(no subject)
The rash of political campaign ads on the TV get a little cumbersome. There's a place in my heart forever reserved for charmingly shoddy advertising. Local law firms have a judo grip on cornball ads that still use early 90's graphics and the most severe audio-visual rape spokesmen they can muster. One of the bankruptcy attorneys who frequently appears is even less animated than a block of wood, and he makes funeral home spokesmen look as bubbly as a flaming drag show by comparison. Car dealerships use the tried and tested formula of a panning shot across their lot of freshly-polished stock and maybe five seconds of a manager followed by a tuneful "RUSS DARRR-OW!" bookended by directions to their location. Menards assaults the senses with fluorescently-lit shots of cabinets, windows, and power-washers accompanied by a blistering banjo tune. It's not high-powered, big budget ad agency fluff, but it's got a down-home local sensibility riding on the squeaky wheels of modestly budgeted production.
But campaign ads are a nice sandpaper facial scrub. The formula is ancient, the results infuriating, the money...wasted. The big hitters tend to have pretty lavishly appointed production values built around basic popularity contest assholery: the other guy is a bloated dimwit with no grasp of the basic functions of their job as a public servant, who has wasted your time and money appeasing someone else or otherwise doing everything short of pissing into the wind, if they haven't already done so repeatedly. They're so inept that they now often appear only in black and white next to excerpts from idiotic speeches. They are soulless, cowardly careerists who care only about getting reelected so they can golf with big business, pursue expensive and foolish ideas, and grow ever more oily and subservient to the whims of the moneyed elite. The politician YOU should vote for loves puppies and hard workers and appears at photo ops in a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled back. This person will give you money! They love Jesus and would never bow to the interests of people with power and influence. They won't fool around with interns because they've already seeded for themselves a loving and perfect family. Why, they're just the salt of the earth, and they'll get things done, you'll see.
Opposition fits in well these days. Back when Bush ran the show it was exhilarating to feel as if the world was wrong and that opposing the administration meant you were working to change things and usher in a better tomorrow. It was a crime, what was going on at the top, and everyone had suffered for it. Something had to change. Then power shifted across the aisle, and it became the Obama administration that was raping the country, whose policies were shortsighted and costly, that was eating away at the moral fiber of us all, and things have to change! Soon the power will shift again, and we'll dance in the other direction. From a general standpoint, it seems reasonable to assume that no matter which side you're on, the other guy is always a fool, perhaps an evil fool, who is trying to hold your side back. There's whole careers to be made in driving people apart. The only people who call for unity seems to be whoever is in charge, which is easy enough to do when unity would then mean "agree with me." Everybody else is simply gunning for the driver's seat.
Maybe a looming extinction-level event would fast-track such unity. Something big and obvious, like a meteor. Or better yet, an Elder God rising from the deep so everyone can see it and not claim it's a bunch of scientists trying to scare us. After all, climate change (or global warming) has been made such a political issue that it seems reasonable that anything short of an improbably enormous, squid-faced immortal goliath crushing cities would be argued away on Fox News. (Although i'm fairly certain Glenn Beck would have a theory on why Cthulhu was a leftist construct before screeching madness inverted the world)
It's entirely possible that my own political evolution as a person is merely undergoing the last few gasps of world-induced cynicism before I fall into one party or another. After all, it's not as if moderate evaluation ever gets anything done. History is shaped by people who make "screw it, kill 'em all" decisions, not by people who are plagued by an abiding feeling of general human ideological futility. Maybe sooner or later, you just figure life is too short to be wondering about everything all the time, and throw your lot in with packaged answers so you can better tend to life's basics, like making money and not sleeping outdoors. And if you're still angry about stuff, just become an extremist.
Boy, what a downer.
But then again, it IS fall. Or almost fall. It's no longer oppressively hot, I'm fully embedded in comic work (but not money...seems to have to be one of the two, never both, heh) and i just popped in MST3k's Warrior of the Lost World, so things are looking at least marginally rosy. That or I'm in hideous denial. But comics are involved, so it can't be all that bad.
Any good movies out lately?
But campaign ads are a nice sandpaper facial scrub. The formula is ancient, the results infuriating, the money...wasted. The big hitters tend to have pretty lavishly appointed production values built around basic popularity contest assholery: the other guy is a bloated dimwit with no grasp of the basic functions of their job as a public servant, who has wasted your time and money appeasing someone else or otherwise doing everything short of pissing into the wind, if they haven't already done so repeatedly. They're so inept that they now often appear only in black and white next to excerpts from idiotic speeches. They are soulless, cowardly careerists who care only about getting reelected so they can golf with big business, pursue expensive and foolish ideas, and grow ever more oily and subservient to the whims of the moneyed elite. The politician YOU should vote for loves puppies and hard workers and appears at photo ops in a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled back. This person will give you money! They love Jesus and would never bow to the interests of people with power and influence. They won't fool around with interns because they've already seeded for themselves a loving and perfect family. Why, they're just the salt of the earth, and they'll get things done, you'll see.
Opposition fits in well these days. Back when Bush ran the show it was exhilarating to feel as if the world was wrong and that opposing the administration meant you were working to change things and usher in a better tomorrow. It was a crime, what was going on at the top, and everyone had suffered for it. Something had to change. Then power shifted across the aisle, and it became the Obama administration that was raping the country, whose policies were shortsighted and costly, that was eating away at the moral fiber of us all, and things have to change! Soon the power will shift again, and we'll dance in the other direction. From a general standpoint, it seems reasonable to assume that no matter which side you're on, the other guy is always a fool, perhaps an evil fool, who is trying to hold your side back. There's whole careers to be made in driving people apart. The only people who call for unity seems to be whoever is in charge, which is easy enough to do when unity would then mean "agree with me." Everybody else is simply gunning for the driver's seat.
Maybe a looming extinction-level event would fast-track such unity. Something big and obvious, like a meteor. Or better yet, an Elder God rising from the deep so everyone can see it and not claim it's a bunch of scientists trying to scare us. After all, climate change (or global warming) has been made such a political issue that it seems reasonable that anything short of an improbably enormous, squid-faced immortal goliath crushing cities would be argued away on Fox News. (Although i'm fairly certain Glenn Beck would have a theory on why Cthulhu was a leftist construct before screeching madness inverted the world)
It's entirely possible that my own political evolution as a person is merely undergoing the last few gasps of world-induced cynicism before I fall into one party or another. After all, it's not as if moderate evaluation ever gets anything done. History is shaped by people who make "screw it, kill 'em all" decisions, not by people who are plagued by an abiding feeling of general human ideological futility. Maybe sooner or later, you just figure life is too short to be wondering about everything all the time, and throw your lot in with packaged answers so you can better tend to life's basics, like making money and not sleeping outdoors. And if you're still angry about stuff, just become an extremist.
Boy, what a downer.
But then again, it IS fall. Or almost fall. It's no longer oppressively hot, I'm fully embedded in comic work (but not money...seems to have to be one of the two, never both, heh) and i just popped in MST3k's Warrior of the Lost World, so things are looking at least marginally rosy. That or I'm in hideous denial. But comics are involved, so it can't be all that bad.
Any good movies out lately?