Tag Archives: reading a face

reading faces: Admiral Rogers and Michael Flynn

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Quite a line up:

From left, FBI Director Robert Mueller, National Intelligence Director James Clapper; CIA Director John Brennan, and Department of Defense’s Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 11, 2013, before the House Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Brennan looks simply evil to me; there seems something evidently awry in his soul. Comey is a different fish altogether, despite his size (2.03 m) he strikes me as somewhat feminine and malleable, which makes me wonder if he was subject to a MK Ultra sexual assault in his youth. Clapper just looks like a typical high-level bureaucrat to me, a man accustomed to bullying and power, nothing special.

They present a stark contrast to Admiral Mike Rogers and General Michael Flynn. Something nagged at my mind every time I saw pictures of Rogers; then I realised – he is the stalwart no-nonsense uncle/father/teacher from every 80s film.

Rogers is the 80s dad whose precocious redhead 16-year-old daughter, Stacy, calls him after midnight from a gas station payphone, in tears after Chad tried to cop a feel in the Prom; 80s dad Rogers listens attentively then says “where are you? Stay there”, because he is after all not merely 80s dad Rogers but also NSA director; his wife Mabel screams “what is it? Tell me! Oh my God, Stacy!” and 80s dad Rogers says calmly: “Mabel, go to bed” then gets his handgun from the bedside table, and drives out to pick up the sobbing Stacy, offering not a single reproach (despite having warned her “be careful of Chad, Stacy, he’s up to no good” throughout the film) then he drops her off at home into the arms of his sobbing wife, says “Have some pancakes. I’ve got an errand to run before I turn in” and drives off to Chad’s house, Chad is boasting about how he took Stacy’s virginity by force when 80s dad Rogers calmly walks into the frathouse and pistolwhips Chad into a bloody mess and whispers: “You’re lucky you were lying about hurting my daughter, Chad. Because I got some brothers in Angola who owe me a favour.”

And now let us turn to General Michael Flynn.

He has a similar “feel” to Rogers though his nose is a fokcen hawkbeak, begad; like Rogers, there is something unshowy and based here. I don’t think Flynn would be a 80s dad but as with Rogers something tugged at my mind; then it came to me:

That’s right. General Flynn is Jim Caviezel.

 

He is the Man in the Suit.

My joy would only be complete if it turns out Flynn had a big-ass dog called Bear. At least now we know who can play Flynn when QAnon the Movie goes into production.

reading a face: Trump in Houston

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Donald Trump in a relief centre (Leftists would say “concentration camp”) following the Hurricane Harvey floods.

I’m currently reading Hamlet aloud with my girlfriend. Despite having read it at least a dozen times over the last two decades, the process of reading it aloud has sensitized me to the range of possibility in each character – I often have to think “should I read Claudius as slimy here? or genuinely caring?” We just read Hamlet’s first encounter with the Ghost; my feeling is that Hamlet has an innate mental instability (“some vicious mole of nature”) and the Ghost knocks him half over the edge; his later “But I’m MAD!!!” act is both a protective mask and an expression of his real & increasing instability – as is often the case with Shakespeare, the characters act some version of themselves, so Iago is genuinely concerned for Othello, at the same time as he wants to destroy him.

Trump is very Shakespearean, I feel; in that he learnt early on to hide his real self, to project an expedient persona. One need only compare his post-reality-tv appearances to this 1980 interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgJAxkALyc

Many intelligent & perceptive people mistake his current, crafted persona for reality. They think of Trump as an 80-IQ buffoon who somehow ended up as a billionaire; and a billionaire not in a heavily aleatory field (Wall Street) but in a very down-to-earth and pragmatic matter: real estate development. But I think those who sneer at him as a “Clotus” (nice allusion from Patrick Kurp) are somewhat dazzled by their own intelligence & learning; for these fine folk, being obviously well-read and intellectual is a matter of societal caste; the Cloud People maintain what Michael Cassio calls “reputation” by sneering at anyone who hasn’t read Cynthia Ozick. In Kierkegaard’s terms, you could say they have become immured in the aesthetic domain, and so all their ethical verdicts are, ultimately, to do with aesthetics: “but he hasn’t even read Henry James!”

I’ve noticed that the genuine aristocracy and old money tend to be neutral on the Trump Question; it is the social climbers (e.g. those from Dirt People roots) who most vehemently despise Trump.

