that movie where...

Regarding the appalling claims we've heard during the past week, an impression I am left with is that the pattern of activities that's being alleged might have been an "open secret" in the entertainment business, for decades:  otherwise, the Las Vegas show would not have been cancelled so fast.


------------------------------


Cognitive dissonance
[free encyclopedia]  In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.


Man I hear that.


---------------------------------
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Review, analysis, and discussion of the movie Charlie Wilson's War -- continues here, now.


That film's director, Mike Nichols, died last week.





He lived a long life, & had a long, exciting, and interesting career; R.I.P.


When we watch Charlie Wilson's War, what we are seeing is the story of the last, past chapter before the chapter we're in now, with the Middle East.


And it came about because of the Cold War.  Which came about because of world tension between capitalism vs. communism.  The Soviet Union was seen to be attempting to "take over the world" and make every place communist, one country at a time. 


There's a saying in the upper Midwest in America, that no farmer wants all the land, just all the land adjacent to his.  After World War II (what they call the "Postwar" years) Russia was seen as being like that Midwestern farmer -- gobbling up countries in eastern Europe.


And not just countries adjacent to Russia.  You had --


Cuba,


Vietnam,


and by 1979, there they were, in Afghanistan.


It never entered my mind, when I was growing up, and through the 1980s, that the Soviet Union would ever be defeated and communism simply "go away" -- cease to be a going concern that was competition to America, and a threat to the world.  I could not imagine it.  I guess I thought the state of


tension -- competition -- unfriendliness, punctuated by diplomatic overtures -- the spying


which constituted the Cold War would go on forever, or at least the rest of my lifetime.  Because neither the United States nor the USSR could use the ultimate power of the atomic bomb to get rid of the other one, because


a)  If they did it to us, ours would respond fast enough that they also would be destroyed, and vice versa; and


b)  Even if one of the two superpowers could destroy the other one "FIRST," and fast enough so they couldn't respond and there could be one "winner" it would be seen as morally reprehensible by the rest of the world, any that was left, plus the nuclear fallout and radiation would be loose in a lot of places and I think the potential horrible effects of that were incalculable.


It was a stand-off; a stalemate.  I don't think most people saw an end to it coming...


=================
A good movie to watch, to get a sense of how it felt in the Cold War's most tense years, is The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.  It's funny.


1966.
Directed by Norman Jewison (Fiddler On The Roof).
Based on the Nathaniel Benchley novel, The Off-Islanders.
Adapted for the screen by William Rose.














----------------------------------


Eva Marie Saint played a role in Russians-are-coming;





she also starred in Aflred Hitchcock's North By Northwest,





"that-movie-where-Cary-Grant-gets-chased-by-a-crop-dusting-plane"...









-30-