Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Elegy

David [to George]: She is a throwback to a completely different time. She has to be wooed.

Right, Tom?

David [narrating]: Consuela. My whole life was dedicated to independence and at some cost I had achieved my goal. Nevertheless, it was in that moment, that my terrible jealousy was born. That is when I realised that I would never, ever, really possess her. I feel anxious unless I speak to her on the phone every day, and then I feel anxious after we’ve spoken. What are you wearing? Where are you? I knew it’s only a matter of time before a young man found her and took her away. I knew. Because I was once that young man who would have done it.

Of course, a lot of these relationships end up on Dateline. If you get my drift.

David [narrating]: On the nights she isn’t with me I am deformed, thinking of where she might be. And all this because this girl will tell me a thousand times how much she adores me and means it. This girl will never once tell me she yearns for my cock.

That's true. At least in the movie.

George: Beautiful women are invisible.
David: Invisible? What the hell does that mean? Invisible? They jump out at you. A beautiful woman, she stands out. She stands apart. You can’t miss her.
George: But we never actually see the person. We see the beautiful shell. We’re blocked by the beauty barrier. Yeah, we’re so dazzled by the outside that we never make it inside.

Men still say things like this, of course. After all, sometimes what else is there to say?

Carolyn: I’m getting old David. The way men look at me changes every day. There are women…a lot of women who are on these dating websites. You’re guaranteed a certain number of dates per year. And you pay for the silence…and…the same conversation, every time. I’ll end up like them.

And Consuela?

Consuela [in phone message]: Hi, David, it’s Consuela. How are you? Feels strange to call you, but I want to talk to you, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you myself before you hear it from someone else.

And he so loved her "perfect breasts".

David: I collapsed to the floor, listening to her message, again and again, fearing the worst. She was in love, she was getting married. Perhaps she even wanted my blessing.

Nope, not that.

David: You know Hipolita, the beautiful Amazonian queen? She actually cut off her right breast so she could shoot her arrows faster and she was no slouch.

Mythologically, as it were.

[iambiguous]

Chinatown with a happy ending? The pragmatic melding of vice and virtue? Copland with a few new twists? Dexter without “the code”? You know me: Make up your own mind. But then be prepared to change it.

Good cop? Bad cop? I couldn’t make up my mind. Each new context seemed to tug me in another direction. But it’s a frame of mind I garner mostly from the world of entertainment. Like you too probably.

But always, always, always: it’s politics. Underlying and undermining everything.

L.A. Confidential

Dudley: Edmund, you’re a political animal. You have the eye for human weakness, but not the stomach.
Ed: You’re wrong, sir.
Dudley: Would you be willing to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect you knew to be guilty, in order to ensure an indictment?
Ed: Dudley, we’ve been over this.
Dudley: Yes or no, Edmund?
Ed: No!
Dudley: Would you be willing to beat a confession out of a suspect you knew to be guilty?
Ed: No.
Dudley: Would you be willing to shoot a hardened criminal in the back, in order to offset the chance that some… lawyer…
Ed: No.
Dudley: Then, for the love of God, don’t be a detective. Stick to assignments where you don’t have…
Ed: Dudley, I know you mean well, but I don’t need to do it the way you did. Or my father.

Next up: Edmund in The Proposition!

Dudley: Bud White is a valuable officer.
Ed: White’s a mindless thug.
Dudley: No, Edmund, he’s just a man who can answer yes to those questions I’ve asked you from time to time.

Of course, Dudley himself is a corrupt scumbag.

Dudley: You’ll do as I say, and ask no questions. Do you follow my drift?
Bud: In technicolor, sir.

His new thug.

Lynn: There’s blood on your jacket. Is that an integral part of your job?
Bud: Sometimes.
Lynn: Do you enjoy it?
Bud: When they deserve it.
Lynn: Did they today?
Bud: I don’t know.
Lynn: But you did it anyway.
Bud: Yeah, just like the half-dozen guys you screwed today.
Lynn: Well, actually, it was two.

Birds of a feather. And, later, lovebirds.

Ed: A naked man with a gun? Do you really expect anyone to believe that?
Bud: Get the fuck away from me.
Ed: How’s it gonna look in your report?
Bud: It’ll look like justice. That’s what the man got. Justice.
Ed: You don’t know the meaning of the word, you ignorant bastard.

