(Thomas Jefferson's intended original artwork for the Declaration of Independence.)
Marx is the Godzilla of economics – heavy, but not real.
The State is... the coldest of cold monsters.
As a teenager, I ran across the two lines above
(Thomas Jefferson's intended original artwork for the Declaration of Independence.)
Marx is the Godzilla of economics – heavy, but not real.
The State is... the coldest of cold monsters.
As a teenager, I ran across the two lines above separately, and put together, they made me think of politics as a giant monster movie. Liberty versus equality! Government versus private enterprise! The powerful versus the little guy! Dogs and cats, living together – mass hysteria!
This (mostly) tongue-in-cheek post will take this dubious premise to ludicrous extremes. We owe the Founding Fathers - and Godzilla - nothing less.
Godzilla started as a villain in the movies, but became something of a hero in later films. It's this Shakespearean moral ambiguity that makes him the best character to play the government. Take Thomas Paine's assertions that "government even in its best state is but a necessary evil," and that:
Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.
Compare this with Thomas Jefferson's contention that:
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."
Let's also throw in James Madison from The Federalist No. 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
Many political thinkers have wrestled with the proper balance of individual liberty in relation to a social contract, of restraints upon and license given to the powerful, and of equality under the law and core rights versus the will of the majority. We can see these core issues play out in many works, from John Locke's Second Treatise on Government to the Collected Political Works of Godzilla. For instance, what is the right balance between civil rights and law enforcement? Godzilla occasionally flattens cities and runs amok, but in later films, he's the 'people's monster' and the only one with the might to take on other powerful creatures that make the populace flee in terror. (Eat your heart out, Jack Bauer.)
The authoritarians of movement conservatism and glibertarians claim to hate "big government" and Godzilla, and rail against him constantly. They sometimes have a point - Godzilla has an unfortunate penchant for accidentally destroying raised trains and other forms of public transportation, and can cause other havoc. However, oddly enough, movement conservatives and glibertarians don't have any problem with other monsters rampaging across the countryside and crushing the citizenry – only Godzilla. Some pretend these other monsters don't exist at all – but most of them actually cheer these monsters on. Even more bizarrely, members of this crowd cheer destruction by Godzilla, too – as long as Godzilla destroys people and things they don't like (such as the aforementioned public transportation).
Godzilla alternatively fights alongside, and against, other monsters. While powerful, Godzilla is occasionally bested by Wall Street, represented here by the mighty King Ghidorah:
(Goldman Sachs is more specifically a giant vampire squid.)
Godzilla must also contend with the Military-Industrial Complex (Mechagodzilla, who sometimes tries to fool the populace by going disguised as the actual Godzilla):
There's also the powerful energy industry (Hedorah the Smog Monster):
There's the insurance industry, able to immobile its foes its foes in
For social conservatives opposing equal rights, let's go with a giant Sneetch:
(Yeah, a Sneetch ain't a Japanese monster, but it'd still be fun to see one tussle with Godzilla.)
As long as we're not strictly sticking with Japanese monsters, for the theocrats screaming fiery damnation, let's go with the ancient evil Balrog:
For neocons, Randians and anyone else who fights for ideology regardless of reality, there's Mecha-Streisand:
Legitimate citizen watchdog groups sometimes fight Godzilla and occasionally help him against more destructive monsters (as does Anguirus):
Watchdog groups can be tenacious in their fight against powerful monsters.
Reality-based bloggers using the hamster-powered internet tubes normally fight against perceived injustice, like humanoid robots Jet Jaguar, Ultraman and Spectreman:
In contrast, authoritarian bloggers are objectively pro-monster. (Evil monster, that is. For their perceived foes, it's: "Ex-ter-mi-nate!!!")
Most citizens just flee in terror, though.
While we're mainly dealing with domestic politics here, Godzilla sometimes faces foreign foes (like Space Godzilla):
Some political players, like Newt Gingrich, seek to impose a "small Godzilla," like son of Godzilla Minilla:
Or Godzilla's clownish son Godzooky (shudder):
In any case, if we're running with this (increasingly strained) analogy, anarc