Remember the schlocky 1980 sci-fi cult hit Flash Gordon?

It wasn’t what you’d call a great movie. Delightfully awful would be a better word for it. Other than a pair of notable acting performances by Max von Sydow and Timothy Dalton and an inspired soundtrack by Queen, the reboot of the early 20th-century comic book series onto the big screen wasn’t something you’d particularly take with you.

But there was one scene worth remembering, that being when von Sydow, as the intergalactic tyrant Ming the Merciless, offers the hero an opportunity to rule over Earth as a vassal king. Ming has unleashed a series of horrific natural disasters on the planet, all but wrecking civilization as Earthlings know it, and believes the suffering he’s inflicted will have subjugated the world’s people.

“After the earthquakes and tidal waves, they won’t be the same human beings,” Ming says. “They’ll be more docile. Tractable. Easier for you to rule, in the name of Ming.”

“You mean they’d be slaves,” Gordon retorts.

“Let’s just say they’ll be satisfied with less.”

Flash tells Ming where he can stick his offer, and the tyrant leaves him, he thinks, to his death.

That’s an exchange which will stay with you, and it has — at least with your author.

And it floats to the top of one’s mind when this tumbles forth onto the headlines of the Amazon Post…

Opinion: Don’t rant about short-staffed stores and supply chain woes. Try to lower expectations. https://t.co/3CLpV5HXbG

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 19, 2021

Yes, they went there. Jeff Bezos might actually be Ming the Merciless (or something awfully close). After what he’s done to brick-and-mortar retail, not to mention American manufacturing (at least to a smaller extent), and given that like Ming, he now rides around on a rocket, and given that he now has his scribes demanding that we peons be “satisfied with less,” this is beginning to fit together.

Who knew that, like Idiocracy, Flash Gordon was a futuristic documentary film?

You shouldn’t be surprised at this, you know. Shocked? Maybe, that it’s so out in the open now. But if you’re surprised, you simply haven’t been paying attention.

Making you satisfied with less has been the Left’s project for a good couple of generations, if not longer.

It was at the height of the Cold War when you first started to see this stuff. By the mid 1960s, it was clear that the capitalist system had done away with any real concerns in the Western world that anybody would starve or that there wouldn’t be enough clothing or shelter for people. Yes, you’ll have poverty and yes, you’ll have homelessness, but by that point in America, Japan, and Western Europe, and shortly thereafter in lots of other capitalist countries, the crushing deprivation which had been the lot of most of mankind was gone, banished by free enterprise and global trade set loose by the leadership of American business.

And meanwhile, it had become quite clear that communism was not capable of matching the productivity and prosperity of the free market. There were still people making that argument, but they were losing, and badly.

So what happened next? We got the rise of the Malthusian academics who first threatened us with a global ice age that would wipe out our crops, then warned of an overpopulated planet, and then settled on global warming. Now it’s COVID. And along the way, there was the constant screeching about the inequality and racism of the free market — though interestingly, the people closest to the top of the food chain became more and more fixated on left-wing politics.

It’s interesting that regardless of the problem, the remedy is always more cowbell. Sorry — it’s more socialism.

And less for you.

You’re now instructed not to eat so much meat because cow farts will kill the planet. You have to drive a tiny deathtrap of a car. You have to have a toilet you’ll need to flush three times, and you’re restricted to a dishwasher which doesn’t get your dishes clean. You shouldn’t get on a plane because it’s bad for the planet. And you shouldn’t breathe freely without a mask because to do so is selfish and risks the lives of others.

Of course, the ruling-class Left exempts themselves from these deprivations and inconveniences. And you’d better not point that out or they’ll call you names.

You must not criticize their performance. You certainly shouldn’t note that in their efforts to create this earthbound nirvana they have ruined everything they’ve touched.

Because you must be docile. Tractable. Satisfied with less.

Ming the Merciless was a Democrat. There is no doubt about it. And Democrats are wannabe Mings.

I don’t really need to tell you how the movie ends. You either already know or you can figure it out. The real question is whether we’re going to be Flash Gordon, or whether we’re going to put up with this.

Be satisfied with less?

Hell, no.

Let’s go, Brandon.