Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts

Friday, June 03, 2016

Trump's Amerika . . . prophesied by ABC?


A fascistic American president goes rogue, decides to nuke Pakistan.

Just because. And does.

Sounds like great TV. (It was.) Sounds like a nightmare reality. (It could be.)

Now watch as prime-time TV of a few years ago meets a superpower that's going absolutely mad right now -- just in time to turn a roomful of television writers, circa 2012, into postmodern Nostradamuses, circa 2016.  

From Wikipedia:
When the crew of the U.S. Navy Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, the USS Colorado (SSBN-753), pick up a U.S. Navy SEAL team off Pakistan's coast, the Colorado receives an order to launch nuclear ballistic missiles at Pakistan.
Colorado's Commanding Officer, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher), asks for confirmation of the firing order because the orders were received through a legacy Cold War secondary communication channel, only to be used in the event that Washington, D.C. has already been destroyed. After confirming Washington's continued existence and refusing to fire the missiles until the command is sent through the proper system, Chaplin is relieved of command by the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Curry, and the Colorado's second in command, Lieutenant Commander Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), is given command instead. When Kendal also questions the orders and asks for confirmation, the vessel is fired upon by the Virginia-class submarine USS Illinois (SSN-786). Two nuclear missile strikes are subsequently made on Pakistan by other U.S. forces.
Realizing they've been declared enemies of their own country, the Colorado seeks refuge on the island of Sainte Marina (a fictional French island located in the Indian Ocean) and commandeer a NATO communications and missile warning facility. When a pair of B-1 bombers is sent to attack the submarine and island, Chaplin launches a Trident nuclear missile towards Washington, D.C. to impress upon the national leadership that he's serious. The B-1s turn away at the last minute, but Chaplin (who has altered the missile's final target coordinates) allows the missile to visibly overfly Washington, D.C. and explode 200 miles beyond in the open Atlantic, the explosion clearly visible from both Washington and New York City. Via a television feed to the media, he then declares a 200-mile exclusion zone around Sainte Marina.
Now, the crew must find a way to prove their innocence and find out who in the U.S. government has set them up, so they can finally return home.
OURS IS an age of signs and wonders. Mostly signs, and prophecy can turn up in unlikely places. Like prime-time network TV.

Last Resort, which ran for just one season, was one of my favorite TV shows -- never missed it, and every episode kept you on the edge of your seat. And every episode, I kept thinking "This could happen. We are so close to this really happening."

Now that crypto-fascist, loose-cannon Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, we are close enough to TV-show-as-prophetic-voice that I am getting nervous.

No, that's a lie.

I am scared s***less. Donald Trump is a racist, unhinged, authoritarian thug -- one who has repeatedly espoused violence at home and abroad, advocates torture and other war crimes, and who says he just might go nuclear in the Middle East and maybe even Europe -- and that's just fine by about half of America. The United States as a constitutional, democratic republic is dying before our eyes, and it is not shaping up to be a peaceful end.

We have enough nuclear warheads and bombs to end life on Earth several times over . . . and a petulant, unstable know-nothing has an even shot at winning the "nuclear briefcase." 


IF YOU want to do some election-year political research, buy the 13 episodes of Last Resort. They may well be one of the most prescient previews of a Trump administration that you'll find.

Make sure you have extra underwear.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Obamma showinge his treu collors!!!


The following message is paid for by Outrage for Outrage's Sake 2010:

I think this videow showes the supposd "presiddente" Barak Hoosaine Obamma's treu collors!!! When the presiddentshul seel fell off the podiom, our Socshulist in Cheif thought it was funney!!!


"All of you no who I am." What arrogunce! Who does this Communiss impostur think he is? He thinkes he is funny and just has no respekt for the symmboles of our country!!!!!

This is bechuss, like a treu Muslin, he has no respekt for the offise of the presiddentcy and thinks America is a big Joke! THIS IS PRUFE THAT THIS MAN IS NOT A REEL AMERICAN-HE WAS BORN IN KENYUH!!!!!! He is juste like his Communiss African Father and thinks America is a Joke but thee last laufgh will be on him the Tea Party will take our Country back in thee elecshun!


And then thee peeople will overthrow his crooked Communiss dictator state in 2012!!!

Palin-O'Donnel 2012!!!!

Monday, October 05, 2009

Post 9/11 Apoco-porn




The latest film from "Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich doesn't feature space aliens trying to destroy humanity.

