October 25, 2016
Source: Bigstock
It’s a head-shaker of a showdown: two unlikely contenders not everyone is particularly excited about. Even some of the voters who got them to this point (beginning what seems like an eternity ago) are shaking their heads at the state of the race.
Nope, I can”t believe it either:
After 40-plus weeks and 60-or-so rounds of balloting, the movies vying for the Dark Corners “Smackdown” title of “Greatest Horror Movie Ever Made” are Godzilla (1954) and The Thing (1982).
John Carpenter’s exercise in close-quarters suspense, subzero testosterone, and game-changing practical effects looks better every year. So I (sort of) get it. But Godzilla? From what I can make out from the comments, voters were swayed by the film’s supposedly poignant subtext. After all, Godzilla was really Japan’s first mass-market attempt, just under a decade after the fact, to come to grips, albeit at some remove, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the monster birthed by radiation; the flaming buildings and helpless, screaming mobs; the kids being scanned with Geiger counters.
None of which I give a rat’s ass about. Between Pearl Harbor, the Bataan death march, and the rape of Nanking, the Japs got what they deserved. Some even admitted that at the time, and certainly none of them seem too busted up about it now.
Of the media’s multiple miscarried “scary Trump” gambits, one favorite is The New York Times“ repeated freak-outs because he (allegedly) asked some foreign-policy guy, three times, why America has all those nuclear weapons but never deploys them.
Obviously, Trump was simply posing the question in the same fashion as one’s husband crabbily wondering “why we still keep this microwave/baby stroller/tabletop hockey game around when we never use the damn thing.” When your spouse complains in this fashion, he’s contemplating tossing said household detritus onto the yard-sale pile, not at your head or somebody else’s.
And besides, I”ve asked the same thing. No later than 2 p.m. Easter Standard Time on September 11, 2001, President Bush should have aimed tactical nuclear weapons at Tora Bora (at the very least). Judging by the, er, fallout from the attacks on Japan, the worst we had to fear was the Afghans suddenly selling us cheap wind-up toys, boxy little cars, and, yes, poorly dubbed, cathartic, allegorical monster movies”maybe even dressing up as greasers in a Kabul park“but otherwise staying niiiiiiiice and quiet for the next half century, minimum.
(It would have been too much to hope that the Muzzies would”ve further followed the Japs” example and chucked their stupid religion as well…)
But this reticence to confront one’s victimization head-on isn”t unique to the Japanese character.
A similar impulse, at least in part, may be what’s made the West’s universities stifling spheres of free-floating resentment, hostility, and outright violence.
I enjoy mocking social justice warriors as much as anyone, but doing so also makes me feel ever-so-slightly guilty because I suspect some of these whiny loons actually have legitimate grievances. (The rest comprise the usual assortment of sociopathic wreckers, on-the-make wannabe machers, generic misanthropes, and neurotic, sentimental do-gooders.)
The trouble for all of us is that, being leftists, SJWs compulsively lie about what they”re actually angry about”a compulsive and spectacularly annoying liberal quirk that’s prompted incalculable waste and heartache.
Was Mattress Girl really raped by whatshisname? Evidently not. Same with the Rolling Stone rape hoaxer. But…I have a feeling they, and many of their less notorious counterparts at campuses around the country”male and female”were sexually victimized when they were much younger, possibly by a family member.
My personal experience of childhood sexual interference, and my observation of others, have taught me two things: that it is almost physically impossible for most people to speak of these experiences in anything but the vaguest terms, out of a combination of fear and shame; and therefore, victims will often channel their frustration and confusion into destructive actions.
