---by Micheal
I was watching rented movie the other day. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is of the disaster genre -- an ecology disaster film to be more specific -- but it had a lot in common with the old rubber-suit-monster movies. It also had some interesting contradictions within it.
In those old movies, some monster is created (or unleashed) because we polluted something. In "Them!" (1954), careless radioactive fallout spawns giant mutant ants which attack civilization. In "Godzilla vs. Hedorah" (1971) ocean pollution congeals to create Hedorah, which attacks civilization. These are just two of many pollution-monster flicks.
The Day After Tomorrow (TDAT for short) is in the same family. Man's spewing of greenhouse gases spawns killer weather and brings on a new ice age. In TDAT, however, Nature itself is the monster which wreaks havoc on our puny civilization.
TDAT follows the pattern of many propaganda movies, including the pollution-monster sub-genre: Show audiences a disastrous future which they already fear and have central characters wistfully say how it's all our own fault. If only we hadn't...(insert propagandist's agenda item here)...our dark fate could have been averted. TDAT is no different. Early on, several characters spell out the movie's obvious message. "It's because we polluted our world..." and "...we produced so many greenhouse gases..."
Unlike the earlier pollution monster movies, TDAT's message gets undermined with the same nagging contradictions which plague the current eco-dogma. For instance, the main character -- a climatologist -- predicts the disaster based on his study of prior sudden ice ages. What? It's happened before -- before people polluted the world? In another scene, actors look at a mastodon exhibit in a New York museum. "They froze in minutes -- with food still in their mouths." This is intended to support the movie's disaster scenario of sudden killer cold. But who polluted the mastodon's world? Is the mastodon actually telling us that ice ages just happen?
The early eco-disaster movies didn't contradict their own messages, so they came across stronger. If some guy in "Them!" said that giant ants had attacked California 500 years before, maybe the radiation wasn't to blame. If some Japanese scientist said that every thousand years or so, this Hedorah thing rises from Suruga Bay, maybe it wasn't pollution that caused him. But, those old films didn't contradict themselves.
That's not the case with TDAT (and many of the present eco-hand-wringers). On the one hand, they shout great woe over climate change, preaching the need for massive investment to forestall disaster. On the other hand, they quietly admit that the climate has changed itself many MANY times without us.
If the climate changes on its own, all the billions we're being frightened into paying to stop it, are a waste. We can spend the billions, but the climate will just keep changing anyhow.
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I knew this "Global Warming" thing was a farst before I read this story. Scare the population enough and they'll come running to the all and powerful Guv Mint to save them from themselves. THAT'S what all this is about. Terrorism fears, running out of gas fears, Free Speech Fears (Good Lord..People can't know the truth that the guvmint has been stealing from them for decades! You trying to start a revolution?!) Bird Flu, Killer Bacteria that eats the skin off our bones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Lesbians attacking our children; trying to turn them queer too. Everywhere you look, listen and taste; people are afraid of their own shadow. And that's exactly how the guvmint wants you, cowering on your knees. Because then, when they pull the plug and TSHTF, you won't be standing up to fight them.
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