Lovin’ Oppenheimer Sex Cheeks
and some paintings
Went to one of the three movies Americans are allowed to see in theaters this summer. It was a drama based on a false story, made-to-leave-feeling true, about an abstractionist/narcissist and all of his super nerdy-cool friends who killed everything. There was this steamy pornographic scene when a communist party ex-girlfriend straddled the pallid potato physicist in front of six old men in a small room, while another actress, who got to keep her clothes on throughout the entire three hour film heroifying degenerates, watched from behind, biting her lip imagining how badly she was slighted by her brilliant husband, the killer.
Besides those gooey pretend sex scenes uncomfortably viewed beside stranger teenagers in a dark movie theater, I also took away good history of Japanese families burned alive, a revived daydream of a dead president whose fibula could be dug up and pressed through his skull nostrils, (if ours was a just and proud species), and the inevitability of near total annihilation tomorrow of all living things earthen.
The $9 ticket was totally worth the renascence of my misanthropy.
The other movies were Barbie and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I think we could be at that state of H.G. Wells fictional evolution when the human species splits into apathetic Eloi and the sadder-but-wiser (and hungry) Morlocks. Just surveying movie-goers at theater exits across the U.S. could, I believe, place us into one of the two evolving human-like species groups. Maybe all it would take is the following question and respondent answer:
Are nuclear weapons bad medicine for life on earth?
Future Morlock: Absolutely. And I’d like to add that we must round up and incarcerate for life (or worse) the makers of thermonukes (Board members of Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman), distributors (generals of militaries), and elected (and non-elected officials) who allow their existence to threaten us all every second, every hour. Do it right now, with torches, pitchforks and mobs.
Future Eloi: I got a little bit of a rise from those naked actors going at it in Oppenheimer. Or was it when funky turtle boy Michelangelo had a teenage wet dream on top of that voluptuous ninja salamander?
The United States is the only nation to ever detonate nuclear weapons on human populations without offering even an empty apology over the last 78 years. That’s a constant feeder of rage to keep me humming unto death. How about you? Do you feel marginalized pre-Morlock like me? I bet my spleen not a single other person in that packed theater has heard of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It was made international law in 2021, and our government ignores it. Which means Costa Rica has every right to call for regime change in Washington D.C. And it might, if it or any of the other 91 signatories had a sophisticated drone fleet, the like which our Congress delivers gratis (your tax money) to the Ukrainian government (not a signatory country I wonder why). The real truth, the international truth, the earth and galaxy truth, is that our rogue pretend leaders would be on trial at the Hague by month’s end, if the Netherlands was a signatory nation to the treaty, and not a powerless puppet of the big rogue players of NATO. Maybe the Hague is just a place for trying Muslims and leaders of countries it’s member nations bomb. Never justice for the crimes committed by their de facto leaders George Bush (the Texan head honcho of the murder of a million brown people), and Barack (Oh Hell yeah, we’ll bomb ya) Obama. As long as any nation on earth holds onto a single nuclear weapon, I consider that government to be illegitimate. Do you? And why not Mr. or Miss Annihilation?
Dear upright antecedents of scrumptious Eloi, in the hope that some of you wish to Morlock up your guts a bit, I shall break the following news to you before Nuclear Winter becomes chief motivator of our atmosphere (coincidentally not so long after Hollywood delivers us Oppenheimer II: The Great Wind of Apathy): Both your Donald Trump and Joe Biden governments are supreme outlaw. Like Saddam, like Putin. Like any bad man (always a man) that you point at from far, far away. It is they and their business acquaintances who lock us down in a near certainty of 21st century nuclear Armageddon.
If you suspect that I might be correct even a little bit, then what can be done in attempt to avert disaster?
I suggest breaking out of your mental groups asap. It is these bubbles that are making us all sallow and dull-eyed. We have the political bends and our clear thinking brains and loving hearts are shutting down. Stop pointing the finger at other bubbles floating as leaderless and frightened as you. Yossarian said in Catch-22, “the enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed”.
Can you say that to yourself and believe it? Can you rise to conquer the Morlock-shaping genes within?
Or are my descendants going to farm and eat your descendants with muck relish?
