Start Getting As Mad As Hell

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.” Well I’m not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets.

All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.” So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell,

“I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

-Howard Beale from the classic 1976 movie Network

Eugenics American Style

One step closer to the end of the world. The one-two combo of corporate greed and organized religion apparently proved to be too much for reason, sanity and compassion.

-Trent Reznor


I have seen the future and it is Idiocracy, a movie that is more outright horrifying than Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Brazil or any other dystopian vision because it is already happening. I’ll get to that in a little while because something has been troubling me for a few weeks and I need to get it off my chest because it relates to the movie or could at least serve as a prequel. If ever there were to occur an American version of the Renaissance rest assured that it will not be centered in South Carolina, the capitol of peckerwood nation. The recent painfully embarrassing performance of Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton whose rambling, clueless and nonsensical answer to a question of why did she think that approximately 1/5 of young Americans were unable to find the USA on a map is a searing indictment of the mass stupidity that permeates this country today in the era of American Idol, Survivor and other simple-minded gravy for the brain that passes for entertainment post 9/11. Such incredible ignorance is a primary reason (along with rampant corruption and electoral fraud) that George W. Bush is the two-term reigning king of Idiot Nation. So thoroughly indicative was her example of damning this brain dead nation of shambling zombies whose gray matter has been rendered into so much mental mush as a result of the constant assault by charlatan politicians, too much religion, tabloid trash culture, too many video games and an overdose of television torpor that establishment boob Matt Lauer of the Today show had to feature her in a nationally televised do over in a desperate attempt to shore up confidence in the moronic progeny of Ronald Reagan’s shitheel generation that we really can’t be that stupid can we? While being soundly defeated by fellow former Confederate states Mississippi and Alabama for the dubious honor of being the fattest state in the nation the embarrassing performance that was a smash hit on You Tube of Miss Teen South Carolina should ensure that the Palmetto State will remain among the largest bastions of ignorant, knuckledragging, regressive, red state fascist raptureheads in the Republican empire of the reconstituted Confederacy born out of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

Of course the south couldn’t have become the incubator of the ‘perfect’ American for the Republican thousand year reich without a good amount of that old time religion updated to mesh perfectly with the authoritarian types and their war on civilizations. That long haired liberal swine Jesus Christ had to be taught the error ways because a peacenik commie who preached against the evils of wealth was incompatible with his new role as pitchman for corporate dominance and global empire. Thanks to the influence of John Nelson Darby and assorted other lunatics with their premillennial dispensationalism that was juiced by the apocalyptic ravings of Hal Lindsay and later the highly influential Timothy LaHaye of the multi-million selling pulp trash Left Behind series Jesus V.2 now preached the gospel of ‘fuck the poor’, only walks on water when it is on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and flies through the skies with the help of an F-14 that he uses to drop napalm pods on brown-skinned Muslims to the delight of the zombies in the Rapture death cult.

Very little is as simplistic as an abandonment of reason and total surrender to religion as an escape from the cruelty of looter capitalism and the complexities of a technological society with no use for the dumb. It has always worked that way since the earliest civilizations with their worship of the sun god vs. the darkness devil and the promise of an afterlife to those legions of slaves who would taste nothing other than the whip of repression as they erected grand temples so that some rotten son of a bitch of an early version of today’s greedy and vainglorious psychopathic leaders could have his face carved onto on a statue or sphinx. Everything was a result of the favor or the anger of God or the even more simplistic and all encompassing master plan of the almighty. I have to simultaneously experience a sadness and a need to sardonically chuckle every time that some red state simpleton praises God for surviving the natural disaster that just wiped out everything that the rube had and this sort of childlike sort of primitive thinking is exactly what the cynical party bosses, CEO’s and war criminals want because a submissive drone with no actual concept of reality makes a good foot soldier. The astonishing level of national regressive thinking in the United States over the past quarter century or so has saddled the country with a mean-spirited, grossly ignorant and maladaptive blight of tens of millions who bear a large share of the responsibility for the erosion of American prestige, morality and economic might that have us teetering on the precipice of something really ugly that could come any day with a government full of war crazed ideologues, a financial system that has been rigged and manipulated by the avarice of the Gordon Gekko/Ayn Rand cult to the point where the entire fucking world economy is on the brink of collapse which is only further facilitated by the 24/7 running of the printing presses at the Federal Reserve and an indolent mass of television lobotomized consumers growing restive now all the credit cards have been maxed out and the rapidly devalued McMansion is no longer a piggybank. We are all fucked thanks to the morons responsible for gross abominations like the Creation Museum or the Holyland Experience and the wart on the ass of humanity that is the Bush administration.

But I digress.

About a month or two ago I caught Mike Judge’s brilliantly scathing Idiocracy on DVD, it was deemed unsuitable for any sort of widespread theatrical release by Fox Studios which deliberately buried it and has largely been ignored by a corporatist media obviously uncomfortable with the movie. The should be afraid because Idiocracy just fucking mocks the dumbing-down of American society that is largely the result of the deterioration of mass media, the rise of southern fried religion and the relentless war on the human condition by the rapacious plague of corporatization and a form of looter capitalism that has become cancerous. I have never seen a movie that is so in your face and that obviously made the Fox honchos very uncomfortable because they are largely a culprit in the ongoing process that has stupified what was once a well informed country with real values. The movie is a bit juvenile and overly loaded with scatological references but that is the point it is trying to make and those who don’t get it bring to mind the famous poker saying that if you don’t recognize the rube at the table it’s you.

