Look, just because this is being written from a parallel universe, you’d be wrong to think that everyone over here is so totally freaky that you couldn’t possibly carry on a conversation with any of us without a cheat sheet in your breast coat pocket.
“There’s more that unites us than divides us.” Isn’t that what the bumper sticker makers say? Well, I’ve always put my faith in their deep wisdom and I think you should do the same.
I’ll give you a ‘for instance’ because over here, just like over there, a quality ‘for instance’ makes everything so much easier to understand. For instance, don’t assume that we on our side of the wormhole don’t damn well love to see John Wayne punch a hippy in his shaggy face, so we can hear the hairy dude whimper “not cool man” as he collapses like a house of cards onto the Duke’s unswept floor.
We’re just like you. We eat that stuff up.
Even over here, the sight of Henry Fonda and Ronald Reagan and the Duke himself dumping an out-cold longhair into a pig trough until his commie brain reboots will vibrate in people’s brains like the paint shaker at the local hardware. It’s kind of like how the sight of a slurring Dean Martin with a highball in his hand will make an auditorium full of Mugwumps hum. It’s some kind of Universal Language.
I’m guessing where it all breaks down is the reason for the fisticuffs in the first place. Let me set the scene of the movie, directed by Bizarro John Ford: Open on our expansive big sky, panoramic Bizarro Wyoming that looks just like your Wyoming, except with free range stallions and clouds of passenger pigeons undulating like schools of amber jacks over the Great Barrier Reef. The overture swells with ten thousand strings and one plucky banjo.
The Duke’s cabin is nestled like a tiny Lego block covered in solar panels and surrounded by windmills that’s radical-homemaking on the limitless fields of prairie grass and wild flower. There’s a puff of smoke trailing from his rusty metal chimney to signify to the entire world that the man is home, no doubt drinking rotgut coffee from his own percolating coffee pot.
Then: A knock, knock, knock and kill the music.
John Wayne (or the character John Wayne is playing, who, let’s be honest with ourselves, is John Wayne) walks with that side windy walk of his to the door and opens it. And there they are, those pinko bastards, the Koch brothers. Charles Koch is played by Jane Fonda (the hot “Barbarella” Jane Fonda, not the creepy step-aerobics Jane Fonda) and David Koch is played by Peter Fonda (definitely “Easy Rider” Peter Fonda. I mean, “Ulee’s Gold” Peter Fonda? Yuck. No way.)
They’re there, again, to try and sell th
e Duke on their socialist pinko vision of a world coming together for the Common Good, so every dimwitted comrade gets cheap energy that’ll allow him or her to fire up a light bulb or a hot pad or a you-name-it for almost free.
They, the two Fonda-Koch pinkos, weave a Marxist mind movie of a world with rows of de-limbed tree trunks stuck in the ground every 200 yards to hold up big black wires that’ll be everywhere you look – connecting every damn house, office and barn you will ever see, forever. Not to mention some “far out” great girder structures that’ll be built in rows and cut through forests to hold up multiple vibrating lines of pure electricity, run from grand smoke-stacky factories that belch cancer-coal-gas to anyone downwind.
Here’s an interesting fact: Rush’s 2112 came out in 1947 in Bizarro World and Duke, like all red-blooded Bizarro Americans, damn well loved it and isn’t about to let the metaphorical priests of the Temples of Syrinx let the lowly unwashed – who don’t even generate a spark of their own energy – reach into his cowhide pocket and grasp what he bought, built and paid for. (Duke’s character’s a guy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps even before he could afford the boots that went with the very straps in question.)
“And, man, we don’t even need to dig coal mines any more, man.” This is the last-straw point of dialogue delivered by Peter Fonda’s character that makes the knuckle sandwiches start to fly. “We can just rip the tops off a mountain like that one,” the camera pans to where the hippy’s index finger points, “and bulldoze the coal right out of it.”
Here’s the next sound the theatergoers hear in Ultra Digimax Dolby Surround Sound: Ka-pow!
Yessir, it’s four powerhouse reels of hardcore good-guy-on-commie violence with an orgiastic final battle between the righteous forces led by General Ayn Rand (played by Elon Musk) vanquishing the collectivist evil no goodniks lead by the CGI-ghost of FDR on his fire-spewing hover board wheelchair.
I personally saw strangers in the theatre leap up during the credits and cry, “No lefty pinko commie bastard is going to take my solar panels!”
Here’s how we got things figured in Bizarro World: Solar and wind is the homegrown homesteading energy of the self-sustaining God-loving Republican libertarian and if everyone ends up sucking their energy from the anus of a sooty coal-fueled power plant than the Liberals, damn their collectivist souls, have won.
Sounds to me like a new bumper sticker is rattling around in there somewhere, just waiting to be born.
