Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 199 skewers the 2016 VP debate as trivial, mocking Kaine and Pence while framing Clinton as a "selfish" corruptor—her immunity deals for aides destroying classified emails labeled "dirty," her foundation’s alleged criminality, and Brazil’s racist affirmative action. He contrasts Trump’s legal business losses with Clinton’s influence peddling, dismisses leftist policies like Obamacare as failures, and warns that moral decay under a Clinton presidency risks deeper societal collapse. The episode ends with a call to resist "decadence," blending political rage with cultural critiques. [Automatically generated summary]
It'll be aired tonight at 6 p.m. Pacific opposite a reshowing of Goodfellas, an absolutely classic film that follows a mobster during the period of the vice presidential debate, which I guess is what we have to talk about.
The vice presidential debate will be between two people who, I guess, are running for something.
Probably vice president.
Hence the name of the debate.
One of the candidates is Tim Kaine.
Or maybe that's the other candidate, who could be Mike Pence, unless he isn't.
Now, this debate could be particularly important because Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for bazaar president, is 70 years old and can't live forever, please God.
Whereas Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate for perfidious president, has of course been secretly dead for months.
Now, in the event Trump should suddenly die or have to be put down in the name of public safety, then Mike Pence would have to become bizarre.
And by the same token, if anyone should wander into the White House cellar and discover Hillary Clinton's body, then Tim Kaine would have to become perfidious.
The question then becomes which of these two candidates is best qualified to become as bizarre or as perfidious as the person they would replace and whether that candidate is really the other candidate or in fact the candidate we originally thought he was.
Equally important is what do these two men stand for and which of them stands for it or is it the other one?
And will it take so long to explain what they stand for that there's a possibility of missing the new episode of Lethal Weapon, which begins at 8 p.m. after whatever is on before it?
Possibly the vice presidential debate.
But that's another subject.
Oh no wait, that's this subject.
The vice presidential debate.
That's what we're talking about now, isn't it?
Or was it Goodfellows?
What a great movie.
Anyway, Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, or vice versa, will face off in a spirited back and forth that will be moderated by Elaine Quijano because no one you've ever heard of would take the job.
Tim Kaine is expected to make the case that even though Hillary Clinton is the most selfish, dishonest, insincere, and empty-hearted candidate to have ever run for perfidious president, he himself is such a nice guy that he may actually turn out to be Mike Pence.
Mike Pence is expected to point out that even though Donald Trump is temperamentally a chimpanzee who shouldn't be allowed any closer to a nuclear code than the Tasmanian devil from the Warner Brothers cartoons, he himself, Mike or Tim or whichever one he is, would actually make a great president in the event someone would just for the love of God sneak up in back of this Trump guy and pound him into unconsciousness.
So that's the preview for whatever we were talking about.
Oh yeah, the vice presidential debate on tonight, opposite Goodfellows.
Great film.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
It never gets old.
I could just play that thing over and over again the whole show.
All right.
It's the mailbag tomorrow, our 200th show.
It is our 200th show, so send in your extra special 200th anniversary questions or 10 and 200 questions or whatever you want to do.
Also, if you think of it, if you're asking a question and you think to let us know who you're leaning toward at this point, who you're leaning toward voting for, if anyone, or if you just want to get out of the country and will you take us with you?
That's all we want to know.
But it is the mailbag.
So please get your questions in.
You have to subscribe to be in the mailbag.
Don't subscribe, you can watch us on Facebook or YouTube for 15 minutes, and then the police will come to your door and confiscate your computer, but they will give you a plea deal so you don't have to go before the Senate to tell how you got rid of your emails.
After we go off on Facebook or YouTube, you can come over to the Daily Wire or download us on SoundCloud or iTunes.
But still, you cannot see this fantastic panoply of magnificence if you don't subscribe and you can't be on the show through the mailbag.
Also, of course, if you subscribe, you get Shapiro's show too, which I've heard is pretty good.
