by Jeff Glorfeld

A movie made 37 years ago explains the crazy world of 2025.

The US filmmaker  John Carpenter could rightly be called a cult  artist. His movies always  attract a ready audience of  knowledgeable fans, and  are usually moderately  successful, but it isn’t likely  you’ll see him on a red  carpet during awards season,  nor is he a frequent guest on the chat-show circuit.  

One of Carpenter’s  best-known films is The  Thing, made in 1982, a  creature feature about a  shape-shifting alien doing  battle with the human  occupants of a research  facility in Antarctica.

It  was a remake of a 1951  production, The Thing From  Another World, which itself  was adapted from the 1938  novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell.  The 1951 movie was  made at a time when the  US was in the grip of one of its periodic internal wars,  as conservative politicians ginned up a “Red Menace” to instil fear in the populace.  

According to opportunistic politicians such as muck-raking Republican senator Joe  McCarthy, The Reds – communists – were living among us, undetected, biding their  time until their Soviet masters told them to strike, with the aim of destroying the American way of life.  

The alien in the story, The Thing, had the ability to kill people and then perfectly  mimic them, allowing it to infiltrate the human community and eventually take it  over. As analogies go, it isn’t subtle but it is effective.  

One Carpenter film that is mentioned surprisingly often lately in these bruised and bewildered United States – surprisingly because when it came out in 1988 it was  not especially well received – is They Live.

Carpenter fans who love this movie will concede that it’s not without some  glaring flaws, but what makes it noteworthy today is its central theme. Now, before  we go any further, SPOILER ALERT: here comes the big reveal.

They Live came out  37 years ago, so if you were planning to rent the DVD or stream it on Netflix this  weekend, sorry.  The central plot of the movie is this: Aliens have invaded our planet Earth – or at  the very least the US part of it – and taken control. But it was a bloodless conquest,  done by stealth.

These aliens have the ability to appear perfectly human and now live and  work among us. How? Doesn’t matter, something to do with technology.

More  importantly, the aliens have co-opted key humans into their takeover, by giving them access to vast wealth and power.  Again, the analogy isn’t deep.

When Carpenter made They Live – he was the film’s  director, co-wrote the soundtrack, and wrote the screenplay, based on a 1963 short  story by Ray Nelson – the US was being ruled by a conservative government fronted  by actor Ronald Reagan.  

At the time, in an interview, Carpenter called the aliens in his movie “free  enterprisers from outer space” who are “exploiting Earth as if it’s a third-world planet.  I began watching TV again. I quickly realised that everything we see is designed to  sell us something.

The only thing they want to do is take our money.”  It doesn’t take a background in literature or cinema studies to see the similarities  between Carpenter’s outlook in They Live and the world we live in today – the world  of Trump’s USA in particular.  

The aliens remain hidden but their human partners, the ones who have betrayed  their fellow earthlings in exchange for bigger yachts, more and better holiday homes,  and larger tax loopholes, are fully revealed.

In Trump 2.0, along with the accumulation of stupefying wealth is the demolition of almost 250 years of democratic governance and the rule of law, replaced by a  mutant hyper-capitalist oligarchy run by fanatics and ideologues.  

Most upsetting is that so many people who have not been invited to join the  alien invasion party and reap the rewards have been so thoroughly deluded by the  traitorous humans that they stupidly go along with the desecration and destruction.  

It’s like the chook helping out the farmer by sharpening the axe.  They live, but so do we. As the Neil Young song goes, keep on rockin’ in the free  world.  

After many happy years living and  working in St Kilda and Wheatsheaf,  Jeff and Carol Glorfeld decided to  retire to the motherland, California.  What a great idea (said in a sarcastic  tone of voice). We’ve kept our  Aussie passports up to date and our  eyes open for cheap airfares home.  Meanwhile, we stay busy.