Let's run this by...Dexter?

Lynn: Where’d this come from?
Bud: When I was twelve, my old man went after my mother with a bottle. I got in the way.
Lynn: You saved her.
Bud: …Not for long.
Lynn: I’m sorry, Bud, it’s none of my…
Bud: He tied me to the radiator. I watched him beat my mother to death with a tire iron. Then he left us there. Three days before a truant officer found us… They never found the old man.
Lynn: Was that why you became a cop? To get even?
Bud: …Maybe.

Spot the part about dasein yet?

[iambiguous]

God

“When something terrible happens, people respond to it in two ways. Either they lose their faith in God altogether, or they start believing in him even more.” Abhaidev

Let's explain that.

“The word ‘God’ is a part of language and its grammar. Even if the whole world turns atheist tomorrow, the incredible arrangement of these three letters would still survive.” Abhaidev

If only all the way to the grave?

“Fuck you, angel. Fuck you and all God's little prison bitches. He slips you some cigarettes and a con job smile and you run off to do his dirty work for him. Go and scare some sinners. No one's listening to you here.” Richard Kadrey

He'll pay for that, of course.

“If God rewards us on earth for good deeds—the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it—then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.” Stephen King

Too close to call, I suspect.

“Our God Is Alive and Well. Sorry About Yours.” Carl Sagan

Back to these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions

“The gods have become our diseases.” C.G. Jung

Cue the folks in Gaza, for instance.

[iambiguous]

L.A. Confidential

Mrs. Lefferts: Was it a rat?
Bud: Yeah, a great big one.

I'll go along with that.

Bud: How would a two-bit hood like Meeks get his hands on a large supply of heroin?
Johnny: You’re right. It’s probably bullshit. And even if he did he could never unload it. Not without drawing all kinds of attention.
Bud: Maybe that’s why he’s under a house in Elysian Park and he don’t smell too good.

I'll go along with that.

Jack: Why in the world do you want to dig deeper into the Nite Owl killings?
Ed: …Rollo Tamasi.
Jack: Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess?
Ed: Rollo was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I just made the name up to give him some personality.
Jack: What’s your point?
Ed: Rollo Tamasi is the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It’s supposed to be about justice. Then somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that…Why’d you become a cop?
Jack: [long pause] I don’t remember.

Next up: why did you not become one?
Then this part...

Dudley: Edmund, might I have a word with you? We’re trying to run down a lead on an associate of Vincennes. The records check has led to a dead end.
Ed: What’s the name?
Dudley: Rollo Tomasi. Have you ever heard Vincennes mention him?

The beginning of the end...for some of them.

Lana Turner: Who in the hell do you think you are?
Jack: Ed…
Ed: Take a walk, honey, before I haul your ass downtown.
Johnny: You are making a large mistake.
Lana Turner: Get away from our table!
Ed: Shut up! A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker.
Johnny: Hey!
Ed: She just looks like Lana Turner.
Jack: She is Lana Turner.
Ed: What?
Jack: She is Lana Turner.
[Turner throws a drink in Ed’s face]

It was bound to happen.

Sid: I can tell you he’s on a night train to the Big Adios.

As, soon enough, he'll be.

Bud: The Nite Owl case made you. Do you want to tear all that down?
Ed: With a wrecking ball…You want to help me swing it?

Next thing you know they're BFF.

[iambiguous]

Madness

“Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.” Paolo Bacigalupi

Or, for years, like me, have tried to.

“Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” Michel de Montaigne

Next up: fractured and fragmented sallies.

“The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind's lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.” Friedrich Nietzsche

You know, theoretically.

“Poetry led me by the hand out of madness.” Anne Sexton

Or, for others, into it.

“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.” Clarice Lispector

What floated by you?

“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.” Benjamin Moser

Hmm, you would think so, would you?

[iambiguous]

The crying game. Two of them in fact. One on the battlefield [of sorts] and one in the bedroom. The one in the bedroom is played straight until it is not. But by then it is too late: he has already fallen in love.

