Slack face of extinction

The Tea Party, to me, is not so much a political movement as it is a horde of panphobic reality-deniers huddling together for comfort, drowning themselves in the confused babble of their mutual delusions, hoping, by doing so, to shut out any minute intrusion of fact. In some ways, I guess they are more than a political movement; something worse in fact. They represent a cohesion of all that is pathological, paranoid, and hypersensitive in modern American political thought.

They are, I think, symptomatic of an uncriticized conservative paradigm run amock.

Well, high-flown verbosity aside, what I'm saying is the Tea Baggers are fast becoming the symbol of, and the party for, the American Dumbass . They are the Stupid Party. One only needs to examine a few of their platforms--which I won't do here, mainly because I grind my teeth enough as it is--to see how ridiculous they truly are.

It's enough for me to say that the Tea Baggers are right up there at the Altar of Platitudes, worshipping away. Platitudes don't just have to be delusions that we ALL find comfortable. Sometimes they are ridiculous ideas that just a few people find comfortable.

Examples? People of white skin color are vastly superior to those of any other. A ridiculous idea, obviously only comforting to people who are actually white. Taxes are bad. Another ridiculous idea which only seems to have any weight with people who sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden, overburdened rich of our country. Big pharmaceuticals have orchestrated a massive conspiracy to give your children vaccines which will make them autistic. The key word is conspiracy. The idea of a shadowy oligarchy behind a perceived evil makes the world into a black-and-white battleground between the Good (tm) and the Evil (tm). That kind of absolutism, while paranoid, is pretty comforting to certain people. The idea that the medical community still isn't certain about what causes autism and the notion that, for the most part, vaccines are extremely beneficial for society as a whole but that some individuals may be negatively affected by them isn't as easy to swallow, and so is not, by contrast, as comforting to believe.

So, I think the Tea Partiers, Scrotum-Suckers, whatever, look more and more to me like a segment of the American population who have backed themselves into an ideological corner, clinging desperately to any platitude that gives them the least comfort, snarling like rabid animals at any fact that might commit the outrage of contradicting their increasingly erratic worldview. These are people who are offended by facts, who are indignant over reality. But rather than committing themselves to any real change, they have determined to believe whatever is easiest for them to believe and, from that point, push an agenda that is positively senseless and incoherent.

They live in a make-believe America that doesn't exist. And as such, if politicians respond to their perceived voter clout, they will see the enactment of make-believe policy that only makes sense in that make-believe world. Can't be good for the rest of us in Actual America, can't be good for the Actual World, can't be good for our Actual Civilization. I mean, just look at Arizona.

It's ironic to me that, in the press, the staunch, oblivious middle-Americans who appear to be flocking to the Tea Party in droves are characterized as "disillusioned" voters. I think, more precise would be to say "hyper-illusioned" voters, maybe even "delusional" voters--that is, fed up with America's problems they may sincerely be, they still have failed to recognize those problems for what they are and have turned to a set of imbecilic platforms as the way out. Like libertarians (read: narcissistic conservatives whose political worldview did not mature after ninth grade), their ideas have become based on adolescent, knee-jerk sound-byte politics. Aside from the astonishing idiocy of their platforms, one is hard-pressed to find any actual depth to them either.

For a group of people who have to believe pretty hard in order to keep their leaky worldview afloat, they sure haven't given themselves a heck of a lot to buy into. When you clear out the puffery, it's hard not to just laugh at their ideas. It's also hard not to openly weep when you set their ideology right next to the facts.

If there really is a threat to our civilization, it's that civilization will choke to death on this glut of overbred, submoronic fact-phobic provincialists who've become so insulated from reality by media, platitude, and redecorated Bronze Age superstition, that they, like a cancer, cease to function as contributing cells, but just fatten and multiply and whine and piss themselves and abuse democracy with their dreamworld policy-platforms. Like human cholesterol, they will choke the arteries of life with their slimy faith, counterproductive behavior, glorified selfishness, and near-constant indignation.

It will be a slow crawl to extinction with these people at the helm, but it will be an agonizing one.

We need civilization chemo...

Where are the fucking zombies? My apocalyptic future scenario featured zombies. I was promised zombies. Where are they?




...maybe the Tea Baggers are the zombies.

Line up the meatbags. Don't bother to write lines for them.

My feelings upon viewing the A Nightmare on Elm Street re-make can be summed up as: an acceptable horror movie in most respects, doesn't hold a candle to the original, lots of missed potential, boring characters were not believable as teenagers.

Every time I see a horror movie I come away with more and more certainty about the biggest problem with modern horror cinema, whether it's a remake of a classic or an original property--the characters almost without exception suck balls.

Hollywood writers seem to have a fetish for filling their movies to the gills with 'everyman' and 'everywoman' characters. These characters are simply repositories for cliched writing, uninspired dialogue, clumsy stereotyping, and lowest-common-denominator personality traits.

I've thought about this a lot. I suppose there are several good reasons to do this.

One, assuming your intended audience really is incredibly stupid and unable to identify with a character without hamfisted personality cues to set them up, it's maybe possible everyman/woman characters are the only characters people are able to comprehend anymore. I don't necessarily believe this, but...I occasionally see people when I go outside. It isn't pretty...

Two, it's real easy to write these characters. Hell, they may even have an automatic method for writing them in bull sessions: assign each hackneyed and boring personality trait an integer number between 0 and 9 (such as occupation, motivation, mind-numbing platitude of choice, # of loved ones that need to be saved) and then use the random number generator on your calculator.

Let's see...ah! Married fireman with extreme protective disposition towards dogs believes all babies are special, has nine children to save from monster.

Third, these characters generate so little sympathy, empathy, emotional response, or even mild interest, that they are able to more efficiently carry out their role of walking, exposition-spouting meatbags whose only purpose is to die in incredibly contrived, yet largely uninspired ways. This is even easier if CGI is employed instead of a single bottle of karo syrup. Cuts down on the mess and/or creative exertion.

Eh. My dissappointment knows no bounds.