By Steve BermanIgnorance, lack, struggle, death. There you go: The Existentialist’s Guide to the Galaxy, lol, nothing matters. Earth has made another lap around the star, so if you’re marking it on a cave wall like Tom Hanks’ character in “Castaway,” it’s 3,652,500,000,000 days minus one before the sun dies—or if we pay down our national debt at a rate of $10 per year, we will have it paid right on time, give or take a million years.
Yeah, America’s got some problems, notably our addiction to spending money on ourselves, and our singular focus on people we think have it better than we do, and people we’re convinced are out to get us. We spent one generation over century ago trying to make America dry, ironically making a generation of heavy drinkers out of kids we sent to the mud pits of Europe in Woodrow Wilson’s bid to install Fascism as our new guiding light. Then we spent another generation saving ourselves from the Europe we helped craft.
In the months after the Nazis surrendered, we turned our focus to the Soviets, and demanded unconditional surrender from Japan, no matter the cost (to them, or us). We spent another generation containing communism, making Little Americas out of our former enemies and turning places like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Nicaragua into battlefields. Cuba nearly broke the world. And we conquered the Moon, never to return (though we’re closer than we’ve been since).
If that’s not good and depressing enough, our government has ignored every warningabout what happens when it gets too big and powerful, leading us to the biggest, most powerful government that has ever scarred the face of this nation.
Alright, enough doomspeak. My 13-year-old son recently asked me what 19th century people would think if we could somehow transport them to our time. As we walked across the parking lot to the Ingles supermarket entrance, I told him they’d say we have it easy. I mean, easy like Sunday morning.
We can walk into any number of large, well-lit, air conditioned and heated buildings, with big signs displaying names like Costco, Sam’s, Walmart, Kroger, Publix, Ingles, Home Depot, and Lowe’s, pick the stuff we want, and take it home right then. Or if we’re too lazy to venture out of the house, we can lift a ubiquitous seven ounce hunk of glass and use our finger to summon crap to our doorstep—or just shout into the air “Alexa, order me a pizza.” People from the 1800s—or even those generations who fought our wars all the way up to Grenada—would say we’re nuts to whine about our “problems” amidst such a utopian consumer paradise.
They might say we have no problems, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a particular set of dysfunctional issues leading to the same kinds of issues that caused kids to march off to war and death in previous generations. And our peculiar reliance on infotainment makes our problems particularly difficult, if impossible, to untangle. The problems of ignorance, lack, and struggle inevitably lead to the untimely death of many people who have no more sin to their ledger than simply being born (and some never make it that far).
Seriously, modern Americans believe some really whacked stuff, awful stuff. Most of it is about each other and how wicked those people who don’t look or think like our little bubbles are. I can handle folks who think the earth is flat—they merely disbelieve physics. Others disbelieve history in various ways, which is a lot harder to argue, since we can only guess at what happened before the age where everything is video recorded for posterity. And the window is rapidly closing where we can even count that as reliable, as generative AI has taken over video creation. History will soon be whatever the poisonous combination of AIs that create content plus AIs that curate our “for you” stream of consciousness online says it is.
Ending 2023, the world is locked in some impossible, unsolvable puzzles, and I’m pretty sure most Americans can agree on what they are, even if we can’t agree on how to solve them.
What we need is a good, swift, kick in the ass. It’s got to come from somewhere that’s not part of the hive of human brain cells slathered all over the surface of the planet. People are just too paranoid about each other to listen to anything that springs from the mind of a man. Maybe from a woman. Anyone who’s got a mother or a wife knows this fact: When a woman assumes that peculiar voice of authority that can break through the natural noise-canceling filter men and boys have in our lizard brains, compliance is almost irresistible.
This is why there’s a long history of artificial voices being female (the kind you want to listen to, like “PULL UP!” when the aircraft is plunging toward a mountainside). The ones that are male, from movies and such, are almost entirely evil, or at least devoid of conscience (HAL 9000, WOPR,). The voice of AUTO (“Otto”) in WALL-E was an actual synthetic computer voice, credited to MacInTalk, a Mac speech program. I am convinced that if all the females on earth rose up at once, using that voice of command, our current problems would be solved immediately.
