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Fallen Angelby
George Giles One of my favorite movies is Angel Heart. It is about the ceaseless confrontation between good and evil, human joy and suffering, heaven and hell. It was an excellent movie adapted from a weak, out of print novel, titled Fallen Angel. Angel Heart is an apt metaphor for the current recession, credit crunch and housing debacle that all Americans now enjoy thanks to the political solution of real problems by our elitist central bankers and their cadre of sycophants. The premise of Angel Heart is that a down-on-his-luck New York City private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke in his finest role) is hired by a foreign gentleman Louis Cyphre (Robert DeNiro) to find a missing person named Johnny Favorite. Favorite is a popular crooner that has disappeared. This tail sets Harry on a journey of torturous self-discovery and confrontation with his own evil past. The movie, set in the early 50's takes place in New York City, the Jersey shore, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta. The casting, cinematography, and wardrobe are impeccable giving a vivid re-creation of the time. Like all great movies this one is a tale is of transcendental discovery. The protagonist Harry is after one Johnny Favorite on behalf of Louis Cyphre. Harry starts this quest as the likable loser and ends as a brutal serial killer whose soul for transitory celebrity, was sold to the devil for all eternity. Such is the fate of the body politic and the public fisc in contemporary America. Americans are some of the most generous people in the world as evidenced by the many charities, missions and disaster relief efforts that we fund. For decades America has welcomed the hungry, the tired and the poor yearning to breathe free. Yet at the beginning of the new millennium we find that only we believe this mythology anymore. Like Harry we move in a carefully crafted deceit that has fooled us far more than it has fooled the rest of the world. Our President and our elected representatives (Ron Paul excluded) are raining death and destruction wherever and whenever they decide for whatever reason. Sadly, in a democratic republic this makes us culpable morally, if not physically. As has been shown these crimes are perpetrated with other people's money, bought in a devil's bargain with fiat currency and bonds backed by the hollow promises of pathological liars. Half of the debt this once noble country has incurred in its entire history has been accrued during the Presidency of one ruthless man and his criminal associates. The race is not over (one of the final scenes in Angel Heart is at a race track) but we are clearly heading toward a finish line very different than what we thought just a few short years ago. Like Harry Angel we may find an America broke, worn out, disillusioned and alone to face the judgments of history, Nemesis will soon be calling. Harry is on a journey of self-discovery. As he moves through the film he comes to realize that he is Johnny Favorite, and he has murdered everyone that links him with his past. In the final scene Louis Cyphre (Lucifer/DeNiro) confronts Harry to take his soul. In his mind Harry has been making love to a beautiful Creole woman (Epiphany/Lisa Bonet), yet in reality, he has murdered her. The cops break into his hotel room, while Harry awakes from his dream, and the policeman intones: "Your gonna burin in hell for this." "I know" says an enlightened Harry Angel cognizant of his fate, at last, for all eternity. So is it with our foreign policy that turned much of the world into an open air Hades.
Our one party has two wings blue state socialists and red state fascists, they only disagree on minor conjectures like should we fleece the public fisc through the Federal Reserve, or the Internal Revenue service, or both? It is a bipartisan effort in the halls of Congress, the boardrooms of the bailed, and in the military industrial congressional consortium. Only, when like peacocks mating, that the politicians strut, preen and intellectually head butt one another, does it seem that there is a real difference when it is a carefully crafted chimera. During the eight dreadful years of the current administration the Democratic opposition provided no opposition at all. They sat back in awed silence as the Republicans boldly destroyed the rule of law, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the good will of the modern world. All so that a few unindicted felons could implement their vision of a "new world order." The Democrats quietly licked their wounds while drooling in anticipation of their turn. The Obama administration is promising change all right, but the only change we will see is that the man with his hand on a tiller steers a ship of state with no rudder, crashing violently about in the maelstrom of their own creation. I will give our current President the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he, like Harry Angel only had a dim recollection of history and was stumbling blindly through his life of privilege thanks to the noble birth. Nonetheless, the President near the end of his term must recognize that something has gone hideously astray, and his primitive hind brain, if not his consciousness, knows that Nemesis and Kerberos await the reckoning with Lucifer. He cannot save himself and his administration from the judgments of history but he may make a bold statement of regret and contrition. It will be a passive statement, but a powerful one: issue no pardons. Let the fate of the henchman be decided by the new administration. If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty then Americans, as a culture, have been found wanting. The immense debt, the vanishing equity, and the struggling economic infrastructure are the waves upon which our ship of state sails. The Democrats still seem to be the party of no ideas other than all the old bad ones. The change is rhetorical only.
If they do not then the same old Nostrums of conventional wisdom will rapidly fail, and the new Administration, like Harry Angel, will learn of their fate well past the point of no return. God has mercy, the Devil does not. A few quotes from Alan Parker's excellent script will give us some perspective: Toots Suite: "Have another two sisters cocktail and make it up any way you want. That's what you [the press] do anyway." Louis Cyphre: "Are you a religious man Mr. Angel? It's a shame that there is just enough religion in the world to make men hate, but not enough to make them love." Louis Cyphre: "The future is not what it used to be Mr. Angel" November 24, 2008 George Giles [send him mail] is an Independent writer in Nashville, TN. Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
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America
has one-party rule, and has had for almost a century. This was made
obvious to enlightened Americans, that when during the debates as
it was Ron Paul's turn to speak, the television coverage went to
commercial. This denied the majority access to a real conflict of
ideas where principle, logic and true compassion can triumph over
the deceit, hypocrisy, and brutality of the 
