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what to do with those cunts of theirs
Thursday, June 12 2003
Gretchen was off at the SPCA doing her cat socializing thing while I was in my laboratory. I kept hearing a terrible commotion going on downstairs and sometimes it even sounded purposeful enough to suggest that Gretchen had returned and was - I don't know - reorganizing the living room. But she hadn't and she wasn't. Eventually I went down to investigate and found that someone - almost certainly Edna - had captured a chipmunk and accidentally released it near the plastic tarp covering the fresh concrete on the front stoop slab. Everyone (particularly Sally) was freaking out in a massive disorganized effort to capture the poor little guy. Sally had grabbed the tarp with her mouth and yanked it numerous times, trying to pull it out from beneath the rocks holding it down. In the process she'd managed to litter the yard with dozens of bite-sized pieces of thick plastic.
I thought the best thing to do to keep the still-soft concrete from being destroyed up by further craziness was to move the plastic - it seemed like the chipmunk wasn't even there anymore. But I was wrong. The moment I pulled off the plastic, the chipmunk ran out and was immediately scooped up by Edna. I chased her out into the yard until she released it, and then fended off Sally and Noah. The latter also managed to grab the chimpmunk for a time, but he lost his hold and finally the little guy, his fur now completely drenched with carnivore saliva, somehow escaped into the bluestone barbecue installation.
This evening Gretchen and I watched another DVD from Netflix, a movie starring Mel Gibson called Signs. We'd been hearing all sorts of disturbing things about Mel Gibson's ultrafascist world view recently, but Gretchen had read good reviews of this movie and wanted to see it. It ended up being such a dreadful movie that I feel no obligation to refrain from completely spoiling it for you.
The story arc concerned a reverend who'd lost his faith after the gruesome death of his wife. Then the world is invaded by evil aliens doing all sorts of stereotypical alien things like making crop circles, flying UFOs, and being green (but otherwise human enough in form to be played by guys wearing rubber costumes). Get this, at the end the reverend sees how his son avoids inhaling poison gas secreted by an alien because of an asthma attack - and he's suddenly convinced that there is a benevolent God watching out for all of us. Then we're treated to a closing scene in which our hero once more dons the crisp white collar of his former reverendship.
It's rare that I see movies - even popular mainstream movies - with transparently right wing themes. But Signs was absolutely loaded with them. Supposedly Signs was originally created as an afterschool special designed to get kids to, you know, think - but its message ends up being "don't think, don't analyze, don't be a skeptic - have faith! Weapons of mass destruction are over there in Iraq somewhere and we will find them!" Here's Mel Gibson, playing a guy whose wife had been cut in half and who experiences a globally-devastating invasion by aliens - but the moment something freakishly good happens to him - he credits God and resumes his faith. Where is the critical analysis that would lead Mel to weigh the good things done by God against His bad things in two columns of an accountant's ledger?
Along the way, we are treated to other narrow-minded jingoistic messages. For starters, the aliens are never shown doing bad things - the director assumes we just know that aliens are inherently evil and never feels the need to prove it. As for that alien who tries to poison Mel Gibson's son at the end of the film, he actually has a good reason for being pissed off - Mel had cut off some of his fingers during an unprovoked attack in an earlier scene. And why exactly had Mel cut off the alien's fingers? Because they had claws on them - that's all! We, the audience, were expected to consider that "justification enough." Why, after all, do right wingers stomp bugs? Because they're funny-looking, that's why. They'd stomp midgets too if only they were small enough. The reason right wingers have any sympathy at all for funny-looking embryoes all tricked-out in gill slits and seahorsy tails is that it gives them an excuse to tell women what to do with those cunts of theirs.
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