Posted by Hawke Morgan on NoWayTrump (2016).
“Abandon all hope, ye who live in blue states” (2022)
“The migration of families out of big blue cities to more affordable environments will only make those cities more uniformly Democratic. Those left behind are more likely to be renters, and studies have shown that renters are far more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans.
“The trick for red states that want to stay red while taking on blue state refugees may just be doing everything they can to keep housing affordable. The more blue-state renters that red states can turn into red-state homeowners, the more Republican voters there will be to keep red states red.
“New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are all becoming playgrounds for wealthy old people and ambitious young people. They will always be nice places to visit (well, at least the parts they don’t let the homeless take over). But increasingly, they are not places for raising a family.” [. . .] — Conn Carroll, “Abandon all hope, ye who live in blue states,” Washington Examiner, April 28, 2022.
Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border Film, dir. Rodrigo Reyes (2013)
“Reyes’ provocative essay film re-imagines the Mexico/U.S. border as a mythical place comparable to Dante’s purgatory. Leaving politics aside, he takes a fresh look at the brutal beauty of the border and the people caught in its spell. By capturing a stunning mosaic of compelling characters and broken landscapes that live on the US/Mexico border, the filmmaker reflects on the flaws of human nature and the powerful absurdities of the modern world. An unusual border film, in the auteur tradition of camerastylo, Purgatorio ultimately becomes a fable of humanity, an epic and visceral experience with powerful and lingering images.” –description on Kino Lorber (retrieved January 12, 2022)
Watch a trailer for Purgatorio on Vimeo here.
Requiem of the Crazies Comics (2018)
“A young troubled man who finds himself living on the streets with a gun in his mouth and nowhere to go is given hope for a new life when he is taken in by a streetwise bum named Vern. Dante is introduced to the underground world of the homeless, the Crazies, where a bum can stay for the month of May and won’t need any money. A sanctuary for all those who have been forsaken. . . If only it were that easy. When corrupt politicians, drug dealers and an insane cult leader begin fighting for power, the meek homeless become nothing more than pawns in a malicious game of power. “I thought being homeless would be really easy,” Dante thinks, as him and Vern set off on their journey to fight the evil forces bent on corrupting the minds of the homeless. ” [. . .] –Rusty Cage, Indiegogo (retrieved October 18, 2021)
The series was started by Rusty Cage in 2018 and is currently on the third of eight planned installments.
Garry Wills, “The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden—and Abortion” (June 27, 2021)
“What is the worst crime a society can commit? Some people (I among them) would say the Holocaust, the cold methodical murder of six million people just for being Jews.
“But some Catholics and evangelicals say they know of an even greater crime — the deliberate killing of untold millions of unborn babies by abortion. They have determined that a fetus is a person and abortion is therefore murder. This is a crime of such magnitude that some Catholic bishops are trying to deny the reception of Holy Communion by the president of the United States for not working to prevent it.
“No one told Dante that this was the worst crime, or he would have put abortionists, not Judas, in the deepest frozen depths of his Inferno. But in fact he does not put abortionists anywhere in the eight fiery tiers above the deepest one of his Hell.” [. . .] –Garry Wills, “The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden—and Abortion,” New York Times (June 27, 2021)
Read the rest of Wills’s opinion piece at the New York Times.
See also this response to Wills’s essay in The National Review, which includes an extended discussion of Dante and his era.
Contributed by Hilary Barnes (Widener University)
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