Jeff has a  radio show, the Down Under Hour,  music from Australia, on KKRN  88.5FM, streaming at KKRN.org.  Have a listen.  

by Jeff Glorfeld

Christmas 2024 in the Glorfeld home was a subdued affair. My father, Bill, a room-filling character in life, died the previous February and this was our first Christmas without him, and my mother had recently moved into an assisted-living facility – what we in our young ignorance used to call an old folks home – and wasn’t adjusting well.  

Nevertheless, Carol and I tried to have some fun with the holiday spirit – I put up strings of coloured lights outside, and we decorated a tree, a little potted pine.

We cooked a turkey and all the necessary side dishes, and made merry with my mum and brother, and Carol’s younger sister.  

Another change this Christmas was in our gift giving. Apart from hanging stockings on the fireplace mantle, stuffed with geegaws and gimcracks and chocolates, we didn’t go overboard with presents. I must’ve been very good last year, though, because Santa (it was really Carol but I don’t want her to know I know it wasn’t really from Santa) surprised me with a copy of Paul Kelly’s book How to Make Gravy.  

Published in 2010, I could’ve used it on my daily Kyneton to Melbourne round trip on the Bendigo V-Line – as entertainment and for the physical workout – my paperback edition weighs in at 568 pages, including photographs and the index.  

Carol and I are Paul Kelly fans and not embarrassed to say so. In 1986 we’d settled into a flat in St Kilda and had discovered the thriving music scene in the pubs and clubs along the Esplanade and Fitzroy Street.  

One of the first shows that really captured our hearts was Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, at The Venue, the old Earls Court, showing every one of its decades as a bayside pleasure palace.

Kelly and his band had recently released their  breakthrough album, Gossip, four vinyl sides, 24 songs, each one a well-polished gem. It was a band with the wind in its sails, a future so bright, they needed to wear sunglasses.  

After that show we became a Paul Kelly version of Deadheads, travelling around Victoria to hear the magic.

It seemed unfortunate when the Coloured Girls became the Messengers, reportedly because non-Australians (Americans?) would not see the connection between the band’s name and lyrics in the Lou Reed song Walk On the Wild Side, but we were truly disappointed when Kelly broke up the band in the early 1990s.

We went to hear his new groups a few times but his legend outgrew pubs and clubs and we didn’t feel the love in the big theatres and stadiums.  

In the book he talks about touring in the US, trying to become established in that massive, lucrative market. He describes having a day off in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2002, and taking a guided tour of the Stephen Foster Memorial, a museum devoted to the early American songwriter, author of such standards as Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and Beautiful Dreamer.  

“Touring is often a grind,” Kelly writes, “touring in America in particular – the absence of family, the endless interstates, the queues at airports, the  incomprehensibility of the sports pages in the newspapers, the indifference of sound checks. But every once in a while, unbidden and unforeseen, a golden day or hour bowls up to you.”

Turns out, the Stephen Foster Memorial in Pittsburgh provided just such a golden day.  When I unwrapped the book on Christmas day I declared that I wouldn’t sit down and read it from start to finish – it was too massive.

It seemed like a book that you’d open at random, or search out a time or place or person or song from the index and read what Kelly had to say.  

A few days ago I looked up Steve Connolly, the older brother of one of my  friends at The Age, Rohan Connolly, one of Australia’s foremost AFL journalists. Steve Connolly was the guitarist in Coloured Girls and Messengers and was one of the chief architects of their sound.

He went on to produce records for Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, and others, before his tragic death in 1995, from a heart infection.  

Scattered among Kelly’s stories and reminiscences are lyrics to some of his songs.  As a fan of his music, I’ve known that he’s as much a storyteller as a musician, and these lyrical interludes help the stories flow from one to the next.

It’s February now and, true to my prediction, the book has become a treasured companion in troubled and trying times. It sits on the corner of my desk, from where I can open it at random, and disappear into a world that’s real but somehow, from far away northern California, slightly magical.

