If one would care to look into a mind afflicted by madness, one can go no further than to read Maureen Dowd’ October 6, 2013 column entitled “Welcome to Ted Cruz’s Thunderdome.” Apparently Cruz is about to bring about the end of days.
“The year is 2084, in the capital of the land formerly called North America.
“The peeling columns of the Lincoln Memorial, and Abe’s majestic head, elegant hands and big feet are partially submerged in sludge. Animals that escaped from the National Zoo after zookeepers were furloughed seven decades ago migrated to the memorials, hunting for food left by tourists. “ It goes on from there in nauseating detail.
Members of the tea party, by the way, are like the Walking Dead, feeding on the flesh of whatever humanity is left. No doubt dogs and cats are living together as well.
Dowd really should write this up as a movie treatment and sell it to Hollywood. Her column touches on two favorite targets of Tinseltown: conservatives and the undead.
Ted Cruz and people like him have been accused of being everything from anarchists to the return of Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy. But no one has before accused the junior senator from Texas of being, in effect, a secular anti-Christ, bringing about the apocalypse.
Liberals like Dowd used to think that righties were plotting to bring about a tyranny, such as depicted in “A Handmaid’s Tale” or the more recent “Christian Nation” where women are forced to have babies, gay people are strung up from lampposts, and all religious faiths are tolerated so long as it’s fundamentalist Christian. Dowd takes the opposite tact, that Cruz is like the muscular, Mohawk sporting people in “The Road Warrior” and that Obama is Mel Gibson trying to hold together the last remnants of civilization. Pretty wild for a couple of graduates from Harvard Law.
Dowd’s depiction of tea party conservatives as brain dead zombies would be bone chilling if it were not for the fact that she is trying to be funny. In every zombie movie ever made, the only thing to be done with the undead is to blow or chop their heads off. That brings to mind another sort of dystopia, the one depicted in “1984.” A world in which the tea party were declared a pack of untermensch and dealt with accordingly would make a great movie script too, but it would not be as entertaining as Dowd’s fantasy.
