Donald Trump Auditioned for Blue Velvet

By Stephen Kunk►

President Donald Trump is a lot of things: world leader, business mogul, TV personality and bestselling author, but did you know that he's also an actor? We're not just talking about his cute cameo in Home Alone 2, though. In the mid-80s, at the height of his initial rise to fame, Trump actually found time to audition for some serious roles in critically acclaimed films. Most impressive among these was David Lynch's sexy thriller Blue Velvet.

"Donny wants to fuck!"

According to Hollywood insiders, Trump read for the part of Frank Booth, the hard-bitten small-city gangster who has kidnapped the son and husband of Dorothy, the female lead played by Isabella Rossellini. The ransom? Kinky sexual favors from Dorothy whenever Frank demands it. The role would eventually go to Dennis Hopper, but not before Trump was tentatively cast for the part.

"He nailed the role," Lynch reported in a recent interview. "Donald Trump was and is Frank Booth. He read his lines just as I'd written them, adding a sheer and inimitable vileness that I couldn't capture in the dialogue alone. Had he stayed on with the role, Blue Velvet would have been a much less contemplative, much more intense film."

Of course, Trump wound up declining the role, citing a shooting schedule that conflicted with his ongoing USFL anti-trust lawsuit. However, according to Joanna Ray, the film's casting director, Trump exited the set after production began.

"He became very incensed," Ray reported, "when he learned that the rape scene in Dorothy's apartment wasn't going to be non-simulated. He insisted it had to be real, and he even made repeated references to Last Tango in Paris. When we told him it just couldn't happen, he stormed off the set."

Eventually, cooler heads prevailed, and, upon Trump's exit, Dennis Hopper took over the role.

"It was a mixed blessing," Lynch reflected. "I wanted Frank Booth to be pure id, but not completely id. At least Dennis brought some restraint to the role."

Footage of early screen tests of Trump's apartment scene with Rossellini have since been destroyed. Rossellini herself has not commented on the encounter.

Towards the end of Blue Velvet, Kyle McLaughlin's character famously asks a philosophical question of his love interest, played by Laura Dern: "Why are there people like Frank?" Perhaps the unrelenting muse powering Donald Trump possesses the answer.

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Stephen Kunk lives in Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

Image Attribution: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Alterations made by Ewedrooper staff.

Chris Langan Knows What It's Like to be a Bat

By Elton Brawn & Stephen Kunk ►

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a landmark essay entitled "What is it Like to be a Bat?" Curiously premised as its eponymous thought experiment may have been, Nagel's essay poses a crucial challenge for reductionist, materialist theories of consciousness. The materialist position holds that consciousness reduces rather tidily and objectively to physical and physiological processes in the brain and the body. For Nagel, however, it is the "subjective character of experience" that makes consciousness what it is. Because there is something it feels like to be a bat (or a person or a cat or really anything above an amoeba), a reductive, materialist explanation of consciousness will always be incomplete, as subjective mental phenomenon cannot be reduced to a material substrate. Even if a human were to somehow acquire a bat's inimitable sensory apparatus, he or she would not have possessed said bat's perceptual wiring from birth, and at most, this hypothetical Batman or Batwoman would be experiencing their own consciousness superimposed upon that of the bat. Ergo, reductive materialist explanations of consciousness falter.

In 1974, however, neither Nagel nor the world knew much of Christopher Langan. Though the word "genius" is often thrown around ad nauseam at present, Langan is just that. With a tested IQ somewhere around 200, Langan is an outlier among statistical outliers, and the intelligence tests don't equivocate. Langan proved too much for the mighty American education system to handle, running laps around his most gifted classmates and teaching himself advanced math, physics, and philosophy as a teenager, all the while mastering classical languages like Latin and Greek. College couldn't handle him either, and he ended up dropping out of Montana State University on the strong hunch that he was smarter than his professors. Throughout his adult life, as he supported himself via a variety of jobs ranging from bar bouncer to cattleman, he has dedicated his intellectual efforts to finding a Theory of Everything merging math, physics, theology and even consciousness, all while remaining isolated from conventional academicians in those fields (to whom he refers as “acadummies”). The result of Langan's toil is his self-published Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU), which is, in brief, a dual-aspect monism where consciousness isn't just a subjective character of experience. Rather, cognition is inextricably linked to the existence of the physical universe itself.

Considering what we know about the sheer power of Langan's mind, would it be so farfetched to speculate that he can know what it is like to be a bat? After all, his performance on multiple IQ tests has proven that he can discriminate complex patterns in sets of data wherein lesser intellects would see none. Is it so much of a stretch to posit that Langan's expansive consciousness could, like a bat, recreate echolocation through outgoing impulses and subsequent reverberations, his nimble brain sorting the information so as to realize a sort of three dimensional forward perception, thereby enabling him to perceive and experience objects in the same way that a winged mammal does? Not all human consciousnesses are created equal, after all, and what mind would be a better bet than Langan's for realizing a bat's perspective? As far as the reader and the authors and Nagel go, we are most certainly not able to have access to what it's like to be a bat, but Chris Langan just might.

