Politics

I've been watching a lot of old 80s and 90s movies recently, and I noticed something starkly different from most of the movies I've seen coming out in the past decade or so, particularly the glut of superhero movies we had for a while there. With very few exceptions, all the protagonists were anti-establishment.

Star Wars, Ghostbusters, the Mario Movie, the Breakfast Club, the Princess Bride, it goes on and on and on. The heroes were all rebelling against some ignorant authority that either didn't understand the damage it was able to do or didn't care about hurting those who had no power. As a result, when I was coming up my generation felt very much against the established status quo. Even the kid-targeted stuff in the early 90s, it was all gross-out humor and struggling against adult authority in favor of personal autonomy. Nickelodeon takes over your school. As a teenager it was grunge and punk and everything being 'extreme'.

The impression I get from a lot of the late 00s and 2010s fictional media, though, and much of what I've seen in the 20s so far, has been stories that are on-side with some big establishment. Even Peter Parker was turned into a suck-up for some billionaire. There are still instances of anti-authoritarianism, but it doesn't seem to be the prevailing narrative the way it was. Instead it largely seems to be about going along with society and not bucking the system.

Maybe what we need, if we want to change things, is to instill that pushing against the establishment in the next generation again. That 70s and 80s era Muppets vibe. Turtles that live in the sewers because if they lived on the surface, the powers that be wouldn't understand them. Otters living in poverty and being exploited by hoity-toity customers who decide not to pay them for their laundry services on Christmas in the first five minutes of the movie.

Did Chris Pratt Mario get into a chase with Koopa cops while fighting a corrupt authoritarian government? No he did not. He was on the side of a social order that was being disrupted by an evil musician.

Artists need to change the narrative and be intentional about it.

It boils down to two main things in that article, possibly one… the Billionaires bought the media knowing full well the power they could wield with it, but more so, dismantling education leads to an easily influenced populace.

The pandemic was a boom for them because it created another “lost generation” and pushed so many educators to hit the breaking point and quit.

Remember back when climate scientists discovered the ozone layer was thinning and the world banded together and worked to repair the damage we’d done?

I’d like to live in that reality again.

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment

Holy fuck the refusal to self-reflect. Was this guy even living in the same reality?

I wasn't surprised by this outcome in the least. Nobody with any knowledge of this country's history or regular interaction with much of the trash that inhabits it should have been either. If you're still confused, look at the exit poll breakdowns by demographics.