Arnold Movies and The Stossernator

While both these things is not like the other, where in one is well.. Uh! Fucking Awesome, with a capital 'A'. I have some thoughts on these two topics that I have to vent/commend.

I'll start with the polar negative of the two. John Stosser, maybe his name is spelled "Jon" or maybe his full name is "Johnathan". I honestly don't care, because he backs Rand Paul, who's running as a senatorial candidate in Kentucky.

Side note: I've had cousins that lived in Kentucky, and experienced a favor flavorful brand of racism there. And while I'm not whitewashing the entire state, I must say it's particularly potent if the long-distance call warrants a mentioning of it with a limit of 5 minutes.

So back to this Rand Paul character and how he ties in with John Stosser. Rand Paul was recently asked what he thought of the Civil Rights and what some of those details in 1964 detailed. In a nutshell he thinks that private business owners should receive the right not hire anyone they want. This means private business wouldn't have to fulfill a quota of multiracial hiring, or hire any women, or hire anyone they just didn't like despite their qualifications. This was a battle fought before my time, but something that you can still see in full color today. It's called:

Discrimination.

Yeah, not news to us born in the era of Martin Lawrence and In Living Color, but honestly, we don't really understand the full implications of discrimination on the level that it appeared through the late 1950's until the early 1970's. Our teachers in high school gave us a crash course to say the least, and we remember that one asshole in class who denied that racism still exists today because he's white and lives in a part of town where everyone is too smug for him to see past his hillside house.

But back to the topic, so here we have two news correspondents talking about Rand Paul. A pretty blonde chick with a dress that can only push ratings, and John Stosser. The pretty blonde representing the sane side of the argument, and Stosser representing a voice that favors Rand Paul's idea. For reference here's the vid:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aakt1J91wlE

Sadly, the blonde can't put together a good argument because her anger is real and her emotion is true. Bless her for being a mess about it. Stosser's basic argument is:

"Private business should be able to discriminate what customers to serve and who to hire, and by the natural laws of business, those business will suffer if they choose to be racist."

"Private businesses ought to get to discriminate, and I will never go to a place that's racist, and I'll tell everyone else not to, and I'll speak against them, but they have a right to be racist."

He goes on to say that Black organizations should have the right to refuse white members, and a Gay softball team should be able to refuse straight players. Blondie says that clubs are still protected as to being able to have more freedom in choosing who they will accept.

And this is why we have the KKK being able to not admit black members of course. There's no legal way to prosecute them because they're a private organization. NOT a private business. Private businesses have a responsibility to the public through product and service. This much is obvious. But Stossel's argument is broken from the start.

First off.. His ideas seem to be logical if existing in a vacuum. But he completely ignores the fact that even today there are organizations that have to exist for the sole purpose of combating racism. He's a whitie living in his own world, where he thinks that naturally racism will be drowned out by the call for profit. But he negates every Black/Latino/Asian/Etc, group out there that supports people of color to get better education by means of college prep courses and seminars, and people pushing for diversification in the job world.

They exist because we still have racism in business. The fantasy world he thinks is reality is the kind of faux-progressive attitude that bleeds ignorance. The results of allowing private businesses to discriminate would set us back before the Civil Rights Act, and you'd have parts of town that were white only, and black only. Hell, can anyone else see a North/South uprising down the line? Parts of town could be dominated by white neighborhoods that will refuse anyone of color because it's their right.

Giving people the Right to be racist entails enforcement of that Right. And by doing so you create a government and a police force that will back a racist in their choice to refuse gasoline to a family traveling across Kentucky, or Alabama, or Arizona or wherever.

Imagine living in a country where you have to check the business bureau for establishments that will serve "your kind", before planning a road trip for fear of being stranded in a racist county.

If you're afraid of this.. act on it. NOW: http://www.colorofchange.org/stossel/


And now on a lighter note: Arnold Schwarzenegger. While I don't think he's an adequate governor, part of me thinks he just had to one-up Jesse Ventura when he got the governorship of Minnesota. I personally think it's a sub-plot of revenge for getting his virtual ass killed in The Running Man.

But Arnold movies are so great for a number of reasons:
Nobody can ever in the rest of history deliver one-liners the way he did.
He makes punching a camel look completely acceptable in Conan The Barbarian.
He can do action, family, drama and be equally bad in all three.
And he has no problem knowingly making a fool-and parody-of himself.

I'm about to watch Total Recall again. And from the start you know you're in for something special. The theme was written by Jerry Goldsmith, and sounds too familiar to the "Anvil of Crom" from Conan The Barbarian. But it's hard to avoid including the metal-hammer pounds, on a soundtrack with Arnold in it. Terminator 2 used them pretty excessively, and I think Predator had some of them too.

I actually get a little depressed thinking about an action-star that could fill his shoes. I mean, he's way past his prime now, but who have we seen attempt to parallel his persona?
Jean-Claude Van Damme? Didn't work out.
Well, he worked out in the physical sense, and directors wouldn't dare short-change him on that. Bloodsport has him showing off his ass-crack and doing the splits between two chairs in a hotel room, along with slow-motion shots of him flexing while cross-eyed. So why didn't Van Damme pull off the whole action-star thing well enough? Well I think it's mostly because he tried a little too hard to use expressive emotions, while Arnold just dropped the line like he didn't even care. Also, who can recite a Van Damme quote off the cuff? Usually his opponents got all the best lines. Take for example the bad guy "Chong Li" played by Bolo Yeung.

Side note: Bolo Yeung is still working out and training at a local gym near Los Angeles. And he's 71 years old!

His best line was "You break my record! Now I break you! Like I break your friend!" I'm still unsure as to is he actually said this line, because he was dubbed in most of his movies.

Then we have Steven Seagal, who made a pretty good run with "Out For Justice", "Under Siege", and "On Deadly Ground". But I think the part of his persona that made him hard to watch was the pony-tail swinging around, the soft voice and the stiff composure. I couldn't tell if he was trying to sound like Clint Eastwood, if he was born a girl, or if he was trying to do impressions of Brando's godfather. Then the pony-tail, something he just couldn't part with for what, like 30 years? Sometimes it was more exciting to just watch his counterparts in some of his movies like Gary Busey and Tommy Lee Jones. Why would you put him next to these guys? They're acting proficiency eclipses him tenfold to a point where you wouldn't mind if they won. Then in "On Deadly Ground", he's opposed by Michael Cain and John C. McGinley. John C. McGinley is badass as it is, but Michael Fucking Cain? How can you keep up with that?! I don't even need to go into it. His saving grace in his films was the moment you saw a bad guy get arm-locked and they cued the blatant bone-snapping sound effect to a close-up of some guys elbow touching the back of his own shoulder. Which was pretty awesome. But beyond that, he just couldn't stay up to par.

It's getting late now, so I'm going to have to save the rest for a Part 2. And you know how good the sequels are. Or not. Whatever. Goodnight.