Front Seat Slap Fights; Street Fightin’ Man; Seven Days In May-Be

Well, it’s Hi, Hi Hee and the caissons are rolling into Washington, D.C., long batons are swinging and pepper balls stinging in L.A.

There’s a lot of military might on display and heated rhetoric flying lately with government officials threatening California’s governor with arrest and Da Guv sounding defiant as elected leaders square off like kids in a schoolyard and foreign journalists find out there can be painful consequences to covering a demonstration in the United States.

We’re watching it all very carefully, of course. We just wish our fellow citizens wouldn’t celebrate our being injured in the line of duty quite so much. Memes of journos taking pepper balls or worse and left grimacing on endless loops have left us with the impression that there are a lot of people out there sitting in basement pain caves who relish watching us get hurt. Over and over again.

That’s not only akin to watching Democracy Die In Darkness, that’s cheering it on.

But as we near the date of a national celebration of our military and the birth date of a dude who did his best to avoid serving with them we have our turntables spinning and an old movie running through our dented little heads – Seven Days In May. It’s an Old School look at a scenario just then threading its way into the public consciousness – a military coup unseating a democratically elected president and orchestrated to install a fascistic government led by a renegade general.

There are some plot parallels to contemporary America and references to characters in play when the film was made (1964) as, as hard as it may be to believe, there were forces in play and personalities of the day who shared the ideology and goals of today’s right wing.

You may want to check the film out if you’re not already familiar as there are several applicable threads, including media suppression, the targeting of political opponents and the rise of right wing thought and ideology in our military. The whole thing has got us more than a little jammed up – if so much as a HumVee veers off the parade route June 14 we’re grabbing the go-bag and heading for the hills.

Locally, we’ve noted a series of anomalies which have also caused us to cock an eyebrow, if not given us outright cause to sound the alarm. Local demonstrators are now bringing their own armed security personnel to protests; couples are settling disputes with front-seat slap fights at freeway speeds; e-bikers are drawing the ire – and single-digit salutes – of pedestrians; and even the Good Humor Man has been abused by local teens bent on hijacking his ChacoTacos. Oh, the humanity. You know society is failing when the kids attack the local ice cream van.

It’s clear things are a little amped right now and from what we can tell people are feeling wrong-footed and off balance. There’s no doubt there are others out there who are happy and content with the way things are going, and we’re sure we’ll hear from them relative to the thrust of this piece. For now, we’re looking at everything with a skeptical eye and double-checking information we get, watching things develop both locally and nationally while scenes from that movie roll through our heads.