I retired recently from a comfortable post as Associate Professor of Communications at a small university in New Jersey. I imagine this blog as a way of keeping the edge in my thinking that I had honed in a near-lifetime of teaching film, video, and English itinerantly in the New York-New Jersey area. There had been side trips to office-temping in the worlds of high finance and washers, widgets, and pipes; there had also been screenplays, plays, proposals, and other incipient attempts at putting things before an audience, but they were not to be. Always, though, the umbilical cord I shared with film kept pulling me back to the classroom, to literature, and to films.
I wanted the blog to continue exploring the ideas about film and culture that I presented in my courses so that I wouldn’t lose my edge on these issues that have been important to me all my life – notice I did not limit that to adult life. I knew who John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock were before my age needed to be rendered in double digits. That was a long time ago.
I still intend to do this.
But not only this. When my classes in my last year of teaching were Covid-isolated on Zoom, and the sense of communion I tried always to foster in those actual teaching rooms was far distant and barely virtual, I started each class meeting with a ten or twenty minute session where people could share their experiences, concerns, hopes, and most importantly, complaints.
I want to find a way to continue that here.
Mostly, we will be talking about films and the other arts as they come within the field of my mind’s eye.
In coming weeks, there will be pieces about rock n’ roll films, the indispensability of Billy Wilder, and who knows what else. They will keep the blog anchored into my initial intent.
But there will be side-trips…
The name of the blog has always seemed to me aggressive, which I like. The title comes from one of the masterful songs written by Phil Ochs, the too little remembered contemporary of, as Ochs would put it, “young Bobby Dylan.” Ochs ended his own life far too early. The song is, “I’m Gonna Say It Now.” It’s a song from the 60s in which a student activist tells the president of his university how bad things really are at their school. The speaker is standing up to one who thinks he has power over others; the speaker is challenging that presumption.
We can do that topic one day later on.
Today, I want to get in some faces. But not too closely, for reasons that will be obvious.
I have questions for all of you reading this who have not been vaccinated and are not masking. For those of you who have been vaccinated and are masking still, these questions are for your friends and neighbors, either rhetorically or actually.
How many people do you know who died, sometimes choking on their own bodily fluids with plastic tubes invading their throats, because they had turned their backs on a vaccination?
How many people did that sadly-dying friend infect so they could share that dying experience? Friends do share.
How many health workers tended your hopeless friend while other ill patients, with hope, went poorly attended because of limited resources? How many of those non-friends suffered and died because of the limited resources available at a health care facility when they didn’t have to?
Your friend could have been vaccinated, and he would have been so much better off. We all would have been so much better off. We all would be so much better off.
How many people have died because of the vaccination?
NONE.
How many people have died because of non-vaccination?
MILLIONS. MILLIONS. MILLIONS.
I won’t even discuss about micro-chips.
Look over the history of immunology in the twentieth century. Small pox; polio; influenza. How many infectious diseases were stopped in their tracks by vaccinations. Why would that change for this murderous virus? It kills on its own. If some crazy-ass psychos wanted people to die, there would be no vaccine publicly available.
No one is an isolated biological system in this world. If you get Covid and have symptoms, you have already put many other people in jeopardy. If you have no symptoms, you likely will already have threatened others anyway.
And all those people have spouses and children and parents and friends and colleagues and students and teachers and sports fans and hungry customers at your favorite diner.
Worship much? How many of your fellow worshipers do you want to send to their eternal reward though horrific unnecessary suffering, and before their time to boot.
How do you want to leave this life? Drifting into eternity with your loved ones easing you into your journey? Expelling bloody liquids in an isolation tent where you face the pain and the fear, where you face the guilt of what you have inflicted on yourself, possibly your loved ones, probably friends and strangers? Alone.
Get the vaccine. Can what your fantasies say be worse than what I’ve described?
Wear the damned mask.
We’ll get on our regular track next time.
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Rest in Peace: Nancy Griffith; Patricia Hitchcock; Charlie Watts; Edward Asner; all those killed at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan; and all those killed by Covid and its accomplices.
Contact info: Feel free to respond to my comments here on line. Feel free also to email me at donophontom@gmail.com. Please be aware that I will feel free to quote, with attribution, in future posts any email received at this address unless the sender specifically requests either anonymity or that no reference be made whatsoever to the comments rendered.
Gonna Say it Now 