Punk’d to Action
There was a time when movies were more intelligent, engaging and entertaining. For years, I’ve been bereft of films that spoke to or entertained me. The Crying Game had given way to The Danish Girl, Goodfellas to Mall Cop, Stalingrad to Aloha. A dummification of filmed entertainment had slowly been eroding intelligent movie going for the last 15 plus years. With predictable results. In many ways it serves as an allegory for our politics today. Keep it simple – good vs evil, enemy vs friend, blue vs red, law vs order, fake vs truth. But are we really that simple?
When I first moved to America, I marveled at its refreshing openness. People took me at face value. There wasn’t that Irish brand of cynicism to personal interactions that I’d grown up with. But this was something different. The cultural positivity was almost blinding. I recall thinking there was a naive gullibility to it all, perhaps borne of American exceptionalism, but in the end I embraced it for what it was. America was good to me. I was good to America.
Fast forward two decades later, that very American openness is being exploited and used against us. And in shockingly obvious ways. Where social media once brought us together, it now tears us apart, memes, groups, influencers, troll farms setup and run by foreign actors make it easy to dissuade, incite, inflame and misinform. And for a lot of people, they don’t even know they are a victim of it. (There are a lot of great trusted sources on this topic, here’s one I enjoyed recently that I encourage you to watch PBS’s Hacking your Mind)
Our press don’t get a free pass either. They helped create the monster. Failing to meaningfully push back on falsehoods & absurdities in pursuit of higher ratings and “likes” during these press conferences (with the exception of Axio’s Jonathan Swan).
Media: Sir, if you lose the election, will you leave office quietly?
President: No.
Media: 200k people have died from COVID since March, could you have done better?
President: I give myself a Grade A +. They said 2 million people would have died.
Media: Do you take any responsibility for people ingesting Lysol?
President: No. I didn’t suggest that. But what have you got to lose? Try it.
OAN: What about Hunter Biden?
Gaslighting on steroids. While this is obviously a made up exchange it’s not far from reality. I remember in Ireland or Britain, Prime Ministers would never get away with evading an answer on significantly important stories impacting their populations with outrageously BS responses and falsehoods. Their press would collectively eat them alive. Here, it seems the press only care about getting their questions in and to hell with the answer, in fact, the more controversial the better. Think “likes”. They ask, he answers, next question. Absurd. And it’s broken.
Dystopian television shows like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Man in the High Castle, stories that seem way out there in terms of plausibility, are suddenly not entirely so far fetched. I remember in one of The Handmaiden‘s episodes, a backstory flashback explaining how Gilead came to be. It wasn’t sudden. It took some time. But for June Osborne (played by Elisabeth Moss), she simply wasn’t paying attention while all the institutions of democracy eroded, slowly in front of her. That is, until it was too late.
Which brings me to Barton Gellman’s chilling article this week in the Atlantic – The Election That Could Break America. I’m not going to attempt to summarize it here, but I strongly urge you to read it, suffice to say, it’s disturbing and it’s happening right in front of my eyes, but this time, I can do something about it.
Coldly staring me right in the face, is a man clearly unfit for the office he serves, at best, and worse, inexplicably a willing or “useful idiot” of foreign powers (Russia for one) who want to see this country implode. We are nearly there.
Democracies were borne of bloodshed & strife. Lives risked in the pursuit of peace, justice and democratic power. But rather than shed blood, I will go and vote in person despite the raging COVID-19 virus ravaging this country. Why? Beware the red mirage. This President plans on declaring victory on election night – polls and analysis show Republicans coming out to vote in person, while twice as many Democrats will vote by mail, thus delaying a final tally of the winner. So on election night, it will appear the President has won, despite the fact that a majority of votes have yet to be counted. The President plans to use that time to steal the election.
In fact he’s already doing it by getting you to believe the election that hasn’t even happened yet is already rigged (again, read Gellman’s disturbing article on the plan’s details). So this Nov 3rd, I’ll be there with my N95 mask on my face, goggles, gloves… the lot… so that there is no daylight between what sensibly should be a resounding landslide victory for Biden and an attempted coup.
The revolution maybe televised, but voting for Biden in person may give the country a bloodless outcome and save our democracy in the process. And just maybe, I’ll get to see a new era of intelligent movies that inspire, engage and yes, enrage.
