Lately, I've been feeling like Dan Ackroyd looked toward the end of Trading Places (1983), dressed like a Santa who just got rolled in a tin pan alley and now stands there dazed and confused and holding a cocked handgun to his beefy head. Violence is in the air. To compound things, I watched two films in recent days that have tested my resiliency and resolve, War Game (2024) and Reality Frictions (2024).
War Game is a film sponsored by Vets Voice Foundation. The IMDB blurb gets right to it better than I ever could: "US officials simulate a coup post a disputed election. Insurgents take capitals, questioning the president's military control. Countering disinformation is vital, highlighting bipartisan defense of democracy." The voiceover tells us this is not meant to be a reference to Trump and his boffo Machiavellian designs, but it sure feels like it wants to be an understated October Surprise.
Already DJ and his minions are refusing to rule out a whatever means necessary scenario to right a wrong if the election should be stolen-- again! He won't put up with fraud a second time. He's pissed off, like the worst contestant ever to appear on The Apprentice. He and his are putting out vibrations: Trump's handler, and future cellmate and wife, Roger Stone, has been heard sneering to the mossy Rolling Stone that Trump should employ private armed guards in heavily contested states. And just a couple of days ago, Guardian was all over Trump's "enemies within" comment with this headline: "Trump sparks outrage after calling for army to handle enemies on election day."
To add to the prison frisson we have had to endure the news that there are all kinds of plans to see Trump shivved Maybe in the laundry. Maybe coming back from License Plates. Maybe dropping soap. But someone's out to get DJ and we gusta be ready. If the guards won't do nothin' then we gusta step in and step up and step on the trouble. You bet your sweet bippy we're in the post-Truth age.
When you stop and consider we might actually 'fairly' elect a convicted felon (who could not vote in Florida) and an ex-president twice impeached, once for his alleged participation in the shaman show events of January 6. He who ushered in Covid-19, and its implied return to gain-of-function research -- the one where you beat the living sh*t out of the virus until it spills all its virulent secrets and, if you've gone too far,starts writing poetry. Then spreads it, upon escape. An ex-president who's put together an enemy's list, reminiscent of G. Gordon Liddy's and probably with a similar plan -- to kidnap and roust to Mexico all the hippies and dissidents who wanted to "sock it to" Nixon -- and, if Liddy had his way, kill them. (See Roger Stone.) And Proud Boys, who borrowed their theme song from a rejected number meant for Disney's Aladdin (polish the lamp until the genie flows out).
There is worry that Trump will use the Act to subdue protesters angry that he is once again elevated by deceit and subterfuge into the highest office of the land, the civilian government CEO and the commander in chief of the armed forces. It is a close race now, and the fear of unrest and violence is deep. The MAGA movement waxes sentimental for the past, forgetting the humorous social commentator Will Rogers who wryly told us, Nothing is the way it used to be -- and never was. And as Greg Palast shows in his latest documentary, Vigilantes, Inc., Trump represents old boy racism and the indifferent rationalizing of Black disenfranchisement. It is easy to imagine how being beaten by a thin margin at the polls by a Black woman could bring out the worst in Trump and alt-right Americans.
War Game plays to real fears. Economic and political. And it is being acknowledged in some mainstream media. One recent observation at psychiatrist dot com tells the reader: "With just a few weeks from election day - Nov. 5 this year - a growing number of Americans are wrestling with anxiety, stress, and even fear. And it appears that women and younger generations are suffering the most." The inheritors of the mess their forebears have made.
If all that consideration weren't bad enough, I went ahead and watched another film, Reality Fractures. Think Adam Curtis and All Watched Over by Hands of Loving Grace. And I Am A Movie Camera (1929). Steve Anderson's thesis appeared to be that the line between what once seemed sure-as-hell real and what's fiction has become so blurred that we may soon be living duckrabbit lives. It's a world of trouble. Deep, shallow fakes everywhere, all around us, out to get us leftover lefties like remainders at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). A world full of AI-driven dipshits leading us toward the precipice:
And then, of course, there's all the warnings that investigative reporter Greg Palast is putting out there, especially with his new film, Vigilantes, Inc., released just before the election to warn voters of the plan afoot by Trump's henchen to prevent fraud in the election this time by outright stealing it, employing tactics of persuasion -- like good ol boy violence, intimidation, and disenfranchisement. Black Lives Matter, but to the MAGA dogmatists that seems to be more than half the problem with America. Vigilantes, Inc., Palast tells us, is a title derived from the KKK.
Palast predicts that there will be blood before, on, in the aftermath of the election. He predicts that Trump's Republican thieves will attempt to disrupt the certification process at the state level this time, hoping to create enough delay that there are not enough electoral college votes available to elect, in which case, Palast tells us, the electoral college system is set aside and each state gets one vote -- California, with the most electoral college votes, would get one vote in the alternate system, just like South Dakota, and Trump would win in that system.
If Trump doesn't win, then we may be back to the scenario tickled up in War Game, with some faction of the military or militia staging a coup d'etat. This could lead to an extraordinary blood bath, Civil War (without apparent end-aim), and, ironically, a military take-over of the streets of America -- after all, the military and its hierarchy and duties structure, is always a government-in-waiting, and it could be for a while, given the bad blood already set loose.
So, yeah, I feel all beat-down Dan Ackroyd right now and may have to cancel Christmas to preserve my presence. Go Downtrodden!.
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