First rule of interpretation for Trumpworld: everything connects to everything else.
Former employees of Despicable Donald’s Florida Mara-A-Lago Resort report that for years during the last decade he tapped phone conversations of employees with each other and guests. Trump’s notorious longtime butler, Anthoy Senecal, plays dumb about whether the reports of bugging may be true.
The story juxtaposes at least in my quarter-paranoid mind’s eye with Hillary’s email scandals, about which Trump is of course appalled: the Ruskies may have hacked her, but at least she never tapped (as far as we know) anybody’s phone.
Today, Israel’s Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan accused Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook of running interference for Islamist terrorists who use the network against Israel. Trump, on the other hand, favors unlimited NSA spying on everybody. Personally, I’m willing to consider that the NSA—but not Trump—monitor my phone. I admit here to talking about–if Trump is elected and builds a Wall–to recruiting a guerrilla network in Tijuana to tear it down and bill him.
The Mar-A-Lago news also breaks at the same time as Gay Talese, 84 year-old “new journalist” master of the fake-umentary, has disavowed his forthcoming book, Voyeur’s Motel, about the how Gerald Foos, owner of Colorado’s The Manor, allegedly snooped for two decades on the exploits of the rich and infamous including sex fiends and murderers. Apparently, Foos, who own the motel for only part of the period chronicled, sold Talese a tale that’s more fiction than fact. There is no report if Steven Spielberg, who purchased the movie rights to Talese’s novel, will go ahead and make the movie.
Then, there’s the related history of the legendary, The Overlook, the Colorado resort that was a character in itself in Stephen King’s novel The Shining, made into a film in 1980 by Stanley Kubrick. A new documentary, Room 237, offers the occult speculations and conspiracy theories of fans of Kubrick’s movie which King hated—and answered with a 1990s television miniseries that more closely followed his own novelistic plot. Kubrick had the hubris to change the number of The Overlook’s horrendous redrum (murder) room from 217 to 237, supposedly because 237,000 miles is the distance from the earth to the moon. Conspiratorialists claim that Kubrick was hinting at his role in concocting fake Moon landing footage for NASA.
Then, there’s history prof Geofrrey Cocks, author of The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust, who argues that the number 42, repeatedly featured in the film, refers to the year of the Wannsee Conference, while the red Volkswagon in the film (it was yellow in King’s novel) refers to the star-shaped identification badges of the Nazis’ Jewish victims. The typewriter used by the crazed character played by Jack Nicholson to type “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in the film is also of German make. Why it changes colors over the course of the movie is subject to interpretation.
In contrast to the film, the novel has a lengthy subplot about The Overlook as the place where mafiosos buried the bodies (though not Jimmy Hoffa’s) during the 1970s. King could have easily have worked Trump into the novel as a character had The Donald been prominent enough back when the novel was originally written.
Let’s hope for a Shining sequel with Colorado’s The Overlook and The Manor both merged with Florida’s Mar-a-Lago. Who would be surprised to find out that Trump’s bugged hotel also had a grisly “redrum”? Spielberg can produce and direct.
