Independence Day
Sometime in the Spring of 1996, in a theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, waiting to see an unremarkable movie while on an unremarkable date, the trailer for Independence Day rolled. What was remarkable about that is that, in the heart of Clinton Country in 1996, when the Aliens obliterated the White House with their death ray, pretty much all of the theater erupted with cheers.
Mind you, this was yet another year when the Repubes handily lost an election to a scandal-riddled wag of a Demon candidate by running a crotchety old shake-the-rake grandpa who just didn’t fit the zeitgeist of those days. Still, it showed that not all was well in the parts of the country that actually mattered, at least as far as the MSM were concerned.
Flash forward 29+ years later, and Channel 4 (UK) still regularly shows the classic; last night it was on their Film4 channel, and it coincided with my workout just to the point where the White House was destroyed as I finished my run on the treadmill. As Harvey Fierstein uttered “Oh crap” while trying to reach his therapist, who had the good sense to get out of Dodge before his patient, I looked at the New Yorkers panicking on the streets and wondered if I would have left earlier while it was still possible. Who knows: If the Bad Orange Man keeps tweaking the Russkies, we might get a real-life test case to see if there is anyone with common sense still in the Big Apple.
What was also remarkable about the film was that it was one of at least two that depicted a youngish, good-looking POTUS with a pretty young daughter who lost his wife. Projection? If only Hillary had the good sense to kick the bucket, thought way too many women in Hollywood in the mid-1990s. Independence Day killed her off in the film, in the form of the pretty Mary McDonnell surviving a helicopter crash but dying from her injuries.:
Just for giggles, Sec State HRC was rumoured to have survived a helo crash in the middle east in 2012. Hmmmm.
Don’t cry for McDonnell, though, because unlike HRC, she went on to become President, albeit in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, the one with the hot Cylons.
The potential FLOTUS in The American President (starring youngish Michael Douglas) didn’t even get to the White House, being offed in the campaign. Serious projection going on in 1995. Makes on wonder what happened in 1996.
We knew by 1998 what happened in 1996.
Maybe ID’s death scene was a limited hangout.
Now that I think about it, they really did an upgrade with both of the motion picture POTUSes. Bill Clinton, despite the claims of a number of media women of the day, was a shriveled specimen of his former self even by 1996. BTW, dude is younger than the Bad Orange Man. Just sayin’.
It’s a shame nobody convinced Martin Sheen to run for POTUS in 2000. We might have avoided the world of grief delivered to us by The Shrub and his successors. Then again, our destiny might have already been decided somewhere else by the Cabal actually running the US.
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