I reckon I’ve still only read about half of it. On my weekly radio program, The Down Under Hour, on tiny community station 88.5FM, broadcasting from a studio in Round Mountain, with a tower on Hatchet Mountain, I often find myself reaching for Paul Kelly records.

They can be from the 1980s all the way into the 2000s, and I can always find something to fit the mood.  My listeners think so too – I’ve had more good feedback about Paul Kelly’s music than any other artist.

I’ve just flipped open the book and found these lyrics to the song, Gathering Storm, from his 1995 album Deeper Water.  

I rise up and turn on the light  

Now it’s shining in my window  

My walls are strong  

My chimney’s smoking  

God speed you in the gathering storm  

After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age, journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife Carol, went back  to California, the land of his birth, where in the past seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet.   

In late January 2017 an insignificant US Republican Party dogsbody named Kellyanne Conway earned long-lasting infamy and ridicule when she told television interviewer Chuck Todd on the Meet The Press program that clearly false claims made by newly elected president Donald Trump’s press secretary,  Sean Spicer, were not lies, or “falsehoods”, but “alternative facts”.  

It’s worth remembering that Conway trotted out her logic-defying statement in defense of a lie over a trivial matter.

Trump claimed the crowd at his inauguration ceremony in Washington, DC, was the biggest ever seen, which was a demonstrable lie.  

Call it an alternative fact, or “untruth”, if you want, but The Lie is the hallmark of the Trump era in US politics.

In 2021 the fact-checking unit of the Washington Post reported that, “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency – averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”  

One of the strategies mastered by Trump and those who serve him is to deny and lie whenever confronted by inconvenient facts, and, if all else fails, profess your devout Christian faith. If you keep the lies coming fast and fantastical, any media watchdogs that might choose to check them will be overwhelmed, and the 24-hour news cycle is such that yesterday’s lies will be buried under layers of new lies.  

In my 30-plus years living in Australia, it seems to me that political discourse throughout the layers of government was often heated, sometimes rancorous, but generally took place with a policy outcome in sight.

Admittedly, some of Paul Keating’s  withering takedowns of rivals were pure theatre: “The little desiccated coconut’s under pressure and he’s attacking anything he can get his hands on,” he said of Liberal leader  and future prime minister John Howard; and for another Libs leader, John Hewson, this: “He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up;” and for Howard’s treasurer,  Peter Costello, “He’s all tip and no iceberg.”  

A lot of Trump’s shameless, cruel, thuggish behaviour has found favour among certain types of people in Australia, and not just fools carrying Nazi flags. Still, I cannot  imagine an Australian politician showing such complete lack of human decency as he and his trolls have during the recent fires in southern California.  

While the fires raged, while firefighters and first-responders were on the ground,  risking their lives, while the people of Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs  were in the midst of experiencing devastation and loss and heartbreak, Trump and his stooges were delivering a torrent of lies to gullible and subservient media about who supposedly was at fault for the ongoing disaster.

Their completely transparent intent was to score political advantage over Democrats and culture-war opponents in  positions of authority.  

Even before the fires ignited in Los Angeles, Trump was preparing an assault on California’s progressive Democratic political structure.

Here’s a statement he made in September while still on the campaign trail: “…and the reason you have no water, you have the canals, the reason you have no water is because [California Governor] Gavin  ‘Newscum’ [his surname is Newsome] didn’t want to do it. I had it all done … So you have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north, with the snow caps in Canada, and it is all pouring down, and they have essentially a very large faucet, and you turn the faucet, and it takes a day to turn it, it takes one day to turn it, it’s massive,  it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you, and you turn that, and all of the water goes into the – aimlessly into the Pacific, and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles … And you have so  much water. And all those fields that are right now barren, the farmers would have all the water they needed.”  

It sounds like the mad rambling of someone in the throes of dementia, but it’s part of the formula – surround the lies with gibberish and no one knows what to make of any of it. It almost sounds funny, the old fool trash talking about things that clearly  don’t exist.

