Brandon Coale Notes

One of my nephews recently turned 18 years old, so he gave me a good excuse to rewatch the fun 1988 movie 18 Again!, starring George Burns as 81 year old Jack Watson and Charlie Schlatter as his grandson David Watson, but Jack inhabits David’s 18 year old body after an accident switches their souls.

It is a good college movie with lots of college age young adults, and much of the college activities could still happen today.  Unfortunately the movie does somewhat glamorize gambling, which has led a lot of people into poverty and crime, but overall it’s still a good movie.  Hopefully college students still don’t bully other students to do their homework for them; in the movie Charlie Schlatter’s character David Watson is bullied into writing papers for three jock-like students.  I’m not recommending students do this, but in our internet age, I’m sure there are some websites promoting services for freelancers for hire who will write papers for students who don’t want to do the work.  Also, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools could be used to automatically write papers for students, and this must be a bit of a nightmare for those professors who care that their students actually understand and retain the content of what they teach in their lectures.

In the movie Jack Watson was friends with the U.S. president Harry S. Truman.  There is a great scene in the movie after Jack and David’s souls are switched and Jack is inhabiting David’s 18 year old body, where David’s history professor believes he knows the full story behind the “S” in Harry S. Truman, but Jack who knew Harry personally is able to correct the professor.  This is one of my favorite scenes in the movie, not for its historical accuracy (in this case the professor is correct, evidently Truman’s middle initial “S” is not an abbreviation of one particular name but was instead to honor both his grandfathers who had names that started with S), but for the principle that students should be allowed to debate the teacher if they believe they know more to the story than what the teacher is saying.  Especially with the field of history, it is very possible that even college history professors who know a lot, still may not know everything about the subject.  Fortunately with the internet making it much easier for everyone to come across good books and archived newspapers and writings, a lot of us are able to learn the real truth about what actually went down in history.  I have the following books on my list of non-fiction history books to read which have provocative titles:

For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, Second Edition by Charles Adams, 2001

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution by Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D, Ph.D., 2007

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson, 2008

New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (2008) by Burton W. Folsom Jr, 2008

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D, 2009

Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America by Andrew P. Napolitano, 2009

Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History by Andrew P. Napolitano, 2010

FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt, and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America by Burton W. Folsom Jr and Anita Folsom, 2011

Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom by Andrew P. Napolitano, 2012

Crony Capitalism in America: 2008–2012 by Hunter Lewis, 2013 (free download at:  https://www.axiospress.com/bookstore/crony-capitalism-in-america/ (also available for free download at:  https://mises.org/library/book/crony-capitalism-america

The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David Stockman, 2013

Uncle Sam Can’t Count: A History of Failed Government Investments, from Beaver Pelts to Green Energy by Burton W. Folsom Jr and Anita Folsom, 2014

9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America, and Four Who Tried to Save Her by Brion McClanahan, 2016

Daylight Robbery: How Tax Shaped Our Past and Will Change Our Future by Dominic Frisby, 2019

Croynism: Liberty Versus Power in Early America 1607-1849 by Patrick Newman, 2021 (free download at: https://mises.org/library/book/cronyism-liberty-versus-power-early-america-1607-1849

Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State 1849-1929 by Patrick Newman, due out late 2024/early 2025

The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance by David T. Beito, 2023

Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better by Lyn Alden, 2023

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula by Wilfred Reilly, 2024

The Greatest Ponzi Scheme on Earth: How the US Can Avoid Economic Collapse by Les A. Rubin and Daniel J. Mitchell, 2024

How the British Invented Communism (And Blamed It on the Jews) by Richard Poe, 2024

Certainly most high school history/social studies teachers have never dug this deep into the topics in these books I’ve listed, and many college professors may also be unaware, choose to ignore, or worse: intentionally don’t present certain information and all the sides to the arguments to their students in order to present history to fit their personal bias.  The 18 Again! movie stays neutral regarding Harry Truman’s contributions to whether or not he did the following as any decent president should do: improve world peace, maintain a stable monetary system to avoid inflation, don’t spy on your citizens and let them have their freedoms, set policies that encourage businesses to create jobs, set policies that are fair to the elderly that don’t wipe out their life savings, but in Brion McClanahan‘s book “9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America, and Four Who Tried to Save Her”, Harry Truman is one of the 9 presidents who screwed up America, in Brion’s estimation.

A funny personal story I have regarding this movie is when I was in junior high school, I was at my friend Tim H.’s house and we were watching it with Tim’s mother, or his mother happened to be watching the part of the movie with us when David Watson is in his college art class where the students are drawing a live female nude model posing for them, and the scene contains some brief nudity.  I still remember Tim’s mother telling me “Brandon, you might not want to tell your parents that you had watched this movie at our house”.  Also in my real life, about 5 years ago one of my coworkers mentioned to me that her daughter had posed nude for an art class at a community college here in Michigan, so evidently this is something that college art departments still do.  I’m guessing this is done later in the semester to make sure only the serious students who have stuck with the class are present, and I would also guess that the students are asked to first turn in their smart phones to the teacher so that the model feels comfortable that actual pictures aren’t taken.

The movie must have been filmed in 1987 when George Burns was 91 years old (in the movie he is supposed to be 81).  George Burns must have had great DNA because he does a great job in the movie and in real life he went on to live to be 100 years old.  Charlie Schlatter does a great job imitating Burn’s mannerisms.  The thing I love about this movie is the grandfather/young adult grandson relationship, it must be one of the best of these relationships in movie history.  In the movie George Burns’ character Jack Watson has a good “do your best/live life to the fullest” attitude, and I’m sure Burns was like that in his personal life as well.