MemeMachineGo!

I first heard of Josh Kornbluth when I rented his movie Haiku Tunnel on a whim a few years ago. Amusing satire of office life, but it could have been better adapted. It still feels very much like a monologue hammered into a movie.

More recently, I ran across another amusing bit from Kornbluth that appeared in Salon. Among other things, he described how, dressed as Benjamin Franklin, he ran into a group of Second Amendment freaks demonstrating in New York City. So he decided to address them in character:

And I'm standing there. And I go, "Well, ah, yes sir -- I couldn't help but overhear you talking about what the Founding Fathers might have intended. As perhaps you can tell, sir, I am a Founding Father! I'm Ben Franklin. And as a matter of fact, sir, I happen to have founded the first ever American militia. So I can tell you, sir, you know nothing about what you speak! Our militias, they were a stopgap measure. We had no standing army. We were a colony. If you, sir, want to join what we intended in the Constitution to be a "militia," then you must join your local branch of the National Guard. Otherwise, sir, just accept you're a bunch of addled, discontented nincompoops -- and that's IT!"

Now here's the thing: He accepted that I was Ben Franklin. That evidently was no leap at all for Michigan Mitch. Without even skipping a beat he goes, "Well, Ben -- I wasn't talking about you, OK? You're one of those egghead Founding Fathers -- the diplomats, the inventors. I was talking about the soldiers, OK? The George Washingtons..."

I said, "Excuse me again, sir. I knew George Washington. George Washington was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are no George Washington!"

Was he being disingenuous? Because it's not like the U.S. is _really_ exporting actual democracy. Our leaders are, however, exporting a lot of anti-competitive corporate capitalism in big-ass crates labelled "Democracy."