K-PAX is one of my favorite films.  One day this rather disheveled but amiable man (who looks an awful lot like Kevin Spacey) shows up out of nowhere at JFK International.  The alien with no papers or weapons attempts to help someone in need and the police naturally handcuff him and take him to one of our better maintained insane asylums located in Manhattan.

After all, nobody in their right mind ever attempts to help anyone in NYC.  But I digress.The film is a softer take off on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The Chief Physician in charge of admissions is a little on this side of Nurse Ratchet, but she is worried about budgets and such.

Dr. Jeff Bridges takes over the case file of the good Samaritan and is told that the newest admission is without papers of any kind. Spacey announces that he goes by the name 'Prote' and comes from the planet K-PAX. Right away, I know this is my kind of film. I mean I could relate with this guy any time.

Prote gets along with all the other inmates immediately. You have your obsessive/compulsives and manic/depressives and hallucination prone patients with all their different quirks and eccentricities. Some symptoms are more endearing than others.

The key to Prote is that he somehow brings hope to all his compadres with less felonious escapades perpetrated than Jack N would ever allow. And all the patients are quickly drawn into Prote's delusions, illusions and distillations to the point where they are all sure that they are going to the Land of Oz with him.

At this point I am forced to digress because of a West African Tribe known as the Dogon or Dogons. Now a fellow by the name of Marcelle Griaule  'discovered' this tribe of the masks and wrote extensively of his findings until his death in the middle of the last century.

The reason the Dogons are of so much interest to amateur anthropologists like myself has to do with their fantastic ritual masks as well as an astronomical model contained in their mythology. Investigators have reached a consensus that the Dogons resided where they currently find themselves for a thousand years or more but definitely have Egyptian roots going back thousands of years.

I think that most people are aware of the importance of the brightest star in the night sky--the Star Sirius which was also intensely important in the Osiris/Isis myths of ancient Egypt. But the Dogon (whose god is Amma rather than Amon) have taken the astronomical aspects of their origins a little further than other bands of Homo Sapiens:

They reported that the Dogon believe that the brightest star in the sky, Sirius (sigi tolo or 'star of the Sigui'[19]), has two companion stars, pō tolo (the Digitaria star), and ęmmę ya tolo, (the female Sorghum star), respectively the first and second companions of Sirius A.[20] Sirius, in the Dogon system, formed one of the foci for the orbit of a tiny star, the companionate Digitaria star. When Digitaria is closest to Sirius, that star brightens: when it is farthest from Sirius, it gives off a twinkling effect that suggests to the observer several stars. The orbit cycle takes 60 years. [21]They also claimed that the Dogon appeared to know of the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter (wiki)

The Dogons knew all of these things five hundred years before Galileo first peered through his famous telescope. I mean this really is the subject of myth to be sure; so to speak.

Well getting back to Prote, we are to believe that there is indeed a planet by the name of K-PAX that orbits a duel solar system in a peculiar manner approximately one thousand light years from us.

And Dr. Bridges just happens to have a brother-in-law who is an astrophysicist for some big government funded operation in NYC and the good shrink takes the initiative and introduces this crazy savant to his brother-in-law as well as his colleagues.

Well Prote is able to provide graphics as well as mathematical formulae to demonstrate that this planet does indeed exist using one of those IMAX projection theaters dedicated to astronomical professionals.

So the audience is somehow sucked into the delusions of this Alice in Wonderland as well as the psychiatrist and the plot is off and running.

The climax comes toward the end of the film after Prote announces to all that he is going back to his home planet on July 27th at 5:51AM and that he is taking only one patient with him.

An essay contest is announced and Prote will choose his travel mate after reviewing all of the essays.

So we are faced with kind of a MacArthur moment where our protagonist announces not only that he will return, but what the date and time will be for his return.

In the end Prote's consciousness appears to be the only thing to actually make the return to K-PAX. Well, one of the patients ends up missing in body and soul.

This movie really caused me to pause and think about two different subjects.  The first concerns 'sanity'.

SANITY

There is a 'test' in a certain set of Mental Health statutes across America. No matter what state you find yourself in, there is a standard that must be met in order to put you on a 30-60-90 day 'hold' for a mental health evaluation. The question to be asked in all these cases is:

Does the subject pose a threat to himself or others?

