From the New York Review of Books, in a discussion of the work of Rod Serling, after a description of a how a character suffers from fevered dreams, comes what is a tiresome and all-too-predictable (bordering on, if not actually invading and annexing) cliché:

“I also wake up adrift, in a desperate and unfamiliar reality, wondering if the last year in America has been a dream—I too expect catastrophe, but it’s impossible to know from which direction it will come, whether I am right to trust my senses or if I’m merely sleepwalking while the actual danger becomes ever-more present.  One thing I do know is that I’m not alone: since the election of Donald Trump, it’s become commonplace to compare the new normal to living in the Twilight Zone.”

From the wails of our betters, you’d think the Nazi flag was flapping over the entrance of the Pentagon…

…. that the round ups of intellectuals, undesirables, homosexuals, gypsies, and Jews were already national policy…

… And that the National Monument was the scene of klieg-lit marches of a million loyal brown-shirted anti-semites-by-law.

Okay, so none of that has actually occurred. But with the dependable obtuseness of a fanatic of the secular sort, the fever-stricken writer overlooks the irony of his own observations about the work, particularly when he mentions that the enduring thing about the series was “Rod Serling’s rejoinders to the prevalent anti-Communist panic that gripped the decade.”

The work itself, of course, is of secondary importance to getting off that required party-line about Emmanuel Goldstein’s treachery. Perhaps (the writer) will look back in 20 years or so and notice a certain prevalent panic that gripped the “correct sorts” himself, but that might be expecting too much.

Just like it might be expecting too much for the daring and completely free-minded content creators who bring us the product that is Television to deliver something new and nuanced, nay, even a clever way to reflect upon the world and our place in it:

Paranoid President gibbering about a Deep State attempting to overthrow them? That would be Homeland, the original (remake of an Israeli) series about a mentally ill CIA agent and the place where “Ripped from the headlines!” becomes “Swiped from the super-secret Antifa website!”

Not to be outdone is The Good Fight, starring the very good Christine Baranski, whose producers promise to name every episode with the number of days a certain Republican has been the CIC, as a way “to grapple with the insanity of a world in which Trump is POTUS.” Apparently, the first episode of this season focuses on Chicago’s soaring murder rate, and we all know how much impact Donald Trump has had on that increase — who knew he personally drives his Lexus down to Michigan Avenue every weekend to give away pistols and crack?

Did a memo go out that every cineaste and would-be taste-meister must be full of fear and trembling, yet aesthetically #RESISTANT to what happened in our relatively peaceful election?

“2017 didn’t improve much on 2016. If anything, the horror and dread of last year only seemed to take root and blossom this year, as some of our worst collective fears were realized and the future seemed to grow dimmer with every bad-news bulletin and misjudged tweet. If there was a constant, at least for cinephiles, it lay with the movies. … But as the world burned, the films still delivered.” — The Onion AV Club

Friendly note to these delicate flowers, so bravely protecting us from the horrors they are certain are happening (even if it’s only in their imagination): if the world burned, it was burning because of Antifa’s infantile tantrums and those of the adherents to A Murderous Theology Whose Name We Dare Not Speak.

Next week: Hillary Porn and a handy checklist to ensure the creative content you consume provides the Daily Required Amount of Woke for your spiritual well-being.

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Photo by cdrummbks

Nazi Flags:(Source:  Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2006-0315-500 / Schwan / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Round Up: Pussyhat By Brian Allen, Voice of America [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons