The new movie opens tonight, and my inner child is all atwitter like R2D2 playing back a sketchy, 1970’s-era hologram.
I was skeptical when I first heard that the franchise had been handed off to Disney, as I think a lot of folks were. At first. But then I tossed a glance in my retrospectrometer and realized that George Lucas lost his mind somewhere between the release of Episode V and VI. Further, nobody seemed inclined, realizing that he had in fact lost his mind, to stop him from actively driving the entire bus off the cliff with the making of Episoded I, II, and III. So on balance, perhaps the franchise going to Disney isn’t such a bad thing.
For fargo’s sake, they can’t do worse than Jar-Jar.
But here’s the thing: the marketing campaign is so wide, so diverse, so all-encompassing, that even I, who love Star Wars more than is probably healthy for an otherwise normal guy to admit (even the prequels, I’m ashamed to say), am getting a little tired of it. Honestly, Star Wars might as well be woven into my DNA, but I’m getting sick of seeing it around. You can hardly step foot out of bed in the morning without hearing the thrumming whoosh of lightsabers, the tromping march of stormtroopers’ boots, the unforgettable leitmotif of the Skywalker theme.
Because it’s everywhere. Star Wars has altered its DNA, bred with some hapless advertisement progenitors, and bled over into absolutely everything. I thought I was watching an ad for the new film, but it turns out I was looking at a Target advert. I was watching football over the weekend and thought I’d stumbled onto a new promo for the film: nope, it was a cable TV ad spot. I went to watch a little bit of youtube and found all the controls had been replaced with glowing blue light beams and lightsaber sound effects. (Okay, the last one is actually pretty cool.)
And I just have to wonder, as one who is unversed in the ways of advertising: have we not reached the saturation point? Fans of the existing films are pretty much going to go see the films, regardless of how many promos they see or don’t see. And those fans will convince a fair few of their non-legion friends and family to come along with them to the films. And there are probably, maybe, a few people out there unfamiliar with the Star Wars universe, seeing the promos, thinking “hey, laser swords and spaceships, that looks pretty awesome,” who will come out and see the movies as well.
What I’m saying is, the future of the films is not in question. As long as there are nerds, there will be Star Wars, and the franchise will be ludicrously profitable. With this massive ad campaign, have they not by now reached a point of diminishing returns?
How much Star Wars, in short, is too much?
Actually, phrasing the question like that made me realize the answer.
(As told by a guy who knows of politics only what he learned a long, long time ago in a freshman government class far away)
I seem to be saying it a lot lately, but this is the part where I say that mine is not a political blog; it’s just that politics are, for better or worse, a part of life, and as such, well, they dwell in the mind from time to time. This little post snowballed on me.
TL;DR version: Trump might win the Republican primary — and that should be exactly what non-Republicans want.
We’re exhausted over here in America. In recent decades, our election cycle has bloated and fed upon itself to the point that it stretches out, without blinking an eye, well over a year. I remember seeing on the Daily Show or something similar several months ago that Canada had just gone through an election cycle. It had lasted about a month, and none of the Canadians could believe how long it had taken. Ha! If that’s democracy, you’re doing it wrong. Silly Canadians. No, our elections are interminable affairs; in fact, if you happen to be a fan of the losing party during an election year, have no fear, because the pundits in your corner will begin immediately discussing the ways they can turn the electorate in their favor four years off.
To that end, the current election cycle feels like it’s been about seven years long so far. Quite a lot of people have been really surprisingly upset about our president ever since his election and all through his re-election, and I can clearly remember interviews with high-ranking Republicans wherein running in 2016 was referenced even a full year or two ago. Now we’re within a year of the election, and people are really freaking the fargo out.
Let’s calm the hell down. The president has not nearly as much power as anti-Obama types would have you think; he’s hamstrung by the checks-and-balances system established by those founding forefathers that pundits so love to idolize.
Second, if you think this election cycle — featuring over 20 presidential hopefuls at one point (and maybe still? surely some other backwoods senator has wandered into the light and declared a presidential bid since lunchtime) — is anything other than idolatry and pandering at this point, you are deluding yourself.
Take Trump. (No, seriously. Take him. To Saturn, if you have the means.)
I’m going to go ahead and put my dollar down: he will not be the next PotUS.
Never gonna happen.
He’s gotten a lot of attention in the current cycle for saying some, uh, inflammatory things. People are freaking out because he’s leading in the polls. But there is no cause for concern. (Well, I guess that depends on where you stand politically.) Trump is not going to be president, and the reason for that is that most people don’t care who the president is.
Don’t believe me? Join me in a thought experiment.
You go to the polling place, sign in with the elderly, cheerful volunteer, and wait in line for your chance to do your civic duty. You approach the booth, and go to place your vote — but you find that the names have been blacked out, and all you can do is vote Republican, Democrat, or Other.
Looks a bit too much like a line of urinals, doesn’t it?
I submit that an overwhelming majority of people in this situation would go ahead and vote Republican, Democrat, or Other, without making too much of a stink about being unable to see the name of the person they’re voting for. Hell, I probably would. That’s because we don’t care who the president is, we just want to make sure it’s one of our guys in the White House.
