The Dead File: We’re Living in a Bottom-of-the-Bin Sci-Fi Flick Right Now
A ferocious pandemic. Dogs with tails on their faces. A cryogenically frozen candidate. We’ve made our way into a dystopian reality.
Editor’s Note: This piece is from The Dead File — stories that, for one reason or another, were not published in a newspaper or on a news website, but now live here in the place where dead pieces go. Enjoy.
WELL, FOLKS, HERE WE are … in the middle of a goddamn movie. Think about it: the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden, speaks as if he were cryogenically frozen in 1970 and was only recently thawed by mad scientists to run for president now 50 years into the future. The man spews 1970s propaganda — like marijuana is a gateway drug; he wants the American people to “leave the record player on at night so children can hear more words,” and he even thinks “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
I’d expect that kind of talk from a presidential candidate with massive sideburns in a bad periwinkle blue suit standing on the platform of a coal-fed steamer train, but not in 2020.
And that’s just American politics. There’s also a global mass panic right now over a fast-moving, mutating disease that has already disrupted international travel, brought the sports world to its opulent knees, and, somewhat instantly, reminded all of us who’s really in charge — it sure shit isn’t humanity.
Right before COVID-19 bled everywhere and onto everything, news broke that this year may be the first time ever that college basketball players would compete in March Madness to empty arenas, each resembling an abandoned building or some post-apocalyptic society after a raging pestilence or zombies or, good god, maybe both.
Fans, fanatics, and coked-out sportswriters couldn’t imagine it: no vendors to dish high-priced beer or popcorn or peanuts in the stands; no drunken, untelevised brawls in the nosebleed sections over a bad bet; a gaggle of young athletes wearing surgical masks just beneath the rim — coaches wearing them too, and even the ref who would’ve inevitably struggled every time he had to blow the whistle, and of course it would’ve been a cold day in Hell before he removed his mask to call a foul. I don’t know the salary of a college sports zebra, but I’m sure it’s not nearly enough to run the chance of contracting a deadly disease and taking it home to the wife, kids, and perhaps the family fur baby, especially not for the sake of March Madness or the viewers at home, each of them frightened, waiting to be next.
But that didn’t happen. All manner of sports has either been canceled or postponed. The only thing that hasn’t been put on hold is the primaries, which makes no sense at all. How can Biden beat Bernie (or the other way round) if voters are saying, “Fuck that shit, I’m not going to stand in a long, cramped line of 30, 40, or 100 people just to vote. I need toilet paper, goddamnit.”
Meanwhile, the villain in this Sci-Fi story that we now live in, President Donald J. Trump, who I imagine sits in the bowels of The White House at midnight stroking a fat, white kittie, has downplayed the severity of the disease, brushing it off as a plague that will just one day, as he put it, “disappear.”
That comment reminds me of every simple-minded, moronic antagonist in every fucking Sci-Fi movie ever made who denies the magnitude of a very real threat. You know who I’m talking about — that one guy who blames others, refuses to listen, and inevitably, in the end, pays some high price for his snooty, dismissive arrogance to the applause of the masses. In this, our story, that guy happens to be the president of the United States. Holy mother of god, we’re doomed, aren’t we? Or maybe not. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Today, sea levels are rapidly rising, earthquakes are striking where they’ve never erupted before; men, women, and children are being corralled into cages; dogs are born with tails on their faces, and a man who was responsible for a local epidemic is now in charge of a global pandemic, which is true.
Vice President Mike Pence, while Governor of Indiana, failed to act when an HIV outbreak hit his state, even as experts told him there needed to be a needle exchange program. As the number of HIV infections continued to rise, according to a report by POLITICO, Pence was “categorically opposed to (a) syringe exchange, period,” Ed Clere, a Republican state legislator, said at the time.
And because of state cuts at the behest of Pence, the only facility people could go to to get tested in areas like southern Indiana was a Planned Parenthood, which of course made it extremely difficult for people to even find out if they were infected and at risk of infecting others.
This, folks, is the guy who’s been put in charge of looking out for you.
I don’t remember stepping through a rheumy mirror or TV screen into some other wild dimension, do you? With all that’s been going on it certainly feels like we did. Yet the fact remains that we haven’t, none of us; still, here we are, characters and villains, heroes and victims. But the story’s not over. We’re writing the narrative as we go. The ending is up to us, at least politically. We can choose to nominate the cryogenically frozen candidate to go up against the kittie-stroking villain and his absentee right-hand man or we can support Senator Bernie Sanders who is the polar opposite of Trump and the GOP hoard who bow and fawn every time Trump shits the bed.
Indeed, these are strange and twisted times. Yet, there still are no flying cars to crash through your roof during dinner. No one has invented teleportation or time travel (and if they have they’re not telling us). I haven’t seen a zombie claw out of the grave and feed on the flesh of my grumpy neighbor who hates dogs, and so far there’s no empirical evidence of ghouls, goblins, or even green, bug-eyed guys who, for some reason, find the rectum particularly fascinating, but we can’t deny there is some real Sci-Fi madness brought to life going on here. Voting can change some of it, but not all of it. We may have passed the point of no return, but, just like in Sci-Fi, that’s when the sun creeps over the horizon and hope is restored. Unless we’re talking the “Alien” franchise here, then we’re all fucked.
Until then, bone up on your Sci-Fi. It may come in handy, and very, very soon.