The plot features Army dullard Joe Bowers, a man of completely average intelligence and a prostitute named Rita who are the subjects of a secret military hibernation experiment of limited duration. Well things go awry and the officer in charge is ensnared by a sex scandal bringing shame and a base closure and a much longer nap for Joe and Rita who don’t wake up until they are freed from their test chambers during the great garbage avalanche of 2505. They wake up to find a world that is FUBAR, the infrastructure is crumbling and looks as though it were designed by idiots (or privatized out to greedy contractors skimming their cut at the expense of quality), the commercialization of society is complete with corporate logos everywhere and characters named after fast food and commercial products “Dr. Lexus”, “Frito” and “Beef Supreme” among them who speak in crude tongues, hurl insults and pejoratives and berate Joe for “talking like a fag”. It’s as though red state social engineering has created a Karl Rove style Republican dream of a reverse master race of abject morons with hair trigger tempers and a birthright of simplicity – George W. Bush’s anti-intellectualism on steroids. The entire population has become twentieth generation trailer trash who in a gross parody of Social Darwinism have outbred those with any intelligence or discretion. The opening few minutes that show how this happened are as classic as they are painfully true with the educated putting off reproduction while the rednecks breed like rabbits.

Centuries of consumerism and too much television have dumbed down the populace to the point of borderline retardation and the greatest advances in technology are huge multi-screened televisions, huge devices that allow for multiple reality trash programs to be presented simultaneously while the viewer is ensconced on a huge plush chair sucking down goo from a tub while reveling in the delights of shows the likes of Ass, Ow! My Balls and the Masturbation Channel. Those three examples are the descendents of current era moronic programming like American Idol, Jackass, The Biggest Loser and the explosion of potty humor as entertainment provided by movies featuring such Earthly delights as diarrhea daquiris, cacophonies of farts and belches, flying wads of semen used as hair gel and horny teenager boners buried in mom’s homemade apple pie that have made the society dumb and dumber as well as ruder and coarser. Corporations like Starbucks now offer handjobs as an enticement to buy a latte and Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers – the corporate satire is as hilarious as it is mostly absent from the media and society today and the part of the movie that takes place at St. God’s Memorial Hospital with the health care system being reduced to a combination fast food joint/casino is down and out classic.

The society that Joe finds himself in is mean, greedy and stupid and the police are drooling overly agressive thugs. After a series of mishaps and an IQ test he is summoned to the White House by President Camacho because he is now the most intelligent man on the planet and up to the task of solving the food crisis that plagues America. The crops are dying because instead of using water (that stuff in the toilet) they are irrigated by mega selling sports drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Joe suggests using H2O and is met with incredulity by the mantra of “It’s got electrolytes.” After causing massive social unrest and unemployment with replacing Brawndo which happens to be the nation’s biggest employer with his idea Joe is taken to an arena for a gladiatorial style event that is a wild combination between Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and the local monster truck extravaganza that is televised on FOX which to no surprise is much the same as it is today other than the appearance of the anchors. Joe eventually triumphs and saves the day when the crops grow again and becomes a truly honored hero of Uh-merica. His best advice is to turn off the TV and read something once in awhile and everyone lives happily ever after.

It’s good advice and should be heeded by a nation gone to seed who don’t bother to pick up a book because the remote for the mind vacuum is much easier to heft and actually reading is just too much of a strain. An astonishing amount of the population don’t even read one book a year let alone a newspaper. Another great suggestion would be to stop choosing politicians based on absurdities like the price of haircuts, their taste in foods (jelly beans, pork rinds), what type of pet they have, their stinking hypocrisy masked by their piety, their promise to open a can of whup ass on ‘terrorists’ and whether or not they are the type of guy that you kin have a beer with. With George W. Bush we have finally seen the rise of the ‘I am a dumbass and he talks just like me’ candidate and anybody who is that fucking dumb just can’t wrap their limited mental capacity around such a thing as a rigged election or two. The scariest thing is that it could get even worse with Fred Thompson, the pope of peckerwood nation being looked upon as a Reaganesque figure by many of the same dopes responsible for Bush Jr. and the threats by the degenerate, sociopathic freaks on the extreme ‘Christian right’ making noises about a third party – can you say Judge Roy Moore? Fred Thompson as a legitimate candidate is a prerequisite to the vulgar smack down champ in the White House in Idiocracy.

If anybody thinks that it is inconceivable that the country would one day be populated by retards if allowed to continue on its current course then they aren’t paying attention. Just pay a visit to your local Wal Mart, megachurch or shopping mall and do some people watching because the prototypes are everywhere. And let’s face it, when the two most internationally known Americans are George W. Bush and Michael Jackson you know we have serious fucking problems and these are further compounded by the big news story of the day is about Britney Spears getting her California drivers license which only further illustrates that we are on the fast track to the land of Idiocracy.