Blog 3169 – 07.04.2024

The Manchurian Candidate

Today is the day that we in the United States of America celebrate declaring our independence from Great Britain or the United Kingdom. We rejected the kingship of the Mad King George opting for a democratic Republic form of government, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people as President Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address eighty years later.

This November we will as a people exercise our franchise, or vote again. Will we pick a President, Senators, Congress leaders, and state and local leaders who are “of the people, by the people, and for the people” or will we pick people who put self interest and that of the rich one percent ahead of their oath to the Constitution and to the people?

Last night I began watching again the nineteen sixty- two version of The Manchurian Candidate. It was written to warn of the dangers of Communism and McCarthyism that ran at a fever pitch barely a decade earlier. Joe McCarthy’s chief counselor was a young lawyer named Roy Cohn. Years later the same Roy Cohn mentored another would-be-king, Donald John Trump.

In the movie the Manchurian Candidate the would be Vice Presidential candidate and upon the death of the Presidential candidate hopefully the next President was a dupe controlled by Communists in North Korea, China, and Russia. If that plot sounds familiar it is right out of the Roy Cohn playbook. The protagonist Senator is always yelling point of order and saying he has a list of so many known Communists in the government. The number of card carrying Communists is always changing. That is the way of lies and liars they are hard to pin down. They refuse to answer direct questions, choosing rather vague charges and dog whistle phrases like Make America Great Again which really means Make America WASP Again (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Don’t believe me, watch the movie again. It stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, the lovely Janet Leigh, and in one of her darkest roles ever, Angela Lansbury playing the evil controlling wife of Senator John Iselin (i.e. Joe McCarthy) played by James Gregory.

Do give the movie a look. And happy birthday to the United States of America. Many have tried to destroy her from without and within. May they forever fail and may she/we continue to shine as a beacon of hope to people everywhere longing to be free of those who would rule over them.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White