Our modern Gatsbies and Undine Spraggs loathe Trump because he early on decided it would be better to communicate with the 99% who hadn’t read Spinoza than those with soft hands and fine manners who make caste judgements based on grammar. That is, Trump decided to communicate with the horny-handed parents and grandparents of intellectuals who haven’t broken a fingernail in 40 years; and for this the Cloud People hate him.

These people despise Trump; they call him an oaf and a buffoon and every -ist, regardless of the facts; and yet this is a man who, on the admission of an illegal immigrant, in a MSM hit piece, demonstrates an unshowy, everyday kindness:

Ms. Morales said she will never forget the day Mr. Trump pulled up to the pro shop in his cart as she was washing its large, arched windows. Noticing that Ms. Morales, who is shy of five feet tall, could not reach the top, he said, “Excuse me,” grabbed her rag and wiped the upper portion of the glass.

The Cloud People despise Trump for being brash and loud, and in so doing demonstrate their inability to understand life as it is for those who don’t read Amos Oz and Spinoza. They cannot grasp a simple concept: Trump wears a mask; but then, it is not a mask designed to flatter the Cloud People (who desire, above all, to be praised).

As with all great performers, one must pay attention when the mask cracks. And so with the above photograph of Trump: what can one see here? He is old, he lacks the usual bravado & bullheaded confidence; he is content to sit half-obscured by childish clutter; he is content to be neglected, to be on the margins, to be a tolerated visitant. Note the baseball-capped woman reaching past him, the seated woman to his right talking to someone else, the negro child who probably doesn’t know or care who Trump is; and then note his smile: the smile of the God Emperor who is tired, old, and happy to have nothing important to do for a few hours, to just sit and let his photographers do their work, as he watches the relief workers and the homeless, his people whether they value him or not.

reading a face: Roger Scruton

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I was listening to a youtube clip of (I think) Mike Enoch and Dr Narcan of The Right Stuff, a bit too carny for my tastes but there was an amusing moment where they discussed some paleocon/civic nationalist type, someone like Tucker Carlson, who was still clinging to the hope of rational discourse with the Left; one of the two said something like: “someone should just put a gun to the Left’s head, I understand he can’t do it, because he’s a conservative. He should ask me, I’m a fascist, I’ll do it.”

I still find such honesty a little shocking, regardless of my degree of agreement or disagreement (but then I live in Germany, a country where you can go to prison for speculating that maybe only 5.5 million were in the hall of cost). When I saw this photo of Roger Scruton, I thought, This is a man who wouldn’t put a gun to anyone’s head.

He can and often is forceful and critical, doesn’t strike me as conflict avoidant or easily rattled, but like most people he was formed by the era of his youth – he is an early-stage boomer (born 1944) who grew up in a time of low immigration, relative social cohesion, and so he has a gentle, open character, a very English tolerance for individual difference, also note his rumpled attire and face. It’s a nature largely incomprehensible to the German/French elites, who tend to the totalitarian & perfectionist & utopian. That disordered right trouser leg is why e.g. Germans think the English are eccentric; when Germans try for spezzatura or eccentricity it just comes across as, well, trying. The whole point of the old English style – a largely bygone characteristic – is to rub up against the grain of obdurate life, and spoil your perfection. It is the culture of the Common Law we had before the EU, of genuine (not enforced & alien) diversity within a genetic group, of a million unplanned & fortuitous events, of accident and humanity, exemplified in Scruton’s right trouser leg, in the legendary origin of The Order of the Garter:

Various legends account for the origin of the Order. The most popular involves the Countess of Salisbury, whose garter is said to have slipped from her leg while she was dancing at a court ball at Calais. When the surrounding  courtiers sniggered, the king picked it up and returned it to her, exclaiming, “Honi soit qui mal y pense!” (“Shame on him who thinks ill of it!”), the phrase that has become the motto of the Order.

Reminiscent also, as Wikipedia notes, of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, one of the quintessential, strange poems of the old, now largely destroyed England. That one of the highest orders in the land seems to have originated in one of these

slipping down a woman’s leg and then being adopted as a mark of status by the various toffs (who at that point were also trained in combat and tended to be routinely murderous) is typically English; at least England as it was before it was systematically destroyed by globohomo and mass immigration.

Perhaps in some distant, post-Race-War future, a new and better order of knighthood will emerge, in which one’s right trouser leg is slightly rolled up; the right, not the left, to distinguish one from the Masons.