Whew. . . .

Instead, God does the job. And much more thoroughly than the space aliens, who could only blow whole cities up.

Oops. . . .

You see, God can blow Los Angeles up and then make it slide into the sea. While bringing down the Vatican on top of Catholics praying for salvation. While wiping out the Eastern Seaboard with a giant tsunami and dropping the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy on top of the White House.

My God is an ironic God.

This isn't a new meme for Emmerich -- in "The Day After Tomorrow," a new Ice Age followed California tornadoes, Tokyo thunderstorms with football-sized hail, a massive New York tsunami and a flash-freezing, 150-below vortex sweeping across the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, it may be the end of the line --
where can one possibly go with this genre once you've destroyed the whole freakin' planet?

WHAT I WONDER, though, is what all this means? Not the whole "End of the World: 2012 . . . Because the Mayans Said" phenomenon -- we've had such and Nostradamus, too, for ages -- but instead Hollywood's (and our) fascination with catastrophe on a global scale.

What does it mean that this persists in the aftermath of 9/11, when we got to see the real thing "up-close and personal"? And when we got to see how horrific that is when removed from the sanitary confines of films like Emmerich's.

Why the continued fascination? I ask this as a self-confessed aficionado of "blowed up good" movies who finds this latest one to be a collapsed bridge too far.

In 1998, columnist and author Peggy Noonan tackled a similar cultural meme in a piece for Forbes ASAP:

Here goes: It has been said that when an idea’s time has come a lot of people are likely to get it at the same time. In the same way, when something begins to flicker out there in the cosmos a number of people, a small group at first, begin to pick up the signals. They start to see what’s coming.

Our entertainment industry, interestingly enough, has plucked something from the unconscious of a small collective. For about 30 years now, but accelerating quickly this decade, the industry has been telling us about The Big Terrible Thing. Space aliens come and scare us, nuts with nukes try to blow us up.

This is not new: In the ‘50s Michael Rennie came from space to tell us in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” that if we don’t become more peaceful our planet will be obliterated. But now in movies the monsters aren’t coming close, they’re hitting us directly. Meteors the size of Texas come down and take out the eastern seaboard, volcanoes swallow Los Angeles, Martians blow up the White House. The biggest-grosser of all time was about the end of a world, the catastrophic sinking of an unsinkable entity.

Something’s up. And deep down, where the body meets the soul, we are fearful. We fear, down so deep it hasn’t even risen to the point of articulation, that with all our comforts and amusements, with all our toys and bells and whistles . . . we wonder if what we really have is . . . a first-class stateroom on the Titanic. Everything’s wonderful, but a world is ending and we sense it.

I don’t mean: “Uh-oh, there’s a depression coming,” I mean: We live in a world of three billion men and hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, missiles, warheads. It’s a world of extraordinary germs that can be harnessed and used to kill whole populations, a world of extraordinary chemicals that can be harnessed and used to do the same.

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.

What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.

A LITTLE LESS than three years later came the horror of 9/11. You'd think that would have changed us somehow -- at least culturally. You'd think we would have emerged from that Lower Manhattan dust-and-debris cloud a little more serious . . . a little more selfless . . . at a minimum, a little less seriously devoted to the utterly unserious.

If anything, we're even worse. Consumed by Kanye, M.J., Jonandkate and David Letterman's stupid-human tricks, now our depraved popular culture is cinematically hurtling toward the Apocalypse.

I wonder what that's saying about our cultural subconscious, circa 2009?

Well, if I had to hazard a guess -- and I'm operating in full-Noonan mode here -- I'd say that maybe Peggy was off just a little bit. Maybe we're not afraid it's all going to end, and perhaps us with it.

Instead, maybe we want it all to end -- and perhaps us with it.

OH, OF COURSE we have John Cusack, one of 2012's stars, quoted about how the film celebrates people transcending their "normal capabilities and normal morals" in difficult situations.

But isn't that the case with every single disaster flick? Besides, you don't have to spend nine figures to make a movie about the transcendent power of the human spirit.

No, if you want to call 2012 (and the deep cultural current that spawned it) anything, call it a death wish by a terminally ill culture looking for God -- or the cosmos -- to assist in its suicide. Could it be that's the deepest subconscious desire bubbling to the surface of the Superfund site we call a culture?

Otherwise, what percentage would movie execs see in what amounts to a $200 million snuff film?