The Crying Game

Jody: I’m thinking to myself, What the fuck am I doing here?
Fergus: What the fuck were you doing here?
Jofy: I got sent.
Fergus: You could have said no.
Jody: Can’t. Once I signed up.
Fergus: Why did you sign up?
Jody: It was a job. So I get sent to the only place in the world they call you n***** to your face.
Fergus: Shouldn’t take it personally.
Jody [imitating a Belfast accent]: “Go back to your banana tree, n*****.” No use telling them I came from Tottenham.

No use at all. And for some here?

Jody: Now put it back in. It’s only a piece of meat.

Right.

Jody: Two types of people, Fergus. The scorpion and the frog. Ever heard of them? The scorpion wants to cross a river, but he can’t swim. Goes to the frog, who can, and asks for a ride. Frog says, “If I give you a ride on my back, you’ll go and sting me.” Scorpion replies, “It would not be in my interest to sting you since as I’ll be on your back we both would drown.” Frog thinks about this logic for a while and accepts the deal. Takes the scorpion on his back. Braves the waters. Halfway over feels a burning spear in his side and realizes the scorpion has stung him after all. And as they both sink beneath the waves the frog cries out, “Why did you sting me, Mr. Scorpion, for now we both will drown?” Scorpion replies, “I can’t help it, it’s in my nature.”
Fergus: So what’s that supposed to mean?
Jody: Means what it says. The scorpion does what is in his nature. Take off the hood, man. Fergus: Why?
Jody: 'Cause you’re kind. It’s in your nature.

And by then he had, no doubt, actually meant it.

Col: It takes all types.
Fergus: So who’s he?
Col: He’s what she should run a mile away from.
Fergus: Then why doesn’t she?
Col: Who knows the secrets of the human heart?

Let alone the secrets of their genitals?

Dil: Funny the way things go. Don’t you find that, Jimmy? Never the way you expect it.

They don't call it the crying game for nothing.

Deveroux: Does Pat have a tart?
Fergus: She’s not a tart.
Deveroux: No, of course not. She’s a lady.
Fergus: No, she’s not that either.

He knows!

[iambiguous]

The Crying Game

Fergus [to Deveroux]: Did you ever pick your teeth up with broken fingers?

And he deserves to, doesn't he?

Fergus: Do they know?
Dil: Know what, honey?
Fergus: Know what I didn’t know. And don’t call me that.
Dil: Can’t help it, Jimmy. A girl has her feelings.
Fergus: Thing is, Dil, you’re not a girl.
Dil: Details, baby, details.

For some, of course, they're more important than for others.

Jude: We’ve got some plans here. And we’ll need a Mister Nobody to execute them.
Fergus: No way, Jude. I’m out.
Jude: You’re never out, Fergus.

The Cause!

Dil: My pills…
Fergus: What pills?
Dil:. For my condition.
Fergus: What condition?
Dil: My condition. Ennui.

Anyone know if there are pills for that?

Dil: She was there, wasn’t she?
Fergus: She was.
Dil: And she used her tits and that cute little ass to get him, didn’t she?
Fergus: Yes.

Some things, after all, never change.

Dil: What am I supposed to call you then, Jimmy?
Fergus: Fergus.
Dil: Fergus… Fergus. My love. Light of my life.
Fergus: Please, Dil.
Dil: Can’t help it. You’re doing time for me. No greater love as the man says. I wish you’d tell me why.
Fergus: As a man said, it’s in my nature.
Dil: What’s that supposed to mean?
Fergus: Well… there’s this scorpion, you see, and he wants to go across a river. Well, he can’t swim so he goes to this frog, who naturally enough can swim. And he says,
[imitating the scorpion’s voice]
Fergus: “Excuse me, Mr. Froggy. I want to go across the river.”
[continues narrating]
Fergus: So the frog accepts the idea. The scorpion hops on the frog’s back. Suddenly, the frog: “Aah!” He feels this sting! “You stung me! Why did you go and do that?” The scorpion looks at him and says, “I can’t help it, it’s in my nature”.

Next up: memes.

[iambiguous]

Lyrics

David Bowie
I heard telephones, opera house, favourite melodies
I saw boys, toys, electric irons and TV's
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

And with more things coming all the time.