But everybody needs to remember that Trump is not currently running for president. Sure, he says he is, and his campaign literature says he is, but what he’s really running for is to be the Republican Nominee for president. A subtle, but key, difference.
For those of you looking at the American election wind-up and scratching your heads or vomiting in the corner, we have these things called Primaries, wherein hopefuls from each political party battle to the death for the right to represent their party in the national election.
What, sorry? They don’t fight to the death? Oh.
If only.
No: in the primary, candidates do battle with members of their own party for the right to represent that party. In other words, the republican candidates must prove they are the most republican, the democratic candidates must prove they are the most democratic, the libertarians must prove they are the most libertarded.
Thing is, to prove that you’re the best something, you must epitomize every aspect of that something. This will prove to your “base” (the faithful voters who will always vote R or D without a second thought) that you are the right man for the job. So what you end up with is a gaggle of otherwise intelligent politicians scrambling like hell to get as far to the right as they can to appeal to the base: those voters who are really concerned about politics.
And here the Republicans have a problem: what has their party been about for the last seven years (and yes, I’m talking specifically about the Obama presidency) outside of being against everything the democrats, specifically Obama, do and say? Republicans have to contend with the fact that a big swathe of their voters are really pissed off that Obama is the president, and nobody — NOBODY — is more vocal about how pissed off over the Obama presidency he is than Trump.
I’m not going to postulate on why this is the case. I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me. But for every possible Republican stance — clamp down on immigration, free market, women’s (lack of) rights — Trump turns it to 11. No immigration, Mexican or Islamic especially. No regulation of the market. Women? More like crazy PMSing baby factories, amirite? (His words, not mine. Okay, maybe not exactly his words.)
This is why he’s leading in the polls. The Republican core is mad as hell and Trump is expressing thoughts that they agree with. And if you’re a functionally intelligent Republican, then, yeah, I might start getting nervous. Because the challenge that sane Republicans now face is, how are we going to get a majority of our non-zealot population to turn out and vote for just one of these unimpressive faces in the crowd? How can we mobilize people who don’t care all that much about all this against the horde of slavering, racist, sexist, Trump supporters?
It’s a problem the Republicans are going to have to solve very soon, or they’re going to reap exactly what they’ve sown over the last seven years.
But by the same token, I see a lot of Democrats and other non-Republicans getting nervous about the Trump bid. His racism scares them, his intolerance scares them, his flightiness and willingness to say or do anything scares them.
But the fact is, if you’re a non-Republican, a Trump ticket is exactly what you want to see.
Why?
Because even though most people don’t care who the president is, people will still turn out in droves for the general election. Something about deciding the fate of the most powerful man (or woman, Hillary’s running after all, and so is that woman who isn’t Donald Trump on the Republican side) in the world gets our American juices flowing. And on election day? The horde of Trump supporters will be as a speck in a fly’s eye compared to the rest of the electorate. Democrats will never vote for Trump. Most independents will never vote for Trump. Even a lot of Republicans will never vote for Trump; just look at their rhetoric: he doesn’t represent the party, he’s not a Republican, etc. Some will vote 3rd party, others will just stay home; either way benefits the Democrats.
If Trump wins the Republican primary, it’s the closest thing to a guaranteed victory for Democrats that you will ever see.
Insert your own conspiracy theories about how this is exactly what Trump wants below.
We hear it all the time, right? Kids today are ungrateful, lazy, entitled; they’re flushing the future of the planet down the toilet, they couldn’t math their way out of a paper bag, if it’s not on google they can’t be bothered to learn it.
It’s all true, of course, and it’s all also woefully simplified. Kids by and large are going to use the technology and the means of the day to put in the least amount of effort and get away with what they can. Of course, if life is a slippery slope, then the automated chairs that keep us from even being forced to do so simple a thing as walking in a movie like Wall-E are not so very far off.
They’ve got this new thing — maybe you’ve seen it — called a hoverboard.
It’s kinda like a Segway, keeping the rider balanced using gyroscopic technology. But with a minuscule footprint and using literally only your feet, it’s the hottest hot thing, especially among the youths.
I’m a high school teacher, so I have a pretty high tolerance for youthful entitlement and sass, not to mention casual indifference to the world in favor of a tiny glowing screen. But even I was taken aback by the display my wife and I saw in Target the other day. (Why do so many of my stories take place at Target? Why am I always seeing stuff to get good and twisted about at Target? More evidence, I think, that Target is the glowing sun at the center of our capitalist universe.)
We’re shopping, somewhere around the hair products aisle (it’s funny how much I still notice the hair products aisle, as if they made an ounce of difference for a baldy like me), when two teenage girls swing into the main aisle in front of us: one walking, the other riding a hoverboard.
