Steven Weber: Failed Fantasies

Every day, another right wing GOP theory is tested and fails miserably.

Because in the real world, fantasy-based theories simply cannot work.

In Colorado, once again, the idea that guns should be easy to obtain and that everyone should be carrying them has been dispelled in a hail of easy to obtain bullets and destroyed lives. Why, it's right out of "The Oklahoma Kid."

In congress, GOP representatives and senators traffic in ideas culled from Ma and Pa Kettle movies and folktales describing days when men hunted and women stayed in their hand-hewn cabins clutching their aprons and baking pies. Why, it's right out of "Shane."

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

And our kids ingest a steady diet of "games" teeming with violent imagery that propagates the fantasy that war is a noble and glorious endeavor.

It's a culture losing touch with reality. Like the distracted and deluged minds it seeks to profit from, the business model utilized by the corporate GOP to great effect is one that is drenched in unreality as well: the fantasy-within-a-fantasy that is Pottersville from "It's a Wonderful Life." It is simple and effective: the world is garish and tawdry, violence is everywhere, low pursuits consume the depressed denizens of this once proud, now corrupt town. The people who work to keep food on their tables and roofs over their heads are rabble, sometimes they're "garlic eaters." And as such they are beneath the oligarchs who know better, who live better, who are better.

There is so much fantasy taking the place of reality in this country that you cannot see a company logo that doesn't in some way have an otherworldly motif, imagery redolent of "Star Wars" with comet trails, laser beams and whirling planets; imagery that fetishizes money with gleaming gold and glittering silver; sunbeams streaming through mountainous meringue clouds denoting heaven and an afterlife. You'd think the last thing people want to do would be to live down here on earth.

But can you blame them? Down here there is the reality that people get sick and need help; people get old and need care; soldiers return from battle and need attention and rehabilitation; children need education.

Down here, men and women in positions of power are seeking to create a fantasyland where such things are masked and only spoken of in harsh, cartoonish terms. It's because they haven't the courage to confront their fantastical terrors with actual real-world wisdom.

It's like watching a movie.

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Follow Steven Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheStevenWeber

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-weber/failed-fantasies_b_1691729.html

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