Nick Cave
Some things we plan, we sit and we invent and we plot and cook up
Others are works of inspiration, of poetry

And what we post here?

Leonard Cohen
When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
this I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often,
I’ve lost my wife and children
but I have many friends,
and some of them are with me.

An old woman gave us shelter,
kept us hidden in the garret,
then the soldiers came;
she died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I’m the only one this evening
but I must go on;
the frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows.

One war at a time, say?

John Lennon
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be

When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can’t really function you’re so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be

There’s room at the top they’re telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

We've got a few of them here, don't we?


Leonard Cohen
Four o’clock in the afternoon
And I didn’t feel like very much.
I said to myself, “Where are you golden boy,
Where is your famous golden touch?”
I thought you knew where
All of the elephants lie down,
I thought you were the crown prince
Of all the wheels in Ivory Town.

Just take a look at your body now,
There’s nothing much to save
And a bitter voice in the mirror cries,
“Hey, Prince, you need a shave.”

Now if you can manage to get
Your trembling fingers to behave,
Why don’t you try unwrapping
A stainless steel razor blade?

That’s right, it’s come to this,
Yes it’s come to this,
And wasn’t it a long way down,
Wasn’t it a strange way down?

There’s no hot water
And the cold is running thin.
Well, what do you expect from
The kind of places you’ve been living in?

Don’t drink from that cup,
It’s all caked and cracked along the rim.
That’s not the electric light, my friend,
That is your vision growing dim.

Cover up your face with soap, there,
Now you’re Santa Claus.
And you’ve got a gift for anyone
Who will give you his applause.

I thought you were a racing man,
Ah, but you couldn’t take the pace.
That’s a funeral in the mirror
And it’s stopping at your face.

That’s right, it’s come to this,
Yes it’s come to this,
And wasn’t it a long way down,
Ah wasn’t it a strange way down?

Once there was a path
And a girl with chestnut hair,
And you passed the summers
Picking all of the berries that grew there
There were times she was a woman,
Oh, there were times she was just a child,
And you held her in the shadows
Where the raspberries grow wild.

And you climbed the twilight mountains
And you sang about the view,
And everywhere that you wandered
Love seemed to go along with you.
That’s a hard one to remember,
Yes it makes you clench your fist.

And then the veins stand out like highways,
All along your wrist.
And yes it’s come to this,
It’s come to this,
And wasn’t it a long way down,
Wasn’t it a strange way down?

You can still find a job,
Go out and talk to a friend.
On the back of every magazine
There are those coupons you can send.
Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians,
They can give you back your hope,
You can find your love with diagrams
On a plain brown envelope.

But you’ve used up all your coupons
Except the one that seems
To be written on your wrist
Along with several thousand dreams.

Now Santa Claus comes forward,
That’s a razor in his mit
And he puts on his dark glasses
And he shows you where to hit
And then the cameras pan,
The stand in stunt man,
Dress rehearsal rag,
It’s just the dress rehearsal rag,
You know this dress rehearsal rag,
It’s just a dress rehearsal rag.

So, what are your rehearsals like?

Tears For Fears
And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it's a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Next up: eternal recurrence.

[iambiguous]

That [in 1965] this was a true story in South Africa won’t surprise many. Though surprisingly some will insist it can never happen again. Or happen here. Wherever here happens to be for you.

What people think gets tangled up in all sorts of variables—factors one would assume are tangential to a rational perspective. A prejudice against those deemed “different” – and in all the ways that can be deemed – has been the lot of many construed to be “other then we are”.

Skin

Title card: Apartheid was a system of racial segregation legally enforced by the ruling white minority in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The Population Registration Act [1950] classified all citizens by racial group. People of different races were forbidden to enter the same shop, attend the same school or live under the same roof.

Let's run that by the bigots here.

Young Sandra: Mother, why are they all staring?
Sannie: You’re new here, my sweet. They’re just curious.

Right.

Elize: Sandra? I’m Elize.
Young Sandra: What do you want?
Elize: I’m from Swaziland. That’s another country.
Young Sandra: I know that, I’m not stupid.
Elize: All of my friends have always been black.
Young Sandra: I’m not black.

Uh, you tell me?

