It’s Captain Crunch, it’s Halloween-themed, it’s for a limited time only and it TURNS YOUR MILK GREEN. How could I NOT do a review of it?
I’m not sure how I was able to overlook it, but last year, a new, Halloween-themed variation of Captain Crunch - called, fittingly enough, “Halloween Crunch” - hit store shelves. I may have missed the proverbial boat last year, but you know DAMN well that I’m not letting this one sail by me two autumns in a row.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the product (or, if you want to be a little more literal, grains and oats), I find it imperative to state that, all in all, I’ve never really been that big a fan of Captain Crunch. That’s not to say that I foster a distaste for the product, it’s just that it was never a cereal I regularly consumed as a youngster. Odds are, if old man Crunch were a werewolf sea captain as opposed to a regular sea captain, I probably would’ve been likelier to gravitate to the product - but alas, that is territory we are ALL familiar with by now.
What makes “Halloween Crunch” different from your standard box of Captain Crunch, you may be wondering? Well, a lot, beginning with the packaging, which I am now going to spend a ridiculous amount of time analyzing and assessing.
First off, the color scheme here is pretty great. It’s mostly black, with lots of orange and green splashed around the box. There are tons of sinister looking pumpkins all over it, too, which makes it even more awesome, clearly. Really, if it wasn’t for the Cap’s grinning Jack O’ Lantern mug carved on the pumpkin, most folks would be hard pressed to distinguish this box from the box art of some antediluvian VHS horror movie from the mid ‘80s. That’s worth so many points, you don’t even know.
As with most cereals, you get some mildly airbrushed, mildly exaggerated cereal bits painted onto the box, complete with splashing milk - because as we all know, if you ain’t eating your cereal and it’s going all over the damn place, you, my friend, aren’t really eating cereal. The attention to detail on the cereal bits is pretty impressive, as you can even see the little green granules on the grain. And this is important, for one MAJOR reason…
…BECAUSE THE CEREAL TURNS YOUR MILK GREEN. GREEN, PEOPLE, GREEN! Granted, just about every cereal I can think of ends up turning your cow juice into some color other than ivory by the time you’re finished with it, but in this case, it’s actually being marketed as a prominent selling point, just like that Reptar cereal from “Rugrats.” And really, what kid in the U.S. could turn down the prospect of eating a cauldron of slime and sugar-sweetened ghosts for breakfast, anyway?
The back of the box has some information about pumpkins and stuff, which, yeah, is probably cool for a read while you’re waiting in line to purchase it, but the clear reason to get excited here is that the manufacturer provides you with a Captain Crunch Jack O’ Lantern template.
You know, something tells me you’re going to be seeing some orange, candle-filled fruit with these things mutilated into them before the month’s over. Just call it a hunch or something.
As for the cereal itself, it’s very, very Halloweeny, with lots of orange and yellow and brown. I guess that would technically make the product more Thanksgiving-colored than Halloween-hued but hey - it’s the right season, at least.
Half of the cereal is your traditional Captain Crunch bricks, while the other half are these light red, ghost looking things that bear more than a passing resemblance to the denizens of a certain General Mills breakfast offering. With that in mind, I like the fact that the ghosts here actually look sort of like traditional, table-cloth-draped spirits than the kinds were used to seeing in cereal-form; you know, the variety that looks more like the monsters that chase Pac-Man around than an otherworldly being caught betwixt the worlds of the living and the dead.
As a general rule, I don’t eat my cereal with milk, because…I don’t know, I just don’t like milk, I guess. Since soy milk was on sell, I decided to use that for my initial Halloween Crunch taste-through. And if you wanted to see me losing my Halloween Crunch cherry live on the Intraweb, well, here you go, folks:
Honestly, I think I feel about soy milk the way most normal people feel about tofu. Yeah, it’s all right, but it’s clearly no substitute for the real deal. Some folks may dig that sweetened-corn-plastic taste, but to me, it just wasn’t thick enough to provide an optimal Halloween Crunch experience. That’s sage advice for anybody, even the lactose intolerant, you know.
Taste-wise, I thought the cereal was pretty good. Granted, it isn’t going to convert me from the Church of Chocula, but it wasn’t a bad specialty item by any stretch. I guess it’s sort of redundant to call a cereal’s taste “sweet,” but this stuff was just excruciatingly sweet, as if someone dumped the contents of a hummingbird feeder over a barrel of oats and marketed under the Capt Crunch flagship. To a lot of people, that probably sounds like a negative declaration, but this IS cereal we’re talking about here: if you want subtlety and refined textures, you’re marching down the wrong supermarket aisle, amigo.
Oh, and in case you were wondering? It DOES end up turning your milk green, to a certain extent. But then again, I was using soy milk…that shit may NATURALLY be that color, for all I know.
Hailing the most horrendous (and underrated) cinematic antagonists of the last quarter century
Hey! The Oscars are coming up next week, and I, for one, don't really give a hoot. Between the eight hour long acceptance speeches and those pointless musical interludes and the fact that dry, boring ass Hallmark movies are nominated as opposed to truly great flicks like "The Raid" and "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within," my interest in the Academy Awards is pretty much limited to whether or not somebody will try to make a really misguided, awkward political statement a la George Clooney or Mikey Moore while on stage (My bet? That dude that made "A Separation" will say something about the Israelis, pending he's picked up a little more English since the Golden Globes.)
One thing that really struck me about this year's acting nods was the complete and utter lack of ANY traditional villainous roles getting nominated. Granted, not every year can we have Daniel Plainview and Amon Goethe up for awards, but I have to say, I am really starting to get disappointed by the lack of refined villainy in our movie-going experiences in general. When was the last time you went to the local googol-plex and said to yourself "damn, that dude is all sorts of evil?" and really, you know, meant it?
The hyper-relativism of modern cinema makes the great movie villainy of yesteryear a fairly outdated ideal. Nowadays, the only times you're presented with straight-up, distinctly evil antagonists is when you're dealing with Nazis or racists. Even our serial killers are typically presented as multifaceted, quasi-sympathetic figures whose proclivities were borne of prior emotional abuses. If Freddy Krueger were a modern advent, they would probably turn him into a janitor with ADHD that was beat up by his dad and inadvertently offs tweenagers instead of a hideously burnt "To Catch a Predator" forerunner. The humanities are killing the fine arts, I tell you what.
Of course, that's not to say that there aren't some great movie villains out there, including some fairly recent ones. Everybody and their mom can rave about Heath Ledger's Joker or Alex Delarge, but what about those cinematic bad guys that just never got the respect the deserved as iconic movie villains? Even though they may not have gotten the approbation of a Hannibal Lector or a Darth Vader, there are quite a few movie baddies that I think deserve equal footing in the pantheon of celluloid immortals - in fact, I can name five of the top of my head that ought to become the archetypes for film evil from hereon out.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling sort of listless this afternoon; now, who's up for a walk on the dark side of film with me this evening?
