Search Results for: the joker

The philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell wrote that the great democracies tend to believe that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man. Our politicians, he says,  take advantage of this by pretending to be even more ridiculous and stupid than nature made them.

This is essentially the key to understanding Trump and the rise of Trumpism and the painful and frightening turmoil r0iling American politics.

Trump’s greatest skill, other than relieving trusting people of their money, is self-destruction. He is proving it once more.

I am a Freudian, I spent years in Freudian therapy. I believe Trump hates himself much more than anyone else in the world could possibly hate him. He blows just about every serious thing he has done in his life.

Trump, whose political career is built on the authoritarian idea that people who disagree with him are false and treasonous  ( R.I.N.O’.s, Republicans In Name Only)  is fast becoming the R.I.N.O now, as growing numbers of  Trumpists have decided to run amok with Trumpism but to leave Trump behind.

He can keep his silly and foolish endorsements. He is becoming the political world’s greatest liability, a flame to the moths.

Since the only genuine people are those absolutely loyal to him, how does a mind like that process this growing truth: his own movement is leaving him behind, in search of the real thing. He has learned much from his favorite foreign pal, Vladimir Putin.

This happens a lot when it comes to revolutions.

Like Jefferson, I believe some revolutions can be a good thing for government. They usually occur when the government has lied to the people, as ours has for years. “A rebellion now and then is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” Perhaps we’re getting the shakeup we deserve.

Trumpism is a movement all of its own, and it is a revolutionary movement, one that wants to fundamentally change the way our government and democracy work.

They are strong and committed revolutionaries, flirting more and more with violence, political and real.  They hate democracy. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that they are beginning to splinter, as revolutionary movements due,  while the other side is coming together once again to challenge them.

They will regret it. I believe women are the future of politics and democracy. Women are rising up again all over the country, thanks to Trump and his legacy.

It is a grotesque optic to see White Christian Nationalist Straight men dictate how women can or cannot have children. My first prediction of this year: it will blow up in their faces. I’m two for two on predictions on the blog.

Curiously, the extremes on the right tend to always overreach, as do extremists on the left. This is why neither one can really win.

This is the Achilles heel of fanatics and ideologues, they have no perspective, and there is no give.

Revolutions occur when large numbers of people hate their government. That is the central ideology of Donald Trump’s rise. He saw that and responded.

Revolutions are driven by anger and vengeance, and revolutionaries often become addicted to both.

When they have no clear or noble goals, that’s why and when they become more dangerous. Anything goes, enemies are everywhere. Yesterday’s heroes of the revolution are the next ride in the night.

Because of Trump, we are “woke” beyond Governer DeSantis’s wildest dreams. That is Jefferson’s “good thing.” Castro was a student of revolution, that’s one reason his revolution worked and lasted so long. And unlike Trump, DeSantis is a smart politician.

“A revolution is not a bed of roses,” he wrote. “A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”

There is no better way to describe the revolution we are approaching in our country today. It’s the last stand of the white Christian man.

It had to come. Trump just bumbled into it at the right time. He isn’t interested in governing. He wants to rule.

When revolutions get older, they begin to eat their own, because anything that is old and powerful must be mistrusted and attacked. That’s the point.

Over time, the revolutionary founders lose trust, they can never really be revolutionary enough, or tough and ruthless enough. They are corrupted by power, just like the leaders the revolution was formed to bring down.

Is there any politician in American history more corruptable or corrupt than Donald Trump? Does he stand for one single good thing, apart from himself and lying addictively taking advantage of people to get their money?

In just a few years, Trump has made it so that the most revolutionary act one can engage in is, to tell the truth.

Now, in 2022, it’s Trump’s turn to be the R.I.N.O.

Under his leadership, a genuine populist movement has turned itself into a national wacka-a-doodle circus of real-life former Batman enemies – sexual predators, conspiracy theorists, bigots, haters, demented congresspeople,  riddles, jokers, white nationalists, and people whose only qualification is that they are rich or were on TV once.

It feels like one of those zombie movies sometimes. They just keep coming.

This threatens the Republican Party far more than any Democrat could or has.  I don’t think most of these people could sweep a sidewalk.

Of course, it makes sense that Trumpists are increasingly abandoning Trump himself; he is old hat by now. even boring. Stale and weak. He has nothing new to say, he just repeats the same old thing. The old fire is going out, he is, after all, heading for 80, the next Joe Biden.

And he is vulnerable.

The sharks are circling all around him. After all, from a distance, he is just another crazy old billionaire holed up in a tacky castle.

You can’t control the whole world from Mar-A-Largo. That is a Mansion, not a base. Time for something new, something more aggressive and hateful. Something young.  The movement is loaded with them.