Young Sandra: Upon seeing Elize with a bloody nose: What happened? Tell me.
Elize: I told Annie you weren’t black and she hit me.

Uh, you tell me?

Teacher: …and on these plains were savage natives who were always trying to take our land, there were many wars between them. Why do you think that was, students?
Annie: They couldn’t live together because they were different.
Teacher: That’s right. Good, good, good. Because they were…
Class: Different!

Of course, some will take this all the way to the gas chambers.

Dr Sparks [a geneticist from Wits University at a court hearing]: I believe there is a plausible genetic explanation for Sandra’s appearance. The history of our country is such that many, indeed, we believe most Afrikaners carry black genes. So two white-looking parents can contribute enough black genes to produce a child quite a bit darker than themselves. This phenomenon is commonly known as a throwback. We prefer to use the more precise term, polygenic inheritance.

Any throwbacks here?

[iambiguous]

Nicolas Chamfort

In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man.

Well, that and oblivion.

And so I leave this world, where the heart must either break or turn to lead. [last words]

Or stone.

If it wasn't for me, I'd do brilliantly.

Well, me and everyone else.

Every day I add to the list of things I refuse to discuss. The wiser the man, the longer the list.

Me, I'll discuss anything.
Uh, make of that what you will?

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

Not quite there yet?

Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.

Populism let's call it.

[iambiguous]

Skin

Reporter [on the radio]: And in Parliament today an amendment was made to the Population Registration Act. Descent rather than appearance, will be the determining factor in all classification cases. Children must now be classified the same race as their parents.
Abraham: Thank God. She’s white again.

How about you, still black?

Abraham: Sandra! You’re white!

Okay, Dad, but is she white enough?

Sannie: No more smart talk Sandy, this is serious.
Sandra: I like him. Petrus.
Sannie: You like him like a friend, like a brother?
Sandra: A boyfriend.
[her mother slaps her hard across the face]
Sannie: Petrus is a black man. Dirt in this country.

So, where does Mom draw the line?

Sannie: All these years you’ve kept us apart. You didn’t even want to see the pictures of her children. What has changed? Why is it okay now?
Abraham: Please. I need to see her.
Sannie: You need to see her? I have needed to see her every day for the last ten years!
Abraham: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was wrong. I need…I have to tell her.
Sannie: You want her forgiveness? You don’t deserve it. Neither do I.
Abraham: Sannie, I’m begging you.
Sannie: No. You made your choice.

Unless, perhaps, "society" made it for you?

Sannie: Your father wasn’t a bad man. He did the best he could.
Sandra: “Never give up”.
Sannie: I wish that I had never heard those words.
Sandra: No, Ma. They kept me going.

On the other hand, never give up doing what?

Title card: Sandra’s Rainbow Tuck Shop was launched in 2003. She now has 7 grandchildren.
Sandra’s two brothers Leon and Adriaan refuse to reunite with her to this day.

They're white inside and out, as it were.

[iambiguous]

Death

“The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options.” Bill Hicks

Well, they don't call Him a loving, just and merciful God for nothing.

“I thought about all of the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it's in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.” Jonathan Safran Foer

Let's change that. You know, for the "good guys".

“We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.” Gayle Forman

If in one and only one lifetime.

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow. That, in short, we are all going." John Green

Okay, but some are going to Heaven, some to Hell and the rest to what others call...purgatory?

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.” Samuel Beckett

Or, sure, snuff it.

“Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.” Terry Pratchett

I'm with the captain [and Woody Allen] here myself.

[iambiguous]

What will always impress me most about this film is Stone’s willingness to broach the military industrial complex as an impetus behind the Kennedy assassination. He focuses on means, motive and opportunity. Around this:

"The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the moon race and cooperate with the Soviets. He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962. He set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963."

Is this entirely true? Perhaps not. But, with billions of dollars at stake, why take chances?

JFK

Title card: “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men.” - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
President Eisenhower: …We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. And to do this three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone…
Narrator: January, 1961. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation.
President Eisenhower: …This conjunction of an immense military establishment and arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office in the federal government. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence - whether sought or unsought - by the military-industrial complex. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

You tell me?

Banister: Here’s to the New Frontier. Camelot in smithereens. I’ll drink to that.

And then some?

