We’re here on the eve of the end of America as we’ve come to know it, and the two of us thought, “what could be a more fitting way to honor everything we love about this country than to do one of the most American things possible?”

That would be watching a movie and then arguing about it. 

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The movie we picked to divert our attention from the machine like roll of militarism and xenophobia across the US is Paul Verhoevan’s Starship Troopers. 

That means we’re talking: propaganda, fascism, more propaganda, some xenophobia, a lot of militarism, and then even more propaganda. So, essentially, we carefully chose a movie that bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to anything happening out there in the real world.

This episode was born out of a conversation Jules and I had last week about a clip from Starship Troopers someone posted on Twitter. It was the scene of the cow in the lab getting gored to death by a giant bug.

In that clip, a couple of guys in lab coats walk a cow into a room with one of the arachnids and then hurry out before the bug gets to them. Immediately, that seemed to me like an encapsulation of the entire movie’s message. My takeaway from that scene and the move overall that fascism is stupidly overconfident, everyone is expendable, and safety is for pussies.