Trump is not the stuff of real revolutionaries. Mao lived in caves for many years and walked across China with his soldiers. Castro hid in the mounts of Cuba for years.

Gandi never even had a house to live in. The true revolutionaries would laugh at the very idea of Trump. They would never lower themselves to fear him. Among other crimes, he has betrayed his own people, just about every day.

Washington spent eight years on a horse.

In the not-so-brave new world that Trump created, you can never lie, hate, whine, or be incompetent enough. The test of a Trump revolutionary is one who can break the boundaries of civil and democratic discourse, now considered elitist claptrap.  The most outrageous and offensive acolyte wins.

There is no need for government experience or even the most minimal policy ideas.

The poor and people of color are enemies in need of replacement. Trump politicians are not interested in roads or poverty, they are hungry for new battles in their never-ending culture wars – Dr. Seuss and the war on transgender children, even Mickey Mouse –  and demonization of the opposition. Anger and grievance replace truth.

The most sacred and revered symbols and traditions of American life are all targets – that the modus operandi.

Trump used the media and broken political system to gain power. But he never understood what it was that he had done or why. And he is helpless when it comes to repeating it, or even controlling it. The monster is out of the castle.

Lying and making things up will only get you so far, even in America. There has to be something more.

Trump is yet another victim of Mary Shelley’s great prophesy.  You created me, said the monster, you are responsible for me.

Trumpism began as a genuine and, in many ways, understandable revolution against a government that had become remote, elitist, and corrupted by corporations who have managed to buy our civic system and set its agenda.

Our representatives don’t represent us anymore, they have mastered deep pockets to serve those who pay for their campaigns.

As Trump has proven, the system is broken, and no one is accountable. The Judeo-Christian ethical system that shaped the country for so long is in shambles. Most revolutions target the rich, this one elevates and protects them.

The greatest revolutionaries have been people like George Washington, Gandhi,  Martin Luther King, and the more ruthless Fidel Castro. They were, in most ways, genuine populists and careful and practical people. They were talented strategists. They were ruthless in pursuit of their mission.

Washington was a farmer and soldier; he and Gandhi and Castro were shrewd pragmatists. They inspired people to follow them. Trump inspires people to hate him and vote against him and his party.

His evolving movement is showing every sign of carrying out his work without him. Only he’s a target now too.

Of course, he is.

Hail the King, the King is dead.

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” wrote Mao, ” or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

It isn’t a bunch of Tweets either.

When it comes to politics, Trump is astonishingly inept and self-destructive. He blew the 2020 election, which he had in his pocket when his megalomania overtook common sense, and he alienated one group of people after another. He’s doing it again. It’s not just about him, you have to stand for something.

Instead of choosing and endorsing candidates that might appeal to women and blacks and mainstream America, he has endorsed a list of extremists, liars, and celebrities that have almost no chance of winning in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Ohio, among others.

These are the “swing” states that are actually up for grabs and which will determine who controls the Senate and, beyond that, the White House.

Two years ago, he cost the Republicans control of the Senate by insisting that the Georgia votes for Joe Biden were fraudulent when there was no evidence that this was true.

The Pennsylvania race may be the most important political race in America this year.  Trump has just given it away, as he did Georgia two years ago (and is doing again).

Trump is blowing it again, and the comparatively sane Republicans like Mitch McConnell know it.

In politics, hubris kills. Our media can’t help us, they live now, and they don’t have time to step back and look at the future.

Last week, Trump shocked many Republicans by endorsing his TV pal Dr. Mehmet Oz.

As political endorsements go, this is a testament to Trump’s political incompetence. Dr. Oz has only one known asset – he is also a TV celebrity, which makes him qualified to run the country in Trump’s mind.

A few months ago, Dr. Oz, a liberal physician before hooking up with Trump,  didn’t even live in Pennsylvania; he registered to vote, thereby giving an in-law’s address.  In explaining his endorsement to thousands of cheering Trumpies (some were booing), Trump said, “his show is great. He’s on that screen. He’s in the bedrooms of all those women.” (Yuk).

Oz is a Greek tragedy all of its own. A once famous and brilliant surgeon and abortion rights supporter, he met with Trump at Mar-A-Largo and drank the cool-aid. He turned into a Tucker Carlson hate machine overnight, claiming the 2020 election was rigged and supporting a nationwide abortion ban.

All sorts of flunkies and lackeys would have happily kissed Trump’s ass to get his endorsement, but he decided that TV celebrities could save the country, just like he didn’t.

Many ambitious people seem happy to transform themselves into nut cases overnight in exchange for Trump’s endorsement.

