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Showing Original Post only (View all)Wake the hell up... [View all]
Ever since I was a teenager, every time I heard the phrase This is not who we are. after some miscreant or group of miscreants did something reprehensible, I would roll my eyes in disbelief that someone other than a member of the clergy would have the temerity to say that.
Why would I be cynical at age 13? I was born in the early 1950s: all we saw on TV were outlaws, murderers, thieves, liars, adulterers, child molesters, kidnappers, embezzlers, abusers of women (both societally sanctioned and criminal), shoplifters, assassins, malicious pranksters, tax cheats, angry and resentful teenagers and adults, traitors, perjurers, con men, blackmailers, and a whole bunch of creative and innovative villains of all stripes which the police, state police, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and mysterious governmental agencies were employed full time with tens of thousands on the payroll had to battle.
Of course, in early TV and film, the bad guys would have to be somehow defeated but we knew that that wasnt always the case. Many of us were acquainted with people and even whole families whod gotten away with all kinds of stuff for years. All the righteous sanctimony was out the window as far as I was concerned: the laws were enacted to attempt to dissuade most people from doing what theyd really like to do, which is harm. Harming people, harming family, harming retail establishments, harming insurance companies and the rest.
This tinhorn Mussolini weve got in whats left of the White House allowed a great number of Americans to live their fantasies of lawlessness, adultery, lecherousness, overindulgence, outright denial by almost proudly lying, and the constant expression of both victimhood and the id as Freud defined it. It is the realization of the Twilight Zone episode Its A Good Life which Rod Serling himself wrote. It is a horror beyond horrors and we are living, somehow, through this.
It is however, the beginning of the end for him. Entropy, both political and physiological is increasing. The McConnell situation is a portent of coming attractions. The next chapter of this saga is in outline form and about to be written. I would say however, that if anyone had written a series of scripts for a miniseries and simply had had a glimpse into this future, it would have been rejected at every level as being too unbelievable even for a gullible audience. That is how absolutely outrageous this time has been.