Doyle Hargraves in “Sling Blade” (1996)
For some reason, nobody ever talks about the absurd brilliance of Dwight Yokam’s performance in “Sling Blade.” Granted, Billy Bob Thornton was pretty captivating as the mustard-biscuit chomping, pig-pecker avoiding Carl Childers, but not only did Yokam steal the show as Doyle Hargraves, he put on what I consider to be one of the all-time greatest cinematic villain performances in the process.
To this day, I am convinced that Yokam wasn’t so much acting as he was reliving specific moments from the 1980s on camera. There’s such a subtlety and realness to his evil that I’m pretty certain that, at one point in his life, he probably did have a ferocious alcohol problem while cohabitating with a Dollar Tree employee, her son, her homosexual best friend and a recently released, mentally-retarded serial killer that lives in a garage outback.
It’s the smoothness of Yokam’s evil that really drives the movie. Take the scene where he gets rip-roaring drunk and throws his band (including criminally underappreciated alt-country legend Vic Chesnutt) out of his girlfriend’s house; after dropping ninety seven thousand permutations of the “f-bomb” in three minutes of undiluted raging, he falls to his knees and proclaims to his girl “I’m hurting’ Linda,” before responding to her son’s criticisms with “I hate you too, you little prick…no, I don’t, I love your mother” with a sneer on his face more Satanic than anything you’ll see in a Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lector movie. Attention, all first-year drama students: if you’re looking for a clinic on how to display reverse pathos, that performance right here ought to be your new north star.
Lotso-Huggin’-Bear in “Toy Story 3” (2010)
I’ve said it countless times, but it bears repeating: Hollywood might as well just stop making movies after “Toy Story 3.”
Odds are, we’ll never see a mainstream, mega-money-backed project that awesome ever again (and clearly, never again from PIXAR, as the tremendously disappointing “Cars 2” most definitely demonstrated.) During “Toy Story 3,” I ran the gamut of emotions, from nostalgic bliss to abject horror to almost pissing myself during the trash compactor scene - and for those of you that doubt the power of the narrative, when you want to scream “NO, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” towards an anthropomorphic teddy bear, you KNOW you are no doubt witnessing one of the greatest villain performances in the history of American cinema.
Lotso-Huggin’-Bear, the strawberry-scented, Ned Beatty-voiced overseer of Sunnyside Daycare’s toy room, is one of the most nuanced villains to come along in quite some time, a hyper nihilistic although strategically cool sumbitch scarred by aging, longing and his own egomania. He straddles that line between pity and evil so expertly that you wonder how Beatty didn’t get an Oscar nod for his voice work alone. Cultural studies scholars often tell us that illustrative evil is transcendent from the cultural text from which it is born - and if that’s the case, the multifaceted vileness of “Lotso-Huggin’-Bear” is destined to become one of those multimedia exemplars of evil that we’ll be citing and imitating for years to come.
Billy Mitchell in “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” (2007)
In my quarter century of movie going experiences, I have never encountered a figure in a film that I have wanted to punch in the face as much as I did this prick. Billy Mitchell, the Donkey Kong world champion and Florida hot sauce baron, is a real-life figure so comically evil that you wonder how close the guy is to turning into a real life Batman villain. I’m guessing one dip into a pool of volatile chemicals, and we’ve got a major social blight on our hands.
Mitchell’s evilness is almost inherent. Before the guy even speaks, you know he’s a grade “A” douche, and by the five minute mark of the film, you want to see him ran over by a wheat thresher. Mitchell is probably the biggest megalomaniacal narcissist since Hitler, so if there’s a silver lining anywhere to be found in the miserable thunder cloud that he is, I suppose it’s the fact that he took up arcade games as opposed to eugenics as a hobby.
Mitchell is very much a technocratic form of evil. In the “King of Kong,” he maintains his world record high score on “Donkey Kong” via an elaborate, bureaucratic network and, according to the hero of the film, breaking and entering into people’s homes so he can send saboteurs to mess up their Donkey Kong, Jr. cabinets. By the time the film’s over, you’ll marvel in the real life majesty of the man’s innate messed-up-ness, concluding that, yeah, there’s a pretty good chance he may end up killing someone to preserve his unblemished Robotron 2040 win loss record.
Precious’ Mom in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” (2009)
I’m likely to catch a lot of flak for saying it, but it’s something we are all pretty much thinking immediately after screening “Precious”; holy crap, was that movie hilarious.
Granted, it’s not hilarious in the traditional sense, but hilarious in the oh hell, I need a defense mechanism to protect me from the abject horror of the situation kind. You may be wondering how a film about an AIDS-infected, morbidly obese illiterate girl raped by her own father can be construed as comedic, in any regard. Well, I can summarize that in one word for you: Mo’Nique.
There’s “over-the-top” performances, and then there’s Mo’Nique’s performance in this film. Precious’ mom isn’t just the embodiment of evil in the film, she’s the kind of evil that most of us refuse to even exist in real-life - you know, the I’m-going-to-throw-my-newborn-grandson-at-my-daughter kind of evil. I’m still waiting for somebody to come up with a drinking game for this movie, in which you have to take a shot every time Mo’Nique throws an inanimate object at her daughter. Granted, you could model one around the number of times she drop’s the f words (the other one’s “fat,” in case you were wondering), but I’m pretty sure you would die from alcohol poisoning before the twenty minute mark of the picture. Mo’Nique deserves a spot on the list just for the scene where she tries to find her wig before the social worker comes in…based on her effectiveness in this role, I think she can legally claim the right to the next ten Best-Supporting-Actress awards.
The Warden in “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky” (1991)
“Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky,” is the greatest bad movie of all-time. The early ‘90s Hong Kong action-splatter film has long been trumpeted as among the all time masterpieces of garbage cinema, and I reckon it’s pretty hard to disagree with the experts here: “Riki-Oh” sucks better than any motion picture in the annals of the art form.
For the most part, the protagonist of the film - this karate master that no-sells bullet wounds and has the ability to punch his way through people’s flesh like tissue paper - is a pretty uninteresting character; thus, the burden of the film is placed on the shoulder’s of the movie’s primary antagonist, the Warden of a futuristic mega-jail with a gaggle of aesthetically interesting cronies that put the entire James Bond series to shame.
It’s sort of hard to pinpoint what makes the Warden so interesting in the film. Perhaps its his coolness and reserve, which is sort of hard to maintain when you’re watching a three hundred pound inmate get disemboweled by a guy that looks like Liu Kang from “Mortal Kombat” just three feet in front of you. Perhaps it’s the profound absurdity of his decision making skills, as it one point, he promulgates burying the main character alive instead of, you know, killing him - and even more irrationally, he just lets him go after a week of rotting in the ground. Hell, maybe it’s even his relationship with his son, the heir apparent to the meg-jail (apparently, the idea of father/son bonding in Hong Kong entails plucking out peoples’ eyeballs with walking sticks.) But ultimately, the thing that puts the Warden WAY out in front of the pack regarding underappreciated film villains is the (OH MY GOD, SUPER SPOILER COMING UP) fact that, at the climax of the film, he just turns into a hulking, Play-Doh faced Muppet monster without any explication from the film itself to do battle with the titular character.
So there you have it, an illustrative look at the refined concepts of cinematic evilness for us, the post-post-modern generation: alcoholic construction workers, nihilistic teddy bears, narcissistic Pong champions, hyper-abusive chronic welfare recipients and poorly dubbed jail overseers with the ability to turn into Beaker's roided-up monster form in times of great duress.
Now, let’s see your lame-ass Darth Vaders or Magnetos top ANY of those afore-mentioned feats of neo-cinematic villainy.
The Reason Why the "Man of Steel" Just Doesn't Resonate with American Audiences Anymore...
A lot of times, our movie going experiences are WAY, WAY more memorable than anything that happens in the movies we watch. In fact, in some instances, we really can’t recall any major details about movies, but we sure as hell haven’t forgotten what happened within the theater while we viewed those otherwise forgettable motion pictures.
Now, I’m not talking about secondary reasons for why you can’t remember the movie (like, you couldn’t remember the plot line for “The Master of Disguise” because you were getting third-based at the time). Rather, I’m talking about those rare experiences where the audience’s interaction with the film before them becomes so intense that such a reaction takes complete precedent over the film itself.
For example, I will NEVER forget the time the 300 pound plus African-American woman stood up during one of the “Scream” movies (I honestly can’t recall whether it was the second or third installment) and yelled, at the top of her lungs “BITCH, DON’T GO IN THERE!”, nor will I forget watching a good three quarters of the audience storm out of the opening night screening of “Freddy Got Fingered” when Tom Green started swinging a newborn around a hospital by its umbilical cord, with blood splashing all over the walls.
And in 2006, I had a similar experience with the ill-received “Superman Returns.”
If you’ve seen the movie, you probably know the exact scene I’m talking about. Superman is doing battle with some generic thugs, and one of them shoots him. . .right in the eyeball. I mean, dead center, on the pupil, at point blank range. And of course, since he’s Superman, he shrugs it off like it’s an open palm strike from Richard Simmons, and the Krypton ass-kicking, it continues.
Prior to that scene, I’ve never heard a movie audience boo in unison before, let alone direct their communal jeers towards the hero of the damn movie. This fat dude in a camouflage hat and overalls waddled ever so slightly out of his seat, and yelled at the screen “That’s bullshit!” before crashing back into his seat to shove more popcorn kernels into his maw. “Man, this is STOOPID,” I hear some kid in the back row smart off. The disdain in the air wasn’t just palpable, it clung to your clothing for three days afterward.
There’s this thing I’ve invented and not at all stolen from Fredric Wertham called “The Invincible American Syndrome.” By and large, Americans picture themselves - and by proxy, their archetypical, symbolic representations of themselves - as completely indestructible figures, these people that are physically impossible to kill, hurt or even impede. You see “The Invincible American” figure all the time in our movies, from the John Wayne types that can survive getting shelled by every single piece of German mortar made in the years of 1931-1941 to the modern day Bruce Willis-Harrison Ford type that can sustain mortal injuries, shrug it off, and then proceed to kill half of the standing army of whoever the international villain du jour is that week at the multiplex. Clearly, this Superman figure is the ultimate -and really, prototypical - “Invincible American,” that (ig?)noble, practically immortal representation of our delusions of grandeur as a nation. We really do think that if we had heavy artillery on us like Dirty Harry or Rambo, we could stop all forms of violent crime by ourselves. We really do think that we can smoke, drink and jam fast food down our throat holes and avoid any and all health consequences, living out our golden years like the aberrational Jack Nicholson we all think we’ll be. In short, we all sort of think we’re a real-life Superman, totally oblivious to the realities of our own meager, oh-so-easily suspended mortalities.
Way to block out the sun...you super asshole.
The really, really ironic thing here is that Superman, for all intents and purposes, was designed as a mockery of the “Invisible American” figure by two Jewish artists that were pissed off that their original idea for a Hebrew super herogot rejected by publishers. Hell, for that matter, the original idea for Superman was a pastiche of the Nietzschean idea of the Superman, a telepathic super villain that was supposed to be a snide swipe at post WWI German nationalism. Nobody seemed to have gotten the “joke” some seventy years ago, and apparently, nobody has picked up on it since.
Despite the critical and commercial failure of the last attempt to reboot the cinematic Super-series, Hollywood just can’t leave the property alone, apparently.
Right now, “Man of Steel,” the latest (and most certainly not the last) Superman reboot is currently in production. Seeing as how the last go-through was about as successful as a hot dog stand outside a mosque, the movie is being super-engineered to avoid failure by enlisting a trifecta of talents that are no strangers to the superhero genre: director Zak Snyder (“The Watchmen”), writer David S. Goyer (the “Blade” series) and even Mr. Batman Reboot himself, Chris Nolan, serving as a producer for the project. The cast - which includes everybody from that chick from “The Muppets” to Russell “Take a Picture of Me and I’ll Punch Your Balls into Your Throat” Crowe - looks like the sort of mega all-star line-up that simply cannot fail. Hell, the filmmakers even gave comic book readers the world over the thrill of a lifetime when they unveiled pictures of the new Supes rocking a costume that FINALLY got rid of that stupid external underwear get-up in favor of something that actually resembled pants. Although details remain sort of sketchy, the film is supposed to merge the first two Richard Donner movies into a single narrative - meaning after 30 plus years of waiting, we’re finally getting another cinematic depiction of GENERAL GODDAMN ZOD on the horizon.
Clearly, these guys are working very, very diligently to avoid turning this one into yet another box office dud. What these big shot movie people don’t grasp, however, is that no matter how they tackle the source material, there’s no way they can turn the film into an interesting human drama...primarily, because we can’t relate to Superman, because we’re not a bunch of unkillable space refugees.
The first two Superman movies worked because they focused on the man part of the Superman mythos as opposed to the super (and yeah, I guess it didn’t hurt that those movies were also written by the same dude that wrote “The Godfather,” but whatever). All of the truly great super hero movies are the ones that center on the human being behind the mask, the guy that just wants to lead a normal, although unattainable life (Spider-Man 2) or guys that are fighting against hell and high water to retain their ethics and ideals (The Dark Knight). The first two Superman movies - especially the second, which was pretty much all about the main character giving up his super powers so he can bone his girlfriend - managed to go beyond the fact that this dude could fart lighting and piss tornadoes, turning the “Man of Steel” into something of a tragic figure that, as powerful as he is, can’t change all of humanity for the better, no matter how hard he tries. That’s some deep, extremely poetic shit to think about. . .which is probably why the next installment of the series was more about Richard Pryor being visibly high on cocaine than Superman’s existential dilemmas.
As a modern archetype, the Superman our grandparents grew up with is completely irrelevant. The character no longer represents the new-wave immigrant (which, at the time of the character’s debut, were mostly Eastern Europeans). Nor does Superman really embody the hyper-patriotism of World War II, or the cautiously optimistic technological excitement of the Cold War. As a cultural icon, it’s pretty safe to say that Superman hasn’t really been emblematic of anything in the U.S. since the 1960s - a decade where the far more politically and socially-driven Marvel characters replaced most of those anachronistic DC characters as the nation’s foremost comic book heroes.
The problem with Superman, I suppose, is that unlike Batman or Spider-Man, the character just hasn’t evolved with the times. Whereas Spider-Man is an immortal representation of the intellectual (although underprivileged) middle class and Batman is an immemorial symbol of our psychological yearnings for justice, Superman is just this alien-dude that’s ridiculously, absurdly hard to kill, for whom no human being stands an even minimal threat. As such a powerful character, his rogues gallery is one of the weakest in all of comics, since outside of Lex Luthor lugging around a shit ton of Kryptonite, nobody seems even remotely capable of going toe-to-toe with him. As grandiose as our illusions of invulnerability may be, there’s simply no way we can relate to a figure that belches tsunamis and has the ability to reverse the earth’s orbit by walking backwards. Canonically, the dude doesn’t even requirethe basic human faculties of breathing oxygen or eating food to survive, meaning the character is, for all intents and purposes, virtually immortal. Americans can grasp a guy being really, absurdly, ridiculously difficult to kill, but as a collective, we just can’t get behind any figure that boasts of an eternal lifespan (unless, of course, he claims to be the son of God or something.)
Bet you didn't know "The Dark Knight Returns" was based on real events, did you?
That’s the rub with the whole “Invincible American Syndrome”, and in many ways, the Superman character. You see, although we all like to think that we and our heroes are unkillable, deep down, we all know that mortality is inescapable. Someday, we will kick the bucket, and odds are, it’ll be in an incredibly unheroic fashion (George Patton, your table is waiting.) As such, we like to believe that heroism is the one natural counteragent to the grim reaper, even though, yeah, we really know it isn’t.
Superman is a character that takes the “Invincible American Syndrome” to such a ridiculous extreme that there’s no way it can allow us to take refuge in the safety of our delusions. To a post 9/11, post Hurricane Katrina, post-economic downturn society, Superman is a downright intelligence insulting pastiche of all of those things we hold dear about the human spirit, like bravery, and duty, and commitment, and all of that jazz. The fatal flaw with the character is that he’s literally an undying monument to ethics and ideas that are incredibly easy to defeat, thus negating that whole thing about sacrifice being worthwhile and valuable to society. Real-life heroes remind us of the frailty and vulnerability of our own humanity…which are two things that get totally thrown out the window when you’re dealing with Superman.
Counting Down Our Species' Greatest Brushes with Complete Eradication
I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but apparently, there are a lot of people out there that think the world is going to come to an end in about a year’s time.
And then, even if Herman Cain doesn’t get elected, there’s still that whole Mayan calendar thingy to worry about.
No matter what 2012 throws at us, whatever's supposed to eradicate humanity better be something fierce, because the species has damn near survived just about every calamity possible since homo got erectus. In fact, when you look at the catastrophic events that human beings have waltzed through - in addition to the near-apocalypses that we managed to avoid by the skin of the skin of our collective teeth - it appears that nothing short of the planet getting McGangBanged by the Sun and Jupiter is going to keep human life from trucking along on spaceship Earth.
So, just how close has humanity gotten to complete obliteration, you may be asking yourself? Well, homo sapiens have played evolutionary Houdini more than a time or two in the 200,000 or so years we’ve been on the planet, and the only thing more surprising than how many times we’ve escaped certain annihilation is just how close we’ve been to guaranteed extinction not just once, but several timesthroughout history.
It seems as if humanity has played the Rocky Balboa to cosmological fate’s Ivan Drago ever since we diverged from our orangutan ancestors. Ice ages, mega-famines, super-diseases, ultra-volcanoes - and during those rare off years when mother nature wasn’t trying to wipe us off the planet - we we’re busy dwelling whether or not we should just use our nuclear uber-weapons to do ourselves in.
The story of humanity, up to this point, has really been the most remarkable survival story ever told, this perpetual, you’ve-got-to-be-shitting-me roll call of near terminal calamity after near terminal calamity, an almost endless parade of would-be apocalypse scenarios that, in a direct bitch slap to probability, we’ve somehow managed to surmount or circumvent time and time again.
So what exactly have we overcome, you may be pondering? Well, I’ve narrowed my list down to eight doomsday scenarios that, through some miraculous, inexplicable fortune, our species has been able to avoid.
Now, who’s ready to get all paranoid up in this mother?
HUMANITY’S EIGHT CLOSEST CALLS WITH EXTINCTION!
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #08
The Year Without A Summer
Pictured: The thing that probably killed half of your ancestors two hundred years ago.
In 1815, the Tambora volcano, which is situated off the coast of Indonesia, erupted. Well, erupt is sort of an ill-fitting term here, as the nomenclature “The earth pretty much exploding from the inside out” is more or less what actually happened.
There’s this thing called the “Volcanic Explosivity Index” which measures eruptions much in the same way the Richter Scale measures the magnitude of earthquakes. The Tambora eruption was the absolute largest since humans had recorded history, scoring a 7 on the VEI scale (the equivalent of a 10 on the Richter) and making Krakatau and Pompeii look like squished zits by comparison. In addition to killing just about everybody in a 200 mile radius, the eruption had the added benefit of spewing so much ash into the ozone layer that it pretty much blacked out the sun for a good year afterward, turning the entire planet into a souvenir snow globe for just about all of 1816...hence, why many historians often refer to it as “the year without a summer.”
