My favorite horror film came out in 1978, but I started living in a horror film in 1980. In celebration of the season of Halloween and Mid-Term Elections, I offer you a meditation on the interweaving of these subjects.
The legendary horror film, ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ was, per all accounts, released in 1978 and allegedly won the Fright Award for the Best Western Pennsylvania Horror Film that same year. This film appears to be in such short supply that few surviving persons can even claim to have seen it, yet, based on a series of Google Searches, it nonetheless retains an apparent cult following.
The available synopses indicate that the film concerns a small group of mutant, blood-sucking monkeys created in a lab in the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, who then get loose and terrorize the surrounding areas and suburbs until eventually moving to downtown Pittsburgh where a Final Confrontation occurs.
In 1979, the corporatists and militarists were smart, because they were busily churning out stuff a lot scarier than ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania.’ I remember in particular a half-hour infomercial, though the word had not yet been coined, featuring General Alexander Haig and other stalwarts, throwing around scary numbers and stock footage from missile tests and May Day parades, and making the case that the USSR outclassed the US in every meaningful measure of military might, and that it was only a matter of time before the Reds were at our door.
I remember well this film, playing on a local TV station at 7:30 PM on a weeknight in the days before cable, and being unsure in my teenage mind if it were really news or a political ad. In those days, with the Soviets in Afghanistan and the US Embassy in Iran under siege, it didn’t seem to matter if it was a paid advertisement, there seemed to be a fundamental truth that the US was actively threatened by the USSR and Fundamentalist Muslims. In recent days, I have searched for this 30 minute or so film, but have not found it. Too bad, it’s probably a classic.
Yet today, all I can find is ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’, so that is the title of today’s rant. Though it may be a non-sequitor, ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ is all I have.
Unemployment then in the US was about 5.9%, but this was before the government stopped counting those whose Unemployment Benefits had ceased. Today, official unemployment is about 9.8%, but due to the fact that we don’t count those who have exhausted their benefits, we know the real unemployment rate in the US is much higher.
Those days in the late 1970’s were the beginning of a revolution, a revolution based on the notion of slick media, of blurring news with entertainment and advertising, a revolution dedicated to the notion of scaring the working class into voting against its own interests. The ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ traveled through the media and thus infested America.
As the 1980’s arrived and progressed, the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ were magnificently successful up to the moment the at USSR collapsed in 1991. And even as fear subsided ever so modestly and the national electorate were emboldened sufficiently to choose a pseudo-liberal government from 1992-2000, the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ marched steadily onward, as exemplified by the rise of both Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and other luminaries.
And of course, by hook or by crook, the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’ captured the executive branch of the US government for good in 2000.
Oh, sure, in 2004, I thought I was voting against the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania,’ and felt the dim rays of hope, thinking that we’d only been narrowly defeated. I survived the next 4 years longing for November, 2008, our next chance to nationally rout the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania.’
Then in 2008, one of the happiest days of all, the election Barack Obama. Surely, I thought, we were turning the tide against the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania.’
Yet as the wars continued, escalated and expanded in to Pakistan, as Health Care Reform was revealed to be a cruel joke, as jobs programs stood as a Lilliputian honor guard against a full frontal onslaught by the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’, the truth dawned on me.
Congress passes the bills, makes the laws, and variously lets loose the executive branch to run amok or, on rare occasions, reigns it in. And for every representative and senator there are about 30 lobbyists. Imagine your representive’s waiting room with 30 lobbyists waiting to see him!
And realistically, 99% of those lobbyists each carry a suitcase full of cash, a bag of good cocaine, and the phone numbers of some excellent hookers. Those lobbyists who are not equipped thus are, sadly, the lobbyists who represent your labor union or the Nature Conservancy or the American Civil Liberties Union.
So when you call your representative or organize a march in your city, it feels good until consider the lobbyists, their cash, their cocaine and hookers. That is when you have to remember the ‘Blood-Sucking Monkeys From West Mifflin, Pennsylvania’. You fought them as best you could, but in the end, it was their horror movie, and you were only an extra.