directed by Sam Seder, stars Jon Benjamin, David Cross, Sarah Silverman,Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, Ross Brockley and Sam Seder. Screens at NetrootsNation on Thursday night.
I took over one thousand photos of my TV during the ongoingtelevision coverage of the theft of the 2000 election.
Photos of chads, brooksbrother riots,Florida Supreme Court Justices and dry erase boards.
Lexapro would have probably helped more, buthindsight is 20/20.
Sometime around the inauguration of the dry drunk, when I regained feeling in my ass I had been sitting on for weeks, I began to
notice that there was not the slightest hint of outrage expressed in or by the media. To read any paper or watch any TV was to
believe there was no discontent amongst the public, nor shock amongst legal
scholars.
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We were all to believe that there were no implications tothe injustice of a Supreme Court decision so incongruous that its authorsnotified future generations that their finding was just a one off --
Themedia's only reaction was somewhere along the lines of "phew, I can finallytake that vacation to
now" and "shit, that was good for ratings".
Personally, I was getting angrier that the dissent I knewexisted had been muted and was convinced that it would lead to some type ofexplosive blowback. At the very least I was worried I'd kick my tv in.
So, in hopes of pre-empting a bloody leg,
I decided to write a script based on acharacter I had been performing at stand up shows.
Arthur, Joe Lieberman's fuck-up of a son, is installed in aNew York City Co-op so he will
and his loss ofan opportunity to use the White House tennis facilities. After a failed attemptat running for the executive board of his building, Arthur decides to lead anintellectual salon based on a back of the book reading of the SituationistInternational. There, Arthur is slowly inculcated to commit a terrorist attackby some
.
The movie starts and finishes with Arthur on the roof of his
co-op shooting a bazooka at another building. We were eight weeks into editingwhen the planes hit the towers.
Needless to say, the idea of religious zealots blowing up abuilding in
was not as comedic as it had been weeks before. Soon, I lost my finishingfunds.
Over the months and years that followed, finishing the film
of a
, though my conviction that the stolen election of 2000 willbe seen by historians as seminal, grew.
I've finally finished the film. Meanwhile, thatmuting of dissent did lead to an explosion of sorts. It was the 2000 electionand the coincidence of technology that began to drive people to question theconventional wisdom in some type of organized and audible way. Blogs, or someapproximation of them, began to pop up around this time and have led to aparallel and ever increasingly influential media narrative, one which is not "gatekept" by the corporate establishment.
Screening this film at Netroots Nation in the final year of thistravesty known as the Bush Administration closes the circle for me a bit-- whichis a nice consolation after seven years. Too bad this country is so fucked! Though, people tell me
DVD's are a good hedge against inflation
!
Here's a clip where Arthur is campaigning to become President of his intellectual salon with the hopes that his new title will get him on the
Charlie Rose Show
... and