I love movies. I always have. When I was a kid we had no electronics and TV was still relatively new in the scope of things (only about twenty-five years in the actual commercial market) so there were only a few stations. Movies were the bomb.
As a kid in his young teens I went to the movies more to make out with a girl than to watch the movie. There were only two genders then, male and female, boy and girl, so it was easy. Back then, in my world, if it quacked like a duck…
Anyway, in New York where I grew up on Channel 9, WOR TV, they had a show called Million Dollar Movie. Every week the station ran a movie, the same movie, twice a day for the week. That’s when I met my all-time favorite movie: Here Comes Mr. Jordan. I literally watched it eleven times and I cried every time. I was a little kid then. My mother was still alive (she wouldn’t be for much longer but we didn’t/couldn’t know that at the time) and my world was pretty normally abnormal like every kid’s was, like every family’s was. Because we didn’t have electronics and because all of the “information” we have today was limited back then, we didn’t think about normality. What we were as a family was like what every family in my neighborhood was. Simply, it was and we were.
Here Comes Mr. Jordan was in black and white. It starred Claude Rains, Robert Montgomery and Evelyn Keyes. It’s about a fighter destined to become a champion who is pulled by an inexperienced angel from his plummeting airplane before it crashes so that his soul is pulled from his body just before he dies. He’s not supposed to die yet and the rest of the movie is about him finding another body so he can go on and meet his destiny.
Wonderful, wonderful movie about fate and destiny and true love, about mind and body, about our souls which make us tick and more. It’s been remade several times, at least two that I know of offhand.
I didn’t have a computer until I was forty.
I didn’t have a cell phone until I was in my fifties.
Life was so much better.
As a kid with no electronics, every day after school all the boys on my block met to play ball. We played touch football on the street during football season. We played punch ball and stick ball on the street during baseball season, and we played basketball and softball in the schoolyards where we met up with all the other kids and chose up sides.
The schoolyards were integrated but we didn’t think of them that way. We chose teams by the best pick (best players picked first) not by the color of their skin. We remembered kids by what they did, not by the color of their skin. So when Alfonso Grimes hit a ground ball to anywhere but second base everyone knew not to bother to try to throw him out because he was just too fast. Alfonso Grimes was always first pick, no matter who the captain was.
Those days the only thing that mattered was winning the game. No one had a thought, ever, about everyone being a winner or letting the other side win. Playing to win all the time made us better, gave us inspiration and determination, gave us incentive and purpose.
It was a different time.
In general, now some half-century later, the loonies on the left will destroy us if we let them. They are completely unhinged. In movie terms they are akin to Dr. Frankenstein or the mad scientists. They have perverted and misrepresented what they are about and portend to know what we are about. They are misguided and they are wrong.
Our government in general, in movie terms, well, they’ll be the ones in the gated cities whether those cities are up in the sky like in many movies or in their own protected spaces like in The Hunger Games. We’re the zombies, the masses, the controlled labor forces supporting them.
Question: how does one live with crazed leaders?
