Flash Of Pink

 I've seen Barbie. 

I've seen Oppenheimer. 

They were both good movies. But only one of them got a lot of media attention. You may not have been paying attention, what with the waning days of summer competing for your last bits of sunshine focus, but there are a whole lot of people up in arms about the movie based on Mattel's sixty-four year old doll. Ginger Luckey Gaetz, wife of Representative Matt Gaetz, complained because it “neglects to address any notion of faith or family.” I remember Malibu Barbie, Day To Night Barbie, and Totally Hair Barbie, but I have no recollection whatsoever of Faith and Family Barbie. In keeping with the idiotic trend of conservatives not fully understanding the true nature of a boycott, Ben Shapiro bought a wide selection of Barbies to set them on fire as his way of showing his distaste for "one of the worst films I have ever seen, on every possible level it is a horrific movie." Transparency insists that I include the disclaimer here that young Ben is a failed screenwriter himself. 

The problem here is pretty obvious: those who prefer that things stayed the way they were back in 1959 and never allowed Barbie to bend her knees or get a job are the ones who are terrified of a "woke" Barbie. The word "patriarchy" got a workout on Faux News the week the movie premiered, because it was used as a punchline in the movie. Some of the pointier heads over there made a count, and they insist that the word "patriarchy" is used more than ten times. That is, I'm sorry to tell them, how comedy works. Lacking any discernable sense of humor would eliminate Fauxians from perceiving this, but this is the same group that got their red baseball caps all singed when Bud Light sent a can of beer to a trans lady. It's what we get upset about now. 

Nobody seemed to notice that just across the hall in the multiplex there was a message movie being played out that politely suggested that maybe making an atom bomb and then using it not once but twice on humans to "end war" was a bad choice. It also made little or no bones about the way the American government manufactured boogie men and women from those with above average IQs who spent their time reading and doing math.  The idea that the Father of the Atomic Bomb was a morally conflicted womanizer who dabbled in communism had a crisis of faith even as he became death, destroyer of worlds is a pretty tricky one. Perhaps far too nuanced for our friends at Faux to wrap their pointy heads around. It also clocks in at right about three hours, which far exceeds the attention span of your average Faux viewer. 

So in the eyes of the mouth breathers who fear all things "woke," the world ends not in the detonation of atomic weapons, but a flash of pink.