Author Archives: diestl

What unfolds on screen is one battle after another, stitched together into a disjointed revolutionary tale that comes across like delusionary story held together by dry spaghetti. To begin with, the film simply did not need to be this long. And because it insists on its length, it also insists on stuffing itself with forcedContinue reading “One Battle After Another”

Homelessness is no longer treated as a problem to solve. It has become a revenue stream to protect for the corrupt. Billions flow through nonprofits, consultants, task forces, housing authorities, and government programs, yet the tents multiply, the streets decay, and accountability disappears. Like the prison system, the incentive is no longer resolution. It’s maintenance.Continue reading “Poverty Brokers”

Many of us men, those of us still clinging to a cache of common sense, have experienced the same quiet tragedy: losing our wives to Donald Trump. Not in the traditional sense, of course. Not flowers, secret texts, or hotel rooms. This is a mental affair. An all-consuming fixation. A constant checking-in. A relentless emotionalContinue reading “The True Cult of Trump”

The inexpensive little ritual we once lived for, once a week, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, meant stepping into the big black red sometimes blue box filled with the smell of buttered popcorn, padded seats, sticky floors, towering screens, and the electricity of strangers sharing the same anticipation. You went there to beContinue reading “When the curtain falls.”

I grew up in Rhode Island. Small towns, real winters, Christmas traditions that actually meant something. When I moved to California in 2000, I didn’t expect to find anything that reminded me of home. But every Christmas season, my wife and I would visit Ocean Park Boulevard in Santa Monica, that stretch overlooking the ocean,Continue reading “The Revolution Will Be Streamed.”

Ode to my father.  Before he ever built anything with wood or steel, my father built his life with small, honest work. As a kid he shined shoes on street corners, set up bowling pins in the crash of the alleys, and swept floors in a garage, just to hand a few crumpled bills andContinue reading “They Took It All and Couldn’t Break the Man”

During World War II, sacrifice wasn’t a slogan, it was a way of living. Meals were smaller, cupboards were thin, and no one believed the world owed them comfort. People didn’t complain; they adapted. They understood that resilience wasn’t optional, it was survival. Today, a delay in SNAP benefits and people claim they’re on theContinue reading “Discipline to Distress”

As a Freemason, I’ve heard the word legacy more times than I can count, from brothers in the fraternity and from the men who knock on the door hoping to join. They want to leave a legacy. Of what? But legacy isn’t what most people think it is. I walked away from a career inContinue reading “Legacy”

Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad went viral, the kind of viral that feeds on outrage. A few seconds of denim, beauty, and wordplay turned into a cultural food fight about race. Then piranhas ate it up like Kobe beef. I felt it was manufactured then. It wasn’t about jeans anymore; it was about meaning, or theContinue reading “Manipulation gone wrong”

Are you walking around unconscious, meticulously brainwashed into believing you’re awake, while following the choreography of a collective sleep? Your eyes, tracked and patterned, already predicted by those who know what activates your gaze. Does that make you conscious? Or just a well-trained reflex, scrolling up and down the feed of illusion? What makes youContinue reading “The casino envision”