I am not easily drawn into the hypnotic state where creature comfort was meant to fulfill and distract from the horrible, shallow, emptiness of these times once termed as the (dis)information age. Sure I sometimes even catch myself staring mindlessly at the animated rectangle which paints all that is wrong in the happiest shades of black or white, failing, purposefully, to mention grey, while repeatedly denying the existence of color outright.
Bad people are back to doing bad things for whatever purpose they've chosen to scapegoat this time around. When, in reality, bad people have to do bad things simply to keep up appearances. Once word gets out that bad people have gone soft it's nothing but work, work, work, toiling away at a hopeless cause of revillainizing in vain. Not that I am defending this in any way, just stating that I understand how public image works: bomb women, children, schools, and hospitals = good; pet a fluffy kitten = bad; have extramarital sex = unemployed. Quite simply put, the more heinous things seem, the more off-balance the rest of us are and the harder to counteract it, it appears, until you trip and your dick lands in a woman you aren't married to, because that seems to be the only thing we are not desensitized to these days. Must be all those years of wearing a ball cap backwards which caused our priorities to become so horribly misaligned.
It's easy to blame Hollyworld for that. They've been so busy trying to make sex appear to be the worst thing imaginable by giving out such heavy-handed ratings so a 13 year-old won't be accidentally seeing a bare-naked tit, but they can watch the hero burn down ten city blocks with napalm... Disgusting.
But the trouble is, that it hasn't played out properly in every vector. True, there is still a massive prudishness in regards to sex which is actually a natural process which predates language by many millenia, but on the other hand, we still seem to know the difference between nobody in the movie having been harmed, vs. real people being killed in wars of aggression. Ultimately, this conflict of conscience is what I believe responsible for causing people to stir from the hypnosis and ask real questions, and start real debates (unlike the ones you're supposed to watch), and write angry letters demanding answers, and protest, protest, protest.
Obviously this accelerated awakening has caused some panic in the strategists office because, yet again, they've somehow misspelled Iran... And this time they've screwed up every letter. GAZA would score worse than IRAQ in mastermind yet, that's how they've chosen to spell it. Maybe the price of oil is too high to travel this week, or maybe there's a sinister (yet poorly written) back story yet to come, about... Well, I am not going to write the story myself in case I don't write it more badly enough and somebody selects mine as the finalist for the official 'how Iran was involved' finger-pointing saga... I don't really need that kind of attention or accreditation on my resume.
Of course, it does raise an interesting analogy when you look back just a couple of weeks at the "red line" episode: A scrawny little bar patron, who's clearly had to much, decides to mouth off at the largest bouncer at the bar, only to realize, too late, that all his friends went home. So he skulks back home in shame to kick his dog and beat his wife. I believe this is the definition of a coward.
From a more objective standpoint, if you are lucky enough to be able to find such a place, you can smell the tension in the air like a gas leak waiting on it's blind date with a tinderbox. With a bit of luck, maybe somebody gets stood-up, and somebody's pride gets hurt, but with so many players on the stage it's difficult to see past the initial smell of things. I can see and weigh the possibilities, and understand what needs to happen or not happen, but I can't see the influence of an internet nobody being the difference needed to tip the scales in either direction. Especially owing to the fact that I'm not even in a geographical location with any geopolitical gravity. Nope, I live in 'me too' territory so the best I can hope for is not blindly following Butch Cassidy off the cliff.
Of course, it could still all be called off on account of bankruptcy.
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