Melania looked like she had just come from Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Goodnight, America.
And there’s this. How do the Evangelicals feel about it? If he doesn’t issue all of those “J6” pardons he promised, then we’ll know he’s signaling to his followers that he doesn’t need them anymore.
Update: Well, he did it. It wasn’t an insurrection to prevent the transfer of power. No, it wasn’t a riot, it was a love-in.
Did you see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer? MGM’s dramatization of the Manhattan Project, with Hume Cronyn as J. Robert, was released only 18 months after the end of WWII. It opens with a whopper of a fib.
The museum’s impressive collection is about the wars that America has fought, and the weapons of those wars. The question that must be asked about every war is, “what are we fighting for?” There is no doubt whatsoever that America was forced by Japan to join the fight in WWII.
The decision to end the war by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan will always be controversial. It wasn’t for my late father, a Navy sailor who was in the first wave of American forces to occupy Japan.
I once visited a museum that presented an overview of WWII that was smaller in physical scale, yet much more comprehensive in scope. The defunct International Museum of World War II, in Natick, MA, had an extensive collection that was bought up by a rich guy who reneged on his promise to make it available for public viewing.
Movies made during the war are especially interesting, because everything was still happening. Without a rearview mirror, nothing could be seen in hindsight.
The Human Comedy was made during wartime, with a bittersweet tone about the American home front. It stars Mickey Rooney, whose fame faded quickly after the war. Having not seen it in decades, I’ll make a point of catching it on TCM, the next time it’s on the schedule.
Another wartime home front movie, with a less sentimental tone, is Since You Went Away with Shirley Temple. She grew up to have the looks of a pinup girl, but the public couldn’t shake their image of her as a child star.*
Since You Went Away is a long, and at times downbeat, movie. Guy Madison‘s brief appearance earned him a starring role in 1946’s Till the End of Time, the same year as the better-known post-war movie The Best Years of Our Lives.
* As a young woman, Petula Clark had a similar problem in England. In the Fifties, the public had no trouble seeing former child stars Elizabeth Taylor and Natalie Wood as sex symbols.
I’m already giving up hoping for a better year. After last year’s cancer treatments and with my upcoming heart ablation, I wasn’t in a good frame of mind to receive some very sad news about a friend who has been fighting the same cancer for more than ten years. We wished each other Happy New Year, and now death could be days, even hours, away.
Mitt Romney, Michael J. Fox, President Biden, David Rubenstein, Denzel Washington
The Presidential Medal of Freedom was tarnished when Trump gave one to Rush Limbaugh. Biden has restored luster to the medal, by awarding it to Michael J. Fox.