But then his pet media pals pick it up, clean it up, and suddenly the focus isn’t on the victims but on supposed scapegoats: Democratic politicians; the Mayor of  Los Angeles, Karen Bass, a black woman; Kristin Crowley, the first openly LGBTIQA+  person to serve as Los Angeles fire chief; and a tiny endangered fish, the smelt.  

As Trump and his minions embraced and amplified the lies, officials who could have been working on recovery efforts, instead were forced to spend hours defending themselves from false accusations.  

On January 20, as he was taking the oath of office to become US president for a second term, Trump took a moment to further denigrate the people who battled the Los Angeles flames. “From weeks ago, without even a token of defense, they’re raging through the houses and communities.”  

“Without even a token of defense”, he said. I wonder how the thousands of first responders with boots on the ground, putting their lives on the line, feel about that.    

After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age,  journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife  Carol, went back to California, the land of his birth, where in the past  seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And  Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet. Jeff is also the voice behind The Down Under Hour which is broadcast every Wednesday at 1pm, in California, on  radio KKRN 88.5FM. The show can be live-streamed at KKRN.org. In Victoria that’s 7am Thursday. Several programs have been archived on the website – well worth a look!  

From California, Jeff Glorfeld pops his head up above the parapet and  surveys the wreckage.

Blame-storming

Anyone who has worked in a corporate setting has experienced the phenomenon known as blame-storming, the action that always occurs after an organisation has experienced a colossal screw-up.

Under the guise of figuring out what went wrong and why, the most important task is to decide who’s to blame.

The US presidential election is over and the Democratic Party has had its collective ass – or arse, if you prefer – handed to it. Thus far we have seen pundits  blame Kamala Harris for a multitude of mistakes, including not distancing herself sufficiently from Joe Biden.

The Guardian published a story citing a “masculinity researcher” (is that even a real job?) who said Harris lost because she failed to impress young men. Several commentators blamed the outcome on the racism and misogyny inherent in US society.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent darling of the liberal Left, blames the entire Democratic Party, which he says has abandoned the values and needs of working-class people.

These are all fair criticisms. But looking beyond the all-important assigning of blame, the choice of Donald Trump to be the next US president reveals some fundamental facts: most voters in this country have turned their backs on principles such as the rule of law, the separation of church and state (Christian nationalism is now firmly entrenched), the equality of all people (white men to the front) and no longer believe honour and integrity matter.   

The US system is often called an experiment: a democracy. It is weighted down by checks and balances, making it slow to produce action but hopefully allowing it opportunities to be fair and deliberative.   

To all these attributes, US voters have said, yeah, nah, no thanks, not any more.   

Sane-washing   

This campaign cycle saw a couple of new terms emerge in political commentary. One is “sanewashing”. We started seeing it more often in the closing months of the presidential campaign, as the deterioration of Donald Trump’s mental abilities became increasingly obvious.   

Writer Jeff Tiedrich explained it in his Substack column as “the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent”.   

Because of this sanewashing, most voters never saw the 78-year-old Hitler fanboy at his demented worst.   

Wishcasting   

Now that the sanewashing of Trump has had the desired effect, the newest media practice to emerge is called “wishcasting”, sort of magical forecasting.   

How that works is, commentators ignore the Nazi stuff, the criminal convictions, the cognitive decline, the overt sexism and racism, the dictator-on-day-one remarks, the “suckers and losers” sneers, the promise of mass deportations and concentration camps, and the punishing of his rivals and critics.

Instead, they predict – wishcast – that, as opposed to hateful, vengeful candidate Trump, a new Trump will appear and be reasonable, dignified and rational – none of which he has ever been at any time in his life.   

Upfront   

I’m not hiding anything here; my family contributed a couple hundred dollars to the Democratic cause and in return received a Harris-Walz sign, which we put up in our front yard, clearly visible from the street.

