Thursday, February 16, 2017

We've gone about this all wrong...

 It's now obvious to me that the best way for the Left to change society is to start producing our own media.

 "What?" you ask, "Are you daft, Wannabehero? The Left produces, and has produced, a great deal of media! Where have you been?"

 Oh, I've been around. But we've gotten it wrong, folks. We've been producing the wrong kind of shit. What we need to start creating is utterly meritless schlock that appeals to mass audiences and disseminates leftist propaganda. I'm thinking along the lines of a film, directed in the style of Michael Bay, about the Spanish Civil War. Or a reality TV show about organizing a union in the style of Rupaul's Drag Race. 

 How did I arrive at this realization? Well, like most occasions when I have an idea, I was in the shower this morning and....

 In 2005 I was working for SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, as a field organizer. It was my first real foray into professional activism. A few weeks into the job another organizer, who for the purposes of this story I will name Anne, and I were conducting site visits in Maryland as part of a campaign to organize Aramark and Sodexo workers. I cannot remember the exact location, but at one point a fire alarm went off at either a hospital or college campus we were visiting where Aramark had subcontracted cafeteria workers, and we found ourselves outside waiting in a crowd of people. Anne started chatting with some nearby folks to see if any of them were cafeteria staff. Finding none that were, she nonetheless made pleasant conversation.

 I'm not sure how the subject of Hillary Clinton came up, but it did. A woman Anne spoke to felt strongly that Hillary Clinton demonstrated her ambitious character by not leaving Bill following his admission that he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Anne, on the other hand, found it endearing that Hillary had decided to stay with Bill and fix their marriage. I remained silent. Having been in high school in the mid-to-late nineties, I was sick of the Clintons. This discussion was the product of utterly meaningless tabloid drivel, drivel that had completely dominated political discourse for a decade. The United States had just re-elected George W. Bush to the presidency, a man who had blundered the US into an illegal war in Iraq, a war Clinton had voted for and her husband had laid the groundwork for. I, at that time a committed anarchist, had become a labor organizer specifically to cut through the nonsensical image-based politics of the Democratic and Republican parties in order to wage class war. What Hillary Clinton did with her personal life was the farthest thing from my mind then. 

 Now, it is absolutely true that Bush and his clique were bad and Clinton did vote for the war (and rightfully suffered for it), and the subject of whether Clinton chose to stay with her husband was and is superficial. But whether we like it or not, and as Trump's election has clearly demonstrated, more people relate to politics through themes found in entertainment than through breaking down their real interests and seeing how they line up with the political process. I could have probably engaged with the Clinton hater on why her hatred  only served to distract her from questions like "Why has the purchasing power of the average worker consistently dropped for 40 years?" or "What is happening to our civil liberties?" Perhaps such a conversation could have yielded results, but unlike asking whether Bill Clinton is really all bad or whether his wife's decision to stick with him means something, the former questions are systemic questions and systemic questions aren't easily answered. 

 For the many, many Americans disengaged from politics due to a lack of knowledge, interest, or both, the decision of who to vote for can easily come down to simple assessments of carefully curated media images of who you'd rather have a beer with, or who seems more charismatic and optimistic, or who is better at business. If you are the type who absorbs 80 hours of television a week, then Bush's compassionate conservatism,  Obama's hope and change, and Trump's "YOU'RE FIRED", mean a great deal.

 Therefore, we need to start over and start thinking simple. Really simple. Like pea-brain simple. We have to approach the MASSES, people! I'll actually start this off with my second idea: A Rupaul Reality TV show centered around union organizing... I don't have the faintest idea how to write a Reality TV script, but can't we just imagine the shenanigans that would ensue with Rupaul training people on how to salt a workplace? Or teaching people how to effectively negotiate across the table from a union-busting lawyer? I actually think Rupaul would be perfect for the latter because....


 Yeah, exactly, you don't even know what to do with yourself after looking at that picture. All you want to do is reward this fierceness with higher wages and better health insurance.

 Ok, next is the Spanish Civil War movie idea, a la Michael Bay. I'll begin the process with this intro scene, and hopefully far more qualified people can take it from there:
FADE IN
EXT - SUPPLY DEPOT
Camera pans around and around, and around, like ten times, our heroine MEGAN FOX, who is covered in honey and is only wearing a thought. 
Camera pans back, MEGAN is revealed to be a platoon commander in the P.O.U.M, a revolutionary Marxist militia operating in Catalunya. 
Cue explosions, multiple cuts, like a million edits so we get 30 angles on the fireball 
NIC CAGE emerges from the fire as General FRANCO. 

