This is your future, America! Unless you wake up!
I never saw anyone discuss this, and I apparently missed it, but it is too beautifully psychotic---or psychotically beautiful---not to post here:
The above image comes from here: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/12/26/in_case_you_missed_i.html You owe it to yourself to begin your New Year by reading this... Wow, I am flabbergasted.
Apocalyptic scenarios have fascinated me for years---after all, I grew up watching such classic cinematic fare as Mad Max and The Road Warrior, The Day After and Red Dawn, etc.---but this is unlike anything I've ever seen before. This is The Turner Diaries for a vaguely mainstream audience, and in comic book form, no less. How the NRA thought this would do anything other than cement their reputation as well-armed wackos I do not know. But, perhaps the real point, in this highly-polarized society, was to "speak to their base" (as the contemporary argot has it), and, it should go without saying, speak to their basest impulses, i.e., fear and hatred of that which they do not know or understand. Let it be said, as well, that segments of the Left are not above such base impulses either.
I have indulged in apocalyptic scenarios, and the revenge fantasies that almost always lie hidden within them, myself---for example, an unpublished and untitled piece that centers on the 2000 Republican convention, and the historical revenge fantasy that takes place within it, and a piece I wrote almost 15 years ago entitled "The United States No Longer Exists". This latter has never been published, either, but is the subject of one of the collages I am currently planning.
In the blue glow of TV sets in suburban living rooms, the United States looms large: an empire threatened from without by barbarian hordes (identified variously as Latin American drug lords, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, Somali "warlords," China's teeming masses, etc.) and from within by traitors, fifth columnists, and ungrateful minorities (e.g. liberal public officials, illegal immigrants, street gangs), yet still holding its own and on the offensive.
But let's be frank, the United States no longer exists.
It was always an illusion peddled by slick salesmen in cheap suits, now even that's gone-----without even a flash, just a slow fading like the picture tube going out, 'til all that's left are the shadows, populated by flash-light spooks, lobotomized law-and-order patriots, cadaverous medieval troll-like street people, harmless frightened sheep.
Rereading this now (having recently found a large-scale mockup for a poster I was apparently planning many years ago), in the wake of reading this NRA comic book, I wonder if there is a difference. Am I as myopic as the erstwhile "author" of the NRA's cautionary tale? Or, was I on to something? I honestly do not know.