And Trump forgets the great law of TV celebrity: it always ends. People tire of celebrities, just as they tire of politicians. They always want something new eventually. Trump will learn this soon enough, I’m guessing he already is.

Trumpism is real and will be a challenge to democracy for years. Trump won’t be a part of it. This is his pathetic legacy, the thing history will remember about him.

Who would have thought it? Is Trump too moderate?

Trump’s biggest problem is that many of his followers know what it is like to be betrayed and abandoned by corrupt politicians; they’ve seen that happen all of their lives.

They know what it looks like. They have always insisted that he was speaking truth to power, but it becomes more apparent every day that he is a stranger to truth, the passion is what he wants. He is a pure hedonist. He is speaking bullshit to all of us. I am sorry for the people who send him their hard-earned money. He has the longest list of victims in financial history, according to Forbes Magazine.

“Dr. Oz had an enormously successful career on TV,” said Trump, “and now he’s running to save our country.”  Really? This is an insult to his own followers as well as the rest of us. They are not all that gullible.

As I write this, Oz is in great danger of being overtaken by another even weirder Trump lover,  Kathy Barnette, an African-American bigot famous for her online assaults and slurs about Muslims. Republicans can’t believe Trump didn’t endorse her!

I imagine the real revolutionaries are spinning in their graves.

George Washington was America’s Greatest Revolutionary. He set the right tone for the country, it lasted for years, for all of its flaws.

When fighting the British head-on didn’t work, he took to the woods and invented guerilla warfare. When he could have been a King, he chose to walk away and be a farmer.

He knew when to use power and when to let go of it. This is the significant failure of Trumpism. It has no stirring goals or visions. It is really only about gaining power.

The gasoline that fuels this movement is hatred. It is already beginning to burn itself out, as hatred inevitably does,  the thirst for enemies can never end. When they run out of enemies, they can always turn on one another.

Trump is indeed no Hitler, as he insists. He is no Mao or Stalin or  Castro or Gandhi either. The great revolutionaries are all very real. They are not brave-on-Twitter-only heroes.

They grew up around real people and knew how to arouse them. Trump is no Hitler, not just because he doesn’t want to be.

He is not Hitler or Mao or Stalin because as evil as they turned out to be, they were each a lot smarter than Donald Trump.

History has its own sense of justice. Trump is his own “R.I.N.O” now, a leader in name only, like some Shakespearan creation, doomed to melt into irrelevance while raging at the world from his guarded castles, surrounded by moats and paid-to-be loyal bodyguards and slaves.

You know, people you can never trust when you turn your back. People like  him.

One of the great ironies of  Trumpism is that so many of its followers, even the so-called Christians,  are wary and mistrustful of the needy and the vulnerable, who they feel are dirty and dangerous,  take advantage of us and waste our resources.

The irony is this: their beloved leader, Donald Trump, turns out to be the neediest and most vulnerable of us all, according to a wrenching new book about him.

___

So where are we today on the story of the runaway train we call our President and his all-encompassing campaign to stay in power?

The wolves are circling and smell blood. The pandemic is out of control. This is far beyond what the polls say, or what the pundits shout on TV.

Reading some excerpts from his niece Mary Trump’s new book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, coming out Tuesday,   I found her insights into the President’s life and childhood riveting, even poignant.

And her stories are credible, mostly because we already know and have seen that almost everything she says is right. So far, she is the only person able to tell us where Donald Trump really came from.

This is especially relevant today, as the Supreme Court sets up the President for what some call a victory, and others, including me, see as the most dangerous investigation yet into the darkest side of his life.

John Roberts can take credit for saving him for now, but he has also just thrown him under the bus.

From the President and Mary Trump’s book, I get the sense of a fragile and deeply troubled personality abused in childhood and now facing a closing circle of challenges and dangers

His missteps will torment and unhinge him. And they will almost certainly trigger another round of crippling mistakes just when he needs to be disciplined and strategic.

In many ways, the story of Donald Trump is not about power. It’s about children and what cruelty can do to them and turn them into.

The thing that I learn from watching Trump these last few days and reading Mary Trump’s book is not that he is strong and fierce, but that he is small and weak.

He is one of the most fragile public figures I can remember seeing.

There is no slight too small or trivial to enrage him, or that he can leave behind.

People have created a monster Trump in their minds, as he wants to be seen in that way, but he is really a five-year-old with a country he has to pretend he can run.

Presidents have a lot of power, perhaps too much, we are learning. But the White House can also be a place for a wounded child to hide and plot and pay back the world.

Consider these insights, unchallenged even by some of Trump’s closest friends: Mary writes that Trump’s ego “is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”

Ms. Trump, a trained and experienced clinical psychologist who wrote her scathing yet somewhat empathetic book about the President, persuaded me early on that Donald Trump is not capable of either discipline or strategic thinking.

