It's a Mad House!

Is there a greater over the top performance than Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes?

I realize I continue to make this timeliest blog you have ever read by referencing a move that was released 45 years ago, but bear with me. (Cut me some slack, the 206^th sequel ((all numbers, as always, are approximate)) is coming out this summer, so it still must be part of the cultural zeitgeist on some level. I am fairly confident I haven’t referenced a movie less than 30 years old at any point.) To be fair to Mr. Heston, the performance fits right in. After all, we are talking about a movie where apes have passed humans on the evolutionary ladder and taken over the world.* Overacting is not only accepted, it is encouraged.

*Let’s pause for one brief editorial comment. The special effects in this movie consist of people in monkey suits. In monkey suits! I know people under the age of 25 don’t remember when a computer didn’t just fill in the more fantastic elements of a movie, but I promise, it happened. Here is a little secret for free: The movie is a thousand times better for it. Don Draper’s kid sums up my feelings about the movie best: http://youtu.be/yy_U-PeRY1k. Indeed, Bobby Draper, indeed.)

Let’s move past the fact that Charlton spends the vast majority of the film in some kind of fur loin cloth engineered to make late 60’s ladies swoon. There are three or four moments in the film where his outrage, his complete disbelief of the situation boils over and Charlton, eyes bulging with outrage and shock, bellows out the most fantastic asides of all time. “A PLANET WHERE APES EVOLVE FROM MEN?”

“YOU BLEW IT UP, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL”, and, my personal favorite, “IT’S A MADHOUSE, A MADHOUSE!” This happens approximately every 24 minutes and if fabulous every single time.* Charlie really sells it; he cannot believe the pile of crazy monkey dung he has found himself in.

*I cannot overstate how much fun it is to yell these lines out in wildly inappropriate situations. The next time you are out for a social function try it. It is crazy addictive. “GET YOUR PAWS OFF ME YOU DAMN DIRTY APE!

Lately I know exactly how he feels. (This your signal to buckle in for a rapid change in tone.)

The ball got rolling in the late afternoon of April 20, two-thousand-aught-fourteen, when my phone blew up with a CNN alert. It was something to the effect of “Shooting at Kansas City Jewish Center.” At this point, there weren’t a whole lot of details. Sadly, as far as shootings in the 21^st century go, it was fairly tame. Beyond that, unlike the multiple school shootings over the last few years, the motivation seemed obvious, as fucked up and evil as it was: A crazy person or persons decided to shoot some Jewish people.

The next domino fell on Monday. I received a text from a friend who was certain the shooter had spoken to her college class at Missouri State about a year or so earlier. He was there as a face of white supremacy and the talk went about how you would expect in a diverse higher education class room in 2014. At one point, my friend, to her courage and credit, confronted him on what he was saying about her people, her heritage. His reply was a racial slur. Bigots are really known for their elegancy. At the time it made for an interesting and disturbing story. Now that the speaker has killed a few people, it moved rapidly into horrifying. What do you do with the knowledge that you stood up to a guy capable of cutting you down and feel 100% justified due to some idiotic and paranoid beliefs? At the least, it is a “step back and reconsider things” moment.

News stories with more details came out around the same time. Three people were killed by this mad man and small details about them were starting to slip out, and our next step toward the mad house quickly followed. Two of the victims were a grandfather and his grandson who had been at the center for a singing competition….who were not even Jewish.

This guy had gotten himself worked up enough to drive three hours to shoot down his sworn enemies…and shot totally different people. Don’t get me wrong-this does not make it less or more tragic and does not take away from the fact that these people were murdered. I am just trying to point out what kind of asshole we are dealing with. A guy whose entire life was dedicated to hating people with no good reason other than his paranoid pea brain sized mind, and he mowed down people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope he knows this and is tormented by it.

By now we are at midweek, and this story has already horrified me to the bone. Surely it can’t get any worse, right? Not so fast, my friend.

I was surfing around on a will-not-be-named news site (it rhymes with Kawker) had a story with a headline of “Missouri Mayor ‘Kind of Agrees’ With Alleged Kansas Shooter About Jews.”  My stomach dropped. Here is one thing in my 41 years that seems to happen more often the older I get and I understand less and less: No matter how horrible an act is, someone will show up to defend it within a matter of days.

Hey, I am not some sort of Pollyanna. I realize this is the world we live in, where we all have an uncensored outlet and the only way to raise above the din is to be outrageous one way or the other. This is the reality, but there is nothing that says I have to like it.

Let’s break this down: You are in an elected office, meaning you have to be able to court people to a certain degree. There is a tragedy that happened somewhere else in your state and you can’t wait to tell the first microphone that shows up in front of your moronic mouth how the killer was a pretty decent guy and was on the right track about a few things. This guy could not wait to line up with Team Crazy Town, also known as Team Hate Crime.

At this point, I was disgusted with people in general. I should have stopped at the headline.

Upon further reading, I discovered this is the mayor of Marionville, MO. The NEWLY ELECTED mayor of Marionville, MO. A town about 25 miles to southwest from me currently and maybe even less than that from where I grew up. In other words, pretty darn close.

Up to this point, and usually with these kind of stories, I can look through my telescope of rational thought to the far off places where these kind of things happen and take comfort in the distance between there and here, physically and culturally. Those places might as well have been Oz (the “Over the Rainbow” one, not the HBO scary prison one. I thought the clarification was necessary given the tone of this conversation.) to me. But this was something completely different.

Let me take this second to acknowledge the more serious, stare at my belly button, tone of this. I know usually I am busy flailing away at attempting to be funny, and I will get back that next time, for better or worse. Every development in this story has clicked closer and closer to my inner circle with this last one being the most disturbing. Marionville, MO, a town just “down the road” has elected, to their highest office, a man who feels it is prudent to identify with a racist, paranoid assassin. These are people who grew up in the same time frame I did, with the same kind of education influences, cultural influences, and religious influences I did. We all got tossed into the same juicer, so how did they come out as crazy sauce?

I don’t have any answers. The old man voice in my head just throws his hands up and says he doesn’t understand the world anymore. The younger, idealist in me argues that the ugliest things in the world, the bigotry, the hatred, and the violence, are insidious and they know how to make an entrance. They have to remain hiding in the shadows to survive. But events like this one make it a little harder to believe.

For one week, I am right there with Charlie Heston, fist clinched and raised yelling “It’s a madhouse!” I think he got off easy though; he only had to deal with some monkeys.