But alas, God is not a woman, or we’d have long ago perished as a race. If all the females on earth rose up and ended our current problems, the human race would end in a single generation, for lack of procreation. Take a look, it’s happening already. Friend, if you bet on a Malthusian tragedy to end our reign on this planet, you’ve lost.
So the ass-kicking has to come from elsewhere. I think it’s useful to turn to myth and literature to find the pulse of our yearning for discipline. I’d turn to the Christian Bible, but it was never designed to fulfill myth. If you have faith to believe, judgment is coming—and even if you don’t have faith, it’s coming. But the Bible doesn’t really inform us more than what happens at the end if we don’t get our personal house in order. That being said, if you don’t have the kind of relationship with the Bible and its author to allow you to get what faith means, feel free to email me and I’ll help you out.
As for an ass-kicking and making people stop killing each other, turning to the movies, we’ve seen this theme over and over. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is a classic where war between planets has been outlawed, and once Earthlings have achieved a state where we can threaten the galactic peace, we’re given the Law and the choice to follow it. But that theme has been worn out and rewoven so many times that it’s lost much of its coherence. I could ask you to name ten movies that involve aliens, asteroids, or natural disasters, and most could do it with little effort.
So I think maybe we need to turn to monsters. Since Mary Shelley stirred her depression into “Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus,” there have been countless versions of “mad scientists” or others pretending to the throne of Creator. I happen to like the more earthbound, Japanese concept of the kaiju. These creatures emerge from somewhere, but usually from the bottom of the ocean, Japan being a series of islands surrounded by the ocean. Among the kaiju, foremost is Godzilla. I think Godzilla needs to come and kick our asses, or at least in movie form, we should pay attention.
Last weekend, my 14-year-old and I went to see “Godzilla Minus One” in the theater. It’s a powerful film; the subtitles and Japanese speech is barely noticeable; you quickly get pulled in to the plot, which isn’t about the monster as much as it’s about kicking the ass of Americans and Japanese people into realizing the value of life.
Writer and director Takashi Yamazaki (spoilers in link!) doesn’t spare the audience one second of reminders of what this monster movie is about. It’s not about the modern world dealing with some eldritch creature, or being hammered in the head with Gaia-worshipping karmic punishment from the core of our planet. It is about the very real Japanese government at the end of World War II, where the populace had been told Americans would rape and murder them to the last baby, and Americans reinforced that view with merciless firebombing campaigns.
The scene of this kaiju movie is almost completely set in war-devastated Tokyo, spanning a number of years as the city slowly rebuilt under the supreme command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The monster’s arrival is a consequence of American nuclear testing, though the monster “Minus One” has always existed, just not as a building-destroying, atomic breath-spewing, murdering giant.
I could not help my mind being drawn to current events. Instead of Tokyo, I saw Bakhmut and Gaza City. The main character Mr. Shikishima spent his days clearing mines, while today millions of mines litter the battle lines in the Donbas. If the Russians stopped fighting today, it would take months—if not years—for Ukrainians to reoccupy the land and clear those minefields. The problem in Ukraine is intractable because all the Russians have to do is throw bodies at the battle, and the Ukrainians cannot break through in a ground war. The days of mass airlifts behind enemy lines are mostly gone; and in any case, only the United States has that kind of capability.
Like the Japanese citizens fighting Godzilla in “Minus One,” the Americans are otherwise disposed and will not help. Unfortunately, even with the massive success in Ukraine keeping Putin’s forces from decapitating their government and capturing the whole of their country, it’s unlikely that Ukraine will be able to retake the land Russia now holds. Not now, and not anytime in the foreseeable future, and not without American help beyond what we’re giving now. In 2024, Ukraine will remain a death machine, if it doesn’t bloom into a full-blooded European war, one that Russia can’t win without resorting to nuclear weapons.
Also, Gaza. Israel is dismantling the tunnels under Gaza like the movie Godzilla dismantled the trains in Ginza. Thousands of civilians perished in this one scene, and in Gaza, civilians are the currency of trade, but lives are cheap. When the attacker, Israel, spends much more time and effort to protect civilian lives than the supposed government that represents those civilians (but Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry is really good at counting the dead), that’s a sign of the cheapness of life.
