Secondi Redux

Tomorrow's tragedy is yesteryear's farce.

(excerpted transcript from a future public address of Markus Bisonius, High Warlord of the Emancipated Duchy of Neo York)

“Good morning.

“You all know that I just ordered the borders of Neo York to be closed. This action is being implemented to preserve our way of life. The American Dream.

“The same dream that has been falsely and cynically held out to the entire rest of the world — which has grown by a billion people over the last ten years.

“Count ‘em, folks. One billion. Standing room only. From Maine to California.

“And by allowing the stampede of whatever you wanna call them — immigrants, refugees, illegals, legals, migrants, aliens, you name it — we are being swamped. And we are destroying our own way of life, at a time when the business community has presided over the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing capabilities. Shipped it overseas, in the name of efficiency.

”We are told that we have to stand by and let the rest of the world flood into America. And now, this group of activists, who have decided on their own to bring into Neo York thousands and thousands of these unfortunate Ukrainian children, who’ve been orphaned by that terrible and corruptly prosecuted war, have in effect told us — the government and the people of this free and independent duchy — to mind our own business.

“Well, as it turns out, that is exactly what I intend to do.

“I was not crowned High Warlord by the people of Neo York to preside over the dissolution of our way of life. Therefore, I am taking control of all matters related to our own borders. And to immigration, and citizenship.

“Some will say this is unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, doubleplus ungood. They’ll say I cannot do this.

“To them, I say: ‘I just have, motherfuckers.’”

---

Does this speech sound familiar?

It probably shouldn’t. It’s cribbed from a different time, a different country. Possibly a different dimension — I’m still eyeing those CERN LHC experiments warily.

The political atmosphere of that rapidly fading world would strike most millennials and zoomers as so batshit bizarre they might choke on it. This was particularly the case when it came to America’s major party positions on the subject of immigration, the dynamics of which would upend every Clownworld model they’ve been trained on. Even the non-progressives among them would be left scratching their heads, I bet.

But I was there. I breathed that atmosphere, once upon a time. So did all the Hollywoodlanders, believe it or not.

For those of you who recognized my (mildly edited) speech and its provenance: bear with me. Spin the wheel a few more times, and watch Vanna light up the pretty letters. We’ll get there, friends.

In the meantime, let’s briefly revisit the year in which the speech was made. Back in 1997, a cat named Billy J. Clinton still sat in the White House. The nation had yet to endure L’Affaire Lewinsky, or the cavalcade of heresies, hypocrisies and lame jokes that flowed in its wake. At the time, he was just that lip-biting, thumb-pointing guy on TV. To me he was, anyway; I was the farthest thing from a political junkie you could possibly imagine.

That’s not to say I was unaware of politics, including the politics of immigration. Growing up in the 1980’s, it was definitely a part of our world’s kitchen table talk. And at the risk of oversimplifying the issue, it could basically be broken down this way:

• The ‘Union Labor’ Left was still a superpower in the Democratic Party

• Unions feared and loathed cheap immigrant labor, outsourcing, and offshoring.

• Reaganite Republicans feared and loathed unions.

• The ‘Free Market’ Right embraced immigration, outsourcing, and offshoring.

Okay, yes, I know it was more complicated than that. There were heretical partisans on both sides who took positions that might look very similar to our current arrangement. But the dynamics above marked the general perceptions and lay of the land, in most parts of the country. The Democrats urged us to “buy American” and “Look for the Union Label.” Meanwhile, the Republicans — in addition to their usual mustache-twirling media roles — were cast as the fat-cat globalists, looking to undercut and price out the American Working Man with cheap foreign imports and labor. Muhuhahahahah.

Then came the ‘90s.

And shit started to get weird.

In retrospect, that must’ve been the decade the LHC was set to when Steve the Intern accidentally beer’ed-up the control panel. Oh, Steve.

If you’d like to take a trip with me to that strange, distant planet, before it recedes forever into the hoary outer voids of space, I only ask for one small favor…

Confwoosus Say:

Dan Rather

has tens of thousands of paid subscribers, to write crap like this.
So does whatever this thing is.
Yet, Poor Fren Mark somehow cannot crack 100.
Your move, faithful reader.

The speech High Warlord Bisonius shamelessly plagiarized was from a 1997 made-for-cable flick called “The Second American Civil War.”

You can of course look up the synopsis for this flick, of which I’ll provide just a taste:

(from Wikipedia)

The film is set in a future United States in which immigration has rapidly increased, resulting in a fractured polyglot society. The mayor of Los Angeles speaks only in Spanish, Rhode Island is populated mostly by Chinese-Americans, and Alabama has a Sikh congressman. Politics have been openly reduced to a matter of catering to various ethnic groups for their votes, and media-fueled polarization has led to widespread anxiety, with viewership of cable news, including channel NewsNet, at all time highs.

When an atomic weapon is used on Pakistan by India, an international organization makes plans to bring refugee orphans to Idaho. NewsNet embeds a reporter on the plane and airs footage of the crying children in order to boost ratings…

The genre is “political satire”, technically speaking. It’s no work of staggering genius; Director Joe Dante — whose 1984 “Gremlins” was a work of genius — seems adrift in unfamiliar waters here at times. The performances are all over the place, with every major player seeming to think they’re in a different movie. That’s not to say they stink, but the tone wobbles throughout.

The plot itself is hilariously prophetic. And, when combined with the oddly disjointed performances, it sketches a strangely accurate portrait of the time. Political gravity had gone wonky, and age-old alliances and voting blocs were being pulled apart as a result. Not totally reformatted or realigned — not yet. We’d have to wait almost another twenty years before catching sight of such major realignments. Instead, what we saw was a picture of ultra-cynical demolitions, absurd palace intrigues, and the barely-controlled chaos of flip-flopping hypocrites in all directions.

We also saw the first rumblings of pushback against not just neoliberal economics, but the totalitarian progressive dream of The Great Replacement. This dream is personified in the film by Phil Hartman’s curiously unnamed character, the priorities of whom are aptly summarized as follows:

(from Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, the President of the United States (Phil Hartman) turns out to be an entirely ineffectual leader, ruthlessly exploiting immigration to fill districts and states with those most likely to vote for his own party.

I’ve said it before that artists see both the future and the past. Not with perfect clarity mind you; we aren’t psychics. But we see the connective tissues, pick up on distant, snowy signals in the noosphere. I don’t know much about the film’s Canadian writer Martyn Burke, except that this wasn’t his first foray into either pseudo-reactionary politics or comedy. He penned 1978’s Power Play, for example, about a military-led dissident coup. He’s also the lovable scamp behind Top Secret! which is probably my favorite film of the gag-a-second genre. Skeet’s up, baby!

But maybe the most interesting entry in his oeuvre was an adaptation he wrote late in his career, when he collaborated with Jim Henson’s Workshop and Hallmark to bring Orwell’s Animal Farm to the small screen… and perhaps to a new generation of young people hooked on sentimental slop. I’ve never seen this adaptation, so I can’t speak to its quality. But it may give us clues to what was on Burke’s mind in his dotage. I see Kelsey Grammar provides the voice for Snowball. Interesting.

Anyway, back to the psychic documentary satire.

While it never runs short on villains, the film puts a lot of energy into casting cable news as the most slimy and despicable of the lot. As the American empire of fractious ethnostates crumbles, the team at NewsNet ever more cynically frames and shapes their coverage for maximum carnage, panic and profit. The soullessness on display is almost a little too on-the-nose at times, as if Burke is narrating their thought bubbles instead of mocking their thinly disguised hypocrisies.

In our world, we knew the press critters mostly saw themselves as heroic stenographers of the Truth, and still do to this day. As a nod to this self-infatuation, the network includes two characters: Darth Vader’s Old Guard newsman “Jim Kalla” and Elizabeth Peña’s home-wrecking racist-cum-race-traitor “Christine Fernandez.” I could probably write an essay in itself on these two characters, or on their NewsNet employer more generally, but that’s a bit too digressive for our purposes.

After all, we’re on the verge of civil war! And, uh, so is the movie.

But before we get there, we need to map out the new American jungle. The POTUS and his reptilian beltway handler Jack Buchan (James Coburn) swing side-deals with a number of racial warlords and their tribes, including Islamic black separatists, Mexicali re-conquistadors, Sino-Rhode Islanders and more. I won’t spoil much of these horse-trading antics, except to say that after the president bribes a certain ethnic group only to discover their current numbers are sorely lacking, he immediately goes about importing millions more of them.

There’s are many subplots running parallel to the main action. The romance between Idaho Governor Jim Farley and his spicy Latina journo-sidepiece is a major focus, portraying the former as basically an unprincipled, doe-eyed simp, who’s only closing the borders to boost his political clout. To lampshade his Nativist hypocrisy, he impregnates a Mex-American career woman and loves eating tacos. If the comedy was as broad as Top Secret! this approach might have actually worked. As it stands, it’s just a mildly sillier precrime forecast of guys like John Edwards David Petraeus, and Anthony Weiner, with a dash of Bullworth and Spanglish thrown in for good measure.

The film's dialogue — much like the tone and production values — is uneven, but sporadically issues forth a psychic nugget worthy of Delphi:

A few choice quotes:

• “Whatever you have to do to keep those kids up there. Stick a cork up their asses.”

• “We’re dealing with a lot more than just messy reality.”

• “He's closing the borders, people! Thank God for arrogance, lust, and greed, or we'd all be doing infomercials.”

• “Since when does a soap opera control the future of the country?”

I refuse to spoil any more than that. I’ll only note that as events spiral towards the eponymous war, the tone of the film subtly darkens as well. Just as Gremlins is a horror-comedy that takes a few infamous dark turns, The Second American Civil War includes a shocking curveball of its own, delivered after another stirring speech that I chose not to steal.

Not yet, at least. But the year is young.

So how long and fine were Dante and Burke’s antennae?

I have some thoughts.

---

Even from my brief capsule summary above, it should be clear to you that this one of those films from the West’s new-fangled “Could Never Be Made Today” genre. It is too frank about the Great Replacement strategy, the cynical racial spoils system, and the vapid emptiness of all those mendacious clowns and perverts who pretend to rule us.

And yet, I smell something foul cooking on the wind.

Artists can see what’s coming years — and sometimes decades and centuries — in the future. Meanwhile, regime propagandists and PSYOP warriors predictively program what’s coming next Tuesday.

In the 1990’s, the prospects for a second civil war were still considered fodder for comedy. But we still knew something genuinely strange was happening, if not by a careful study of history then by our noses. The strange, stinky tide didn’t recede or slow down either. For instance, when Clinton lied under oath and got away with it, we watched in amazement as the feminists scrambled to defend his two-timing, secretary-boinking, cradle-robbing ass.

The anti-NAFTA unionists were somehow brought to heel, too, with their bosses trained to hop on one foot and bark on command. Outsourcing and offshoring wasn’t exactly hip, yet, especially among the crankier fossils of the Labor Left. But they were being rapidly replaced by the Academic Left, where “immigration” translated to “multiculturalism,” which translated to “diversity,” which translated to “anything but WHITE.”

After decades of playing footsie, the U.S. Democratic party had settled on its Eternal Jew, even if a few old school commies — and actual Jews — were very slow to get the memo.

(excerpted from Ezra Klein’s Vox interview of Sanders in 2015)

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing ...

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. ...

Ezra Klein: But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

Sit down gramps, you ol’ White-Suprema-Republi-Nazi!

But like I said: fossils. Dudes like Sanders will be exiled to a Central Park bench in a few years time, feeding Marxist dialectics to the pigeons.

Here in 2024, some say the wheel has turned 180°. Old alliances have re-congealed, wearing their old enemy’s uniforms. Oddly enough, this IS the same view that left-leaning revisionists take on Nixon’s Southern strategy. You see, Democrats and Republican just suddenly “switched sides” on matters of race. And they’ve never switched back, and there’s never been any major strategies, transformations or realignments in the decades since. Nope, nope, nope. The Klan just traded in their robes for red ties and American flag pins. It’s all very simple, smooth and pat, like the electrical pathways in the average Diversity Studies professor’s frontal lobe.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we see constant transformations and mutant hybrids everywhere. No, the unctuous moral scolds and sweaty preachermen didn’t go extinct. But their sermons and stylings are wildly different now…

…as are their stated goals:

The term “fighting words” is mostly a legal fiction. But if there was such a thing as “war words” it might be a bunch of people chanting:

We’re here. We’re queer. We’re coming for your children.

But of course, even these vile idiots are ultimately being used and played. The grand strategic idea was and is a nationwide coalition of Fanon’s Wretched X’s, with ranking issued according to distance from Straight White Male. I’m sure the plan seems to be going swimmingly from the ivory tower’s window slit.

On the ground, however, it’s looking like Burke’s racial balkanization scenario on steroids was far more prescient. When you fill people with wrath and train them to see and rank each other by grievances, they’ll eventually fight like hell to ensure they’re never the low card in the stack. For example, anybody who thinks there’s some kind of major kumbaya solidarity among black and hispanic Americans has obviously never lived in close proximity to either. If and when the actual shit hits the actual fan, strange bedfellows will surely be made.

Maybe that’s already happening apace. Multiple forces are certainly on the move, it seems, and once-blurry and seemingly paradoxical alignments are coming into sharper focus. I don’t think a bloody Bello Civile: Part Deux is inevitable, because nothing is. There’s always the possibility of a Soviet-style collapse. That’s what I’m hoping for.

That said, the table has been set, and all the appetizers have disappeared down the Enemy’s viscid gullet. Here we have an imaginary petrodollar pasta, served with a side of bubbling housing market soufflé, a soupçon of election theft, and perhaps the mother of all black swan PSYOPs for a palate cleanser.

What’s next on this shitty menu?

Will it be primi as farce, secondi as tragedy?

Yo, waiter!

Check please!

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