I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Here we go again, another jagoff trying to tell me how Ghostbusters II is the most important movie ever made and I need to understand its deeper meanings," aren't you? You're right. I am one of those jagoffs. I know what else you're thinking; "Why the hell is this jagoff talking about Ghostbusters II when there's a shiny new Ghostbusters being made that celebrates women in the workplace?" Well, I haven't seen it yet, so get off my back about it.
Ghostbusters II is a movie that was not well liked. In fact, it's really stupid and was a terrible follow-up to the original. But watching the "election coverage" that's presented to us by the (supposedly) adult-version-TMZ news channels like CNN got me thinking; this presidential election has us living the Ghostbusters II plot.
First of all, we have Donald Trump himself. There may have never been a movie character that better fitsthe Trump profile than Vigo the Carpathian. In the movie, Ripley/Dana Barrett describes Vigo as a "powerful magician and a genius in many ways, as well as a tyrant, an autocrat, a lunatic and a genocidal madman." Sound familiar? Even the "powerful magician and a genius" has a wisp of truth to it. In fact, powerful magician might be the most obvious explanation for the fact that Donald Trump is even famous in the first place. As for the "genocidal madman" part? We've yet to see that scene, but at least there's some hope that we can avoid that.
So here we have a tyrannical, autocratic madman who can trace his lineage back to Europe and now calls New York City home.
As the plot unfolds we find that Vigo's powers are boosted by something called "psychomagnotheric slime" or "mood slime." For this exercise we'll call Donald Trump voters the slime, an apt description on multiple levels, as it turns out. It started out as a trickle, so small you couldn't imagine that it actually existed, but as we approach November 2016, that little trickle of slime has turned into a raging river of douchebaggery. What is this gooey river of Trump voters feeding on? You guessed it, bad feelings! As the dialogue has become more cynical and vile, that river of slime is picking up steam, and Donald Trump is picking up steam right along with it. His campaign is feeding off of it. His campaign manager was charged for physically assaulting a Breitbart reporter, for chrissakes! His main competition, Ted Cruz, tried to keep up with the nasty rhetoric by suggesting that we need armed military patrolling Muslim neighborhoods all across America, and a majority of the populace, U.S. Muslims aside (hello white privilege!), barely batted an eye! The Trump campaign started floating rumors that Cruz had engaged in multiple affairs and the Donald retweeted some dipshit on Twitter who mocked the appearance of Cruz's wife. What did Cruz do in response? Did he try to cool the emotions by being the bigger man? Of course not. His campaign bought the rights to a nude GQ photo set of Trump's wife! (side not: why does she not own those rights, they're her photos AND her husband is running for president.) IIf Donald Trump-mood slime-river were an actual thing, the entire country would be drowning in it. Every time a story comes out about Trump that would bury anybody else, he RISES in the polls. His slime river picks up more momentum.
Where are our heroes? Where is that ragtag bunch of every-(wo)men that will unite the common people against this megalomaniacal Huckleberry Finn riding his douche canoe down a river of living internet comment sections? Presumably there's a lot of behind-the-scenes research going on. I'd imagine there's a boatload of scandals that the Democrats are waiting to unleash. Will that do the trick? TBD. But it seems to me, with the way Donald Trump is able to brush off negativity, that isn't going to be enough. We need some positivity up in here. Democrats, despite all worthy criticisms you can make, have saved this country from serious devastation. The economy has returned from the brink (in some cases), healthcare coverage has been extended to far more people, gay marriage is the law of the land and net-neutrality seems to be a goal. Minimum wage is even going up in cities all across the country. There's many other positive things to mention as well, almost none of which would have happened under a GOP administration. It's time for America to have our Higher and Higher moment. We need Hillary, Bernie, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and the rest of the Democrats to jump into their poorly animated Statue of Liberty, start bringing some positivity back into this race and send Trump the Carpathian back to the demonic underworld of Fox News where he belongs.