The other night I watched John Carpenter's They Live for the first time since I don't even remember when. I remember it being somewhat frightening back then, but now it's just a crazy fun movie. And it is such a beautiful comment on Reagan's America, that became Bush's America, and Clinton's America, and then the perverse insanity that was the Bush America Redux: our consumer culture is unprecedented in the history of mankind. The Romans in their orgies would have looked at the average Joe with his widescreen TV, beer and bible, myriad gadgets and doodads, and multiple gas guzzling automobiles, and wondered at the wastefulness of it all.
That great scene where Roddy Piper and Kieth David slug the crap out of each other over and over again for ten minutes is the perfect metaphor for our inner spiritual selves trying hard to wake up the fat, lazy, apathetic, consumerist, imperial bastards we've all become.
And on some level all of this struggle, all of this suffering we're experiencing now, is a relatively easy way to be let down, for the hot air balloon to pop.
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