Big Mike: Life Ain’t A Movie, Folks

And now it’s The Loved One’s turn. Poor thing. I’m just getting over this rotten flu and now she’s hurtling (and hurling) head-on into the second crest of its roller coaster ride.

I wish I could say I’d do anything to take it away from her, up to and including suffering it myself in her stead, but I’m afraid I can’t. Or, more accurately, won’t. If you think that’s selfish or unhusbandly, then you haven’t had this thing. If I had to go through it again, they’d have to shoot me like a broken down old horse.

ME, AFTER THE FLU.

My lovely bride was laying inert on the sofa last night as I celebrated my return to the living by baking oatmeal cookies. She was staring through half-lidded eyes at Turner Movie Classics when the eight-o’clock feature came on. Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Man, I’m glad I caught the opening titles and so knew I was watching a work of fiction.

The movie had it all. High-level government conspiracies. Obfuscating scientists. Phony media stories planted by the powers that be to mislead the public. Bureaucrats and public officials dismissively waving off the pleas of earnest, honest simple folk. True believers and wild-eyed cranks joining forces to uncover the truth.

I could easily have mistaken it for the Fox News Saturday evening report.

ANOTHER COVER-UP EXPOSED!

I don’t know if Steven Spielberg bought into the UFO/alien visitation craze when he made the movie. For that matter, I don’t know if he believed that sharks were an actual safety concern to the American public when he made Jaws, two years earlier. I assume he knew the difference between fiction and reality when he was shooting the two films. Sadly, the American public doesn’t know the difference.

Too many people, to borrow a phrase from the eminent sage Cecil Adams, thought Close Encounters was a documentary.

For a long time, the conspiracies-under-every-bed gang was relegated to late night talk radio. Insomniacs and other excitable sorts could fever-dream about one-world governments, UFO cover-ups, secret societies, and Nostradamus until the sun came up and they’d have to go back to pretending they were sane.

We could titter about these people when they lived on the fringe. But now they’re among the most prominent opinion-shapers in America. Glenn Beck last night whipped out his trusty blackboard during his keynote address at the CPAC annual convention and showed, conclusively, how “Progressivism” has been eating away at this holy land since the days of the Model T. It’s practitioners, a secret-handshake cabal whose boss is now Barack Hussein Obama, have nothing in mind except the overthrow of America’s principles.

Phew. Tall order, no? Not for the evil Progressives — those who want equitable health care for all, who want to see struggling homeowners get the same kind of shake Wall Street bankers got, who’d like to see average people’s kids be able to afford college. You know, really sick, destructive stuff.

Progressivism’s raison d’etre is “to destroy the Constitution,” Beck howled. He went on to say, “We need to address it as if it was a cancer…, it must be eradicated.” Sheesh!

PRETENDING HE’S SANE — SORT OF.

Beck’s baying at the moon would have been a joke in another year. For instance, he says Obama’s health care reform is nothing more than the president’s secret plan to enact slavery reparations. Obama’s environmental legislation, he adds, is simply another secret plot to rob from the hardworking, deserving rich and give it to the lazy-assed poor. No one’s laughing at Beck this year. In fact, he’s prominent on the New York Times best-seller lists.

He speaks of high-level government conspiracies. Obfuscating scientists. Phony media stories planted by the powers that be to mislead the public. Bureaucrats and public officials dismissively waving off the pleas of earnest, honest simple folk. His urges his army of true believers and wild-eyed cranks to join forces and uncover the truth.

If Steven Spielberg had made a movie with a character like Glenn Beck back in 1977, no one would have bought it. Instead he made a movie about spindly UFO pilots working hand-in-hand with the US Army and eminent scientists to fool the American public about a rock festival they wanted to stage near Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. I wish Close Encounters was the real thing and Fox News a figment of a creative filmmaker’s imagination.