If you’re wondering just how much of an impact one volcanic eruption in southeast Asia can have, chew on this: the eruption not only royally effed up the Pacific rim, but plunged Europe and the Americas into months of aberrant frigid weather. The highlights include a doubled mortality rate throughout Europe (complete with a Typhus outbreak that killed a good 100,000 Irishmen), a massive rice famine in China, a worldwide cholera outbreak, a Hungarian mega-blizzard (in which, reportedly, turd-colored snow blanketed the entire country for a better part of the year) and crop failures in New England and Canada so vast that it ultimately led to entire agricultural industries relocating halfway across the countries.
The breakdown in Europe was especially severe, as it almost led to the complete downfall of civilization within the continent. Arson, looting, pillaging and sundry other forms of chaos reigned as starved and diseased villagers ransacked one another like they were in "State of Emergency" or something - in Sweden, the proverbial shit hit the fan so hard that people had to resort to eating grass to stay alive.
As bad as it was, 1816 - often given such whimsical nicknames as "eighteen hundred and froze to death" - could have been WAY worse. Had the weather freakiness and accompanying famines continued for a few more years, it's pretty much a guarantee that there would have been some MAJOR political revolutions going on throughout Europe, and the likelihood of a super pandemic emerging would have been way, way higher than any of us would like to imagine. And speaking of global disease outbreaks...
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #07
The Bubonic Plague
I wonder why you never see this at Ren-Faires?
Yeah, yeah, everybody knows how bad the Bubonic Plague was. By the time most of us are in the fifth grade, we’ve probably had to do at least one project about the Black Death in class, so we consider ourselves bona fide experts on the subject at hand. The thing is, we really don’t have a proper grasp of a.) just how ghastly the plague was, and b.) just how many people died as a result of it. . .primarily because so many Europeans kicked the bucket that there was hardly anybody around long enough to scribble down accurate statistics.
The Plague, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t thefirsttime the Bubonic Plague that threatened all of civilization. Nor, technically, was it the absolute deadliest such pandemic in human history. However, in hindsight, it probably came closer to wiping out the species than most analysts observe. . .or would care to consider, for that matter.
Depending on who you ask, the Bubonic Plague managed to off somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the entire European population from the 13th to 17th centuries. According to some analysts, once you factor in worldwide deaths stemming from the disease, you could be looking at a death toll about twice as costly as World War II.
The Bubonic Plague is one of those cruel, bitter in-jokes that makes you wonder why the universe hates the English so much. You see, the Bubonic Plague began right around the same time the Dark Ages came to a close; which meant that as soon as Western civilization was ready to make that great technological leap forward, it had to do so with feet covered in gangrenous boils. Needless to say, the Plague not only came dangerously close to wiping out Western progress, in a lot of ways, it pretty much succeeded - had the pandemic not occurred, it’s quite likely we would have encountered the Renaissance about three hundred years later. . .which, if you believe in the literal definition of history, would have resulted in an alternate reality where George Washington had a Facebook account.
Although it sounds sort of douchey to look back on an event that murdered half a continent as “a stroke of good luck,” that’s precisely what the Bubonic Plague was. You see, back in the Medieval days, people really didn’t do much traveling - in fact, the average European probably traveled no further than 20 miles away from his or her place of birth throughout his or her entire lifetime. Since people were so isolated, disjointed and virtually quarantined as communities already, the highly infectious disease was pretty much relegated to specific towns, which meant as long as you carried an oversized bird beak filled with crushed up flowers and knew where not to go, you had a pretty high likelihood of avoiding the Plague like. . .well, the Plague.
A lot of people tend to think that the Plague was an epidemic that only affected the white folk, but in reality, the disease was pretty common in Asia, the Mideast and Saharan Africa. Once again, the fact that transportation was so gloriously primitive was sort of our unintended saving grace here, so even if a traveler contracted the disease in one part of the world, odds are, he or she would most likely be as dead as a doornail before they even got halfway home. This, of course, results in one of the most ironic ironies in the history of irony: the Bubonic Plague was a direct result of primitive technologies, and our humanity was inadvertently spared BECAUSE of our primitive technologies. Had the Plague flared up about three hundred years later - when global transportation was fairly commonplace - we would probably be looking at a much, much higher worldwide death toll, with at least half of the planet succumbing to the pandemic. Pending the disease spread to more remote places on the map - the Americas, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa - we’re definitely looking at the virtual eradication of entire races of indigenous peoples here.
Even after the Plague suddenly disappeared around the 1600s, the after effects on humanity were being felt all the way up until the mid 20th century, as the post-plague population numbers of Europe didn’t fully recover until the early 1900s. . .just in time, of course, to whittle those pesky figures away once again with back-to-back World Wars.
And, thankfully, the Bubonic Plague has been officially “cured” by modern science, which really isn’t shocking, since health care 600 years ago consisted primarily of stabbing people and getting them to hock loogies in buckets until they bought the farm.
Well, except for this one guy in Africa, who has apparently developed a case of a treatment resistant strain of the disease. But hey, it’s not like we’re at any risk of another pandemic of the like, right? RIGHT?
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #06
World War III NARROWLY Averted (Part One)
A man who knew that there was only one pathway to prosperity and peace: one paved with lots and lots of dead Soviets.
Following the Allied Victory on May 8, 1945, many Europeans wondered just how long until World War III would break out. Well, had Winston Churchill had his way, it would’ve kicked off right then and there.
It’s no surprise that Churchill wasn’t really a fan of Joseph Stalin. In fact, Churchill was so damned certain that eventually, those godless Communists would try to succeed where Hitler failed that he engineered plans for a counter-strike to a potential Soviet invasion before Berlin had even fallen.
Before the war in the Pacific theater was even finished, Churchill drew up plans for combating the Soviet Union, pending they staged an invasion of Europe. Churchill’s blueprint, the not-at-all-ominously titled “Operation: Unthinkable”, involved pretty much every planet on the earth attacking the U.S.S.R. in case they made any indications of eastern movement - so, yeah, as much as Churchill went on and on about this being retaliatory plan, all signs point to this thing being a preemptive strike designed to cripple the Soviet Union pronto.
The thing that kept Churchill’s plan from occurring was, primarily, the fact that the U.S. was still sort of fighting World War II at the time. Churchill sent several cables to Truman, who I can only expect replied with “BRB, FIGHTN JPNSE, NO THX KBYE.” Without U.S. backing, Churchill knew that his plan was quite unlikely to be implemented, since he pretty much credited the U.S. with winning the last war by itself. Even so, Churchill was so CERTAIN of the Soviet Threat that he continued to push for the preemptive strike all the way up into the early 1950s, getting shot down by pretty much everybody he talked to as “some batshit insanery right there.”