It is an interesting standard for many reasons. First it means nothing. Second threats are in the eyes of the beholder. Third, our mental health professionals end up holding a great deal of power in our society over the individual.

I mean with the flick of a Bic, you could be incarcerated with very few constitutional rights.

So I read this article at TPM and hear the report on Cable News concerning some strange goings-on in Tennessee recently:

First, a Tennessee man was arrested after walking into his local county courthouse to try to effect a citizen's arrest of a grand jury foreman who had refused to investigate President Obama's legitimacy to serve -- an encounter partially caught on video. That enraged one Georgia-based member of the far-right OathKeepers group. Responding to a call from an extremist leader, he drove to Tennessee with an AK-47 in a bid to get his comrade released -- only to wind up getting arrested himself.

We are not taking real good care of our mentally ill people in this society. And this amounts to proof of this maxim.

The second OathKeeper not only drove across state lines with an AK-47 but he was bragging that he carried 400-500 rounds of ammunition along with a Colt-45 pistola.

So you ask yourself this question:

Are there not physicians and shrinks and therapists available to swear under oath that these two men are dangers to themselves and to others?

When I think of a grown man who thinks that there was a liberal/socialist conspiracy in this country to fill the Chief Executive Office in the United States of America with a Muslim/terrorist/communist and compare that man with someone who thinks he is from the planet K-PAX, I simply weigh the risks.

I mean an OATHKEEPER with an AK-47, a Colt-45 and 400-500 rounds of ammunition in his pick-up truck, crossing state lines to help out his buddy who just attempted a citizen's arrest of the President of the United States is more of a risk to himself and others than some unarmed guy who thinks he is from K-PAX.

I mean find an Oath Keeper to take care of these OathKeepsers. That's all I'm asking.

HISTORICAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

MacCarthur just stood up in front of those cameras (that he always had ready) and announced that he would return after getting his ass handed to him in the Philippines during WWII.

Kennedy predicted that we would send a man to the moon within the decade (60-70)

Abraham Lincoln swore that the Union would not be dissolved during or after his administration.

My grandmamma predicted that I would never accomplish anything significant during my lifetime.

And Prote promised that he would leave this planet at a certain time while in a certain place and he did.  Sure he only took his soul with him and left his mindless corpse but he did manage to take one of his inmates with him. Perfection is hard to achieve at times.

All these predictions ended up 'right on' as men like to say in the locker rooms across this great nation.

But, you see, we only seem to recall the prescient lines in history and we tend to forget those predictions that just never 'made it'. There are those promises that were made that never materialized as they say on Star Trek.

It was supposed to be a GOP ideas factory that would fill the leadership vacuum on the right after Barack Obama's landslide election. The National Council for a New America was supposed to be, in the words of founder Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), "a conversation with the American people" to "develop innovative solutions that meet the serious challenges confronting our country."

But, Roll Call reports, the group is now dead one year after it launched to what, in hindsight, appears to be excessive media coverage of an entity that hadn't actually done anything.

"Republican Party plans comeback" declared CNN; "GOP recasts brand, sans wedge issues," said Politico; "GOP Forms Ideas Coalition" said National Journal. In fact, there were no less than 5,000 positive media hits for the National Council for a New America, Cantor's spokesman told Roll Call.

Despite all that, the national conversation never really happened. There was only one town hall meeting attended by GOP heavyweights, in Arlington, Virginia.

Roll Call reports that the Cantor camp is blaming "liberals" for killing the group:

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/cantor_national_council_for_new_america_dead.php?ref=fpb

I just love the idea that Cantor is blaming liberals for the fact that his vision for a new network of happy repubs talking with happy repubs failed.

But what's a mother to do?

Climbing up the heavenly stairs
You know where you're going when you know where
You're going to hell
Yes, you're going to hell.

You're going down a hundred eighty degrees,
You can see when you can see
You're going to hell
Yes, you're going to hell.

You were weak, you were easy to squeeze,
They did with you as they please,
You're going to hell
Yes, you're going to hell.

They're going to tear you limb from limb
Because of your so called sin
You're going to hell,
Yes, you're going to hell.

They're going to tear you limb from limb
Because of your so called sin
You're going to hell

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxr-fbtV1-8