Feet On The Ground

 “She thinks I’m a fascist?! I don’t control the railways or the flow of commerce!” This is how Barbie reacts to being called a fascist by a group of high school girls. 

If you didn't catch the movie, perhaps being stuck on the horns of the dilemma of which to see first: Oppenheimer or Barbie, I can sense your frustration with my opening. Perhaps you thought the story about the making of the first atomic bomb was about fighting fascism. What was that overtly political quandary doing in a movie about a plastic doll? 

Well, let me set you down easy by saying that both of these movies dealt the the American Zeitgeist and how we have all been affected by the last eighty years. As Barbie seriously ponders how she could be called a fascist, she is culling up images from Mussolini and Hitler, who both took great pride in "making the trains run on time" as well as restricting and controlling the economy. 

That second part probably sounds familiar as "MIster T" (that stands for tariffs) continues to twist and bend the US economy like it was some high school economics class project, trying to find a way to turn making money for himself the focus while bankrupting the country at large. This scheme has been paired with his lust for power, having recently deployed governmentt troops to our nation's capitol ostensibly to battle crime, but actually to pick up trash. 

When Vice President Jo-Jo Dogface Vance, Defense Secretary Pete "This Round's On Me" Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen "Who Shall Not Be Named" Miller showed up last week at Washington DC's Union Station, they were jeered and booed, and called fascists. It was the mocking of these central figures of the Second Trumpreich that brought down the fury of the guy who is just trying to keep us from talking about the Epstein Files. It was the convicted felon that commanded the already deployed National Guard to seize control of the train station, partially obscuring the fact that Joe Biden had made restoration of that historic spot part of his infrastructure plan continuing a process that began back in 1983 via a non-proft organization. Joe, as you may remember, was a bit of a glassy-eyed rail freak himself. 

Which brings us back to Barbie, who made the valiant choice after disrupting the patriarchal takeover of her native land to leave her dream house and come to live in the real world. Her first stop? Spoiler alert: her gynecologist. Here she hoped not to control the means of production, but her own means of reproduction. 

Not an atomic bomb or a massive reworking of our nation's economic plan, but a pretty sizable choice.