Now, if you haven’t seen these things yet, you really are limited when riding one. You have to hold your body very still, lest you throw yourself out of balance and wipe out in dramatic and delightful fashion (just do a youtube search for “hoverboard crashes”, and laugh away a few hours). So you’re limited in the first place to a sort of zombielike pose. And, hey, since you’re standing still while you roll around the store anyway, why not entertain yourself on the go with a book? HAHAHAHA of course not. The hoverboard girl was, of course, staring into the magical world of her cell phone as she trawled the aisles of the ‘Get.
Then she and her friend had to turn around. Presumably because they forgot to pick something up, or — this is Target, after all — some subconscious advert suddenly took root in their brains and they realized they needed to go back and spend more money. So they turn, and I get a look at them face-on.
And the walking girl looks perfectly normal and average. Face blank but engaged, looking around, you know — signs of life. But the hoverboard girl lowers her phone for a moment and looks where she’s going. (Presumably so that she doesn’t end up in the search results for “hoverboard crashes.”) My god, her face.
If you were to try and personify “disinterest,” her face would have been a good candidate. If you wanted to try to explain to somebody what it felt like to watch C-SPAN for fourteen hours, you might start with a picture of her face. A torture victim, deprived of food and water for days and given to believe that there was no escape in this life, might adopt an affect as empty and hopeless as hers.
I wish I’d taken a picture, but I wasn’t a quick enough draw with my phone. Also, I’m way too much of a chicken to take a picture of somebody doing something dumb to their face. (Unless I know you. Then it’s open season.) The eyes were half-lidded, like the collapsing blinds in an abandoned house. The mouth, open and slack, as if waiting for a train of ants to march in and start retrieving crumbs. A tiny line of drool from lip to shirtfront would not at all have seemed out of place. She looked, in short, as if she had just emerged from a nice, deep coma, except for the whole standing-upright thing.
Honestly and truly, just add a little costume makeup and dirty up her outfit, and she’d have been a perfect extra on The Walking Dead.
And she had just come out of a coma, hadn’t she?
What use has your brain when everything that interests you and excites you is delivered straight to your face by a device you can carry around in your hand? What use have your legs when you can get wherever you want to go by leaning ever so slightly forward? (Except for stairs, I guess.)
Technology is awesome. The science behind these things is mind-shattering.
But for some, it all just seems so mundane.
Not that I think it will happen at this point, but here’s hoping I never lose the ability to wonder at how fargoing amazing the world around us is.
I mean, to an adult, being a kid is awesome: you have zero responsibilities, zero stress; all you have to worry about is whether you want mac and cheese or chicken nuggets for dinner, or how many laps you can run around the couch before you get dizzy and fall over, or how many colored scribbles you can get on the wall before your parents have a hissy fit. (The answers, obviously, are chicken nuggets, twenty six, and anywhere from three to a hundred and three, depending on how much you’re laughing like a maniac while you do it.)
But actually being a kid actually sucks.
You’re always getting hauled off to places you don’t care about. Trips to the grocery store or to Target. Stops at the bank. A daily sojourn to day care. Then, you’re being forced to do all sorts of things that interest you not a bit. Eating vegetables. Going to bed at a “reasonable” hour. Not coloring on the walls. (I should confess that both of my kids are actually pretty well-tempered about these things almost all the time.)
But despite these day-to-day inconveniences, I don’t know that, for a kid, there is any indignity worse than picture day.
You wake up, hoping for a day of cartoons and playgrounds, of candy and sunshine, but the parents are up. And they’re a little bit more wound up than usual. Bustling about. Rushing through breakfast. Nipping at each other about time and duties and outfits and responsibilities. Then they’re stuffing you into stiff clothes that — let’s be honest — are a little long in the sleeve or short in the leg: uncomfortable threads that rub and irritate and constrict and ride up.
Next thing you know, you’re crammed into the car seat — but you can’t have any snacks, because you can’t get any gunk on your hands, and you can’t have anything to drink, because you might spill it on yourself. Now you’re sitting around a lobby, and sure, there are toys around, but they’re not great toys, and your parents are getting mad at you for trying to run around and crawl on the seats, and there’s nothing really to do except sit around and not have fun. Anathema for a toddler.
Finally, you’re shepherded into another room with some other lame toys and a weird adult with a fancy camera, poking and prodding at you and telling you where to stand, how to sit, where to prop your knees, and she keeps telling you to “smile” or say “puppies” and all manner of adults-talking-to-kids-they-don’t-know nonsense.
Intolerable.
You can bear it for a few minutes because you’re generally agreeable, and your parents seem really concerned about you doing what the other weirdo asks. But you’re three. There’s only so much you can stand. The ants start creeping in and you have no more patience for holding still. They’re still asking you to smile, but all you can do is bare your teeth like a wild animal. Meanwhile, your baby sister has long ago given up the fight and is intermittently squalling like a hamstrung sheep or swatting you about the face with spit-slick hands.
Somehow, you survive it, and you end up at home again. You’re allowed to put normal clothes on again and have something decent to eat. And what do you have to show for this? A handful of pictures of you, which makes not an ounce of goldfingered sense to you, seeing as the house is full of pictures of you anyway.
You may have heard the expression about “herding cats.” It’s much more apt as “herding a 2- and 3-year old.”
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