Had Churchill decided to follow through on his plan sans United States involvement, it’s pretty much a given that Europe would’ve been annexed into the Soviet Union shortly thereafter. With a ten million man army, Stalin’s forces outnumbered almost the entire remaining armies of Europe combined; the Russians would’ve most likely steamrolled over a war-ravaged Europe on a B-line to the U.K., and that’s where things would’ve gotten really interesting.
The only reason the U.K. didn’t get demolished a la France during WWII was because it had a natural barrier keeping the Germans from having an easy access point into the country. That, and Russia hasn’t had much historical success with its navy, getting its ass kicked by both Japan and…if you can believe it, Finland...in battles early in the 20th century. Now, there is a likelihood that the Brits could have staved off an all out Soviet attack as long as they were well buttressed by Scandinavian flanks and a secured waterway, but that would only delay an inevitable beat down from Russians, not prevent one. That means that, eventually, the Russians would either invade the island or the Brits would have to enter Soviet territory. And when this thing would’ve gotten to a ground battle, it’s all but certain that Stalin’s armies would’ve kicked so much limey ass their boots would’ve been permanently stained citrus green.
For those of you keeping score at home, a non-U.S. backed European attack against the U.S.S.R. would’ve been a suicidal plan that gave Stalin complete control over every continent on the planet except the Americas. . .which, obviously, would’ve led to an impending World War IV, probably no sooner than the early 1980s.
Of course, that’s not to say that the U.S. DIDN’T have its own plans for instigating World War III in place at the same time frame…
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #05
World War III NARROWLY Averted (Part Two)
One of America's greatest wartime leaders, seen here probably envisioning the death of millions upon millions of Asian people.
During World War II, the U.S. had the good fortune of enlisting two of the most brilliant military strategists in history in BOTH theaters of warfare. While Eisenhower led the Allied Troops to victory of Nazism, General Douglas MacArthur waited breathlessly for his opportunity to pounce on the carcass of what used to be Japan…a country, by the way, that was ready to do battle without a navy, an air force, land vehicles, or ammunition. Of course, Truman made an executive call that quickly brought that prospect to an end, and MacArthur was soon reassigned the not at all ironic duty of rebuilding the nation he was sort of responsible for turning into a rock quarry.
Fast forward about five years later, when America’s next major military ordeal flares up in Korea. MacArthur, now appointed general of the Korean operation by Harry S. Truman, says that he has a brilliant plan to end the skirmish in a hurry. Truman, no doubt intrigued by the World War II hero’s plans, is somewhat shocked by MacArthur’s idea. . .namely, the fact that he wanted to drop nearly two dozen atomic bombs on Korea and just call it a day.
The shocking part, if you dare imagine it, isn’t actually the fact that MacArthur wanted to dole out ten times as much atomic death to the Koreans as we did to Japan, but the fact that MacArthur was ready to stage a military coup to make it a reality. The Joint Chief of Staffs - perhaps realizing that turning a nuclear arsenal into weapons of conventional warfare wasn’t the wisest idea - went to Truman, whom subsequently fired MacArthur’s ass on the spot for even campaigning for a nuclear attack, let alone threatening a goddamn overthrow of the executive branch to get it in action.
The ramifications had a.) MacArthur promulgated an official coup attempt or b.) Truman actually authorized MacArthur’s plan would have been absolutely momentous. In the first scenario, we’re looking at the probable dissolution of the entire U.S. military, and most certainly, a long, long moratorium on international militarization for the United States. Although it seems pretty unbelievable, there have been a number of coups staged against the standing U.S. government throughout the last two hundred and fifty years, from a pissed off moonshine distillers revolt in the late 1700s to DuPont’s failed bid to overthrow FDR in the 1930s. The thing is, we’ve never actually had an internal military overthrow happen here, so had MacArthur commandeered a one-man, non-state-sanctioned onslaught against Korea, there’s no real precedent in place for us to guesstimate what would’ve happened. The only parallel I can think of is Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” - only with freaking nuclear weapons at his disposal.
If the atomic bombs indeed got dropped on Korea (whether by Truman’s authorization or decree of a shirtless, bandana sporting MacArthur), we’re pretty much looking at World War III occurring just five years after WWII ended. China would’ve gotten pissy about us turning its backyard into a radioactive garden, and that probably would’ve given the U.S.S.R. a lot of incentives to retaliate. From there, we’re most likely looking at an all out, pro-wrestling style donnybrook between the capitalists and communists, with central Asia as our three-ringed, steel-caged enclosed Pay-Per-View venue for mayhem.
With European troop numbers extremely depleted following WWII, the communistic nations would have had a staggering man advantage over the ex-Allied Forces. To compensate for a lack of ground forces, this probably means that the U.S. would have gotten even more bomb happy, probably launching a couple of extra atomic bombs at China, Russia, India or anybody else that got too sassy for our liking.
The only thing keeping humanity from evaporating here is that, at the time, the U.S. was the only nation on the planet with a known, sustainable and viable nuclear arsenal (the Ruskies, contemporaneously, were still working the kinks out in their program, mind you). While there would have been untold nuclear-spawned fatalities, I suppose we can take some succor in knowing that those bombs were only headed unidirectionally. . .because the murder of two billion people and turning half the planet into a toxic waste dump is really the best case scenario we can vouch for here.
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #04
The Ebola Virus Outbreak of 1976
Yeah, you're going to be having nightmares about this one later...
A lot of times, it’s sort of difficult to gauge just how close humanity has gotten to almost certain doom. In the case of the Ebola Virus Outbreak of 1976, we actually know the precise mileage: only 20 freaking miles.
That year, a mysterious trader waltzed into a Maridi hospital, complaining about a headache, the chills, and the fact that blood was profusely seeping out of every hole in his body. The under-trained, understaffed and under-equipped physicians really didn’t know what to do, and in just a matter of days, half the hospital population had dropped dead.
Now, if you know anything about politics in the Congo, you pretty much know that they don’t give much of a shit about anything. This incident, however, was so pants-pissing horrifying that officials had no option but to call the World Health Organization for back-up, who promptly sent surveyors to Zaire to assess the outbreak. And yeah, just about all of them, died too.
The WHO, realizing that this is one of those scenarios where it’s probably for the best if they interfered, sent more personnel to the area, and in a matter of weeks, the enigmatic Ebola Fever had all but vanished - mostly due to the fact that well over half of the people that contracted it died within hours of catching it.
Since the WHO had their shit together and the outbreak occurred in an extremely remote part of the planet, humanity didn’t just dodge a bullet with the Ebola Outbreak, we dodged the biological equivalent of an all out nuclear blitzkrieg. Had the wayfaring stranger with a bloody bunghole managed to crawl his way into a more densely populated area of Zaire - or god forbid, he managed to make it to a social gathering place, like a market or a roadway - we’re looking at the single greatest pandemic in human history, bar none.
