Revolution!

Yesterday I was riding my motorcycle and I pulled up behind a van with a sticker on the back.  Guy Fawkes face with the words "revolution" under it.  I started laughing so hard I almost fell of my motorcycle.

Guy Fawkes was the principle in an event in England called the "Gunpowder Revolution", or the "Gunpowder Plot", a failed attempt to kill off the entire government of england with a shit load of gunpowder.

Wait, this gets better.  The government Guy was trying to kill was King James, you know, King James of the famous King James Bible, the first widely produced Bible in any language except Latin.  The "Protestant" king.  The English King and the House of Lords which had presumed to revolt against the excesses of the Catholic Church.

Guy Fawkes was a catholic religious fanatic, a counter revolutionary trying to put the world back the way it was before the Protestants revolted against the Catholic Church.

There was this movie, "V", and the protagonist, a nut case who tortured a young woman because he wanted to force her into seeing things the same way he did (which makes so much sense!), wore a Guy Fawkes mask.  While I think the move was ridiculously stupid, the subtle irony of a terrorist wearing a Guy Fawkes mask working against a conservative Christian government did not escape me.

It has, however, apparently escaped the vast majority of people including Anonymous, who hide behind the mask of this counter revolutionary, and others who see "V" as a revolutionary film.

The movie "V" really isn't a movie about revolution, it is actually a pretty sick commentary on the ignorance of people and their willingness to destroy each other based on ignorant ideologies.

One of the major ironies of the film is that both V and the Conservative Christian Government believed torture was an appropriate means to an end, so regardless of which fascist was in charge, people were tortured.

The writers and directors put so much subtlety in this film, most people apparently missed it.

But, this momentum of ignorance generated by the film is amazing.  Will anything good come of it?

No.  In fact, seeing Guy Fawkes face above the words "Revolution" reminds me of nothing so much as "Idiocracy".

I like movies, and I know they are fantasy.  The influence that movies, television, music, and video games have on the thought processes of people can not be overstated.  I'm no psychologist, and even if some did have a reasonable theory about this issue I probably wouldn't buy it.

People adopt ridiculous and hypocritical ideologies presented in film because they are ignorant and have no capacity to think and reason.  This is nothing new, people have had a lack of an ability to think for thousands of years.  Some of us think slightly more than others, but, all of us show an amazing capacity for ignorance.

If we are going to have a revolution, it should be a revolution of knowledge and the ability to think critically.

Fat chance of that happening while we still have counter revolutionary Guy Fawkes around trying to blast us back into the "Dark Ages".  He just might get us there yet.