A few days ago I put up a cartoon I’d drawn of David Evans and Keir Starmer wrestling, based on a photo I’d found in an illustrated dictionary of two wrestlers in a very bizarre hold which could raise a few bawdy guffaws and speculation about such sportsmen’s sexuality. Brian Burden, one of the great commenters on this blog, suggested that I should find a whizz kid with photoshop and produce a photoshopped image of Evans and Starmer using that photo. I regret that I don’t know anyone like that, and I don’t think I’ve got the programme myself. But I did create the following rough image of the two leading politicos on the bodies of the wrestlers using Windows Paint. I don’t think there’s any chance of it going viral, but it should give you an idea of what someone with far more skill could do. I hope you enjoy it, and don’t have nightmares.
This is just a bit of fun inspired by a photo I found in an illustrated encyclopaedia of two wrestlers engaged in a very peculiar hold.
Decades ago in one of their lampoons of the Labour party, Spitting Image had then party leader Neil Kinnock and his shadow cabinet discussing what they should do about the coming election. When the subject of the party’s election broadcast was brought up, the Roy Hattersley puppet immediately said that they’d filmed him and Kinnock wrestling naked in front of the fire. This was, of course, a reference to the notorious bit in the film of Sons and Lovers where two of the male characters wrestle in the buff. But is having Starmer and Evans wrestling in their party election movies such a bad idea? Obviously, they wouldn’t be naked, at least, not before the watershed. By wrestling they could demonstrate both their close working relationship, and make explicit their wrestling with intense political ideas and close grasp of today’s issues.
I therefore drew this cartoon yesterday showing how it all could look.
Then again, perhaps not.
But it couldn’t damage the Labour party any worse than what those pair of jokers are already doing to it. And that’s not satire.
This is a suitably Hallowe’en themed video from the left-wing American vlogger, Thought Slime, which I found on YouTube. In it, he discusses the top five horror movies with an anti-capitalist messages. They are George A. Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead at 5, The Stuff, 4, Alien at 3, John Carpenter’s They Live, 2, and Society at no.1.
In Dawn of the Dead, the heroes take refuge from the zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall. However, the zombies themselves are drawn to it because of its importance to them in their former lives. Thought Slime then discusses how the film thus presents zombies as a metaphor for mindless consumerism. He also acknowledges that Romero himself didn’t intentionally put an anti-capitalist message in the movie, and only realized that he had after he had made it.
The Stuff is, Thought Slime says, not a good movie. One of the actors insisted on improvising his own lines, and it shows. But it is very clearly an anti-capitalism film. It’s about an evil corporation that finds a highly good seeping out of the ground, and decides to package it as a new foodstuff. Not only is this mess addictive, it also gradually takes over the brains of those who eat it, and eats them from the inside out. The company isn’t worried about this, because it’s making them lots of money, and so they kill Federal investigators and anyone else who might discover its evil secret. The movie also includes fake adverts for this Stuff, and has it shown served in restaurants.
Thought Slime explains just how close this satire is to the behavior of amoral companies in the real world. The tobacco companies knew about the lethal effects of the product they were selling, and continued to promote it. And Big Oil is very aware of the damage petrochemicals are doing to the environment, but are intent on selling them because of the massive products they make. Even though this threatens to destroy the world.
Alien also has an anti-capitalist message, as the real villain isn’t the titular extraterrestrial creature, but the Wayland-Yutani Corporation. The Alien’s like a wild animal, a force of nature. But the Wayland-Yutani corporation, which employs the Nostromo’s crew, are completely amoral. They want it for their weapons division, and considers the crew expendable. Thought Slime compares their disregard for the safety of their workers with that of the corporations mining rare earth elements now, who similarly aren’t concerned with protecting the lives of the miners they employ. He also ask which company would also be so set on acquiring such dangerous weapons. As he ponders, the name ‘Raytheon’ appears on the screen, the name of one of the big American weapons manufacturers. He also makes the point that the Alien itself is a metaphor for sexual assault and the invasive nature of pregnancy, but doesn’t elaborate on it as it has been better explained elsewhere.
In They Live, an unemployed vagrant, played by the wrestler ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, discovers a pair of magic sunglasses that reveal that the Earth has been taken over by evil capitalist aliens, and the subliminal messages that they put in banknotes, the press and adverts to keep people enslaved, obedient and consuming. The aliens represent current capitalism and the capitalist class, while the spectacles are a metaphor for class consciousness. He discusses how the Nazis have taken this film as an anti-Semitic metaphor about the Jews, and makes the point that this is angrily denied by the director and writer, John Carpenter, himself.
He argues that within the film there is no alternative to capitalism, and compares this to Noam Chomsky’s book on propaganda. This argues that the major news outlets and the media all have this bias. He also recommends Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, which argues that capitalism ensures that capitalism is the only economic model people will consider.
He puts Society in top position because, if They Live is didactic about the evils of capitalism, Society is practically a call to revolution. In this movie, the rich are a completely separate species of goo monsters with predatory sexuality that prey on the poor. The hero is a normal lad a family of them has raised, but that’s just a joke they’re pulling at his expense. He can never really be one of them. Class mobility is an illusion. They control the politicians, education system and the police. Anyone who tries to expose them is consumed by the system. It isn’t a conspiracy movie, like They Live, which suggests that before the aliens arrived, society was just and good. But in Society, there has never been a good past. The goo monster rich have always been in control. The goo monsters don’t need to do what they do. They simply behave as they do because they enjoy it. And humans are, in this movie, a metaphor for the poor.