Over the next few weeks I joked (?) to friends that, happily, there were still no bullet holes in the sign.

Also, in honour of my dad, who was a proud veteran and rusted-on Democrat, we hung his US flag off the front of the house, which we never do.   

Americans display the flag like a fetish – it’s abso-bloody-lutely everywhere and I think it most often denotes false patriotism and cheap virtue signaling. But I  wanted to send the message, combined with the Harris-Walz sign, that we vote Democrat and respect the country’s core values.

Time to take the tinsel down   

After the election disaster, the next morning I went out and removed the  Harris-Walz sign. Why? Because we lost, the election was over. But, after I  thought about it a bit more, I realised that I felt fear that leaving the sign there might make my home a target for MAGA people, who, emboldened by their victory and, Trump-like, would be seeking to punish those who opposed them.   

I’ve also left my dad’s flag up, as a sign that we’re good Americans too.   

Daring liars   

The distinguished American journalist H.L Mencken, whose career stretched from 1900 into the 1940s, is quoted as saying, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”, which is a paraphrase of the actual quote: “No one in this world, so far as I know – and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”   

He also said: “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”   

How has Trump managed to prevail? He has demonstrated time and again that he lacks compassion and empathy, that he is wholly motivated by personal gain and greed, and cares nothing for concepts such as the common good.   

He will do and say anything, as long as it benefits him. Powerful forces came together to put him into power. We can only guess at what happens next.   

When I left the USA, in 1983, the only Australian music to be heard on mainstream radio was Men At Work, songs from that amazing album Business As Usual, which was released in 1981 in Australia, 1982 in the USA.

Coming back to the USA in 2018, imagine my surprise to discover that – nothing much had changed!

Radio stations were still playing Down Under and Who Can It Be Now, and occasionally they’d add some INXS, but that’s pretty much all there was.

So when a cool little community radio station broadcasting out to my part of northern California ran an on-air promotion telling listeners that they too could be on the radio, I thought, why not, and pitched the idea of a show playing nothing but music made by Australians.

And, given Americans’ familiarity with Men At Work, I called my show The Down Under Hour.

The music I play runs from the 1960s right up to 2024 and includes rock, country, a taste of hip-hop, some mainstream pop, a tiny bit of jazz, and even some classical. You will also hear music by Central Victorian artists such as Adrian Kosky and The Cartwheels.

The show has been running for more than a year now, once a week, and I have stayed with the format, with a few exceptions: we love New Zealand people and music; and we don’t mind if Aussie musicians go overseas to make records, as long as they come home afterwards.

We have a bit of fun with expat musos like Nick Cave and Acca Dacca in an occasional segment I’ve named “Still Call Australia By Phone”.

As one of my good mates says, “It’s songs I don’t know by bands I’ve never heard of ”. It’s all just a bit of fun, and maybe, just maybe, some poor Yanks out there will be enthused enough to go looking for more Australian music.

The Down Under Hour is broadcast every Wednesday at 1pm, here in California, on radio KKRN 88.5FM.

The show can be live-streamed at KKRN.org. In Victoria that’s 7am Thursday – sorry about that. Several programs have been archived on the website, so check that out too.

Jeff Glorfeld moved from Wheatsheaf to California a few years back. He loves great music and a decent red. Oh, and Carol, his wife.

The 2024 contest to see who will be the next president of the United States, between incumbent Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump, is being called the most important in the country’s history, by many professional political observers.

Adding to the dramatic tension is that if one word can be used to describe the political situation in the US today it is “divided”. Between the progressive liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans there is no apparent common ground, no space for negotiation, no mutual respect.

Democrats want to win in 2024 so they can continue trying to find solutions to the myriad problems facing the country. Republicans want power and they want to obliterate their Democratic opponents in the process.

