Late afternoon yesterday, New Year’s Day, I invited a friend — one with roughly similar political views — to go with me to see the biopic Vice, about Dick Cheney, perhaps my favorite villain of all time, or at least of the Bush Jr. presidency. Indeed, I remember putting pics of Bush Jr., Rumsfeld, and Cheney up on my altar, so much did I need to neutralize my own hatred and forgive them for the horrors inflicted upon the world with 9/11, the Patriot Act, Afghanistan, Iraq, on and on, the planned forever War on Terror that has terrorized human hearts ever since.
My friend and I discussed 9/11 on the way to the movie. What kind of perspective would it offer? Would the movie show Cheney as complicit in planning the attack?
I was interested in the movie more for sociological reasons than anything else. Interested in who the audience would be, whether or not there would be any audience in this liberal academic town. There was! I guess about thirty middle-aged or older people (30 is a lot, these days when everyone carries around their own private screen.) But, sitting there, waiting through the interminable previews of violent movies, I finally remembered: Oh, of course, there would be an audience! The movie itself is most likely told from a liberal point of view, since the three U.S. administrations Cheney had participated in — at first under the tutelage of Rumsfeld; by the time of Bush Jr., the teacher/student roles had switched — were all Republican.
I have considered myself an Independent all my life, and yet when I came of age in the ’60s I sided with the Democrats and my generation’s hero John Kennedy, and pretty much held that point of view all the way through the rest of the 20th century. The bloom began to fade with the Clinton administration; not just his obviously lying peckerdillos, but my reading of de-programmed CIA MK Ultra mind-controlled sex slave Kathy O’Brien’s book Trance Formation of America which named Hillary herself (later “our” first female, feminist presidential candidate) as a pedophile. That did it. The bloom was off.
Even so, it took a few more years for me to completely break the spell of my Democratic leanings. In fact another decade. Even so-called liberal Obama signing that first draconian NDAA, back in December 2013, didn’t completely cynicalize me.
Yet, by the time I stopped my print subscription to the New York Times, back in late 2010, I was beginning to recognize, very clearly, that the two parties were indeed two heads upon one ravenous beast; that both parties started wars under false flag pretenses, that banksters funded both sides, that both big newspapers and university towns like this one, Bloomington, Indiana, were biased “liberal,” on and on.
And, I began to seriously poke around the internet for alternative news of interest to me. Not even a month later, in January 2011, I started this blog.
By the time of the runup to the 2016 election, and the wikileaks release of all sorts of horrific stuff about America’s wars and Podesta’s emails, I knew I was definitely not going to vote for criminal Hillary. No longer even faintly leaning towards the Democratic party; but then, vote Republican? Equally repugnant, except that Donald Trump was the candidate. And what would that mean? I had no idea. His unpredictability both fascinated and frightened me. I took the coward’s way out and voted for Jill.
Over the past two years, I have shifted “right,” as they say, finding myself in nearly full agreement and admiration of Donald Trump and how he uses his bloviating personality to keep the virtue-signalling “left” tittering furiously about his “character” while going full steam ahead with his own agenda, the one he had promised as a candidate, which includes, as priorities, exposure of the pedophile and human trafficking rings, bringing jobs and troops back home, letting go of foreign wars and multilateral trade deals, focusing on America first, all in the interests of smashing the nearly-complete globalist plot that had nearly strangled the whole world before he came into office.
So, despite his apparent cluelessness on matters concerning the universal suffering from pollution and resource extraction demanded by predatory capitalism’s continuing greed for more and more “progress” in industrializing and privatizing the entire commons of Mother Earth, I have been, and remain, biased towards Trump. First things first.
Which makes me, at this point, a Republican? And if so, why did I choose to see that satirical movie which bashes Cheney, a Republican?
What interested me most about the movie was how it divided my friend and I. She couldn’t even stay to watch the whole thing, so disgusted was she by the way they skewed 9/11, making Cheney complicit, yes, but only in taking advantage of 9/11, rather than masterminding its evil design.
I can’t help but agree with her on that point, and yet I found the movie very interesting, especially the part at the very end, after all the credits, one final, unexpected scene with the hilarious “focus group.” Someone said in that group, “But what about this movie? Isn’t it a liberal bias?” Another participant demurred, no, it’s not, it’s about the facts. Just FACTS!” Oh you would say that, you libtard!” shot back the first man. At this point the entire group dissolved into a free for all, the two men and others caterwauling physically on each other.
What a perfect scenario to illustrate the Great Divide that we find ourselves in now. And yes, a perfect counterpoint to even the final scene of my friend and I as we sat in the car on the way home, she bemoaning the fact that the movie was not nearly strong enough on fingering Cheney for 9/11, and me saying I prefer to keep my mind open, because there’s always more, always. That we will never come to the end of any of our interpretations!
Perusing a few reviews, I found this one the most interesting, from Rolling Stone, a magazine I used to read voraciously, when I was a libtard.
“VICE” Review: Meet the Dubya Era’s Dark Lord
Adam McKay’s biopic of former Vice-President Dick Cheney takes on the controversial political figure, one dark, bleak laugh at a time