You ever see that movie “Pay It Forward?” Well, back in ‘76, we were this friggin’ close to using that precise model, only the “It” in question was “unstoppable, untreatable grisly death” for millions - and quite possibly billions - of human beings across the globe.
And to think: the ONLY thing that prevented an unparalleled biological catastrophe from decimating civilization 40 years ago was a pair of good running shoes.
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #03
All Out Nuclear War NARROWLY Averted (Part 1)
You sunk my battleship...and oh yeah, came this close to instigating global thermonuclear omnicide, too.
There’s this thing you’ve probably heard of called “The Doomsday Clock.”Although the eggheads at the University of Chicago claim that the closest we've ever gotten to being nuclear annihilated was in 1953, we actually came THIS close all-out atomic war in 1962...and had it not been for the bravery of one Russian submarine second-in-command, there's pretty much a 110 percent chance that our grandparents would've been turned into radioactive clay about fifty years ago.
Pending you didn't snooze through your high school U.S. history course, you'd know that in 1962, there was this thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis. Long story short, the Americans and Soviets were ready to blow the living hell out of each other, and each side was waiting for the other to make just the wrong move so we could ka-blooey the dog shit out of the corresponding half a hemisphere.
Well, on Oct. 27, a goddamn armada of American ships trapped a Soviet sub off the coast of Cuba - a sub that, wouldn't you know, just happened to be equipped with a nuclear arsenal. In other words, the very fate of the species hedged on a game of nuclear chicken between nautical forces - and ever ones to keep hostile events from getting suicidally tense, the U.S. fleet did what any reasonable organization would do to a cornered enemy force that had atomic weaponry: they started dropping depth charges on them to scare them into resurfacing.
The captain aboard the Soviet sub, understandably, started freaking out, thinking that a nuclear war had already started. His political officer likewise panicked, and since they had authorization from Moscow to launch one of their nuclear torpedoes, both of them were WELL beyond ready to send the missiles a flying.
The lone dissenting voice amongst the officers came from the second-in-command, a guy named Vasili Arkhipov. Arkhipov - who already survived a near nuclear mega-disaster a year earlier when the K-19 sub he was on almost melted down - stood his ground and fought against the torpedo launch, ultimately getting his captain to surface. . .thus saving the entire planet from atomic omnicide.
Although Arkhipov's adventures inspired several movies - including "Crimson Tide" and a Harrison Ford movie nobody went to see - he died a relatively unknown soul, receiving very little acclaim upon his death in 1999 - even though he's single-handedly responsible for preventing the absolute closest call we've had to nuclear Armageddon as a species.
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #02
All out Nuclear War NARROWLY Averted (Part 2)
What we almost woke up to a good 27 years ago...
…that is, until 1983, when we somehow got even closer than we did in 1962.
For those of you that weren't around in the early '80s, let me put it to you like this: it was a scary, scary time to be alive. As bad as U.S./Soviet relations were in the '60s, things were immeasurably more intensified by the 1980s, thanks to the two nuclear powers collecting a stockpile of weapons large enough to kill everybody on the planet a couple of times over. The fact that we had a probable mental retard serving as U.S. President most certainly did not help matters, either.
Looking back on the chain of events that led to the absolute closest we've ever gotten to realizing World War III thus far is sort of like looking at the craziest ass "Metal Gear" scenario Hideo Kojima could ever dream up.
In 1981, the Soviets began Operation RYAN, the largest intelligence gathering initiative in USSR history, to find out just how likely a nuclear strike by the U.S. would be. In riposte, the U.S. began a series of PSYOP maneuvers, which were basically moving ships and personnel around the Arctic Circle...you know, because making a bunch of trigger happy Reds even more paranoid is the best approach anybody could've taken at the time.
From there, shit got all sorts of real when on March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan to use outer-space satellites and drones to laser-cannon the shit out of Russia if they ever thought about sending some warheads our way. In response, the Russians shot down a Korean flight that hoovered over their airspace - taking out a crazy ass U.S. congressman from Georgia in the process. Clearly, the stage was being set for some tremendously intense times...but little did anybody know just how unbelievably close we would get to complete nuclear annihilation shortly thereafter.
On Sept. 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a duty officer at the the Soviet Union's nuclear early warning command center, received a system report that the United States had launched five ballistic missiles their way. Petrov, who had been rather skeptical of the program's accuracy for some time, decided that the message was erroneous, and decided to not report the detection to his superiors. Oh, and by the way - the Soviet Union's official policy was that if ANY incoming missiles were reported on the Oko System, that meant the entire Soviet arsenal was to be utilized in retaliation.
Of course, Petrov was in the right - as it turns out, the system accidentally mistook the refraction of the sun through some low-lying clouds as an atomic attack - but had Petrov followed procedure...yeah, none of us would be here right now.
And if you're wondering how the man that literally saved the planet was rewarded, he's currently living as a pensioner in the outskirts of Russia, having received a monetary gift of just $1,000 USD by the Association of World Citizens in 2004 for saving the collective asses of the entire human race...while Madonna reportedly spends that much on body lotion every night of the week.
NEAR EXTINCTION EVENT #01
The Lake Toba Eruption
Such a lovely view...of the thing that almost wiped us off the planet.
Although humanity has been faced with certain doom several time throughout history, one incident stands head and shoulders above them all as the absolute CLOSEST the species has gotten to extinction. Just how close, you ask?
How about this, amigo: it dropped the worldwide population down to just TWO THOUSAND PEOPLE.
Remember when we were talking about the Tambora Volcano a little earlier? Well, that wasn’t the first time Indonesia came close to killing us all…and nor was it the island’s most proficient attempt at omnicide, either.
The thing about Indonesia is that, for all intents and purposes, the entire nation is basically a volcano. Actually, the entire nation is like some sort of super-duper-mega-volcano, as it rests on this thing called a caldera, which is to the common volcano what a SCUD missile is to a water balloon.
When calderas as MASSIVE as the one at Lake Toba erupt, the result isn’t so much an eruption as it is the earth’s freaking core getting puked into the atmosphere. Keep in mind that calderas are the things that are pretty much responsible for forming most of the land mass in southeast Asia - so every time one of these things go off, it’s like the planet is cranking up a steamroller and preparing to pave over whatever’s in a 500 mile radius. . .and just for good measure, the things typically trigger earthquakes, tidal waves and send enough ash in the atmosphere to trigger overnight ice ages. So in other words, it’s like playing SimCity and hitting the tabs for all of the natural disasters at the same time.
