Get Your Apocalypse On

I'm sure we've all watched and enjoyed post-apocalyptic movies. Methinks LaPee-aire and Miss Lindsey might have seen The Road Warrior one too many times. Or maybe The Book Of Eli. Heh.

TPM

Back in late December, when NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre delivered his first bracing, snarling comments about the Newtown mass killing I noted how LaPierre repeatedly diverted into the language of secular apocalypse, the total breakdowns of public order that are his signature device to play up the need for everybody to be armed.

It’s almost … scratch that, it’s not almost as if it were a tailor-made focus-group litany meant to incite maximal fear and hysteria, it clearly is just that. We just had Sandy. We’ve had black outs. We’ve had big terror attacks. We don’t go all Escape from New York or Mad Max. Yes, you can come up with a lot of scary scenarios and there are gangs and you do have looting sometimes. But these are terror fantasies. The whole thing is intended to portray a world just one slip down from a rapid descent into chaos....

It strikes me as something like comical. But it just drives home to me how this is an organization, at the leadership level, entirely focused on creating hysteria and maximal fear to drive its agenda, even in cases where the rhetoric simply becomes comical.

Does it ever! Jon Stewart rakes the whole it'd-be-funny-if-it-wasn't-so-pathetic NRA fearmongering bullshit over the coals.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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And just as an aside, my personal vision of the post-apocalyptic world derives from somewhere between watching The Grapes of Wrath and Beach Blanket Bingo perhaps one too many times. I'm still trying to shoehorn Aunty Entity and The Himalayan Suspender as my weapon of preference in there somewhere...