Societies that throw lives away like Imperial Japan did in World War II deserve an ass-kicking by a kaiju. Hamas deserves Godzilla. So does Russia.
But the biggest unsolvable ball of thorns for 2024 might be American politics. In 2001, Congress united on the steps of the Capitol to sing “God Bless America.” They were united for a few weeks, maybe a few months, while the U.S. war machine spun up to its full fury against a group of terrorists who hit us where we were weak. In response to terrorists killing 2,753 innocent civilians, America and its coalition partners killed at least 400,000. And 21 years later, Afghanistan is back in the hands of the very people we started with.
In 2001, Rudy Giuliani, as mayor of New York City, attended 200 funerals for New Yorkers killed on 9/11. Now Giuliani is facing felony charges for his role in the 1/6 Capitol riots and spreading stolen election conspiracies. In 2000, President George W. Bush’s election victory was decided when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped a recount of ballots in Tallahasee, Florida, which was ordered by the state’s Supreme Court. The clock ran out on December 12, the “safe harbor” day for election certification and elector votes, and on December 13, Vice President Al Gore conceded the race.
“I accept the finality of the outcome, which will be ratified next Monday [Dec. 18] in the Electoral College,” Gore said. “And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”
Sandra Day O’Connor, who passed away this December 1st, later regretted her decision to side with the majority. If the SCOTUS justices had refused the case, the recount would have continued, and it’s possible the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives, which would likely have resulted in a Bush victory in any case. Bush was certified to have won by 537 votes, by Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
In 2020, the Trump campaign filed 62 lawsuits to overturn certified election results. State and federal judges, including judges appointed by Donald Trump as president, dismissed or rejected 61 of the lawsuits. The suits contested results in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The U.S. Supreme Court twice denied lawsuits that would have granted the Trump campaign some basis for its legal efforts, including a lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
After multiple recounts, including a hand recount completed by Georgia, Donald Trump still trailed Joe Biden by 11,779 votes in Georgia and 20,682 votes in Wisconsin. Biden won Arizona by 10,457 votes, Nevada by 33,596 votes (or 2.4%, not even close), Pennsylvania by 81,660 votes (1.2%), Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and Michigan by a whopping 154,188 votes (2.8%). The Trump campaign would have had to show enough provable fraud in these states to overturn 333,044 votes. Thats 4.7% of the total Biden popular vote lead. It was an impossible task.
Donald Trump never conceded the 2020 election. He left only because he had no choice; Biden was going to be sworn in on January 20th, 2021 whether he wished it or not, and nothing he could do could stop it. God knows, he tried to.
Yet, in poll after poll, at the end of 2023, Donald Trump is still competitive—even leading—President Joe Biden. Though Trump stands indicted and awaiting trial on multiple felony counts related to his actions as president and his campaign’s actions before and after Election Day, 2020, the path to legally removing him from politics remains foggy.
Americans remain divided to the point of ruining holiday get-togethers, relationships between parents and children, between siblings, and even divorces. Despite having clear jurisdiction and authority to keep Trump from seeking high office ever again, the U.S. Senate opted for partisan politics, because “the people” were still high on Trump.
A kaiju rising from Chesapeake Bay and striding down the Potomac, breathing atomic fireballs at the Jefferson Memorial and tearing the Ionic columns from the South Portico pilastrade to hurl them at the Capitol rotunda dome, might be enough to re-unite Congress against Godzilla.
Congress, if not the whole of America, deserves Godzilla. If the monster came, it’s a fair bet that our politicians still couldn’t pass a budget, approve aid to Ukraine, or agree that Hamas are a bunch of bloodthirsty rapists. The greatest country in the world, where we have so much, we shouldn’t have a care in the world, has brought itself to this place through inattention, selfishness, and ignorance. Our national motto, “lol, nothing matters.”
Godzilla, we’re waiting for you.
Follow Steve on Twitter @stevengberman.
The First TV contributor network is a place for vibrant thought and ideas. Opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of The First or The First TV. We want to foster dialogue, create conversation, and debate ideas. See something you like or don’t like? Reach out to the author or to us at ideas@thefirsttv.com.