He is not capable of thinking ahead or making reasoned judgments. He is not capable of righting himself; he can only be himself and hope for the best. He doesn’t have another lane.

As we can see every day, every decision he makes refers back to him and his naked narcissism.

This illness is what makes him plow ahead with catastrophes like Tulsa, which was all about his ego, not his judgment, or the coronavirus, which cannot simply be denied and wished away without penalty.

In a job with great responsibility to others, he never gets one step away from himself. When he tries to look caring, he lowers his voice and looks down. He just looks false, he can’t even fake it.

Yes, the polls will go up and down, and yes, the election will go up and down, that’s what they do. But it’s apparent that this is a deeply flawed human being who is under far too much pressure given his fractured psyche and aloneness to respond to anything but his own needs and desires.

Why I wonder, can’t journalists say what they know? I guess, to be generous because it changes the narrative they need to present to be relevant and valuable. What will become of them when the game is over?

As awful as his presidency has been, this is a very small and frail man with a cold and disheartening story acting out his nightmares right in front of everyone day after day.

It is hard for me to watch, but also impossible to ignore. He lashes out and reaches into every corner of our lives. Don’t we all know a kid like that, whose anger hides his fear?

Mary Trump’s style is credible and urgent, and more importantly, it squares with almost everything we see and feel about this man, nearly destroyed by his cruel and domineering father when he was young.

The media is playing it’s usual who won-who lost parlor game after the Supreme Court ruling today that found that Donald Trump is not above the law. They also kept his tax returns out of the public eye through the election.

The pundits are already fighting about who won and who lost as if this is the playoff round before the World Series.

There are no winners to be found anywhere in this latest chapter of the Fall of Donald Trump, the title of the next big book about him.

Nothing – nothing – has obsessed Trump more than his belief that he is above the law and cannot be questioned, investigated, disagreed with, or reproached. It is the most consistent and obsessive theme of his presidency, his defining value.

It has been driving him crazy from the first days in office.

The law does not apply to him, nobody – not Congress, Democrats, Special Prosecutors, Whistle-Blowers, Watchdogs, U.S. Senators – have the right defy or block or challenge him.

He even claimed on national TV that he had full power to tell all the governors what to do about the coronavirus. He never mentioned it again.

The bodies of people who tried to rein him in are all over Washington, indeed all around his business associates in New York City. There, Trump was always considered a joke. Now, he is regarded as an awful and scary joke, like the fictional Joker himself.

How would you like to be waiting over the next year for your worse nightmare to come into being? The thing you have feared the most and fought the hardest to keep from happening is now certain to happen.

I feel a bit alone when it comes to writing about what I see as a wrenching political Death Watch- people write about Trump as if he were Zeus –  but I’m not into the he-said, she-said thing.

Anybody can see it. He is choking on grievance and self-pity.

I know what I see, and I am grateful to be free to write it. People need to make up their minds, but the pattern becomes clearer almost by the day.

The fact that a team of prosecutors and investigators have me in their sights for many months ahead would be an awful prospect for me or a healthy person to wait for and live with. It’s a dread nightmare for a paranoid narcissist who has so much to hide.

When one considers the extraordinary effort he has put into hiding his financial secrets, Sherlock himself could only conclude there must be something awful to hide.

Look how furious and unmoored the Russian investigation and the impeachment investigation left him; he still tweets about it every day. He tries to smear, silence, even jail, his political opponents, who he blames for it.

Reading Mary Trump’s book, I see that it is because he is terrified of everyone who threatens him in any way, from a 16-year-old girl to Angela Merkel to Joe Biden.

Now,  when he needs to be savvy and articulate and strategic, he is none of those things. He is not able to be any of those things.

His race-baiting will work with some people, but this is a different America than he faced even four years ago. The corporate and civic and medical and educational structure of the country is mobilizing against him in shocking and previously unimaginable ways.

The clock is ticking, whether we see the tax returns or never see them. I can’t say I care.

We can just imagine what’s in them. In a sense, it’s a juicy weapon for Joe Biden.

The people who have investigated him say they know what’s in there: the answer to his unwavering deference to Alexandr Putin. What else could it be? We know about his debts and bankruptcies and frauds.

What could be worse?

What else would frighten him so much and get him to fight so hard?

Trump’s ego has taken an awful – and to a narcissist, unacceptable –  beating in recent weeks, from Tulsa to his Bible photo-op to the NFL to Nascar to a pandemic he and his allies have not found a way to threaten or control.

To look bigger, he runs to the big mountain and gives the audience a show, fireworks and jet planes, and bands. If you can’t cajole, children, you distract them.

