Let’s start 2022 on a positive note:

We are still alive.

Well… sort of alive.  Homeostasis is occurring (in most of us)… but are we really alive?

Using The Matrix (Alice in Wonderland) motif:  Many of us have elected to take the “blue pill”.  

Speaking of The Matrix, I watched the newest installation the other day.  Chaney was home for Christmas and, to my utter shock, I realized that she had never seen any of the episodes of The Matrix.  She knew the plot line… that has become fairly ingrained in our societal zeitgeist… but she had never actually watched the source material.  

I contemplated for a brief instant of sitting down and having her watch the trilogy with me.  Then I remembered how disappointed I was in the second and third installments.  I also distinctly remember when Carolyn was a child of around eight, subjecting her to a marathon of Star Wars movies, only to discover the excitement I felt about Star Wars as a child, crumbled away when I watched them as an adult.  

Still, she was more than willing to jump into the storyline now for The Matrix Resurrections.

So we watched it.

If you have any inclination of seeing the flick, fear not… I won’t give out any spoilers.  (Though, to be honest, anyone with a brainstem can fairly easily predict the plot arc from the first few minutes.)

What I did notice, and, frankly, was surprised to see… was a nascent but ever present theme telling the pro-government Collectivist audience that it is squarely on the wrong side of history.  Well… maybe that is too dramatic.  Without question though they were saying that our Collectivist colleagues are, well… just not cool.  

This theme is important.  Frankly, it is something I hoped would happen for a very long time.  It may take a generation of hammering this point home, but the very fact that it is springing up, like a dandelion in a concrete crack of Socialist urban sprawl, is encouraging.

One of my friends on Facebook was decidedly more negative about the movie:

“It’s woke!  Neo can’t fly anymore!  But Trinity… the WOMAN… can!  He is dependent on her!  And the soldiers are being commanded by a WOMAN and many of them are ethnic!”

Yeah.

Well… you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

The fact that he highlights this is troubling, to say the least.  The fact that the cast is ethnically diverse is problematic?  Hmmmm… there is probably going to be a separate blog about this coming out in the future.  

Let’s really focus on the “you guys aren’t cool” part though.  While I happen to agree, it is extremely entertaining watching the Collectivists scream that they are.

As it has been said:  “If you have to state you are cool, you aren’t.”

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This is not the first time this theme has been proffered.

As I have said before, Conservatism and its cousin, Classical Liberalism (known modernly by anarchists in leased BMWs as Libertarianism), have always been the dower bunch.

The Liberals had the drugs and the sex (well… so did the Conservatives, they just didn’t talk about it), and, most importantly, they had the humor.

Conservatism sought to maintain some form of a paradigm.  Forget the fact that our paradigm was based on the protection of minority rights through rigid Constitutional interpretation.  

The Left, however, didn’t like our haircuts.  

They also were not particularly thrilled about the paradigm itself.  Well… the part about free speech didn’t bother them, it allowed them to protest and pontificate to coeds in coffee shops, but they wanted to ultimately be the ones in control.  

And they got their wish.

Now humor has become flashpoint to them. 

George Orwell wrote a piece called Shooting an Elephant.  (Yeah… I know, I should be talking about 1984 and Animal Farm, but stay with me for a moment.)

In this piece he has to go kill an elephant in India that has been terrorizing local villagers.  As a member of the British Occupation of India (my words, not his… though I suspect he would agree)… the single most important thing… his main mission… is to not be laughed at. 

The empire can withstand screams of aboriginal indignation, cries for justice from the exploited, even a disgruntled view towards the massive bureaucracy of the empire… it cannot, nor must not EVER, be subjected to ridicule.  The most effective form of ridicule is humor.

Staying with our literary theme, let’s talk about the 2005 film V for Vendetta.  

After its debut, the Left embraced the film.  It was about a victim of the rightwing state seeking vengeance against its oppressors!

Yeah… no.

Just the opposite.  If you have not watched it, or haven’t seen it in a while… watch it now.  

One of the most telling scenes in the movie is when a TV Show host runs a skit that pokes fun at the Prime Minister.  The next day the show’s host is forcibly “disappeared”… we are left with the uncomfortable assumption that he has probably been killed by the forces of the state.  It is not that the Prime Minister was emotionally traumatized by the skit… who knows if he ever saw it… it is that the public cannot, under any circumstances, see the state as something other than omnipotent and God-like.

This is much like where we are today, at least for fifty percent of the population.  The thing with cool people, though, is they are like magnets.  They create an orbit and an interest.  People seek to mimic them, and be exposed to them.  They are charming, they are erudite, they are well… cool… and most of all… they are funny.  They make us smile and chuckle.  The easiest way to do this is to take the largest most obnoxious un-cool group, person, or thing… and hold it up to public ridicule.

The coolest kid was the one who spoke up and said the “emperor has no clothes”.

I wonder if he was sent to a re-education camp…