The Remakes, Reboots, Ripoffs, and Re-imaginings of Politics

Actor and comedian Sammy Petrillo passed away over the weekend. Who is Sammy Petrillo? Good question. I wasn’t familiar with him either when I heard the news, but after a few minutes on Al Gore’s Internet I found out a lot.

Sammy was a Bronx born actor and comedian who had some minor success in the 1950s. He took his physical similarity to Jerry Lewis and ran with it. He became known as the “fake Jerry Lewis” after creating an onstage and onscreen persona that mimicked Lewis’ shtick. He even went as far as to hook up with a Dean Martinesque straight man named Duke Mitchell. The real Jerry Lewis wasn’t amused and even went so far as to intimidate others in Hollywood not to feature Petrillo on their shows and bullied Vegas venues into blackballing his act.

The point of bringing up Petrillo (besides encouraging you to watch his funny performance in “Bela Lugosi meets the Brooklyn Gorilla” on YouTube) is to illustrate that the “trend” of ripoffs, remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings is nothing new. Take it from me, the guy who shamelessly made “Transmorphers,” remakes and ripoffs are part of Hollywood history. What is more depressing is the fact that re-imagining and remakes are also part of the political culture.

Our society has a sort of “political amnesia”; forcing us to repeat the same economic and policy mistakes every thirty years or so. What else is the Obama administration but a “remake” of the Clinton administration (with almost half the original cast!)? You can almost hear the pitch meeting. “It’s FDR meets Clinton! We reboot the franchise. We forget about the Carter episode just like we pretended that Superman III and IV never happened.”

It’s the same tired ideas. Same scripted attacks. Same demagoguery. Just listen to mental midgets like Paul Krugman discussing Keynesian economic models and talking about getting the “factories” started. Hey, Knuckleheads, in the modern world the factories are all in China and Wal-Mart is the nation’s largest employer. Let’s get “shovel ready” projects going so we can help out all those Starbucks baristas who are unemployed. Let’s pretend that race relations today are only slightly different than they were in Mississippi circa 1950. These clowns live in the past.

It’s maddening that this amnesia also affects our ability to learn from global history. How well has pandering to maniacal, tin pot, dictators worked out in the past? Why don’t we ask the Eastern Europeans how cool it was to have centralized everything and a government that spied on average citizens? Yeah, that flag@whitehouse.gov thing was a great idea.

I’m sure that every evil dictator started out by laying out his case for evil fascism. Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin, and yes I’ll go there, Hitler all showed up twirling their mustaches and telling everyone how great its going to be living in a statist hell hole. No, it always starts out with smiley faces and unicorns, but it ends in bread lines and political prisons.

While I don’t advocate a wholesale freak-out at this point, a little perspective would be refreshing. Anything resembling a massive clusterfark should ring alarm bells for all citizens, regardless on which side of the left/right paradigm they sit. We should be past the point of deficit spending orgies, head-in-the-sand foreign policy, and irrational discussions about impending Christian theocracies.

I like to smack around my leftist friends by pointing out that since 1970, for the past 38 years, we’ve had 26 years of Republican administrations and 12 years of Democratic presidencies. Yet, we don’t have prayer in school, forced Christian conversion, film and television censorship, book burnings, gay concentration camps or back alley, illegal abortions. Still, you can bet that in early 2011, the news media and the wunderkinds of the left will start crying about Palin’s book banning, Romney’s Mormon proselytizing, and Huckabee’s closet desire to turn the airwaves into 24/7 Christian programming. I can’t imagine what they will dredge up about my homeboy Bobby Jindal (oh, wait didn’t he perform and exorcism? Frack!)

I’ve seen this movie before. Several times actually. It is old and busted. Where is the new hotness?

There is a bright side. The latest episode of leftist nincompoopery seems to be particularly inept. Too many development execs and a weak, first time director. They had a big opening weekend, but their box office is down, and dropping fast. In 2010 and 2012 the other side may have an opportunity to return to the top spot. The question for us is this; do we want another lame remake or sequel of our own? Do we want our own “Transformers 2” or a remake of “Nightmare on Elm Street”?

I vote that, at a minimum, we push for a re-imagining like “The Dark Knight.” I want familiar concepts and ideas but told with a new spin and by really talented people. I want it to be multi-layered and complex. I want a classic. I want something with staying power that resonates for generations and changes the landscape for the foreseeable future.

Even better, I want something completely original and fresh that changes the political landscape forever. Just look at the cinematic world before and after “Star Wars”. That’s what I want for politics. A reformation. I want to build on the successes of the past and avoid the obvious failures.

I want politicians who don’t want to be politicians. I want senators and representatives who push for term limits, and drastically reduce their pay. I want them all to understand the concept of “public service”. I want a massive dismantling of our government’s bureaucracy. I want a complete rethinking and overhaul of the tax code. I want massive, massive privatization. I want people of all races, creeds, religions, and sexual orientations to put aside their differences and join together under the banner of national pride. I want politicians who not only preach the dangers of socialism, but also extol the virtues of liberty and free markets. I want my fellow countrymen and women to understand that the true path to success for all people lies in self-reliance, responsibility and national brotherhood, not in the suffocating embrace of big government.

Any politician or movement that can capture that sentiment and actually deliver will get boffo box office. I’m talking “Titanic” numbers.

After eight years of George Bush bashing, a financial meltdown and a general desire for “change”, the left waltzed into total control of the nation. The right and the middle may find themselves in the exact same position in a very short time. When we do, let’s not make the same mistakes. Lets not accept another retread, no matter how nostalgic it feels, and demand something bold and totally different.

We are Americans. We deserve nothing less.