The Tik-Tok kids – he is now threatening to ban the site in America – pulled off the mask. Trump is picking up where they left off. Kim Jong Un blew up the negotiating building. The Iranians ignore and defy him.  His former friend Xi Jinping shut down freedom of speech in Hong Kong, and no longer speaks to him.

Generals and corporate execs are abandoning him, Dr. Fauci, confined now to podcasts,  has broken out of his confinement, his Jacksonville coronation is in great trouble, and even the stock market has started to tremble again as new realities sing in.

“While thousands of Americans die alone,” wrote Mary Trump in her book, “Donald touts stock market gains.”

The narcissist sees every event as a salute or slight to him, from Mt.Rushmore to the Fourth of July, to Tulsa to Jacksonville. But he has dug himself a big hole, and he keeps digging.

Wouldn’t we all wish to return to our biggest successes? Most of us know we can’t.

Jacksonville is in trouble; there, he faces another humiliating disaster and reality check at the moment of his supposed greatest triumph. More than 500 people in Tulsa now have the virus; health officials say they got it at the rally.

He made it; he did it, he ran, he won, he battled and dodged and plotted and weaved and schemed, and survived every rock and missile and mine in his path.

Now, on the eve of another great victory, the ground under his feet is shaking and crumbling and sinking.

He has neither the psychological or spiritual strength to handle it, as Mary Trump and his behavior make clear.

If you believe in psychology at all – I’ve had too many years of therapy – it’s all there to see. The fear, the rage, the flight, the bad decisions.

I don’t ever compare myself to a President, but I can say I’ve been to that awful place.

Covered in all that fear and bluster and hiding, it’s almost impossible to make a good decision, and if you try, you just look worse and weaker than before. There is nothing more disturbing than a sick man trapped and with nowhere to go.

There is nothing more healing than knowing the truth about yourself.

Today Fauci today urged cities with a growing virus to consider shutting down again; he said the pandemic was becoming his worst nightmare.

The President said again he doesn’t agree with him.

I don’t believe it matters one bit when and if we see his tax returns. The Supreme Court ruling casts another very dark cloud over a man who can’t handle them.

The people who dislike him also know who he is, and nothing he has done would surprise them. The people who love him don’t care what the tax returns tell us.

Once those records get into the hands of prosecutors, the world will see whatever it is that Donald Trump has tried so desperately to hide all of these years. If he is not in the office, he will be even more powerless to stop it.

That is precisely what he seems unable to bear. If he believes he could shoot someone on Park Avenue and get away with it, why would he care what’s in those returns?

In great desperation, he turns to the people who love him so blindly and ignores the very people who might save him.

The protests have toned down; the dread Antifa have yet to appear.

The radical leftists are not to be found; Joe Biden is happy in his basement, corporations and schools are abandoning the confederacy in overwhelming numbers, all kinds of athletes, black and white, are getting ready to kneel when the national anthems are played.

And get this: Yesterday, Disney signed up Colin Kaepernick, the father of the taking the knee movement, to a first-look deal  via his production firm to “focus on telling scripted and unscripted stories that explore race, social injustice, and the quest for equity.”

This is the man President Trump called a “son-of-a-bitch” just two years ago. This is not the America of 2016. When Disney, NASCAR, Coca-Cola, FedEx,  and the NFL blow you off, you are in the muck. They know where the wind blows.

Every one of them has a message for the President. You are wrong, and we don’t need to listen to you.

He will surely do a lot of damage along the way. All the way back to slavery, white people have feared a black revolution. Many sociologists even trace police brutality back to this primal fear.

Every police reporter – I was one – knows that a cop who shoots a black man for no reason is often not a racist.

Most often, he has been taught to be afraid of black people, even kids. Trump is playing to that; it is vampiric but often effective.

The President’s bumbling and stumbling about the coronavirus will haunt him.

Now, he has once again reclaimed ownership of the virus as his own by insisting schools open fully in the Fall, whether the doctors like it or not.

That means he will own every illness and death every child or their family suffers right up to the campaign. Every death of every kid and every teacher will be on him. No one except Sean Hannity will let him forget it, either.

Trump set it up so that people would blame the governors, now there is no one to blame but him, and his obedient governors are scurrying for cover like rats.

The Supreme Court has re-ignited the darkest, most paranoid, and dangerous part of President Trump – nothing has terrified or distracted or unraveled him more than the prospect of being investigated by prosecutors and investigators that he can’t control.

Reading those excerpts, I felt sorry for Trump. If he were anyone else, we would all feel sorry for him. Because he can’t feel empathy for anyone but himself, people can’t feel any pity for him.

So it turns. If he were still a child, he would break our hearts.  And in many ways, he is still a child. Some kids do not get the chance to grow up.

