Rally For Sanity vs. Red Dawn

I didn't get down to D.C. for Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity, but I hate crowds like that anyway. I did see a number of pictures from the event online, especially at the Huffington Post, where the coverage was breathless. Most interesting, to me, were the signs people were carrying, especially when compared to the signs waved at Tea Party rallies, where the words  "exaggerated hyperbole" are used sparingly, if at all.

Honestly, signs like that will probably not ignite a groundswell of action, and maybe that's the point, but if so it's a weird goal for a big rally.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sick of the lava that flows from Glenn Beck, and I don't care if I never see another Tea Party sign about Americans being under the boot heel of a tyrant in the White House. Who the Tea Party hopes to turn out of office. At the polls. In two years.

Which brings me to something I thought of yesterday as I was channel surfing. With the mid-term elections only days away, I'm pretty sure I finally have a visual handle to understand the passionate intensity of the Tea Partiers and all their signs about tyranny.

Back in the 1984, with Ronald Reagan in the White House, no one seemed to worry much about home-grown tyranny. We were more scared of the Russians, and our fears were amply rewarded with the movie Red Dawn, in which a young Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen fight back against Soviet and Cuban troops who invade Colorado. There is much anger and lamenting that fact that no one took the Communists seriously until everyone had been enslaved by them.

As I was watching it on Saturday, I realized that if you replace the words "Russian" and "Cuban" with "Democrats" and "Obama" you pretty much have a Tea Party rally attended by Charlie Sheen. Which is a rally I'd go to.

Try making a good movie about exaggerated hyperbole.

The teenagers in Red Dawn live in an occupied zone controlled by the Reds. The Tea Partiers today live in an occupied zone controlled by liberals, Wall Street, the IRS, and shadowy special interests. If I were a smart movie executive, I'd be making a Red Dawn sequel right now.

Oops, I'm too late. Again. There is a remake, in which the Chinese take over Michigan, or some place like that where the militias are ready to go. What timing. Here's a trailer: