Week of 10/30/2017

Maximum Overdrive: Washington D.C.
– by David Matthews 2

Literary legend Stephen King is known for writing some of the best stories in the modern age.  Stories like “It” and “The Shining” and “The Stand” and “Christine” have all found their way either to the silver screen or to television.

But there is one that Mister King probably wishes he didn’t put pen to paper, and that one is “Maximum Overdrive”.  This is a 1986 movie that was written and directed by Stephen King that starred Emilio Estevez, Pat Hingle, and Laura Herrington, and it included an appearance by the future-and-former Mrs. Donald Trump, Marla Maples.  (Don’t worry, you’ll understand the reference quickly.)

If you never saw this movie before, here’s a quick summary: a weird comet races past Earth, and, soon afterward, all of the vehicles and a few other inanimate objects started running by themselves and killing humans on sight.  Keep in mind that this is decades before “smart cars” were a reality, so to have any kind of vehicle start by itself and drive by itself at that time was reserved for science fiction or a “Transformers” cartoon.

So the characters in the story are surrounded in a roadside diner by autonomous vehicles that hold them hostage.  If they venture outside of the diner, the vehicles chase them down and kill them.  There’s some debate about what the vehicles want and why they want to kill the humans, but not everyone can handle the insanity with a calm disposition.  Finally, a waitress named Wanda June loses her last frayed nerve and races out of the diner screaming “You can’t do this!  We made you!”  She is then shot dead by a machine gun atop a military vehicle.

No, there is no use trying to apply logic with this movie.  You can understand why this was not one of Mr. King’s proudest creations and why he vowed to never direct a movie again.

Anyway, what brought me to think about this stinker of a cult classic was the recent stances made by two members of the GOP in their criticism of President Donald Trump.  Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker have each announced their planned retirement from Congress, which freed their consciences just enough to speak out against the Narcissist-in-Chief.  Flake, in particular, gave a rousing speech where he urged his fellow members of the GOP to stand up to the Twitter-tantrums and the hypocritical bullying that Trump has been recklessly engaged in.

Sadly, though, his words fell on deaf ears.  His fellow GOP grifters and shysters were enjoying lunch with the orange-skin wacky man while they listen to him boast about his tax plan and how they will make it happen for him.

The problem, of course, is that both Senators Corker and Flake, as well as Senator John McCain and former President George W. Bush, not to mention a few others, are pretty much acting like the waitress in “Maximum Overdrive” that lost all sanity when it came to the current insanity of the world.  They are the ones that are now running out screaming “You can’t do this!  We made you!”

And the sad fact of the matter is that, if they themselves didn’t create the political monstrosity that is Donald Trump and his red-hat-wearing Trumpets, then they certainly prospered from it.

The wave of pro-corporate populism can be traced back to the infamous Powell Memorandum of 1971. Prior to being nominated to the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell III sent a memo to the chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he described the American Free Enterprise system as being “under attack”, and outlined what needed to be done. Those measures were eventually put into place, which included the removal of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” in the 1980’s.  This allowed conservative viewpoints to be introduced in the media without the required “equal time” counterpoint.

The removal of the “Fairness Doctrine”, while done under the pretext of free speech, gave rise to conservative media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, as well as the eventual creation of the Fox News cable news channel in 1996.  (Editor’s note: the online column Brutally Honest pre-dates Fox News by six months.)  Conservatives helped fuel the fire in the newly-converted during the 1990’s in their crusade against all things Clinton by being elected to office and going after President Clinton and his wife.  And then in the 2000’s, they rode the wave even further with their post-9/11 fearmongering and warmongering.  They were the ones that declared it was “wrong” and even possibly “illegal” for people to question “their” president.  They hammered in the notion that people must “obey” government, no matter what.  And then, during the two terms of President Barack Obama, they actively and hypocritically rebelled against the very President that they pompously declared was not “legitimate”.  They told their supporters to fight Obama and his programs by any means that they can.  They told the masses to “fight the establishment”, because, at the time, that was what Obama represented.  Obama represented the very “evil” that future-Justice Powell warned about four decades earlier.

In other words, folks, the conservatives and neo-conservatives and the rest of the GOP made Trump happen.  They created the groundswell of nationalistic populism that Donald Trump would eventually co-opt and transform into his army of red-hats that would propel him to be the GOP nominee and eventually President of the United States.

And all during the rise, men like Corker and Flake and Bush Junior said nothing of it, because they still believed that they could control this monster that they created.  Hell, John McCain actually contributed to it by naming flaky Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 and then said nothing as the monster began to surface. 

So now that we have a narcissistic bully in the White House, and armed nationalists marching like the fascists in 1920’s Italy, and nationalist terrorists driving cars into peaceful protests in at least two separate incidents, and Gold Star families and their supporters getting death threats, and armed nutcases attacking pizza parlors looking for fictional child victims in a basement that does not exist, and victims of shootings being told to their faces that they are paid actors that made up their tragedy, now that the ugliness of the GOP is coming out like the Mack truck with the huge Green Goblin grill ornament looking for victims to kill in “Maximum Overdrive”, now Corker and Flake and McCain and Bush Junior are crying foul.

No, I’m sorry you lot of Wanda June party players, but it’s too late to sound the alarm.  Your cohorts have already sold themselves like cheap prostitutes to the monster and have already accepted this as the “new normal”.  Your monster is circling the diner, and rather than making a stand, they’re pumping the gas.  And that’s all that they’ll do.

Let’s get brutally honest here… Corker and Flake and McCain and Bush Junior have no business crying foul now that the damage is already done.  People like myself have been warning this sort of stuff was happening for well over a decade now, but you sorry lot refuse to listen.  You gang of bitches and bastards knew precisely what you were getting into, and you said nothing about it.  You dismissed the worries and the complaints as you continued to prosper from the political carnage, and now that the monster has embarrassed you, you pretend to be innocent and pure, and that should not be allowed to stand.

Senator Flake’s declaration of resistance may have been a little more genuine if not for the fact that he made it quite clear that it comes after his book was released to explain his supposed “outrage”.  Oh, you didn’t know he had a book out?  Apparently a lot of people didn’t.  But now that he’s made his speech, that book is now soaring off the shelves.  How convenient.  How utterly “coincidental”.

Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, we are all in the madness of the real-world remake of “Maximum Overdrive”, only our monsters aren’t inanimate vehicles, but red-hat wearing followers of a political death-cult willing to destroy the world in order to “save” it.  And if you helped to make it happen, if you prospered from the insanity, then you have no moral claim to being outraged over how it has come to be.