The weekend found me rolling down one of those easily stumbled into internet rabbit-holes.
(NOTE: As the post is longer than normal, with numerous links, it'll remain on top for a couple of days.)
Teeny-tiny nutshell of storyline: Time: the present. A single strand time portal to a certain date in October 1960 is discovered in a Maine diner. Someone decides to use it to try to stop the killing of JFK in 1963 by exiting present, remaining in past for 3 years +, changing past, then returning, having been away from present for only 2 minutes.
In case a passing reader might not want the full story "spoiled", don't read the links above. All I'll say here is that, after the mini-series ended, I was left with a question. "Why was George Wallace so bad?" I was strongly advised by husband to Google for information. This I did. Wiki has it all, also worthy of perusal, an NPR article by Debbie Elliott: Is Donald Trump a Modern-Day George Wallace?
“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”Fork in rabbit-hole led to: George Wallace's natal chart, HERE. First glance indicates this is the chart of an unbalanced type, with awkward potential! I notice that Wallace had Moon conjunct Regulus. Regulus is what I've always thought to be the catalyst beneath Donald Trump's surprising success. I note that Wallace's time of birth at Astrodatabank, though given "A" rating is based "from memory". I suspect the time could be a bit off at 26.6 Cancer - early Leo rising would be a far better fit - this from my own experience of living with Cancer on the ascendant! Wallace had no Air in his natal chart - that's an important difference between his chart and Trump's.
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
A blog post at Ohio Astrology next slowed my rabbit-hole descent:
A Fire Moon in the Crowd. The blogger's take on rabble-rousers' astrology is intriguing - do take a look! Wallace is included there, along with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
At this point, a random "George Wallace" link led me down yet another rabbit-hole fork, to a forum (a few do still manage to exist in this Facebook-heavy world). This forum is, I discovered, a newer version of an old-established forum taken down by its creator fairly recently, perhaps due to net fights or bad feeling surfacing, and lack of a moderator. The new forum :
Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory.
The forum had no focus on George Wallace, I'd landed there due to a single mention of Wallace in a post on the forum by an astrologer. I think this link should go to the thread in question. Forum member "Eric the Green" (E. Alan Meece perchance?) had done extensive research into the natal charts of USA presidents and candidates, historically, allocating a scoring system based on various astrological factors (which I've yet to find detailed). Explanation of his system perhaps existed on the original forum now defunct. George Wallace appeared in a list:
1968: Richard Nixon 17-6*, Hubert Humphrey 11-4**, George Wallace 2-6 J (+ Mars rising)
Didn't convey much to me, but I found a few interesting items while rolling around the forum generally - having fallen down this rabbit-hole, may as well take full advantage of surroundings!
Back on surface ground, what conclusion, if any?
SPOILER (don't read if looking forward to reading or seeing 11-22-63).
When the time traveller of Stephen King's novel returns to the present after spending 3 (or 5) years in the early 1960s, managing to prevent the assassination of JFK, he finds, to his horror, a very different city (and world) awaits him. He's told that JFK was president for 2 terms, then George Wallace was elected. During intervening years the city had been laid waste through bombing, the population left homeless, starving. We're not told detail in the mini-series, but the novel has it all, and it's pretty darn scary! The sight of what had happened was enough to propel our time travelling character back to 1960 once more, to reverse all that he had wrought.
Time itself had tried, again and again, to warn him that the past should not, could not be changed. The past had "pushed back" against change, made his task difficult, near to impossible, yet he had persevered, determined to carry out the important mission his old friend, Al of the diner, had set for him, and with the best possible intentions.
Thoughts: why would a guy like Wallace have been elected after 2 terms of JFK? The novel has an explanation. Basically, though Republicans were determined to reverse things. Do we have something akin to that now?“The past is obdurate.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
The novel and film are pure fiction, of course.
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
“For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dream-clock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”That was one messy rabbit-hole!
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
6 comments:
Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, and George Wallace were three of the ultra conservative stinkies that ran for prez. These three men share similarities, but Trump has his own flavor. Thurmond and Wallace were segregationists, Goldwater was a militant anti-communist. Goldwater was perceived as over-the-top and loonie, much like Trump, and both present an outside enemy, communism and Islam. Goldwater and Trump share nationalism-fascism, too. Trump is unique for the extraordinary baggage he carries that is so easily overlooked by his followers.
From http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/why-trumps-naked-corruption.html
Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.
BTW - Netflix is releasing a new sci fi movie, "ARQ" September 16th. It involves time travel. He's murdered over and over, and must try to remember how to fix things.
"In a dystopian future, an engineer trapped in a house and surrounded by a mysterious gang of masked intruders must protect a technology that could deliver unlimited energy and end the wars that have consumed the world."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0DGLrd9GY
I think my comment went into your rabbit hole.
Some of Stephen King's work is very good. Some of it really, really drags, though.
mike (have rescued it) & Vanilla Rose
Will read your comments ( for which many thanks) in the morning - been out all day, and now find Clinton and Trump are in a forum on NBC just as we arrived in...so will read all & respond tomorrow. :-)
mike ~ Thanks for the above. Sensibly it would be blindingly obvious that under no circumstance could Donald Trump ever become President of the USA. Media are trying to persuade the people otherwise by constantly publicising those silly opinion polls, which, due to the USA's ridiculous electoral system (electoral college) become quite meaningless - but TV and internet sources need to keep us tuning in, to feed the advertisers.
Stephen King's imaginings about a possible political result of there being no JFK assassination was scary - but then Stephen King delights in scary - that's his way of ensuring people read his books.
Had the Republican nominee been anyone but Trump it would have been harder to judge the outcome.
We watched the forum on NBC last evening. I dislike both nominees intensely - will vote for neither. On the face of it Trump comes over as more approachable (hardly likeable, but less stony than Clinton)- which, if the items you've mentioned about his negatives were less severe could have made him more dangerous to Clinton.
If time travel were "a thing" - a possible thing, and the past were not, as King said "obdurate", the best that could be done by a brave time traveller to the past through Al's diner portal, for us, could be to somehow prevent 9/11. That would not make things all hunky-dory, but it could prevent so much that now ails us.
Thanks for the news of a new TV time travel tale. I think we've seen the ads for it.
As it'll have commercials threaded through it, we'll probably wait for DVDs or for Netflixing. :-)
Vanilla Rose ~ I haven't read any of his novels other than 11-22-63, it's l-o-n-g, but the theme engaged me so easily that I stuck with it. I've seen a few films based on his books, but none other than 11-22-63 have impressed me - I'm not a scary movie type of gal. King also wrote a book on writing - or how to be (in his estimation) a good writer. My husband has read it and declares it to be excellent. :-)
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