FRANCO
MWA HAHA! We will have Fascism!

Camera spins... and spins, and spins again around MEGAN FOX, who is slowly standing up, determined, completely unintimidated. She's glistening. 
MEGAN
It's on now! 
FRANCO is screaming. The whole world explodes behind him. MEGAN runs at FRANCO, she's completely unhinged, explosions everywhere, she's got like crazy mad shiny honey titties. They both leap into the air, screaming, and as they collide...
FADE OUT
TITLE SEQUENCE BEGINS 
 
 Now I know what some of you are thinking: This is incredibly condescending. I'm literally talking about the people I want to influence like they are morons. And you'd be right. I am. They are morons. And as evidence I offer this fucking pig...


...who is now the President of the god damned United States. He attained this office by fooling 63 million mouth-breathers into thinking he knows how to run a country in spite of the fact that he's never run a successful anything, let alone a business or marriage, in his entire fucking life. He wasn't alone in this effort. He benefited from a media system that sold his sorry brand and manipulated people for profit for years. They did it with some of the stupidest, shallowest programming they could. All I'm saying is even though him and all other stupid, pop-culture trash shouldn't matter, it inevitably does, and we should start employing the same idiotic weapons to serve a higher purpose, namely indoctrinating those same masses with some class consciousness and leftist ideas. 

 Because if we don't then major media companies, Trump, the GOP and the Democrats, will. 



Monday, February 6, 2017

Broodings on Bay-ing

  

  The Rock (the film, not the former wrestler) may be the single most important cultural contribution ever by someone masturbating furiously with an American flag wrapped around their penis, i.e. Michael Bay. I learned this when I was unable to sleep last night due to my brain running at light-speed the moment I lay in bed, and I decided a Michael Bay film would be the ideal form of media to take advantage of the passive, mind-erasing relationship between film and viewer. I was, indeed, successful as I only got about half-way through the film before passing out.

  The film's principle contribution to AMERICA FUCK YEAH-ness definitely lies in its total commitment to just how bad the troops, in this case personified by Ed Harris, have been betrayed. They get no respect, so they come up with a way to get even and get the attention they deserve by invading Alcatraz Island, taking a bunch of tourists hostage, and threatening to fire missiles with VX nerve gas at San Francisco. Ultimately Ed Harris can't follow through with his threats to do this because he could never harm all those innocent people (minus the hostages, apparently). The real troops don't do that! But Ed Harris gets betrayed again, this time by the troops who stopped being real and started selling out for money. There are also great conversations between two dudes who I think were in the West Wing talking about all the secrets and dirty lies they've covered up, and how they have to keep Sean Connery locked up in federal prison. See, he knows the location of a roll of microfilm containing The Truth™ regarding the alien landing at Roswell and JFK's assassination. The Truth™ was really big in the 90's, by the way. Everybody was looking for it.

  Ed Harris is the true American, embodied in the selfless soldier, betrayed by feckless, power-obsessed bureaucrats and greedy capitalists. The Rock was truly a film with a statement in the somber days of the Clinton presidency. Oh, America! Would that you had not lost your soul then! Morality and honor no long occupied the White House, and no one cared about all those poor, forgotten, highly-equipped and excellently trained soldiers!  What was to be done? What indeed!?

  Aside from all that, I should point out that I was able to learn at least one life lesson from the film: If I'm ever in a firefight, and I'm trying kill this one loner determined to stop what's going on, and neither I nor any of my comrades can seem to land a shot... well, I'm just putting my gun down and walking away because, clearly, I'm the bad guy. It probably wouldn't even get that far, though, because I'd pick up on earlier clues. Like the fact that the dude I'm trying to kill keeps saying witty shit about being in way over his head before masterfully finding his way out of his present situation. I mean, if you can talk like that during a gun battle you are probably a will-to-power type, and have more control of your reality than you think

  The Rock, directed by Michael Bay, and starring Nicolas Cage (RAGE), Sean Connery, and Ed Harris, is like a microscope for those seeking to explore the wonders of Trumpanzee land. I highly recommend watching with friends, colleagues, and fellow will-to-powerists. I give this film 50 stars and 13 stripes.