He concludes by saying that he doesn’t think that these movies were made to turn people anti-capitalist, but framing it that way makes it easier to communicate an anti-capitalist message to people. Horror movies are uniquely positioned to do this as they are a commodification of death and suffering. They’re considered more mercenary than other movies, are cheap and easy to make, and can turn a big profit at the box office, even if they’re terrible. Here the opening titles come up for the film, Ghoulies, which he explains at the beginning of the video is one of his favourites. And even when a horror movie is good and artistically accomplished, it inspires scores of cheap knock-offs. It’s considered a low genre which provides cheap, almost pornographic thrills. Thought Slime then argues that this attitude is rooted in classism. In other words, he says, hoity-toity types ignore horror movies. Which is why they’re good for reaching out to people against capitalism.
Warning: There is some foul language, and it naturally contains clips from the films it mentions. Though as this video was posted on YouTube, it shouldn’t be too horrific for the proverbial People Of A Nervous Disposition.
This is awesome. In this video from TYT Politics, The Young Turks interview Kai Newkirk and Tania Maduro, the spokespeople for Democracy Spring, about the mass rallies that are set to be held tomorrow to persuade Republican electors not to install Donald Trump as the next president of the US.
The blurb for the protests states
In order for Republican Electors to vote tomorrow, Dec. 19 on whether or not to install Donald Trump as the United States president, they will need to go to their state capitols where concerned citizens will be waiting to greet them, hoping turn them against the reality-TV start turned demagogue turned president-Elect. Kai Newkirk and Tania Maduro of Democracy Spring and December19.us explain their strategy to use 51 public demonstrations to remind the Electors of their Constitutional duty to deliberate upon whether or not the electoral vote leader is fit to hold the highest office in the land.
Their argument includes (1) reports from the FBI and the CIA that Russian spies intervened in the election to help Trump win, (2) Trump has failed to disclose financial conflicts of interest that may prevent him from protecting the interests of the United States, and (3) Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.
Newkirk and Maduro state that Trump should not be president, not just because of his racism and sexism, but because of his unstable, aggressive character. They fear that when he gets into power, he will install an official, who will try to ban Democracy Spring and its efforts to get corporate money out of politics. They state that they will try to engage with Republican electors by saying that they have to vote with their conscience, but Trump is not just a danger to people like them (the protesters) but to all Americans, to the world, and to the climate. They realise that many Republicans are unhappy about vile character and its defects.
Interspersed with the interview is clips showing the Orange Fuhrer actually beating someone up at a wrestling or boxing match, and a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Putin describes him as ‘the best candidate … the Manchurian candidate’. They not that the Electoral College was put in to protect America from potential Manchurian candidates. The organisers also show how you can join the protests by logging on to their website and looking up one near you.
I’m fully behind Democracy Spring and their efforts to oust Trump.I don’t believe that he is a Manchurian candidate, and indeed the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has said that all the material published by WikiLeaks did not come from the Russians, but by disgruntled Democratic insiders. Similarly, the Electoral College was set up to preserve the power of the slave states, who did not want their slaves counted as full human beings.
But the organisers are right: Trump is a vicious bigot, who has drawn any number of Fascists and misogynists out of the woodwork and put them in his cabinet. He is indeed a danger to America, the environment and the world. And there are a number of Republican Electors, who have already decided that he is too much for their stomachs to bear. I hope tomorrow we will see many more of them.
More verbal thuggery from the Duce of Trump tower. In this clip from The Young Turks, Wes Clark, Steve Oh and Malcolm Feschner discuss Trump wishing for the return of the old days when a protestor is hustled out from his rally. He says that it was great back then, because he wants to punch protestors in the face. You can’t do that now, but back then they’d be sent out on a stretcher. The TYT panel talk about how Trump is always keen to incite violence at his rallies, though less eager to engage in it himself. What Trump describes isn’t quite the good old days. That was when the police beat and turned fire hoses on people. While it goes down well with his supporters, it doesn’t appeal to the great American public. They state that the classic example of that was at the 1968 Democratic convention, when the cops rioted and began beating the anti-war protestors.
They also point out that Trump wants to appoint a force to go door to door, checking for illegal immigrants. They ponder it’s bizarre appeal to his supporters, who have a fear of state violence. In fact, one of them says that actually they’re really hoping that they’ll get the call to join Trump’s forces. It’s the same type of mob mentality that saw the rise of the Fascist militias in the former Yugoslavia, and the Brownshirts in Nazi Germany. Absolutely. In the 1920s, when the Communists and Nazis were running around the streets of Weimar Germany beating the living daylights out of each other, the Nazis used to sing a nasty little song. It clearly express their anti-Semitism, and ended with the line, ‘Until the Jew lies bleeding at our feet’. It’s not hard to imagine Trump’s supporters singing something similar about Muslims. Steve Oh says that Trump is a charismatic bully. He is, just like that other charismatic racist bully, Adolf Hitler.
The panel also discusses the possibility that Trump’s supporters will start appearing next at his rallies with their guns. It’ll only be a few at first, but the numbers will steadily increase.
In a lighter vein, they also talk about how the Republican primaries could be improved if Trump and the other candidates just decided to get in the ring, as at a boxing or wrestling match, and beat seven bells out of each other until a winner emerges.
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