Garrison: Thank you for your time, David. I’m sorry this has to end inconveniently for you but I am going to have to detain you for further questioning by the FBI.
Ferrie: Why, what’s wrong?
Garrison: David, I find your story simply not believable.
Ferrie: Really? What part?

How about from the beginning all the way to the end, Dave?

David Ferrie: Oh man, why don’t you fuckin’ stop it? Shit, this is too fuckin’ big for you, you know that? Who did the president, who killed Kennedy, fuck man! It’s a mystery! It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin’ shooters don’t even know! Don’t you get it?

So much more to the point, we still don't.

X: After I came back, I asked myself, why was I, the chief special officer, selected to travel to the South Pole at that time that any number of others could have done? And I wondered if it was because one of my routine duties if I had been in Washington would have been to arrange for additional security in Texas, so I decided to check it out. And sure enough, someone had told the 112th Military Intelligence Group at Fourth Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston in Texas to stand down that day, over the protests of the Unit Commander, Colonal Rike. This is significant because it is standard operating procedure, especially in a lnown hostile city like Dallas.

What to believe, right?

X: We would have arrived days ahead, studied the route, checked all the buildings. Never would have allowed all those wide-open windows overlooking Dealy Plaza, never! We would have had our own snipers covering the area the minute a window went up! They would have been on the radio. We would have been watching the building, checking for baggage, coat under the arms… Never would have allowed a man to open an umbrella along the way! Never would have allowed the car to slow down to 11 miles an hour, much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm! You would have felt an army presence on the streets that day. But none of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection code we have, and it’s an indication of a massive plot based in Dallas.

What to believe, right?

[iambiguous]

JFK

X: Don’t underestimate the budget cuts that Kennedy called for in March of 1963. Nearly 52 military installations in 25 states. Twenty-one overseas bases. Big money. You know how many helicopters have been lost in Vietnam? Nearly 3,000 so far. Who makes them? Bell Helicopter. Who owns Bell? Bell was nearly bankrupt when First National Bank of Boston asked the CIA to use the helicopter in Indochina. How about the F-111 fighter? General Dynamics of Fort Worth, Texas. Who owns that? Find out the defense budget since the war began. $75 going on $100 billion. Nearly $200 billion will be spent before it’s over. In 1949, it was $10 billion. No war…no money.

What to believe, right?

Broussard: How the hell can you keep a conspiracy going between the mob, CIA, FBl, Army Intelligence and who knows what else when you can’t keep a secret in this room between 12 people?

Yeah, what about that?
Indeed, here’s where some say the “conspiracy” goes off the deep end:

Garrison: Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren Commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the Mob used anything but .38’s for hits, up close. The Mob wouldn’t have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish… a coup d’etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.
Broussard: You’re saying Lyndon Johnson was involved? The President?
Garrison: Johnson got $1 billion for his friends, Brown and Root to dredge Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.
Broussard: Boss, are you calling the President a murderer?!
Garrison: If I’m so far from the truth, why is the FBI bugging our offices? Why are witnesses being bought off and murdered? Why are federal agencies blocking our extraditions and subpoenas?
Broussard: I don’t know.

Okay, maybe not the Mob?

Broussard: This is Louisiana, chief! I mean, how do you know who your daddy is? Because your mama told you so? You are taking a crap in the wind. And I am not going along on this one.

The heart of the conspiracy:

Garrison: The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague’s cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We’ve come to know it as the “Magic Bullet Theory.” The magic bullet enters the President’s back, headed downward at a 17-degree angle. It then moves upwards to leave Kennedy’s body from the front of his neck wound #2 where it waits 1.6 seconds presumably in midair, where it turns right, then left right, then left and continues into Connally’s right armpit. Wound #3. The bullet then heads down at an angle of 27 degrees, shattering his rib and exiting from the right side of his chest. Wound #4. The bullet turns right, reentering Connally’s body at his right wrist. Wound #5. Shattering the radius bone the bullet exits Connally’s wrist, wound #6 makes a dramatic U-turn, then buries itself in Connally’s left thigh. Wound #7, from which it later falls out and is found in almost pristine condition on a stretcher in a corridor of Parkland Hospital. Some bullet. Any combat vet can tell you, never in the history of gunfire has there been a bullet this ridiculous.