I've never met the man, but also, I don't think we're giving away the great good thing a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
I will not continue to, I cannot stand plugging myself, I just can't go on and doing it.
So, I'm going to stop reminding you, and you're going to miss the experience of a lifetime.
Not your lifetime, my lifetime.
The great good thing a secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
Just before we start, I have to say we're really sorry about what happened with our cultural correspondent Michael Knowles.
Why Faith Matters In Politics00:15:25
A lot of people were complaining.
Let me, you know, there was a technical difficulty in the satellite that goes around Neptune.
Let me be the first to take responsibility for blaming Jonathan Hay for this.
But, you know, from now on, I mean, the joke was funny, but we actually can't, the guy literally is 25 feet away and we can't get a good connection.
So, from now on, we're going to bring him into the studio and talk to him here.
And if he still breaks up like that, it's him.
You know, maybe he's just, he just comes home.
He's a hi, hop, home, for dinner.
You know, maybe just Knowles is like, all right, so this campaign, you know, this campaign has now become so degraded that I feel it's degrading me.
You know, I feel like I'm becoming a worse person for being in a country that is having this campaign.
And I really, you know, I've really been thinking about this.
There's something about politics.
There's something about politics that is, in fact, that distracts you from the important things in life and actually gets you to think in a way that is not good for you.
And this campaign is just that written large.
If you took every instruction that Jesus Christ ever gave his followers, judge not lest you be judged, you know, forgive, forgive those who trespass again.
Politics leads you into doing the exact opposite thing.
It really is true.
It is politics.
This is not blaming either candidate or anything.
These guys just make it worse.
So now we're talking about absolute garbage.
We're really talking about garbage.
We're talking about Trump's legal tax returns.
Tax returns that are completely legal.
As if anyone, you find me, you find me from Hillary Clinton to the editor of the New York Times, you find me anybody who pays more taxes than he has to pay.
And I will show you a guy who should be tarred and feathered and thrown out of the country because he doesn't know what he's doing, you know?
So Trump made a loss.
This is how Hillary is spinning this.
Hillary, and watch her, by the way.
She looks great.
She looks like she's really having a good time now.
And all the while he was using his political connections to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and extra tax breaks for his companies.
In other words, Trump was taking from America with both hands and leaving the rest of us with the bill.
Now, he says that he's the one who can fix things, but that is like letting the fox guard the hen house, right?
And here's what I really am just stunned by.
I get stunned every day in this campaign, but here's one of the many things that I'm stunned by.
He has put forth a tax plan that would cut his own taxes even more.
It would be like you're playing, paying zero.
You expect us to pay you to stay in business, all the rest of us in America?
He'd open the loopholes even wider, and according to a new independent study, he would actually listen to this, people, because this is a real shocker.
His plan would actually raise taxes for millions of middle-class families.
That's the best I've seen her since this campaign began.
Something about this debate, I mean, I think that this was the big question.
Obviously, it was a big question in her mind whether she would go on against Trump and he would blow her away.
She had this trick that she used where she goaded him and she baited him and she went after him and the psychologist told her that he couldn't stand it.
He couldn't stand it.
He went nuts.
He went nuts.
And he has made an utter fool of himself.
Now he's starting to get his footing back because his response to this was excellent.
I thought this is what he should have been doing the whole time.
This is the Trump on influence peddling.
They haven't added a single dollar of value, people like Hillary, to the American economy.
Hillary Clinton hasn't made an honest dollar in her entire life.
All she does is takes from you, takes from your country, and peddles influence to donors, special interests, and foreign actors for astronomical dollars like you've never seen before.
It's corruption of the highest order.
You know it.
I know it.
She knows it.
And plenty of other people know it, but they're not doing anything about it.
While I made my money as a very successful private business person, following the law all the way, Hillary Clinton made her money as a corrupt public official, breaking the law and putting her government office up for sale.
And now she's running for president.
By her own account, Hillary Clinton left the White House dead broke.
She said dead bro and then remember she became a senator for New York did nothing.
Remember the job she was going to produce?