Now, the Lake Toba incident is pretty controversial, because we don’t have too much physical proof that it transpired. This, primarily, is because the eruption killed damn near every living thing on the planet, not to mention that it occurred approximately 70,000 years ago…which was about 64,000 years before we had written accounts of history. Even so, a lot of scientists are pretty sure that it transpired, based on mitochondrial DNA, fossilized remains, and some rather telling geological data that says that something unfathomably massive happened pretty damn close to where Lake Toba is situated today.
At the time of the eruption, human beings were barely recognizable as we know them today, probably looking more like the genetic cross-pollination of hobbits and Monchhichis than Tom Brady and Roseanne Barr. As such, they were probably ill-prepared for a sudden, onset case of doomsday, and an overwhelming majority of the human population was killed off. And by majority, I don’t mean “half plus one”, I mean a good 99.99998 percent of the species.
You know how the Tambora eruption turned the planet into a refrigerator for a year? Well, the Lake Toba eruption disrupted the global climate not for a year, but for about a thousand, ushering in an ice millennium that sent many a species into extinction. . .and humanity survived, by just about the tiniest margin we can dare imagine.
According to the most popular version of the theory, the eruption dwindled the global human population to just 10,000 people - of which only about one fifth were capable of reproduction. That means that no matter who you are or where you’re reading this, your ancestry can be traced back to one of just one thousand pairs of great-to-the-21,000th-power grandparents. So yeah. . .there’s a pretty high likelihood that we’re all humping our genetic cousins at this point in time.
For all of our doom saying and prophesizing about geopolitical events bringing about the end of humanity, historically, our greatest threat comes not from the earth itself, but the unlit powder keg underneath it. You can broker armistice deals and engineer antibodies to fight viruses, but there really isn’t shit you can do to stop a caldera from erupting - nor is there really anything you can do to safeguard civilization from a mega-eruption, either. And although caldera activity of the sort hasn’t transpired on such a massive scale in recorded human history, there’s plenty of geological data out there that proves that ultra-eruptions really aren’t that uncommon of an event throughout pre-history. And then, there’s the data that says there’s increased geological activity going on throughout the Pacific Rim, which may or may not indicate that these dormant mega-volcanoes aren’t all that dead yet.
And the absolute most horrifying thing? The Lake Toba caldera is actually one of the smaller calderas on the planet. The largest super-volcano on the planet isn’t just active, it’s actually one of the most active calderas on Earth, with a history of mini-eruptions that have caused instantaneous climate shifts, not to mention the insta-death of untold indigenous people in the surrounding area. And the geological consensus is that, one of these days, it’s going to not only produce a 7 on the VEI scale, it’s likely to produce an eruption on par - if not even more destructive - than what Lake Toba did 70,000 years back.
The Hidden Politics Behind The Biggest Movie of 2012
In case you haven’t heard, the next Batman movie is being filmed in New York this month, and there happens to be a little shooting conflict involving a couple of people obstructing the view of Wall Street.
It’s sort of an ironic predicament, really, with a fictitious representative of the elitist class staring down a real-life mob of irked college students and unemployed liberals. Even more kick the cat and set fire to your own home ironic is that the movie ITSELF is about that fictitious representative of the elitist class doing battle with a guerrilla terrorist socialist revolutionary that riles all of the irked college students and unemployed liberals to go on a rampage in a cityscape that looks an awful lot like NYC. And also, there’s something about Anne Hathaway dressing up like a cat, which, I guess could be a parable forjust about anything.
The Christopher Nolan Bat-movies have been pretty darned biased towards the Republican Party, with many, many analysts saying that the first two films (and especially the monumentally successful The Dark Knight) are nothing more than thinly veiled celebrations of the W. Administration. With the third (and supposedly last) Bat-movie scheduled for release next summer, one can only imagine what The Dark Knight Rises is going to furtively comment upon. Judging from what we know about the film so far, here’s my unfounded conjecture.
Batman, as he was in the last movie, is a stand in for George W. Bush. And if you don’t think that the story of a self-righteous, wire-tapping, Constitution-avoiding, urban terrorist-obsessed mega billionaire ISN’T a parallel for Dubya, rest assured that the character of Batman could just as easily be a metaphor for Dick Cheney.
In the last movie, Batman did battle with an Osama bin Laden-ish villain that blew up civilian infrastructure and regularly used suicide bombers as henchmen. And oh yeah, he sort of had a proclivity for filming executions on camera, too. In the third film, however, the primary villain is a character named Bane - who, in the comics, was a super intelligent, island born, quasi-socialist revolutionary that turned Gotham City against Batman by declaring him emblematic of economic totalitarianism.
In other words? He’s a caricature of Barack Obama, only on steroids and wearing a respirator mask.
The plot line for The Dark Knight Rises, I suppose, is that Bane decides to turn Gotham City into an anarchist hellhole by promising its citizens’ liberation from economic corruption and political malfeasance. Here’s a brief clip that recently made the YouTube rounds, displaying Bane interrupting a Pittsburgh Steelers game:
If that rhetoric sounds remotely familiar, it should, because it’s almost identical to ANY number of speeches you would have heard from Hugo Chavez or Vicente Fox over the last decade. Just, uh, ignore the fact that he sounds like Kermit the Frog, though.
And the rest, as they say, writes itself. As Bane-a-mania sweeps throughout Gotham, an underground and universally despised Batman must fight for the greater good of society, even if that same society has no idea what’s good for it. In other words, the mission for Bats AND the Republican Party in 2012 seems to be selling people on the idea that they need an elitist protector to save them from the madness of populism, to get people to decline change and just go along with the course.
And with that in mind, I think I have a good idea as to who that new cat-suit-bedecked fellow crime fighter may supposedly symbolize…
…anybody else thinking they might try to trot out Batman-themed tea bags for the next installment?
Greetings, Intraweb travelers! My name is Jimbo X (an unusual surname, I know...I think it's Greenlandic) and I'm your kindly proprietor of IIIA. You're probably wondering what the intent of this site is, so that makes two of us. I suppose it's an info-dump for all of the stuff that I find fascinating/irksome about American culture and society, so you'll find a nice jumble of high culture snobbery and low culture sleaze here. It's also a place for me to rant, rave and ramble about all sorts of things that matter and don't matter, so prepare yourself for some heavy-handed bloviating about politics and consumption. Well, that, and lots of stuff about video games and junk food. The things that matter the most obviously.
A Look Back At.......
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*Vengeance 2002*
Welcome, one and all! This go-round at Cannonball's Corner, we're going to
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A nihilist and an idealist
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The Petite Pink Bitchin Kitchen
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Last night my wife and I built a kitchen playset for our daughter. I called
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plywoo...
