Impossible To Choose

 Go ahead and try to select your favorite Gene Hackman movie. 

I'll wait. 

That will be a bit of a challenge, seeing as how he appeared in some seventy-seven films over the course of a career that ended in 2004, and a life that ended just last week. 

Did you pick one of his starring roles? Maybe you liked him in The French Connection, as "Popeye" Doyle. That car chase? 

How about Lex Luthor? Every bit as charming as Christopher Reeves' Superman. Except evil. 

On the flip side of that would be the incredibly selfless and heartwarming story of Hoosiers, where Gene played Hickory High's basketball coach to the state championship. 

Or swinging back to the nasty side once again you could have selected Little Bill in The Unforgiven. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences did. He won an Oscar for that one. 

Maybe any of the other times he was nominated for best actor, or best supporting actor, including way back in 1968 when he was recognized for one of his earliest film appearances as Buck Barrow, older brother of Clyde who just happened to have another partner. A gal named Bonnie. 

Perhaps your tastes run a little more esoteric, in which case you might pick the pater familias of the Tennenbaum clan, He put the Royal in The Royal Tennenbaums. 

And so on. Gene Hackman's first film was Lilith, released in 1964. Somewhere in the midst of all that sexual obsession. His final film was Welcome To Mooseport. Not everybody loved that one, even though everyone loves Raymond. 

Somewhere in there, he played my favorite role of his. The blind hermit in Young Frankenstein. "I was going to make espresso."

Gene Hackman passed away at the ripe old age of ninety-five, leaving a legacy that will be studied and discussed for ninety-five more years. He stomped on the Terra, and even in outer space. He will be missed. Aloha, Gene. 

Stand Up And Cheer

 Imagine being in the position of having to go face to face with the constituents for whom you are nominally allowed to keep an office in Washington. Imagine having to show up and try to sell them on what a good deal they're getting from the rollercoaster chainsaw steamroller that is currently being employed by the ruling party to "make America grate" again. 

Let's take a quick peek at Representative Mark Alford's Town Hall from this past weekend. People showed up to a coffee shop in Belton, Missouri not to praise the king, but to bury him. They had a lot on their minds, and there were a lot of them. They didn't come to listen. They came to jeer. They came to boo. They came to announce their discontent with the way this particular trolley had jumped the track. 

A question from the assembled mob was read by Representative Mark: “Why is an unelected person allowed to hire and fire federal employees?” The limp response, “The reason is ... he was hired.… Elon Musk was hired by the executive Donald Trump, and he has given him that authority—” was eventually shouted down in what might best be described as a community catharsis. 

Things didn't go a lot smoother for Wisconsin's Representative Glenn Grotham, who was met with similar levels of discontent with the Shadow President. One Oshkosh resident yelled, “You don’t represent us, you represent Elon Musk!” Representative Glenn tried to quell his constituents' nerves by insisting, "He does not have the ability to do any actions on his own." As if that made everything that has happened over the past month and a half okay. Eventually, Glenn fled the town hall after promising to google the incendiary rhetoric that the DOGEmeister has been routinely spouting. Because apparently hearing from his constituents that they were tired of reading it wasn't enough.  

In Trinity, Texas, a similar disturbance was experienced at a community center where Representative Pete Sessions endured a much less than happy crowd in a place where you might expect more subservience. Similar events erupted in Idaho and California. Representatives in those states were also lambasted for their fuehrer's scorched earth attempts at cutting federal spending. It seems somebody forgot that these "leeches" were all potential voters and not a one of them signed up to have their livelihood erased. 

We have just redefined the term "tough crowd." 

Stay tuned.