, keeping unity beyond the reach of the world’s population. There is something else going on that requires the abolition of Individuality and National Sovereignty. Both must be obliterated to get to whatever Brave New World our betters have dreamed up for us.

So long as the confused masses of the world assume that they live in a Failsafe world, where things can go wrong by accident, creating room for heroic leadership from somebody like Hank Fonda, no one will challenge the evil at its source. People need to realize that Dr. Strangelove provides the key to understanding the psychopathic mentality of people who presume to rule the world.

The current implementation of State Totalitarianism in Canada IS the goal. For people who already run the whole fucking world to stage a revolution to make themselves EVEN MORE omnipotent is proof of insanity.

The next step for our rulers is A Clockwork Orange and the Ludovico technique for improving the population by making criminals puke all day. Better living through chemistry . . . .