She never produced them.
And then she became Secretary of State.
And now she have made more than $200 million without building a company or creating a single thing of value.
I mean, that's what he should have done during the debate.
She attacks you, you attack her.
That's the way that works, you know, but he has to defend himself.
And whether or not anybody has said to him, Steve Bannon or anybody else has said to him, this is your problem, stop doing it, I don't know.
I don't know.
Because he's still, I mean, you know, Nolte, who supports him, our friend John Nolte, who writes for the Daily Wire, he supports him.
Nolte's going nuts.
I mean, he's just saying this is his fault.
I mean, a lot of people who support Donald Trump are saying, you know, if this is what he's going to be like, you know, he's going to destroy himself.
Now, I think my guess is he's got one more shot.
And the reason is this.
One, if he comes back and does a good job at the next debate and really takes her out, you know, does this sort of thing, I think all this poll stuff is just going to go back the way it was before.
It's going to be a very close-run race.
I suspect there's a little bit of advantage to Trump outside of the polls.
A lot of people who the pollsters don't talk to probably voting for Trump.
But the polls have been very accurate for the last two elections.
So let's assume they're going to be accurate.
The other advantage he has is the media.
He has the media.
We talked about this yesterday, that they overplay their hands.
They're so obviously in the tank for Hillary.
She's so obvious.
It's not like Obama.
First, let's just take a look.
Here's Jim Vandehe from Politico, which is a left-wing site most of the time.
But he's getting it.
He understands what's happening.
Then there are these overreactions in the media.
I think one of the things that helps Donald Trump, and one of the things that discredits our profession, is that you go on Twitter and you watch the people on TV who are supposed to be sort of playing it down the middle and that people are watching for cues on whether they can trust him.
And if every single time you're like doing the end zone dance because you want to make fun of Donald Trump or you want to defend Hillary Clinton, I don't think that really helps us.
I don't think it really helps the voter.
And it ends up, I just worry at the end of this election, people are going to say they don't like her, they don't like the Republican Party, they hate us.
And so the situation we have is worse, not better than most of us.
And, you know, and this is the thing: the media's line that they're selling you is that, well, Trump is so bad that this time we're not going to be objective.
And that is too loud.
I laugh.
Ha ha.
That is me laughing, you know.
I mean, because the media sold its soul for Obama.
It was always left-leaning, but it sold its soul for Obama.
And the way they have covered and not covered the IRS scandal, the shutdown of free speech throughout the administration, the disaster, Obama's disastrous decision-making in the Middle East.
You know, today in the Wall Street Journal, a guy named Lawrence Lindsay had a thing where he just compared, he said it was called Judging Obama by His Own Standards, and he was judging Obama's economic record.
And he points out that the administration in February 2010 submitted a budget where they predicted that real growth would average 3.9% annually.
Instead, it averaged 2.2%.
2012, they put out a budget estimating they would get 3.9% growth for five years, 2%.
It's been 2%.
In February 2012, the administration submitted its fiscal year 2013 budget, estimating 3.6%.
It's gotten nothing like, again, more closer to 2%.
They're failing on their own terms.
They have introduced a new normal.
I mean, even the New York Times yesterday led with a story about Obamacare falling apart.
And of course, the New York Times says, well, Obamacare is falling apart.
What we need is more government health care.
We need a single-payer health care, which is like every con man who has ever lived, when you realize, like, oh, we gave you money to make it rain, but it hasn't rained.
Well, you didn't give me enough money.
You know, if you'd had a little bit more faith, giving me a little bit more money, that rain would become and it would be coming.
Feminism, you know, feminism has made me more miserable.
You need more feminism.
You know, that's what it is.
Leftism.
Leftism destroyed the country because you're not leftist enough.
Every con man who ever has lived from snake oil salesman to Karl Marx sold the same thing.
It's failed.
You need more.
But the Clintons, okay, so the media sold their soul for Obama, but the Clintons are just different.
The Clintons corrupt everything they touch.