There are other subtle indicators of Langan's bat-like capacities. In the past few years, Langan's polymathic genius has branched out into a number of other intellectual pursuits, most notably politics, both American and global. As his own political opinions have been tuned up to a high-frequency shriek, our man-bat with the 200 IQ has proven he can discriminate a lot more than just complex patterns. Indeed, he has rapidly dispensed analyses of equally complex social issues for his adoring Facebook faithful. For instance, Langan offers the following with regard to immigration: "Koko [the famed gorilla] was believed to have had an IQ of between 75 and 95 and could sign more than 1,000 words. The average IQ of a human is around 90 to 110. […] Koko's elevated level of thought would have been all but incomprehensible to nearly half the population of Somalia (average IQ 68). Yet the nations of Europe and North America are being flooded with millions of unvetted Somalian refugees who are not (initially) kept in cages despite what appears to be the world's highest rate of violent crime. Obviously, this raises a question: Why is Western Civilization not admitting gorillas? They too are from Africa, and probably have a group mean IQ at least equal to that of Somalia. In addition, they have peaceful and environmentally friendly cultures, commit far less violent crime than Somalians, and with minor modifications to Western education systems, can easily be taught to use language. Why are these gentle creatures, who have been threatened with genocide for decades, not being taken in by Western nations as refugees despite the indisputable fact that they are teetering on the edge of extinction in their homelands? Can this be called humane or compassionate? What on Earth is going on here?"

Now that, dear reader, is batshit insane.

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Elton Brawn and Stephen Kunk have a combined IQ of 195. 

Image attribution: This image is a composite of two images. The Langan part is by Ben David [CC BY-SA 2.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. The bat part is originally by Oren Peles; Derivative work by User MathKnight [CC BY 2.5  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons. 

A Dam Shame: Linguistic Relativism and Necrophilic Bestiality

By Elton Brawn (with additional files from Stephen Kunk)►

Crystal meth is a hardcore drug. And if Whitney Nycole of Washington state didn't know that, she sure as shit does now. Why? Because poor Ms. Nycole had the dubious privilege of watching a meth-head have sex with a dying beaver. And that's about as hardcore as things get right there.

Nycole first found the beaver after it had been hit by a car and left for dead. At that point, the animal was still alive, though badly injured. She hurried home to get a box so she could transport the beaver to a veterinary clinic. But when she came back, things had taken a turn for the worse.

At first she thought that Richard Delp, 35, was merely comforting the dying animal. But, as she neared, she discovered that Mr. Delp had things other than palliative care on his mind. His pants were down, and he was having intercourse with the beaver. Nycole, horrified, called the police, who arrested Delp on charges of animal cruelty and possession of methamphetamine. Tragically, however, the beaver couldn't be saved. It had perished while Delp was fucking it.

But why? Why would a man have sex with a beaver? Aside from the fact that meth is one hell of a drug, there may be something else going on here as well.

There is a hypothesis in linguistics that the languages we speak influence and shape our thoughts and even our perceptions. Known as Whorfianism, the hypothesis asserts that the structure and content of the languages we speak are reflected in the realities that we experience. Rather than merely conveying objective reality to us, our brains construct a subjectivized version of reality, and both language and culture play an unconscious role in determining how we experience the world.

And so, according to Whorfianism, Richard Delp may actually have believed he was making love to a woman rather than a dead animal. "Beaver"—the word refers to a large semi-aquatic rodent with a flat tail and a penchant for building dams. But it also refers to the genitalia of a female human being. What if Delp, due to a semantic error (not to mention a sort of synesthesia of the concrete and figurative) deep in his meth-addled brain, saw a beautiful woman with willingly parted legs lying there on the side of the road that night? What if Delp merely got "whorfed" into committing the indecent act rather than actively choosing to do something horrendous?

Nobody wins in this story. It starts with an innocent beaver being hit by a car, and it ends with necrophiliac bestiality. It's a goddamn nightmare for everybody involved (even for Richard Delp, who was presumably interrupted before he could climax). Really, the only silver lining here is that things weren't as bad as they could have been. Indeed, the only winners here are the women Delp might have assaulted that night had he not laid eyes on that mangled Castor canadensis when he had.

Also, one has to wonder if this incident indexes rising anti-Canadian sentiment in the United States of America. In addition to signifying the vagina, the beaver is also a symbol of Canada as a nation. Given the increased trade tension between Canada and the United States at present, Delp’s erotic aggressions could speak to more than just the potency of meth. The brutality done to the beaver may suggest that the American collective unconscious, when fully awakened, seeks all-out assaults against its meek northern neighbor and the figurative vaginas that so adequately emblematize them. 

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Elton Brawn is the nom-de-plume of a very famous, very flamboyant singer who has been knighted.