There is nothing ahead for him but more trouble, more humiliation, more recrimination, more enemies, more traitors and cowards heading for the hills.

He knows now that he is not above the law, and that is the very last place he ever wanted to be. In his head, he is weaker, more impulsive, more frightened and desperate than ever before. And it shows.

The real story of Donald Trump can’t be found in the White House, as John  Bolton and so many others have learned.

It can only be understood through the story of his family, as ours define our stories.

It is not a story of power, but rather of how we damage our young and turn them into lost and dangerous souls.

That may be the most important part of the legacy he will leave behind.

Martin Scorcese’s Irishman is an epic mob drama, a great and poignant movie, the kind of expensive and grand movie the Hollywood Studios would never make, but which Netflix did.

It’s out in movie theaters for a couple of weeks and also streaming on Netflix, and says much about the future of moviemaking, to Hollywood and us movie lovers.

The movie is slow, beautiful, and melancholic. I have no crystal ball, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn up on future Great American Movie Lists soon. It’s three and a half hours long, yet it didn’t feel too long to me at all.

One critic said the movie was long and dark, like a novel by Dostoyevsky.

I should disclose that I grew up in the heydey of the American Mob, and as a reporter, I met, saw and interviewed several of the characters referenced in the film – Philadelphia Mob Boss Angelo Bruno, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, Atlantic City Boss Skinny D’Amato (discoverer of Frank Sinatra and Martin and Lewis.)

I can say that Scorcese has done his homework, he gets these people, their culture, their language, their inverted morals and their love of family.

I can imagine that some people, weaned on the Superhero Era, might find the movie dawdling and even borning.

It never wavered for me, and what a fantastic film that showcased the great cinematic actors and chroniclers of organized crime, Scorcese (Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs Of New York) and Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino.

I have little patience for too long movies, but this one didn’t feel nearly as long as it is, it just flowed and flowed and carried the audience along.

All of these actors were great, and thanks to the miracle of digital de-aging technology, the trio – all in their 70’s now – reunited for this sweeping story as it spans six decades.

The story is framed around a mob “peace mission”  – a 1975 road trip from Pennsylvania to Michigan with frequent cigarette breaks and bloody flashbacks. The violence is the movie is restrained and not jarring if that matters. The Joker and Spiderman are a lot more bloodthirsty.

In tone and pace, The Irishman is very different from Goodfellas, although the dialogue in this movie is brilliant and genuine, as it is in most Scorcese films.

The movie tells the story of Frank Sheeran, a second world war veteran turned thief, fixer, and killer.

Scorcese has chosen to use Sheeran – a bodyguard for Hoffa – to tell the story of Hoffa’s rise and fall as head of the powerful Teamster’s Union and his mysterious and still unsolved disappearance. He was presumed to have been murdered.

Pacino plays the volatile Hoffa as an over-the-top madman who sees Sheeran as a son. Like all mob bosses, he senses he will one day be betrayed because everyone in every mob movie is ultimately betrayed.

Pesci, who is returning to movies after a 15-year absence, was terrific, he was soft-spoken, statesman-like and patient, human and evil at the same time playing Russell Buffalino, Frank’s closest boss and friend.

The movie has a lot of funny dialogue, full of wise guy lore “You charge a gun; with a knife, you run,” and it “is what it is,” which means run for your life.

Frank (De Niro) is the narrator, speaking from a nursing home in Pennsylvania,  sometimes speaking directly into the camera documentary style.

“But the mood is different this time around,” wrote A.O. Scott in his review in the New York Times,  “even if we recognize a few of the faces. The anecdotes, some of which are funny, some horrifying, are edged with a bleak sense of absurdity and shadowed by the rapid onset of oblivion. Death is close at hand.”

The movie, for all its sweep and skill (the transitions are managed smoothly), has a somber tone running through it, like a stream or railroad track.

This culminates in the last bleak half-hour, which is heartbreaking. Our heartless hitman loved and protected by some vicious supporters, is reduced to hobbling on his walker to unsuccessful beg his daughter to talk to him.

In most movies and TV shows that deal with family, the end would have been their miraculous coming together.

The man who showed no mercy to so many people in his lifetime gets none at the end of his own life. We think of these people as powerful and strong.

But Scorcese challenges us to think of what they become. They can be frail and disappointed too.

The film opens with Sheeran in his 80’s, frail and lonely (his wife has just died, and his favorite daughter hasn’t spoken to him in decades). Sheeran is a cold fish in many ways, willing to kill and kill for his mob friends and mentors, but as he ages, he finds himself looking back on his life with a mixture of pride and regret.