Everything that the Clintons do, people make excuses for them, and then it gets worse.
So Bill Clinton is having sex or something like sex with a woman young enough to be his daughter in the Oval Office, which we pay for, and they have to make excuses for that, and then that becomes okay.
That becomes okay.
So the next guy down has to do something worse, and they make excuses for him, and it just gets worse and worse and worse.
This show, however, is going to get better and better and better because we have more interesting things to say.
But we have to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube.
Come on over to the Daily Wire.
can hear the rest.
Let's just take a look back at what's happening to the FBI.
You know, remember James Comey last week said, We're not weasels.
You call us weasels, but we're not weasels.
They're weasels.
I mean, I stood up for James Comey when he didn't indict Hillary Clinton because I thought, you know, when he didn't recommend indicting, since it wasn't his job, it wasn't his job even to recommend not indicting them.
Because I thought, why would he stand up and just rip into her like that if he was letting her off the hook?
You know, why would he do that?
And I think now it looks to me that the people who said that he was just covering for himself at some level were absolutely right.
He looks despicable.
He looks dirty.
He looks like a dirty cop.
That's what he looks like.
And now it's come out that there were immunity deals for two of the top Clinton aides that included an arrangement that the FBI would destroy their laptops after reviewing the devices.
This is from Fox News.
This is an exclusive.
The House Judiciary Committee has told Fox News.
So now let's think about this for a minute.
If on your laptop you have classified government documents, your laptop belongs to the government.
That's the law.
If you have classified documents on your laptop, the laptop is now the possession of the government.
They can take it from you anytime they want.
They can subpoena it, take it away.
They don't have to make any deal.
Instead, they made a deal with Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and a campaign staffer, Heather Samuelson, that they would limit their search of these laptops to no later than January 31st, 2015, which was when they started ditching emails because the thing became public.
Remember, they heard, oh my God, they're coming after our laptops.
Start deleting emails, start a bleach bit, pouring the bleach bit into the computer, you know, to melt the smoking gun, and then the press goes, oh, there's no smoking gun.
The FBI was saying, that's okay, we're not going to pay any attention to that, you know.
This is what the Clintons do, because you start defending them instead of your principles.
You can defend left-wing principles.
They don't work, but at least they are, the idea behind left-wing principles makes some sort of sense.
You want things to be fair.
You think the rich are too rich, the poor are too poor.
I get it.
This has been a problem with human governance since Adam and Eve.
Inequality is a problem in human life, and if it gets too bad, you want to fix it somehow.
And the best way to fix it seems to be to redistribute wealth.
It's not, but that's okay.
I understand that it seems that way.
But once you start following the people, you go down this rabbit hole.
You know, in the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, is that his name Schneiderman?
Yeah, the Wall Street Journal calls him the worst attorney general in the country.
He came out with this thing where he has banned Trump's foundation from fundraising in New York because he didn't fill out the paperwork correctly.
And he says, if you keep doing this, we'll consider it fraud.
So in other words, the Clinton Foundation, which has been a criminal organization for all this time, now, because of this dishonest attorney general, they can say this about the Trump Foundation, which hasn't done this.
I mean, it just hasn't.
Just paperwork.
He hasn't really made any kind of, he hasn't made any kind of accusation of illegality.
He's just trying to cause a scandal.
This is what's going on.
These guys are so corrupt.
You know, the other thing that everything is emptied out.
Everything is emptied out by this political process where you follow the people instead of the principles.
So, for instance, there's this vice presidential debate I'm joking about because nobody's interested in it, even though these guys, either one of them, could easily turn out to be the president with these two old people running for president.
The New York Times ran this thing saying the New York Times, which hates religion, hates Jesus, hates anything that has anything to do with Christianity.
The New York Times was talking about Tim Kaine's deep religious faith, his deep religious faith.
Well, Bill McGurn, who is an actual Catholic, an actual practicing Catholic, i.e., he's won awards for his fight for anti-abortion fight and all this stuff, he wrote a column today saying that Kaine's Catholicism is this empty social justice Catholicism that is far more Karl Marx than it is Jesus.
