By Shawn Macomber on 9.9.04 @ 12:05AM
But only conservatives appear on the receiving end.
Despite the many indignities a night
spent in a jail cell with a group of lefty protesters can visit
upon a political writer, it is good for a couple things. First, it
helps keep one's thumb on the pulse of the legion of Chomsky-fed
college students, the young, restless, and bored who Democrats seem
so intent on getting out to the polls this fall. Of course, these
folks will never actually vote, but they make for colorful copy.
Secondly, professional protesters, perhaps due to a lack of
employment, give great movie recommendations.
Take for example, The Last Supper, a quaint little
feature from 1996 wherein a group of five liberal grad students
decide to begin inviting conservatives over to their house for
dinner every Sunday. Once there, they engage the right-winger in
conversation on "life current events, the environment." If by the
end of the meal the guest hasn't seen the error of his wicked
conservative ways, the grad students kill him and turn him into
fertilizer for their backyard tomato garden.
The liberals in The Last Supper take the old ethics
quandary -- if you met Hitler in Austria in 1909, would you kill
him to prevent World War II? -- and twist it into a preemptive
strike on anyone standing in the way of progressivism. It's a movie
all journalists should be forced to watch before chanting the
oft-repeated lore of the 2004 election cycle that liberal wackiness
and unrestrained hatred towards all things right is a brand new
phenomenon.
"Think about all the right-wing a**holes the world would be
better off without if someone had wasted them before they did any
real harm," one student muses as they begin to plot their detour
from their Master's work into serial murder.
It is simple to see why the anger brigades of the protest
movement find this film so appealing. The conservatives in the film
bear more of a resemblance to the papier-mâché puppets
and paranoid conspiracy theories on display at any far left event
than to actual people. In this imagined world, conservatives are
Holocaust deniers, racists, religious fundamentalists, and against
any sort of women's rights. One refers to feminists as "lesbians
who love plaid." In a particularly galling scene, another explains
that all rape allegations are made up. "Isn't violating a woman's
body wrong?" a grad student asks. You kidding?
In short, conservatives are uncultured and uncouth. When one of
the liberals tells the first conservative victim that they are grad
students, he shoots back, "What's that?" Later when as they sit
down to dinner, the conservative has the gumption to say, "Aren't
you forgetting something?" meaning grace, Cameron Diaz explains to
him, slowly, "We eat our salad after our meal, European style." Not
surprisingly, the dumb schlock doesn't get it, and starts ranting
about the Jews and his time fighting in Desert Storm.
"Was that really a war?" one of the students asks. "I thought it
was just a campaign commercial for the Republican Party." Yucks all
around.
OF COURSE, TO MAKE this a bit more palatable, days after they kill
him the group finds out that the conservative was a child killer.
But the quick succession of victims, dispatched with homicidal
glee, are less outside the mainstream. Seinfeld's Jason
Alexander is put to death for being insensitive to the plight of
the spotted owl. A librarian is poisoned for calling The
Catcher in the Rye "mean-spirited." A society must have
standards, after all. That abortion protester? Not their kind of
dissent. Off with her head.
"These aren't people," one of the students snarls. "They're
people who hate."
It's not until half the house wants to put a high school girl to
death for campaigning against sex education in her school that any
sort of inner moral alarm goes off. The girl is freed and the grad
students begin to go their separate ways until a chance encounter
gives them the opportunity to kill a Rush Limbaugh-type
conservative radio host. Alas, he is too charming and sensible, and
the students do not kill him. "We're liberals," one pleads. "We're
the ones who do the right thing."
The host walks away free. It is only later, when he has become
president of the United States and we hear his voice whipping the
masses into a nationalistic furor at a Nuremberg like rally, that
it becomes clear: they should have killed him when they had the
chance. You can't trust these conservatives, you know. Even when
they sound completely and utterly reasonable, they are charting the
apocalypse. It's no wonder the frothing at the mouth lefties enjoys
this film so much. It confirms them in their paranoia.
So, from my jail cell to yours, The Last Supper is my
video pick of the month. May you be allowed to live to see it.
topics:
Education, Abortion, Environment
