Let’s forget for a moment that Christian Bale thanked Satan for his Golden Globe, a much-debased award handed out in recognition for providing swag to foreigners, thereby insulting many people of faith in America. There’s also a cheesy party afterwards. Or perhaps it was a lame attempt at sarcasm at the expense of Dick Cheney. Either way, it’s Hollywood par for the course.
What is more interesting is a growing phenomenon that used to be relatively limited to the entertainment industry but now is branching out to be the guiding ethos of the Democratic Party and even a good number of the American people. No, not leftism. That, again, is expected. But the practice, which we’ve only just touched on in this space, to delusionally substitute fantasy for reality. To go from lying to outright lunacy. To play pretend and believe it.
Now, you may say, really? Wasn’t that Bale line just a straight up insult? I think it’s past that point, given the disturbed banality with which the sentiment was delivered. Insinuating someone is akin to the greatest malevolent force in the universe is a squinch past a normal ad hominem attack. Even for an actor.
These people like Bale have come to trust their own hysterical fairy tales. Hear that froth in their tone and see the cold little look in their eyes? Those aren’t the images of vicious wordsmiths. It is the slobbering vigor and unglued glassy stare of true believers.
As Hollywood is a land of make believe, where adults make fortunes pretending as they probably did when they were six years of age, it is of no great surprise that their politics follows suit. After some career success they morphed into “activists,” which is just an entertainment industry term for anyone with a working IQ under 70.
Their activism falls into giving oodles of cash to the Cause of the Week and helping others play-act in Congress and sometimes in the Oval Office. But the recipients of the largess used to merely see the Hollywood crowd as marks to be fleeced. No more. The Dems have gone SoCal not only in pervy personal lives, subpar intellects, and gross displays of parvenu wealth. They have now gone with the overarching mental flow of the joint and metaphorically substituted the pretend reality of a classic Walt Disney film; I’m thinking Fantasia, for the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Granted, Disney plays better with focus groups.
It’s pretend when Nancy Pelosi tells the DHS Secretary she “rejects facts.” Nancy wants to make believe she can just discount facts to suit her ideological mission of the moment. Children, as we parents know, will do that when caught in a sticky wicket. Though it usually has to do more with using mom’s expensive shampoo on the dog than with green-lighting dangerous criminals into the country.
It’s pretend when Sheila Jackson-Lee, Dem of Texas, still calls a shooting a “hate crime,” though all involved were black. She did so because at first the shooter was thought to be white. But Sheila understands the new Dem standard. Facts can be rejected. Just make believe anything you please. Though to classify anything a “hate crime,” given it’s sinister Orwellian undertones of Newspeak and intrinsic absurdity that one should be prosecuted for the motivation not the crime, is about as pretend as you get.
It’s pretend when leftists intone that the right is upset at the AOC dancing video. Have you seen it? I have. Given by their own terms the hated straight white male makes up a majority of the right, very few straight males of any heritage or ideology are going to have a problem with AOC in that video. The young Bolshie has a brain of mush. But thankfully the video does not focus on her mental abilities.
It’s pretend when socialized healthcare is held to be far morally superior than private health insurance by Dems. If so, why don’t upscale Dems just throw away their private insurance and march right down to enroll in Obamacare? Aren’t they altruistic people who prize equality and thus who want the same healthcare for themselves, their families, and the poor? Ergo…
It’s pretend when, I’ll try to be a bit more concise here, Dems claim their Great Society solutions haven’t done massive harm to the American family, when they assure us that the U.S. is the imperialist bad guy in the world, and when the homeless become an issue only in GOP administrations.
You’re getting the drift here. All that above can be disproved by facts, by empirical evidence. But in the Alice Through the Looking Glass world they live in, facts be damned. Sheer delusion rules the day for the Democratic Party and for many who shrug off their hijinks. And I wonder if the point isn’t being hammered in by the virtual reality of video gaming.
I’m not talking about the stereotypical delayed adolescent who spends more time playing video games than face-to-face interactions with real people, i.e., most under thirty-five. I’m speaking about those who obsess on gaming to the point it’s an imitation life.
I worked with some young people a couple of years back. All very sharp, very high-tech. Great kids. One day they were excited that a new version of the military game Call of Duty had hit the market and were chattering about it at the office. In the conversation, one of them asked me what were the most popular games like Call of Duty when I was their age. I told them that when I was their age there were no games even remotely like that and in my early 20s I was actually in the U.S. Army. They looked confused. I responded, “Guys, you know, real guns, real grenades, real blood if somebody got shot.” It took me a bit longer to clarify that I was not talking about a video game because violence, amongst…ahem…other things, were matters they came into contact with only virtually. Only by make believe.
This all might be considered innocent and quirky if we were talking about nine year-olds. Awww, Senator Hello Kitty passes an appropriations bill with the help of her pet unicorn. How cute!
But we’re not. We’re talking about the U.S. House of Representatives. It is a body now in the hands of those who make Christian Bale look like a combo of Diogenes and Aristotle. The Pretend Party has decided to reject objective facts and instead intentionally embrace illusion, thus abrogating a basic responsibility of their current place in our constitutional system.
They govern by pretending. We pretend to be governed.