And he says, Mr. Kaine's recent assurance on same-sex marriage, the church he says will eventually come around to the Democratic Party's view, reflects the Hillary Clinton principle that religious conviction must yield when it collides with secular dogma.
In this sense, Mr. Kaine might be best understood as the byproduct of a decades-long effort by liberal Catholicism to make the world safe for pro-choice Catholic Democrats.
Mr. Kaine protests he's not pro-choice.
He is personally opposed.
But what can this mean?
For Mr. Kaine, it meant a giant evolution once he reached the Senate when he started to vote so that narrow pro-choice America has deemed his voting record 100% pro-choice.
McGurn says, in short, the reason Mr. Kaine's personally opposed position is no obstacle to a slot on the Democratic national ticket is because much like Barack Obama's original claim that he believed marriage was between a man and a woman, everyone understands that his Catholicism has no meaning.
Everything gets emptied out if you get rid of your principles.
Interesting Things About Negro Heads00:05:56
You know, let me show you the problem.
Let's say you're a left-winger and you want things to be equal.
And you start out saying, there's not going to be any bigotry anymore.
That's the way the left started out.
No more black and white.
Blacks are mistreated in this country.
Absolutely true.
Many years ago, blacks were mistreated in this country.
And then it starts to be, well, now we have to fix the balance because obviously the guy in power needs you to keep being aggrieved.
If he can say to you, okay, we got rid of the laws that were anti-black, anti-black people, now things are fine.
And why would you vote for him if that's all he's got?
That was a good issue.
He doesn't want to let go of that issue.
That's why revolutions devour their own children because nobody wants the revolution to end.
It just gets worse and worse and worse.
Down in Brazil, where they have had terrible, terrible bigotry problems, really bad, anti-black and all.
But at the same time, everybody's mixed race.
Everybody is intermarried, so everybody's mixed race.
So they have an affirmative action program going on.
But everybody looks tan in Brazil, okay, because they're all of different parentage.
So a guy will go in and get a job, and somebody will say, well, you took my job and you're not black.
And he'll say, well, I am black.
I have mixed race, but I'm black.
They've now established a commission, okay, to look at people and decide whether they're black.
And they can't do it through DNA because everybody's mixed race.
So these race tribunals are now mandatory for a government job, okay?
They issue guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture, and nose width.
So if you want to be, if you say, look, you know, I want to fill a position that's held for a black guy, you go in and they're going to measure the width of your nose.
Do you ever see this Kian Peale?
Did we have this Kian Peale thing?
Kean Peale had a bit where the Nazi from Inglorious Bastards essentially shows up at a black guy's house looking for Negroes.
And Kian Peele have white face put on to hide the fact.
So he decides, so the Nazi decides he's going to run a test to test to see if they're really Negroes.
Here it is.
We have developed many tests to determine if an individual is, in fact, an actual Negro.
It's very scientific.
Like when we throw the beans up against the homosexuals to see if the beans explode.
Yeah.
What kind of tests?
It's interesting that you would ask me that.
Would you mind if I removed your hat?
So that I can measure your head.
The Negro head, interestingly enough, only comes in the half sizes.
It's one of the many interesting things about the Negro head.
Hmm.
Everything seems in order.
Well, no Negro heads here.
I'll tell you what, though.
If a Negro head came in here, it would find itself detached from his Negro body.
I'll tell you that, right?
Am I right?
This is very, very good.
There are so many exceptions to the rule, which is why it's so important that we have a test which is foolproof.
More tests?
You know, hunting the Negroes all day, you really build up an appetite.
You know what I'm saying?
Can I interest you too in some delicious beets?
Interesting.
The Negro cannot resist the beat.
These guys were great, man.
They were really...
That's a guy from Modern Family.
Is that where he's right?
Yeah, he's really funny.
So, I mean, you know, the thing is, that's a joke, but it also is true.
