“I wanna thank you for meeting with me in this super-secret high-level meeting in the White House (and broadcast on Truth Social), okay. I brought you here… I am really good at bringing people and stuff together, by the way… I brought you here so we could make the Marx Brothers great again, okay? We are going to make a new Marx Brothers movie. It’s going to be great… bigly tremendous.”
“Wotta you sayin’, boss? The Marx Brothers is dead. How you gonna make a movie with dead guys? You gonna dig ’em all up and do a Frankenstein number on ’em, or what?”
“No, no… We will play the roles ourselves. I’ll be Groucho, you know… the really smart one… the one with an amazing mind. I really am very smart, you know. Everyone says so.”
“And who am I gonna play?”
“Steve Miller, you get to be Chico. You know, the fast-talking Wop guy. You think of the greatest plans. They are really great, you know.”
“Okay, boss, I got one already.”
“Really? What is it?”
“I think we gotta do an executive order.”
“Executive order? What’s that?”
“It’s a order you give like Obama did, you know? You take a pen and phone and say something in writing that everybody’s gotta do, and then, because it’s an executive order and you signed your name to it, you gotta execute somebody.”
“Ooh! I like the sound of that. We’ll call the movie Horsefeather Soup. It’ll be tremendous. The most tremendous thing people have ever seen.”
“Yeah, and the executive order will say we are banning Mexicans that come from places like Venezuela, Colombia, and Somalia. That kind of Mexican has to be sent back to where they came from. You know, just the ones where they might want to vote for Democrats. And we can say we are doing extreme vetting so we are keeping America safe from terrorists. And WOKE Mexicans.”
“Ooh! Yeah! Extreme vetting rhymes with bed-wetting. Tremendous. But what if people say I’m being racist again?”
“We say we intend to protect Americans from those really bad people you keep talking about, you know, the ones that eat the cats and dogs? We’ll claim that nobody who’s innocent will get hurt. And the good thing is, the immigration people will just know that anybody who is a Mexican is a bad person. No matter where they’re from. We’ll get everybody that way.”
“Good one, Steve, I mean… Chico.”
“Wait a minute, boss, who do I get to be in this movie?”
“Hogsweat, you get to be Harpo, okay?”
“My name is Hegseth, boss.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, Heegsop.”
“HEGSETH!”
“Okay, Harpo doesn’t talk, so shut up, Hogsbreath! Here, take this bicycle horn and, when you go on George Stefenopolis’s show and he doesn’t let you talk either, just honk it at him. It will be really great.”
“And me, boss?”
“Oh, JD, I almost forgot about you. What’s the name of that other brother? Dumbo? You get to be that one.”
“Hey boss, we gotta get goin’ on this executive order crap. Somebody needs to get executed in the worst way.”
“Oh, yeah! The worst way to execute is the best way. I feel the need to tweet a truth about it. This new Marx Brothers’ movie will be the best, just the best. It will be so bestest that America will get tired of bestiness.”
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
Catch a Falling Star 
Mickey Predicts… Uh, Oh!
I have lately been watching YouTube videos about science fiction writers like Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. These are visionary writers who predicted many things about future applications of science and technology.
Verne foresaw nuclear submarines, expeditions into the interior of the planet, and men setting foot on the moon. Asimov predicted much of what we must deal with in terms of robots and thinking machines with artificial intelligence. And Clarke envisioned satellites and how they could be used for communications and other things we are currently doing in a massive way. He wrote the story that the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey is based on.
So, now Mickey has to get in on the prediction bandwagon too. After all, he thinks he is a science fiction writer too, foreseeing things like rabbit people, de-evolution machines, and time-travel gloves.
The disturbing thing is, however, that much of what Mickey sees in the near future is rather bleak. We have a sinister tendency to live our current lives in very stupid ways. Rich industrialists like the Koch brothers, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos put profits in the short term over the safety, welfare, and lives of people, even the people who made them wealthy. Because you can make money faster by not worrying about how you may be changing and polluting the environment, you are turning the planet into a hothouse of unbreathable gasses and toxic chemicals.
Since we are entering a time with rising oceans, we are going to have to work at not only de-acidifying the ocean water and restoring fish and other aquatic life, but becoming sea-dwellers ourselves. We will be living in underwater cities. We will travel in underwater cars powered by solar-charged batteries. We will wear scuba gear to school. And we will need to invent aqualungs that extract oxygen and nitrogen from the water.
We will also need to develop environmental suits even to live on the land in the toxic atmosphere. We will all be like Ironman, all living safely inside our Swiss-army, all-purpose, and internet-connected Ironman suits.
And many of us will become Martians… or Venusians… living on other planets in the solar system.
Of course, we will have to do something about all the stupid people. Ideally, we would solve our aversion to educating kids to think for themselves, and take advantage of all the educational methods that really do work to make everybody into a self-sufficient, competent, and intelligent individual.
But since rich folks don’t like the idea of sharing what they accumulate with other, less-economically-fortunate people, there will probably be some kind of eugenics-based program to exterminate all the lower-class people that will no longer be needed to polish shoes or hand-make widgets for the wealthy. Being wealthy does not automatically make you a good person, even though most of them think that it is so.
And of course, there will have to be some progress on the matter of artificial intelligence. If terminator-style robots are just going to carry pretty sleeping girls around with them for decorative effects, we will have to figure out, “How are we going to treat them as people too?”
After all, they will all be much smarter than us. Even if we are rich. And we have to acknowledge the fact that they will have decided that they didn’t need to terminate all of us in order to make the world a much better place.
So, I guess that sorta proves that Mickey can do the science-fiction-y thing of predicting the future too. But we should ask ourselves the question, “Do we really want him to?”
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