"How I learned to stop worrying
and love The Donald."
A few weeks ago, I started repeating
the phrase in my head: "How I learned to stop worrying and love The Donald," a variation on the phrase used to market the film Dr. Strangelove when it came out in 1964. Posters advertising the film read, "Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to stop
worrying and love the bomb."
There must be a reason I keep repeating that phrase, I figured, so I got the DVD of Dr. Strangelove from the
library and popped it in the machine.
One after another, parallels between the Stanley Kubrick film and the Trump For President Campaign were
striking:
FIRST:
Trump resembles in both swagger and
mannerisms General Jack T. Ripper, the character in the film who goes nuts and
starts nuclear war. Played by Sterling Heyden, Ripper snarls orders into the
phone, with the same sociopathic self certainty as we've all seen in Donald
Trump as he repeats "believe me, I'll be the greatest" with no
evidence to back it.
 |
| Gen. Jack T. Ripper |
In one of the first scenes of the
film, Ripper sits in his office announcing a Condition Red using phraseology
and mannerism similar to Trump.
"Let's see if we can stay on
the ball," he hollers. "Listen to me carefully." (Like Trump, Ripper just keeps repeating "Listem to me" which is same as Trump's "believe me, believe
me." The general, like the Donald, uses his dominance to keep people from asking questions.
"Listen to me carefully."
"Believe me"
"Listen to me carefully."
"Believe me"
Ripper is bombastic and egoistic and so much like Trump it's scary, as he delivers his explanation for dropping the bombs.
War is too important to be left to politicians.
*****
War is too important to be left to politicians.
Ripper: "Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? War is too important to be left to the generals. When he said that fifty years ago he might have been right, but today war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time the training or the inclination for strategic thought."
(HOW MANY TIMES in past years have the likes of the Tea Party said we should elect outsiders with no experience in Washington instead of professional politicians?)
"Today war is too important to be left to politicians," said Jack T. Ripper.
(HOW MANY TIMES in past years have the likes of the Tea Party said we should elect outsiders with no experience in Washington instead of professional politicians?)
"Today war is too important to be left to politicians," said Jack T. Ripper.
The more I watch, the more I realize,
THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE FILM DR. STRANGELOVE AND THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ARE AMAZING!!!!!
THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE FILM DR. STRANGELOVE AND THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ARE AMAZING!!!!!
Dr. Strangelove: "Truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments, one with twenty million killed and one with a hundred and fifty million killed.
"I say no more than ten million killed tops.
(Like today we will soon have a choice between two horrendous presidential candidates, one of whom is Trump / Ripper ) (giving me chills)
They cut to Russia: a convoy of trucks traversing a barren landscape
It looks like the images we saw last year of ISIS spreading across Iraq.
*****
Ripper: "I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration communist indoctrination communist subversion and the international c conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."
Okay aside from the part about bodily fluids- substitute Muslim for communist above and you have Trump, in the persona of General Jack T. Ripper.
Then says Ripper: "This base is sealed, I want all privately owned radios to be immediately impounded. I want every single one of them collected without exception."
Then says Ripper: "This base is sealed, I want all privately owned radios to be immediately impounded. I want every single one of them collected without exception."
Up in one of the planes, Major Kong,
speaking in a southern twang like LBJ after a sixpack, prepares to go after
them Russkies.
"Well boys I reckon this is
it. Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the
Russkies." (about as much concern as one hears today from a Trump supporter
about the idea of a madman like Trump with his finger on the nuclear button).
(In my memory, in 1964 that kind of
extreme red-neck style patriotism was not as widespread as it is today in 2016.)
More notes from from Dr. Strangelove:
Buck, the other general, has a personal assistant working in his home office in a bikini
(I'm beginning to see the meaning behind similarities
between the film and today. Trump is
taking America on a dangerous ride much like General Ripper, telling everyone
to just believe him.)
Ripper: "There's nothing anyone can do about
this now, I'm the only person who knows the three letter code group."
More notes as the film continues, we
are now in the war room and Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley resembles
eerily the current President of France:
 |
| Sellers |
 |
| Hollande |
Peter Sellers as President of the United States looks way too much like French President Francois Hollande for my comfort
********************
MORE NOTES
They are at Burpelson Air Force Base
They are at Burpelson Air Force Base
Interrupted in the middle of
Operation Drop Kick to attack Russia.