So the movie was filmed beautifully, and the sound was exceptional. The history was 6th grade textbook, and the story was all about propping up man (always a man) as the super (tragic) hero. Supposedly this Oppenheimer developed a conscience after melting the people of Japan. The actor Truman called him a “crybaby”, which is almost historically accurate. The real Truman of 1948 was referring to the music to his ears of the actual babies crying in Nagasaki while their tummy skins flaked off.
In the hotly debated world of ignorance politics, Oppenheimer was definitely not a man ahead of his time. Condensed propaganda brought to our great and grandparents via the Ministry of Truths of governments and millionaires made sure of that. He and Einstein and Fred the milkman all shared equal knowledge of what exactly was not going on. Of course Oppenheimer had the secret information of his own annihilation project, just like Fred the milkman pre-urinated clandestinely into buttermilk bottles left on German stoops (Japanese Americans weren’t allowed any private doors for milk at the time). All political knowledge afforded to the masses was infantile, as it is today. Actually today it might well be zygotian thanks to Fox, MSNBC, CNN, and bargain potato chips always priced around $2 a bag.
Even art teachers of the world got wildly wound up with the war frenzy. Roy Lichtenstein’s mentor, Hoyt Sherman, was a tenured art professor at Ohio State University. I wrote about his love of killing human beings for millionaires while researching the rise and never fall of the highest grossing painter of all time. I post it here to show that the mass majority of people will hate, kill and allow for nuclear weapons to exist if a group leader (no matter how made up and abstract) tells them to. Oppenheimer the physicist and Sherman the “artist” were both jonesin’ to kill. From different worlds but of the same mind. Obeyers of the Officers of Abstraction.
The story is that on Monday, December 8, 1941, Hoyt Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein’s painting mentor, arrived on the Ohio State University Campus to find the art department gathered in a meeting to discuss how art and design could help in the fight against the Japanese. Later that afternoon Sherman briefed the Chairman of the Art Department on an idea that came to him several years prior while reading about Rembrandt van Rijn.
One day as a young man Rembrandt was studying the interior of his father’s windmill and while looking out a window, noticed how the revolving windmill blades created strobe-like effects, alternately blocking and letting light into the room. While looking at objects throughout the interior of the windmill, he experienced a unique way of seeing a whole space within a sequence of separate views. According to Sherman, this was a red-letter day for Rembrandt, and instrumental in changing the way he would see and compose future paintings.
Sherman believed he could replicate Rembrandt’s method to teach Navy pilots “how to see”. The U.S. Navy accepted his proposal at first, but a few weeks in, scrapped the deal because Sherman was having students stick clay on ship models that the Navy provided to the university, which apparently made a top naval officer very angry that his little kill toys were being muddied.
A year later while working on another military contract with the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps, Sherman oversaw his experimental course where thirteen male students, (all with no drawing experience), were set in a dark room while a tachistoscope (a rapid fire slide projector) flashed an image on and off the screen in a tenth of a second. Each student had ten seconds to draw the image onto paper in the darkness. This would better equip their eyes to detect enemy aircraft symbols and shapes in a split second.
Sherman called it his “flash lab” where Roy Lichtenstein took classes and entered the war seeing good enough to kill people, yet fortunately for his psychological health, never got the chance to.
All in all, jingo Hoyt Sherman taught Roy Lichtenstein how to see. Roy thought Hoyt was the bee’s knees, and several years later, brought the peace time concept of the flash lab to Oswego State Teacher’s College. Also, after hundreds of successful World War II sorties bombing the b-jesus out of civilian populations (enabled in part by the practical applications of art used in wartime), the Joint Chief of Staffs of the U.S. military now control enormous sums of money flowing in and out of psychotic bureaucracies such as Ohio State University.
Professor Sherman was an impostor artist carrying a stupid be-a-man-chip on his shoulder. I pity you Roy Lichtenstein for being misled by a charlatan. I pity your innocent future that began with the help of the cosmological loser Hoyt Sherman to lead you astray.
Thanks for saying what I was thinking that keeps me from seeing this sympathetic bio pic. You went to get the evidence. I decided I hated it without the evidence. I agree with every word you wrote and share your fury and disgust.