You know, they actually did that.
The Nazis actually did say that Jews' heads, you could tell, you know, what was it called?
Phrenology.
That if you measured, you could tell if a guy was hiding out.
You know, you could measure his head and find out he was a Jew, you know, and all this stuff.
This is what stuff devolves in, when you devolves into, when you let go of your principles.
And that's why, you know, I get the alt-right slams me every time I say that race is a superstition.
Race is a superstition.
It's a superstition not because there's no such thing as genetics.
It's a superstition because the principle is, the principle is that we're children of God, that we're made in God's image.
We're all worthwhile at some level.
If you're not going to live by that principle, you are going to walk into darkness and madness.
You know, I mean, that's just the truth.
The same thing is true about honesty.
The truth, honesty, lack of corruption, straight dealing, those things come before your belief system.
They come before your belief system.
You know, when I first saw Rudy Giuliani in New York, I was living in New York.
I was a newsman.
He walked into our newsroom, and I looked at him and I thought, oh, there's an honest man.
And I didn't agree with him because I was kind of, I was still, I would say, mid-range.
I was right in the middle to the left.
I would say middle left.
But I thought, I'd rather have an honest man become, you know, being a federal attorney than a guy who agreed with me.
You know, these people are going to follow Hillary Clinton down the path.
And the thing is, in the end, I'm not even worried about them.
I'm worried about us.
I'm worried about the people listening to the show.
I'm worried about my friends, the people on my side.
This is going to be a decadent time.
We're going to have four years of decadence.
It's politically.
It's going to be bad.
Where are we going to stand?
How are we going to speak?
And that's the reason I want to hear what you're thinking when you send in mailbag questions.
I want to hear how you're deciding who you're going to vote for.
Are you all Trump?
Are you all anti-Hillary?
Are you just going to plunk for one or the other?
Are you going to go third party?
I'd just like to know what you're going to do and also hear your questions.
All right, let's move on to the culture, which is at least, you know, this is one of the things that we can hold on to because culture is often beautiful during the worst of times.
Ghost Stories Unveiled00:04:26
You know, sometimes the work of art that you're admiring was taking place while people were just being killed all over the place.
So no matter what's happening, there can be good stuff.
We were talking about Halloween stuff I like, but I also want to just, I saw a lot of movies over the weekend, so I just want to review, just talk about the shallows briefly, which was the Blake Lively picture.
Yeah, it was good, you know.
I'm not like, look, I'm not going to tell you it was a great movie or anything like that, but for an adventure, exciting shark picture, basically, she swims out into the ocean and there's a shark and she gets on this rock that's the size of your hand, and that's the movie.
The movie must have three plot points in it.
It really must have three plot points in it.
It's so efficient.
It tells its story so well and so quickly, an hour and 27 minutes, something like that.
And Blake Lively, not only is she very beautiful, she's actually a very appealing actress.
You know, she really delivers.
So anyway, I recommend it.
It's scary if you want a scary Halloween movie.
But now let's talk about ghost stories, my favorite subject, ghost stories.
For some reason that I'm not sure, I'm not entirely sure of, I love ghost stories more than any other kind of scary story.
And we have this thing that it's, they're subtle.
You know, they're subtle, and the purpose of a ghost story is not really to scare you.
It's just to send this uncomfortable little chill up your spine.
Frequently in a ghost story, there's one sentence that just makes you go like, eh, you know, and that's really what works for me, and I love that.
And so let me recommend to you, yesterday I recommended a vampire book.
Let me recommend to you what I think is one of the greatest ghost stories.
The thing about ghost stories is they became really, really popular in England.
The English love their ghosts.
They love ghosts.
But they became really popular.
Literary ghost stories became really popular in England just around the turn of the century.
You know, M. R. James, who was probably the master practitioner, he was right around the turn of the century.
And a lot of people think that the reason for this was because science was on the march, and it seemed like it was shining lights into areas of superstition that were coterminous with areas of religion.
