{I just caught the last half hour or so of 'Touch of Evil'. Orson Welles. He does this perfect J. Edgar Hoover. I never knew though I should have. Dietrich's in it. Charlton Heston plays a Mexican intellectual cop named 'Vargas'. Whatever else he did with his life, arranging for Welles to direct was a gift to us all. The film is thick with atmospheric compression, layer after layer. Perfect photgraphy, great dialogue.
Then I was thinking, the way I'm trained to, about all the 'good cops' doing their best, inside a corrupt machine, a rudderless ship, delusional captain, whatever. The idea that you can be moral, righteous, and that it doesn't mean anything if what you're part of is evil. That's the big scam of current theology, that all that matters is what's in your heart, your will. Bullshit. It's a con to keep everybody holding back. It'll never be too late, so there's no need for desperation. The zealots grin and carry on, the signs and wonders unfold. And the souls go on winking out. Then I was thinking about Labor Day and how the unions start there. Right there. It's corrupt but it's all we have. And it's not that we just want more, a bigger share, it's that this is all we have, the way it is. We work from here. No matter how great the change that comes, it starts with this. The way things are.
We're at the junction, in a lot of ways. The one I'm thinking about now is the moment where helplessness demands submission, like self-aware cattle, having to choose the blindness of what seems like safety, all the predators are gone, it's safe, so safe in the field. But we can see it isn't. Some of us. And what I think we're struggling with, what we're fighting, is the ones who would keep slaves, and the ones who have to live the lives of slaves because they can't do anything else.
That part's pretty clear. What we are, who we are, that's not so clear.
Those cattle though, there's a predator there still. They just don't see it that way.}