God knows?

Garrison: When my office or you, the people, asked those questions, demanded evidence the answer from on high has always been: national security. What kind of national security do we have when we’re robbed of our leaders? What national security permits the removal of fundamental power from the people and validates the ascendancy of an invisible government in the US? That kind of national security is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it you call it what it is: Fascism! I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d’état. Its most direct and tragic result was the reversal of Kennedy’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam. The war is the biggest business in America worth billions of dollars a year. President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy planned at the highest levels of our government carried out by fanatical and disciplined cold warriors in the Pentagon and CIA’s covert-operation apparatus. Among them, Clay Shaw, here before you.

God knows?

Garrison: There’s a simple way to determine if I am paranoid. Ask the two men who profited most from the assassination former President Johnson and your new President, Nixon to release the 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. Or the secret CIA memo on Oswald’s activities in Russia that was destroyed while being photocopied. These documents are yours. The people’s property. You pay for it. But as the government sees you as children who might be too disturbed to face this reality or because you might lynch those involved you cannot see these documents for another 75 years. I’m in my 40’s so I’ll have “shuffled off this mortal coil” by then. But I’m telling my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit so that one glorious September morning, in 2038 he can go to the National Archives and learn what the CIA and FBI knew. They may push it back then.

Only 14 more years to go!

[iambiguous]

Men! In particular the lowlife scumbag working class sort? Not all of them of course but it sometimes seems that way. But with so much at stake what alternative is there but for both sides to push back as hard as they can?

Some might find it hard to sympathize with the victim here. But those that made her the victim are, for many, way beyond anything but contempt.

And it also exposes the [behind the curtain] practice of “let’s make a deal” for what it sometimes is: the least possible justice.

This is an unusual case in that those on trial were not only the rapists themselves but those who cheered the rapists on and encouraged them.

Then this part: https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/t ... rue-story/

The Accused

Kathryn: A lot of alcohol.
Rape center volunteer: Legally drunk.
Kathryn: And grass too. What else?
Rape center volunteer: What difference does that make? She was raped by three men.
Kathryn: I’m not a rape counselor. I’m a prosecutor, and I have to make a rape case.
Rape center volunteer: Then go prosecute.

So, she does.
However reluctantly at first?

Sarah: And I heard someone screaming. And it was me.

I guess "the boys in the bar" didn't hear her.

Sarah: What the hell are you talking about? You saw me at the hospital, what you think I asked for that? Is that what you think? If that’s what you think then you get the fuck out of my house!

Let's just say she's got a lot to learn. About, for example, the criminal justice system and rape victims.

Kathryn: Have you ever made love to more than one man at a time?
Sarah: What the fuck kind of question is that?
Kathryn: It’s the kind of question you’re going to be asked on the witness stand. You’re also going to be asked if a man has ever hit you and you liked it. You’re going to be asked about your drug bust and how many drinks you had that day. And how many joints you smoked. And how often you go to bars alone and whether or not you wear underwear when you go to them. And which diseases you’ve caught and how many abortions you’ve had. And I will object to all those questions. And sometimes the judge will sustain me, but sometimes not.
Sarah: That ain’t fair.
Kathryn: Sarah you’re a witness and the defense’s job is to show the jury that you’re a rotten witness because you’ve got a rotten character.
Sarah: I’ve got a rotten character. You ain’t gonna defend me because I’m some low-class bimbo?
Kathryn: I didn’t say that.

On the other hand, what did she say? She's not even sure herself.

Kathryn [in plea bargaining negotiations]: This is what the jury is going to see. And they are going to see the girl too and you can’t tell it from these. But she’s tiny. She’s the most defenseless looking thing you ever saw.

And then, of course, the other side's rendition of her.

Sarah [at Kathryn’s dinner party]: You don’t understand how I feel! I’m standing there with my pants down and my crotch hung out for the world to see and three guys are sticking it to me, a bunch of other guys are yelling and clapping and you’re standing there telling me that that’s the best you can do. Well, if that’s the best you could do, then your best sucks! Now, I don’t know what you got for selling me out, but I sure as shit hope it was worth it!

Plea bargaining they call it. For the suckers, say?