So as science was getting rid of our superstitions, there was this great fear that it was getting rid of our religion too.
And that's true, if you don't really think about it too much, that it does get rid of certain things about religion that you might want to hold on to, but have nothing to do with the core of religion.
And so ghosts were sort of a way of being, they were frightening, but they were also a way of reassuring people, I think, that the mystery was still there.
And frequently you find that ghost stories circle around an issue of whether or not there is such a thing as the spirit.
And so they're frightening, but at the same time, they're also not.
And they also harken back into a past of darkness and a world of darkness.
One of my favorite collections is the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories by Michael Cox and R.A. Gilbert.
It has some wonderful ghost stories in it, and it goes through, I don't know, maybe a century, I would say, of ghost stories.
But it also just has some wonderful authors in it.
So if you find a story you like and look up that author, you can find even better stories.
The best story, best ghost story ever written, in my opinion, is The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs.
If you've never read The Monkey's Paw, you must read The Monkey's Paw.
It is a great, great ghost story.
It must be 10 pages long, if that.
It's really short, really concise, really well written.
W.W. Jacobs never wrote anything else of note.
I read one of his other stories.
It was nothing.
Monkey's Paw is a classic.
There's a story in there called Sme by A. M. Burridge, which I love because I've been almost in the situation in the story.
It's a story where they play a game at a party game and something scary happens.
I have been in that, and I'll tell that maybe another, maybe before Halloween, I'll tell that story.
And one of the great, last great modern practitioners of the ghost story, a guy named Robert Aikman, has a story in there called The Cicerones, which is really, really frightening, very, very subtle, really good stuff.
And while we're talking about ghost stories, since I don't want to just recommend one or two things, I know we're covering some ground that I went through last Halloween, but still, you know, there are only so many classic things.
I do also want to recommend, if you want to sit back and watch what I think is the best ghost movie ever made, it's a movie called The Innocence with Deborah Carr, and it's based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.
Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is probably the most famous ghost story ever written.
And it's been filmed, I think it's been filmed like 10 times.
It's been made into an opera.
Man Standing on Tower00:02:26
It's been made into a play.
If you haven't read the book, the book is worth reading, but it was never so well done as this picture from the 60s, which was written by Truman Capote, I believe.
I think Truman Capote wrote the script, or at least had a hand in the script.
Deborah Carr is a governess.
She goes to take care of two children.
She's kind of a sexually repressed governess.
She goes to take care of two of the most beautiful, innocent-looking children, and they just start to behave just a little weird.
And here's a scene where she looks up the battlement of this Gothic house, and she sees a man looking down at her.
But when she runs up to the battlement, she finds only the little boy is there.
Miles, how long have you been here?
I don't know.
Twenty minutes, half an hour.
Oh, then you must have seen him.
Whom?
The man who was standing here on the tower.
I've been quite alone.
Except for my greedy friends.
Well, that can't be true.
Not two minutes ago, I saw a man standing exactly here.
Perhaps it was me.
No, no, it was a man.
He was looking at me.
I expect you imagined it, or else, oh dear.
I hope you won't have to wear spectacles.
You're much too pretty for that.
I just expect I'm tired.
I haven't been sleeping well.
I know.
Flora told me.
She says you make little groans and moans all night.
Of course, one can never believe Flora.
She invents things.
She imagines them.
You mean like poor silly Miss Gittins?
And that's as weird as it gets.
There's some supernatural stuff, but it's mostly the kind of just under-the-surface malevolence and sexuality of these little kids.
And it's a really, really interesting, different story.
And when you turn it off, that's when you suddenly think, like, I don't want to be in the house alone anymore.
You know, it's like great stuff.
The Innocence, my favorite ghost story, my favorite ghost movie of all time.
All right, we'll be back tomorrow after, you know, after the debris clears away.
We're supposed to have an earthquake, aren't we?
They keep telling us, so maybe it's just the earthquake of excitement we feel over the vice presidential debates.
We will be watching it even as the rocks and ceilings crumble around us.