A luckless staffer named Jillian Rayfield over at Talking Points must have drawn the short straw, for it fell to her to review Atlas Shrugged, Part One, which made its debut over the weekend. That’s right, the producers of this flick apparently think it’s the next Star Wars, for they project parts Two and Three, making, if the sequels are ever made, what will surely be the longest right wing wet dream in human history.
Oddly enough, for no one could have predicted it, the movie has garnered universally bad reviews, which enables its right wing backers to play the victim. It’s all a liberal plot, don’t you know, that people are not lining up to see this steaming pile of… Well, this is a family blog, as least for today.
But I take issue with Ms. Rayfield’s premise that the movie pushes the Tea Party ideology. It may push the ideology of those that pull the teabaggers strings, but not that of the teabaggers themselves, because it is giving them too much credit to say that they have any ideology at all. They are a group of people who are insecure in the present and fear the future, and who have found a convenient target for their deluded fears in the person of a middle of the road president who happens to be black. Does anyone really believe, for instance, that they are really against big government? Ask them if they’re willing to give up their Social Security checks or their Medicare, or, for that matter, any government program from which they benefit. Why is it that, now that the feces has hit the fan, attendance at teabagger rallies, even those headlined by the greatest grifter of them all, has fallen so low that the media has to strain to pretend they matter? A group of people that don’t have the capacity for thought, even of the barely rational variety, cannot be expected to articulate a coherent philosophy, unless you consider Groucho Marx’s philosophy intellectually coherent.
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