{"id":2694,"date":"2016-10-02T20:13:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-02T20:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mattralston.net\/?p=2694"},"modified":"2016-10-02T20:37:24","modified_gmt":"2016-10-02T20:37:24","slug":"rufus-gifford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/politics\/rufus-gifford\/","title":{"rendered":"Rufus Gifford Jumps The Shark To Idiocracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around the time Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for President of the United States, many\u00a0of the clever and astute among us remarked that the 2006 film Idiocracy<\/em>\u00a0was in essence\u00a0becoming reality. The movie’s theme is that of a dystopian future wherein people become hopelessly dependent on technology\u00a0and the species regresses to the point that the President of the United States is a glorified professional wrestler. Like Trump.<\/p>\n

Trump has actually appeared on stage in the WWE as it were, and has been reality show trash his entire life, even before he had a reality show, and even before we had reality TV. He’s always been a bogus personality.\u00a0He just used to\u00a0have to rely on the occasional shitty Barbara Walters segment to promote his trash image.<\/p>\n

There may be some dysgenics involved.<\/p>\n

Since birth control became widely distributed in the late sixties, the dumber among us have been reproducing at a much greater rate because they think Jesus hates condoms. That weird family down by the creek who make their own clothespins\u00a0has fourteen kids. The friendly neighbor and his wife who\u00a0work the cardiology wing and occasionally drop off banana bread are still trying. The second, third, fourth generation of Honey Boo Boo and Billy Ray Cyrus\u00a0are upon us, and they love reality TV.<\/p>\n

In Idiocracy<\/em>, futuristic\u00a0technology is depicted in a cartoonish, slapstick manner. A pizza ATM, an oculus sex chair. We have those now, but the real culprit is more incendiary, and wouldn’t read well on camera. Smart phones. People can’t look up. Can’t follow a film.<\/p>\n

Check Twitter. A network where you speak in 1\/3 sentences. Where nobody can properly articulate any point beyond I Hate, I Heart. This leads to confusion and hoards of idiots squabbling amongst one another.<\/p>\n

Our standards really are dumbed down, there’s no other realistic\u00a0point of view. Pop culture is fucked. It was weird in the 50’s, but at least then it attempted to be genuine. The artists portrayed themselves as earnest. The sixties were a necessary time of rebellion, the seventies and eighties were trying to figure it out. By the nineties we were ironing out some kinks but then the illuminati took hold. A few buildings went down, the economy tanked, and we came out with Justin Bieber. Censorship, a new scare. The Patriot Act. Divisiveness. Fucked up veterans. Back to the 50’s, just shittier music. Beyonce.\u00a0Autotune\u00a0performed on a laptop while she dances around like\u00a0the most self-important stripper of all time. People worship Kanye West simply because he’s an asshole.\u00a0Elvis would be ashamed to steal one of his songs.\u00a0For multiple reasons.<\/p>\n

Trump may be the obvious exhibit, but the fact that a politician as shamelessly corrupt as Hillary Clinton is being lionized as a progressive\u00a0by\u00a0her pseudo intellectual pseudo liberal casual\u00a0feminist and hostile yet\u00a0resigned fan base doesn’t bode well for humanity.<\/p>\n

Remember when Donald Trump said that thing that was really obnoxious and Hillary Clinton or the person running her Twitter account wrote to him,”Delete your account”?<\/p>\n

YOLO.<\/p>\n

The next morning\u00a0the following headlines popped up on the Huffington Post and similar sites which pretend to be earthy and independent but are in fact owned by media conglomerates targeting the entitled I Tip My Mexican Nanny Well demo to sell them the same shit as everyone else: “Hillary Clinton Just Broke the Internet” “Hillary Clinton Dropped a Weapon of Mass Disstruction” and “17 Flawless Reactions to #DeleteYourAccount” amongst others.<\/p>\n

What is she the next Don Rickles?\u00a0I hate to break up your incredibly lame, incredibly forced party, but that burn wasn’t that good ladies. It’s like a 3. If you couldn’t tell by its content, or the fact that Katy Perry has more followers than the President Obama, Twitter is drastically dumbing down anyone who checks it on their phone every ten minutes. That includes you, progressive meme posters.<\/p>\n

Fuck ethical standards, what happened to comedic standards? (If we’re talking the diss game, Donald Trump is so much better than Hillary\u00a0it’s just laughable so what you’re doing reads as desperate. You’re applauding the lady at the nursing home for stumbling through a knock knock joke.)<\/p>\n

If Trump, a former reality show host with zero political experience, became the most powerful man in the world, (except for the CEOs who tell the president what to do or else they’ll off their children), it would indeed signify a fairly insurmountable plunge into idiocracy.<\/p>\n

The fact is, we’re already there.<\/p>\n

Because a currently serving US diplomat has a reality show about being a US diplomat.<\/p>\n

His name is Rufus Gifford<\/strong>. He’s currently the US ambassador to Denmark, appointed by Barack Obama and confirmed by the US Senate, and he’s released a reality show on Danish\u00a0television which is now available around the world on Netflix. He filmed this while serving his position and receiving\u00a0paid a salary.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert: He’s openly\u00a0gay. (Being a gay guy\u00a0still passes for bawdy cutting edge entertainment\u00a0among fat women in the deep south who like to get drunk on Four Loco and talk shit about their husbands while watching shitty reality TV which they often are too pilled up to realize they’re starring in.)<\/p>\n

Gifford\u00a0sets an interesting precedent. I don’t know how it works, but I watched the first episode of\u00a0his show, which is called\u00a0I am the Ambassador<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0it’s cool for a diplomat to film a reality show, why not the president?\u00a0I mean, surely Hillary Clinton would want you following her around with a hot mic\u00a0catching her dolling out insider trading tips and tax loopholes as shush money right?<\/p>\n

In said first episode Gifford is shown discussing ISIS with the Danish ambassador to America about how the new Cold War\u00a0should be handled between the Danish government and the American government.<\/p>\n

So, clearly completely pointless babble. Yet, someone at the State Department would have had to approve\u00a0a final cut of this show before it was aired to make sure it didn’t contain\u00a0any sensitive intelligence information, right?<\/p>\n

So that ISIS couldn’t scout out major terrorist attractions in Denmark such as, where is the gay porn factory we must scout it and blow some dudes to make sure they’re gay and then consider blowing it up, right?<\/p>\n

So, someone at the State Department is essentially spending their time editing content for a reality show, right?<\/p>\n

An American diplomat filming a reality show is really a monumental\u00a0step. It’s something. Probably bad. Maybe good. It’s just never happened before. A reality TV guy being president, we can’t have that. But, diplomats, they’re fine. Not a slippery slope. Not at all.<\/p>\n

Assuming we’re going with the educational angle, why don’t we skip this whole Denmark thing and start broadcasting the meetings between the US and Saudi Arabian ambassadors? That might be a compelling reality show that almost nobody would watch as they’d realize their own currency was being destroyed.<\/p>\n

It’s called escapism. Fallon is playing cornhole\u00a0with Blac Chyna’s face holes at 11:30.<\/p>\n

Gifford doesn’t seem like a bad guy\u00a0at all. Although he’s a reality show guy now, so all bets are out the window. The wheels were set in motion before he arrived. If it weren’t him, it’d be someone else. This is the end game. He says:<\/p>\n

“We call it a documentary series, not a reality show, to distinguish ourselves as much as we can from the Real Housewives and the Kardashians.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You say tomato, I say fuck you. To give you an idea of how relentlessly full of shit this guy is, the first episode is centered around his birthday. This is what he says while sitting in a limo going through various voicemails while he wistfully meditates\u00a0on the significance of his birthday and tears\u00a0up at one point either out of shear sociopathy or because he was hand selected by someone behind the scenes at G8 because\u00a0he’s emotionally unstable\u00a0and will make for okay material.\u00a0That’s how they cast reality shows. Either way, this is what he says (INTERCUT):<\/p>\n

“What would I like to be doing today? Would I like to go to the beach and take a walk absolutely but, you know, this job, I’m all in, and when I get invited to events, it’s hard for me to turning forty and being an ambassador, I’m crashing a barbecue that didn’t have anything to do with my birthday, but now it might be a birthday thing. This is my mom, she sent me a birthday message this morning, I’m sad that my family’s not coming to my birthday, it’s hard. I’m doing my birthday here, it’s hard, I’ll miss them, but you know this is my home now.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To state the obvious, if this were to be a believable Documentary Series, please inform me what sober forty year old man cares about his fucking birthday???!!!!<\/p>\n

The next episode features a shitty staged group conversation about how his birthday went down.<\/p>\n

How shitty are Danish storyline producers?<\/p>\n

Or, US diplomats.<\/p>\n

Isn’t America consistently striving to promote an image of strength? Like, all that military propaganda they pay for at football games?<\/p>\n

Whose idea was it to show our guy\u00a0crying about his birthday, and can they please be fired immediately?<\/p>\n

Not because of the foreign policy\u00a0implications, which, if ISIS were a real and not created threat, this would definitely boost their morale after they binge\u00a0watched Season 1, as they most certainly have\u00a0from their compounds.<\/p>\n

The national security you morons are always getting huffed up about is one thing,\u00a0I say fire whoever’s in charge because\u00a0this show sucks.<\/p>\n

Prior to be appointed his\u00a0cushy position, Gifford was a major fundraiser for Obama’s first win.<\/p>\n

They\u00a0owed him something.<\/p>\n

Hillary too.<\/p>\n

Idiocracy is fully upon us. Gifford just punctured the hull, and before we know it we’ll be sinking. The\u00a0vice president will be checking his phone during the debates. The Secretary of Defense will be getting an STD test on an MTV segment. The head of the Supreme Court will be holding a little service dog. Congress will outlaw gluten and then vote to bomb Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Regardless of who becomes president\u00a0there’s no turning back now. This is where our species was fated to go.<\/p>\n

Gifford took the first step. He’s bringing us into the next phase. Surrender. We lost.<\/p>\n

He’s the new divinity. Bad Jesus. Xenu. Pray to him from your steakhouses or vegan bistros, and catch his show on Netflix.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around the time Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for President of the United States, many\u00a0of the clever and astute among us remarked that the 2006 film Idiocracy\u00a0was in essence\u00a0becoming reality. The movie’s theme is that of a dystopian future wherein people become hopelessly dependent on technology\u00a0and the species regresses to the point that the …read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[852,897,1017],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2694"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2698,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2694\/revisions\/2698"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattralston.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}