09-01-2019, 03:51 AM
(09-01-2019, 01:14 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: ...No it isn't. It's bullshit, and bullshit should never be tolerated.
I'm not sure what post you consider "bullshit". Almost everything about Donald Trump is ethically and factually suspect.
Chicago is entertaining, even if depraved. It depicts a sick 3T with its celebrity circuses, amorality, and corruption. See also Cabaret, which succeeds as much as a horror show (what could be a bigger horror than the rise of Nazis?) A coarsened culture, a shabby economy, degradation of intellectual life, and mass hardship make a Hitler or even a Trump possible. (In both cases I speak of feature films, and not of stage plays).
I am not in the stage business, but if I were to stage Cabaret I would set most of the denizens of the story in a Nazi concentration camp in which the German characters (including the Jewish ones -- they are German as any others) recall the last gasp of freedom. The characters are inmates at a place resembling Theresienstadt, the showcase for 'privileged' inmates... but all the characters of the Cabaret except the emcee are in prison uniforms with badges signifying their offense to Nazis: "work-shy", "homosexual", and of course "Jewish". The original cabaret appears as flashbacks, with the emcee as the commandant of the camp. The British and American characters who got out appear only in the flashback scenes. In the end the emcee, the camp commandant, sends the characters of the cabaret show that he staged largely for his entertainment, along with the innocent Jewish characters (in the feature film, those are the only likable characters, but we all know what happens to Jews if they don't leave the Demonic Reich quickly enough)... to a genuine extermination camp such as Auschwitz. The emcee in the feature film (sorry about the spoiler) seems to exult in the rise of the Nazis, so such would be parallel.
But I digress. 3T ways of culture, business, and politics become increasingly depraved to the extent that people tolerate them; the success of a 4T depends upon the weaning people away from those ways. Freakish characters doing what normal people would never do themselves, and bad things happening to good people? Such is the essence of literary and cinematic horror.
So what is depraved about our time? Acceptance of homosexuality in the mainstream? Hardly -- that is one of the few things that we got right. I credit mainstream gays and lesbians with joining the rest of us in throwing the child-molesting perverts to the figurative bears, Big Cats, and crocodiles. Schlock entertainment such as talk shows in which trashy people expose themselves for what they are in front of a live TV audience? Yes. Superstition and pseudoscience? Of course. The every-man-for-himself ethos in which everyone gets hurt? Sure. Failure to stem economic inequality approaching the levels of fascist regimes and plantation societies? That is much of the pathology that we Americans have yet to undo.
We Americans are playing with forces that have destroyed democracy in other times and places. Those forces are best avoided.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.