The movie is well worth it to see De Niro, Pesci (who was terrific) and Pacino act for several hours. But beyond that, the movie is enthralling, chilling but not nearly as violent as a Superhero movie; I’d call it a long-form grand slam, a knockout.

One thing that stands out is  Scorcese’s much-document lack of women at the heart of any of his work (except maybe for Sharon  Stone in Casino).

The digital facial and aging software didn’t bother me; it was barely visible much of the time. The women here either melt into scolds or enablers or are just standing out of their husband’s earshot smoking.

This long and hard-hitting movie seems almost glaringly out of sync with movies these days. There have been some influential books and stories written about the women in this crime, and the agonies and humiliations of their lives.

The film has a stately and sweeping feeling; it is beautifully shot and ripples like a great wave coming into shore from miles out and then rolling back.

The movie has an epilogue feeling to it.

It is also a reckoning and grand vision of the rise and fall of the once vibrant American subculture we called Organized Crime (a dull name for what it was), but it also offers a mirror of one chapter in America’s turbulent, violent and intense history.

We tend to think our political troubles are new, but they are not, they are quite familiar to historians and people with long memories.

Hoffa is a subtle kind of Trump stand-in, his followers,  blindly cheering on his corruption and abuse of power in the million-member union, whose members would look right at home shaking their firsts and roaring angrily at a MAGA rally in Kentucky.

Thirty years after his classic Goodfellas, Scorcese has plenty of fascinating mob stories to tell in creative, even stunning ways.

All of Scorcese’s mob stories are love stories, surprisingly.

He loved the dons and foot soldiers of the American underworld and took the time to get to know them. He always saw them both as human and vulnerable, even as they murdered and robbed without much shame or hesitation.

Part of the genius of The Irishman is his understanding of the mob criminals of post-war America as being all about family; their crime family, but also their wives, sons, daughters, and friends.

Everything they did revolved around their ideas of family.

They loved, protected, betrayed, and cared for one another in ways that make the murderers of our time seem even more hollow and soulless. At least they killed people for a reason, not because they were shopping or in church.

Even though the movie does not emotionalize or excuse their murders and cruelty, I found myself missing them. They did not slaughter innocents.

They are so much more understandable – and ethical –  than the machine-gun toting bad guys of today.

Organized crime movies prove the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s theory that evil is banal, not dramatic.

Scorcese gets that idea.

As a killer, Sheeran is very good at what he does.

When he heads out to kill a renegade mob boss – Joey Gallo – in New York City, while he is celebrating his birthday with his family,  he reminds himself to wound, not kill, Gallo’s bodyguard.

The guy doesn’t deserve to die, he says thoughtfully, he’s just doing his job. So he shoots him in the arm.

It’s hard to imagine any terrorist or bigoted nationalist or online troll being so considerate of their victims.

Frank Sheeran is a complex and compelling character. DeNiro does him justice.

I think the movie is a remarkable achievement and a moving one. This movie flows gracefully and even gently.

Age and death do hover over the movie.

Scorcese and his stars are septuagenarian actors slowing down and fading from the spotlight. You can’t help but feel they were all making different statements about where they are in their own lives.

I think of the movie not only as a knowing homage and testament to the lost and soon forgotten wise guys of the mob, but also as a kind of the last look, a farewell. The story of organized crime in America is a riveting chapter in our country’s bloody history, which never seems to end.

But the surprise to me is that what powers this movie is love and empathy.

Even as Sheeran kills, Scorcese can’t help but show us his fears, confusion, and broken moral compass. As played by DeNiro, Frank Sheeran is both savage and pathetic.

As he struggles late in life to regain the love of his daughter, he is wholly bewildered about why they are fearful of him, and horrified about what he has become.

Scorcese loves his wise guys and only gets better and gentler at portraying them. He seems to be telling us in this movie that maybe they were not so tough and not so wise. They all seemed frail and vulnerable to me.

I think this is a great American movie; I wouldn’t miss it. If you can, get to a theater and see it on a big screen. If not, it’s already on Netflix, and good for them for funding it and letting Scorcese do it his way.

I can’t quite imagine any other filmmaker would try to top this look at the bad guy culture in America; it has a last word kind of feel to it. See it if you can.

I decided to walk this afternoon by myself. I tried to nap, but couldn’t sleep.

Maria was at her Belly Dancing class, and I was in a funky mood, I didn’t want to walk with any dogs, just me.  That’s unusual.

I took my walking stick, it’s not a cane, I don’t need it, but I just like the feel of it, and the sound of it clacking along the road. I swing it like a baton.  It gives me a sense of solidity, of being grounded.

But it probably looks like a cane, and often out in the pasture where it’s rocky and muddy.

I’ve used one for years.