In early 2016 I was greeted by a friend in the Coles parking lot in downtown Daylesford. He had a question for me. “He can’t win, can he?” was the fearful query “he” being Donald Trump, and my friend was asking me, as an American, if I believed Trump had a chance to win in the upcoming US presidential election. “Yes, he absolutely can win,” was my reply.

It turned out I was wrong, but right. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election by almost 3 million votes, but through the peculiar institution called the Electoral College, he won the presidency.

Four years of a Trump presidency convinced enough Americans that he was unfit to hold public office – he lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and don’t let anyone tell you that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen. It wasn’t.

So now it is 2024 and I can feel the fear of my friend in the Coles parking lot welling up again. Trump can’t win, can he?

As I am writing this, Trump has been declared the winner of a piece of political theatre called the Iowa Caucus, which, in a normal presidential campaign, is a relatively insignificant event used to judge who the voters in the state of Iowa want to see as their party’s nominee in the national election.

In 2016 most political commentators dismissed Trump as a publicity seeking clown, a self-promoting con man and reality-show TV personality.

In 2024, after his so-called “landslide” victory in Iowa, even supposedly legitimate media sources such
as the New York Times are diving for their dictionaries looking for bigger and better adjectives to describe the significance of the event.

But looked at another way, Iowa is one of the most thoroughly conservative states, but only 51 per cent of eligible voters selected Trump, and he was running against inept Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and insignificant Nikki Haley.

In other words, after being embarrassed in 2016, the US media machine is blowing gale-force hot air
into Trump’s sails in 2024.

Previously I described a two-party system in play in the US, but it isn’t that simple.

Poised against the Democrats is a divided Republican Party: traditional Republicans, sometimes nostalgically called the party of Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981-89, who supposedly believe in low taxes and minimal government intervention; and a relatively new force, the MAGA Republicans, who have rapidly evolved into an anti-democracy cult with Donald Trump at its head and the Murdoch-owned Fox News as its propaganda wing.

The Biden administration has had to handle wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, steep economic inflation and worsening pressures on the country’s southern border brought on by many thousands of people seeking entry into the US in search of a better life.

China remains a potent adversary, and the Biden government has at least made an effort to address climate change, which should have been at the top of the list, but wasn’t.

Meanwhile, after four years as president, Donald Trump racked up 91 charges across four criminal cases, including 44 federal charges and 47 state charges, all felonies.

He has been found guilty of sexual abuse and defamation against writer E. Jean Carroll, his companies have been found guilty on multiple charges of criminal fraud and keeping false business records in a long-running scheme to avoid paying taxes.

Trump has been on the campaign trail since he was ousted from office in 2020, and his rallies across the country have taken on the air of holy-roller revivals or rock-star concerts, with his delirious followers (commentator Jeff Tiedrich calls them “worshippers”) decked out in MAGA outfits in red, white and blue.

In these events Trump rages and complains wildly and often incoherently about how badly he has been treated, how innocent he is of all the charges against him, how the 2020 election was stolen from him, and how he will punish all those who failed to support him.

Lately he has taken to paraphrasing the writings of Adolf Hitler, describing his opponents as vermin and accusing migrants of poisoning the pure blood of America. He has quipped about becoming a dictator, if re-elected.

Sadly, these deranged comments have increased Trump’s support in parts of the country. He has tapped into a bitter, hateful, repressed fear among many Americans: fear of migrants, fear of people with some “other” sexual orientation, fear of empowered women.

Trump speaks to these people, encourages their fears and hatreds, tells them liberal progressive ideas are destroying their way of life. And they hear him and believe him. They are willing to give up on American democracy.

Can he win in 2024? Yes, absolutely. But we all better hope not.

After many happy years living in Victoria, former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife Carol, went back to California, where he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And Trump. Once so far. And Covid. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive…well, not yet. While he waits for them, Jeff hosts a radio show with 60 minutes of Australian music, the Down Under Hour, on radio KKRN 88.5FM, streaming live at KKRN.org, on Thursdays at 8am. Tune in!