American Idiot?

July 17^th – D’yever get the feeling that the good ole’ USofA is teetering on the brink of something…catastrophic? The worry is that, when they fall they’ll not go alone, that they’ll drag plenty of other far more worthy unfortunates with them…like the Balrog and Gandalf; a casual glance at their landscape gives some pointers.

Yes, of course, the flash-floods and hurricanes are a terrible thing to those involved, an event you wouldn’t wish on anyone but, the thing is they’re local events. That sounds really harsh, but you all know me better than that; what I’m trying to say, in my cack-handed way, is that the results of these terrible events are only felt locally. They don’t, apart from the obvious fellow-feeling for those in distress or experiencing loss, they don’t have an effect on the global community. When weather events affect what’s known as the Corn Belt however…well, that’s a whole new different story.

46% of American citizens believe in creationism…46%. That’s nearly half of the population; that’s half. Voter turnout floats at around 56%. That’s a 10% differential. So, let’s do a little bit of arithmetic shall we? Let’s say that out of those two figures, the creationist 46% and voter 56%, let’s say 30% of each following doesn’t vote; apathy, missed the bus, couldn’t give a shove, whatever. So there’s a possibility that this total voter turnout consists of between 24 and 34% of the 44% of voters who believe God created the earth in the requisite days (7) put dinosaurs on earth to test our faith and, even though God is an entity, created us in his image.

When the Star Spangled Banner begins and the Stars and Stripes fly over an event like a remembrance of 9/11, of the opening of Ground Zero…or at the opening of a baseball game…or, well anything really, there will always be a large section of the American public who will begin to cry, in some cases weep, at the memory, at the terrible cruelty of it all (not of the baseball game; ’course not, not unless you were a die-hard Chicago White Sox supporter in the 70’s; that would have made a saint weep). At the appropriate memorial they are bewailing the terrible waste of life and injustice of it all…and yet these are the same people who seem to have by-passed the point when it came to supporting the US Healthcare Reform Bill…from the get-go.

The undoubted foundation that was constructed by Hollywood, from the very beginning of the use of film, to tell a story has been used by all other countries in order to build their own film industry. This success story has become woven into our very lives. At every high point in our existence we can relate to lines from films, characters from films, events from films… like pop songs for the eyes they help define, make sense of and highlight events in our lives, underline the changes and reasons. So, in the birthplace of film what can’t you find? A foreign language film, that’s what. This is a nation that thinks a news item longer than three minutes is an in depth report; a nation that believes putting cheese onto any form of food turns it into a gourmet feast; that has the capability to launch men into space and yet encourages its citizens to worship at the alter of a cartoon mouse; believes that any film not in the mother tongue (English, or at least the American approximation of English) should be remade so that folk don’t have to tax themselves by having to read the subs.

So, we should be totally unsurprised that, on this day in 2004 when Linda Rondstadt, performing at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, dedicated her encore (a cover of The Eagles’, Desperado) to the filmmaker Michael Moore, urging her audience to go see Fahrenheit 9/1l that she was greeted by boos and over half the audience walking out there and then…

Pay attention out there; watch out for the shit that leaves the fan of Uncle Sam…that sort of  blind foolishness will be visiting a country near you very soon.