I went halfway up the hill, then turned around, and as I did, a man pulled up in a big SUV and rolled his window down and leaned over to me.

He looked concerned,  and spoke to me slowly, almost as if I was hard of hearing or slow to grasp what he would be saying.

I was a little broody as I sometimes am after doctor’s visits, I spent the morning at the eye doctor. I didn’t see a doctor for years, and ever since my heart surgery, I see a whole bunch regularly. That’s probably why I am alive, but still, I don’t like it much.

I was surprised when I heard the engine stop, and annoyed. I didn’t want to chat with anybody at the moment. He had a big black Lab in the back seat who was pretending to growl at me, but whose tail was betraying him.

I was preparing for small talk, which I hate and am no good at.

I didn’t recognize the man, but that is not unusual.

A lot of people know me that I don’t remember or know I know. It’s a byproduct of doing all those readings and being on TV. People never forget a voice on the radio or a face from TV. I just smile, wave and say hello, which I started to do…

“Listen,” the man said, looking serious, “there is a lot of glare from the sun up ahead of me, you might want to think of walking on the other side of the street.” At first, I thought I knew him and I wasn’t clear about what he was telling me.

I’ve walked on country roads a million times, nobody has ever warned me about the sun. I mean, don’t I know how to walk?

I asked him about his dog, I just didn’t realize he was talking about the glare on his windshield, and he wasn’t clear. I had been walking pretty deep in thought, looking at my long shadow and wondering, as I sometimes do, who that old man with a walking stick was walking down the road.

It doesn’t look like me, or at least, not the image of the “me” I carry around in my head. The man spoke even more slowly, gesturing up towards the setting sun, and I realized he was just trying to warn me about the side of the road I was walking on, he must not have been able to see me clearly as he drove behind me.

He didn’t want me to get hurt. But it wasn’t until he drove off, that I pieced it together. I must have sounded addled and confused to him, I imagined him shaking his head and wondering if I would make it to the end of the road.

Most people who see me recognize me, I am not famous, but I am pretty well known where I live. And I don’t really look like anyone who is from around here.  I think I just assumed he was somebody who knew me but who I couldn’t place, and I was trying to be polite.

Perhaps I was confused. Perhaps I was really the fuzzy-headed old man he seemed to think I was, in need of watching and protecting.

It was a thoughtful thing of him to do, yet something was bothering me. I was struck by the way he was speaking to me. The people at the Mansion often complain to me that people speak very loudly to them, as if they are deaf, or very slowly as if they are dumb.

I have a friend who is legally blind, and he says that people shout when they talk to him. He keeps having to tell them he isn’t deaf.

I am careful to speak to the residents in my normal voice, and if I have to repeat something, I just get closer and repeat it. I am all right with getting older, I was never good at being young. In so many ways, I’m finally accepting myself, just as Sylvia Plath wrote, as having the right to live on my own human, fallible, terms.

I am both happy and fortunate in my life.  I know I am blessed in many ways.

It is a strange experience for someone to speak to me the way this well-meaning man did, and it makes me wonder at times just how old I am or seem. I have a bit of an old man’s shuffle and have gotten an old man’s belly. My knees tell me  I’m getting older, especially when I walk on concrete for hours.

And sometimes, getting up from a deep and soft chair requires some planning.

The very young techs and the vet will not let me carry bags of dog food out to the door ever since my heart surgery, and people are constantly asking me if I need help to get things I buy out to the car. Young men open doors for me and call me “sir,” like I am some grizzled old veteran.

Nobody asks Maria if they can carry things for her, and I wouldn’t dare.

That’s a big transition for me. I’ve always been the guy who holds doors open and helps older people carry their things out to their cards. I’m the guy who helps, not who needs help.

The man kept repeating his warning, although, in those minutes, he was afraid I didn’t get it. The sun was dipping below the horizon. I wanted to shout at him (I just saw Joker): “Are You Talking To Me?’ just like DiNero did in “Taxi Driver,” and President Trump did to a reporter the other day.

The thing about getting older is that you are always young in your own head, it’s only when you look in a mirror, or see a photograph, or look at your shadow in the setting sun that you are reminded who you are and where you are.

And you get a fleeting glimpse into how other people are beginning to see you.

I was struggling to respond gracefully. He was just being nice, but I didn’t like it.

Striving to be polite, I asked him if he was taking his big sweet Lab to the vet just down the road, and he said he was getting some stitches removed from the dog.

I said goodbye, and before he could warn me again, which he seemed to be cranking up to do, I waved and started walking and shouted over my shoulder, “good luck at the vet, I’ll be sure to be careful.”

I think I realized that I wasn’t really annoyed. I was just embarrassed.