In the battle to redefine what America can and should be, one Youtube video offers a comic glimpse of a dystopian America under Republican control. It's an over-the-top satire, but the message has never been more trenchant: if we don't vote, we'll get exactly what we deserve...
In a scathingly funny Youtube video called RepubliCorp Takeover of the United States of America, a woman from the future breaks in on a news broadcast to deliver an urgent warning:
"After you didn't vote, Republicans took back Congress and merged once in for all with the big corporations that fund them to form RepubliCorp. All because you didn't vote."
The woman, who has the amusing name of "Kickin Chipotle Time Warner" goes on to recite a litany of horrors resulting from the Republican takeover of America, including the election of President Sarah Palin, who signs a declaration of "Superwar" against Norway, followed by a declaration of "UltraWar" against "Iran, Botswana, and whatever country Björk is from."
It's an amusing, over-the-top political satire, a couple of years old, however its injunction to get out the vote has never been timelier. The more Americans who vote, the quicker we'll be rid of the Republicans.
The demographics in America have changed dramatically in recent years. So much so, that the only real shocker is that there are any Republicans holding elected office at all. By all rights, they shouldn't be. Women, Hispanics, African-Americans, and students under 30 now comprise the largest and most powerful voting block in American electoral history, and they are overwhelmingly Democratic. The only problem is that the majority of them don't bother to vote. If every person who's eligible to vote actually voted, the Republican party would cease to exist as a viable political force. Virtually overnight, the GOP would be relegated where it belongs--to the ash-heap of American history.
The GOP knows this, and it terrifies them. The Republican party is terminal. It's not a question of whether it's going to die, but when. That's why they are unraveling at such a giddy pace. The party is desperate and doomed, fighting for its survival, and it will stop at nothing. Which is why we've seen such an unprecedented increase in right-wing hysteria, and why so many Republican governors have have been frantically trying to rewrite the voting laws. Don Yelton, the Republican precinct chair in Buncombe County, North Carolina, was speaking for all Republicans when he candidly admitted that the new voting laws implemented in red-state legislatures were designed for no purpose other than to stop Democrats and "lazy blacks" from voting.
We can't blame Republicans for being greedy, misogynistic sociopaths, because that's what they are. To blame a Republican for being a psychopath is as pointless as complaining about the smell of sewage. We can only fault ourselves whenever they get elected, because that means the majority of us stayed home. As Hugo Weaving's masked anarchist observed in the film V for Vendetta, if we're looking for someone to blame, we have but to look in a mirror...