Chapter 16. Who Is Democracy's Jonathan E.?

Anyone who has watched a 1950's "look into the future" will snicker at the predictions of the world of tomorrow, say in the 1970's or 80's, or even the turn of the century. The promises of flying cars and housework-busy robots and moon bases seem quaint and naive in the face of the reality of Communism and unpopular wars and a terror-driven Middle East.

Some predictions, however, while not literally manifested, can inform us about the dark machinations of the human psyche. If some author can imagine the future world, why not a politician, or dictator, or corporate giant? The paragons of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are familiar to us as cautionary tales.

Another interesting look into the future is Rollerball, the 1975 film by director/producer Norman Jewison and starring James Caan and John Houseman. The year is 2018, and nations have dissolved by conflict into six mega-Corporations: Transport, Food, Communication, Housing, Luxury and Energy. A few executives on the Directorate make all the decisions. Mankind has rid itself of famine, disease and war.

And individuality.

The deadly game of rollerball pits teams from corporate-cities in a mixture of roller derby (remember that?), football and extreme fighting. Players can be injured or killed, and the masses can return home with their innate human desire for conflict quenched, until the next game. The Game has been carefully designed to encourage allegiance to the Corporations and to its authority.

But as in all utopias, there is trouble brewing. There is Jonathan E. of Houston's Energy team; he is rollerball's best and most popular player, and its longest survivor (ten years). In fact, he's too popular, and has risen above the game itself and its purpose. So the executives "ask" him to retire, and when he refuses they begin making the game and its rules more deadly until at last, at the world championship, there will be no penalties and no time limit, meaning it will continue until all players are maimed or dead, even Jonathan.



There is, of course, only one way for Jonathan to make it through the final game, and you can watch the movie yourself to see what happens.

Well, 2018 is right around the corner. We don't have flying cars, or moon bases or rollerball yet. But we do have a growing public sector that rewards mediocrity and dissuades high individual achievement, as the only way to perpetuate the single truly mega-Corporation in the United States: the government itself.

Watch closely as our contemporary Jonathan's are torn down, simply from their brazen defiance of the Directorate.

Quotient out.

Chapter 15. Stinking Candy

So, what to make of Scott Brown's election in The Blue, er Bay State?

It is difficult to avoid post-electoral hyperbole to say that this is the beginning of some counter-revolutionary conservative uprising. Some claim that Massachusetts voters simply didn't like the dour Martha Coakley, at least to the tune of a 110,000 vote margin of victory for Brown. Others say it was about health care, or the President, or simple anger at Washington...

Or, perhaps it was the phantasmic fantasy of faux candy.

Perhaps voters in Massachusetts, as they did in 2009 in Virginia and New Jersey, have come to the realization that they were duped, or were victims of their own willful naivete. It's clear that many well-meaning Americans have awakened to the ideological shove to the left, even as a lot of them are breaking to the right on several important socio-cultural issues. During the election Senator Obama promised tax cuts for nearly everybody, bipartisanship, and transparency. In the last few months hundreds of millions of dollars worth of targeted "candy" was doled to various Congressmen to buy their votes on radical health care change.

A lot of Americans stood in line for the big parade, and excitedly clamored to catch the handfuls of promissory candy being thrown out by the Left.

Unfortunately, they thought they were getting a chocolate kiss, and it turned out to be a turd. Guess the decision to eat it is in the hands of the voters.

Quotient out.

Chapter 14. It's Easy To Kill Children...

...as long as you can convince yourself that they are dirty aliens, or crustaceans, or "prawns."



The movie District 9 gives us many things to think about: immigration, segregation, racism, and in this chilling scene, abortion. More to the point, when is life considered unworthy to be?

The character Wikus van de Merwe becomes the supervisor of an effort to control and relocate a million aliens (from another planet) who have mysteriously shown up hovering above Johannesburg, South Africa. At first they are brought down to an area near the city, but soon crime and poverty, not to mention their appearance and habits, make them unwelcome and earn them the pejorative "prawn." So it's time to move them further away, under Wikus' direction.

In the abortion scene above, he cavalierly detaches the feeding tubes keeping the prawn eggs alive. Note halfway through the scene the reaction of the reporter following Wikus around, as he refuses Wikus' offer to "pull the plug" on a prawn egg, then mutters and looks back briefly at the camera as Wikus kills the egg. Finally, the reporter gingerly takes the defunct feeding apparatus from Wikus, who cheerfully gives him a "souvenir from your first abortion."

The film direction is obviously designed to be a little over the top. Or is it?

How cavalier must abortionists treat human fetuses as they suck, carve and pith their way through 1,000,000 baby murders a year in the U.S. alone. We somehow must emerge from our euphemistic-complacent, radical feminist driven eugenic haze to again comprehend what is happening.

Everyone should watch the 1983 PBS Frontline special on abortion, featuring an abortion "clinic" in Chester, PA. It is objective, graphic and real. No actors or CGI special effects. Real women, real men, real doctors.

And real children.

Quotient out.