Once the go-code issued, if they fly
past their fail safe location, there is no way to call back the planes
Dr. Strangelove: "Once the go
code is received, the radios in the aircraft are switched to a special coded
device. To prevent the enemy from
issuing need three letter code
Radios are off in the planes
General Ripper has sealed off the
base and cut off communications.
They are on their way in there and
there is no way to bring them back.
"Let's get going there's no
other choice, god willing we will prevail
through the purity and essence of our natural fluids, god bless you
all." - Ripper's last message to the world (the haters always invoke God
to justify their hate).
Meanwhile General Buck Turgidson
speaks like every bureaucrat you've ever encountered. When the President shouts
I thought you said this could never happen, Buck replies:
"Well I don't think it's fair
to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up, sir." (sounding like
every milquetoast bureaucrat one has ever dealt with in these decades).
That war room set in Dr. Strangelove
was so futuristic at the time, how does it compare to today?
As real army trucks approach the
base but the soldiers think they are enemy trucks, armed guards have this
dialogue:
Those trucks look like the real
thing don’t they
Probably bought them from the army
as war surplus.
Then soldiers, as ordered, shoot
down the truck convoy before anyone can see who they really are.
Americans shooting at Americans,
each thinking the other is the enemy.
**********
On the fifteenth anniversary of the movie's release the New Yorker proclaimed
JANUARY 17, 2014
Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True
Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.
The command and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an “always/never” dilemma.
For years, the Air Force and the
Navy blocked attempts to add coded switches to the weapons solely in their
custody. During a national emergency, they argued, the consequences of not
receiving the proper code from the White House might be disastrous. And locked
weapons might play into the hands of Communist saboteurs. “The very existence
of the lock capability,” a top Air Force general claimed (in 1960), “would
create a fail-disable potential for knowledgeable agents to ‘dud’ the entire
Minuteman [missile] force.” The Joint Chiefs thought that strict military
discipline was the best safeguard against an unauthorized nuclear strike. A
two-man rule was instituted to make it more difficult for someone to use a
nuclear weapon without permission. And a new screening program, the Human
Reliability Program, was created to stop people with emotional, psychological,
and substance-abuse problems from gaining access to nuclear weapons. Coded switches to prevent the unauthorized
use of nuclear weapons were finally added to the control systems of American
missiles and bombers in the early nineteen-seventies.
****
More Notes from Dr. Strangelove:
Ripper goes off on riffs about the
importance of water. . .
In his case it's the fluoridation
"The most monstrously conceived
and dangerously communistic plot we've ever had to face."
(There used to be people who went on
and on about fluoridation of water back in the sixties. Today the threat people obsess over depends
on what websites they visit.)
As things get worse, we have the
introduction of Dr. Strangelove who advised the Bland Corporation on the
technology.
Dr. Strangelove represents the
madness that Trump is releasing. Dr.
Strangelove becomes the most important person in the war room as Earth
approaches self destruction.
Strangelove himself is connected to
a gigantic complex of computers
Circumstances Under which the bombs
are to be exploded are programmed into a memory bank
(In 1964 that was futuristic, today
it is likely true)
Shootout continues at the Air Force
Base, Americans shooting Americans, too caught up in the crossfire to realize
they are shooting their own people.
Side trip of our hero having to stop
at a phone booth to call the president and don’t have change to place the call
They aren’t able to stop the planes,
34 are recalled except the one piloted by Slim Pickens,
"It's not going to help either
one of us if the doomsday machine goes off,
is it?" says the President.
Pickens goes off looking for
"target of opportunity" because his plane is losing fuel, drops the
bomb on the nearest city and begins the end of life as we know it on Earth.
At one point dr. Strangelove almost gets strangled by his own out of control hand
Buck warns against a mine shaft gap
(I have to learn to stop writing things
down and just watch the movie.)
*********
"She will be easier to beat
than many of the people I've already beaten." - Trump re Hillary after his
April 26 sweep.
Yikes.
Posted by Kay Ebeling
Producer, City of Angels Blog
Not just L.A., the city of angels is everywhere
Producer, City of Angels Blog
Not just L.A., the city of angels is everywhere
