*Kelly

Hey, at least they were aware enough to add an explanation. Come to think of it, due to certain defunding efforts in the past year, that explanation isn’t too outlandish.

Part of the premise with the new drug called “Hype” is that there are just some areas of the city that the cops don’t venture into at night for any reason, and the VFW sits in one of those areas. Also, shut up and play along.

Though the VFW movie also sounds like a pretty great premise (Vietnam vets taking on drug dealers), I have to wonder what the writers’ explanation is for the vets just not calling the cops.

Not to mention the whole “Taco Bell” thing.

I gotta say, though, movies about weaponized viruses that escape labs and prompt the military to effect a cover-up aren’t nearly so much fun to watch as they once were.

Eh, well, that’s what happens when fiction meets reality. In the Watchmen graphic novel, something a number of the minor characters and supplementary materials casually mention from time to time is how the existence of actual costumed heroes and then superheroes led to superhero stories falling out of favor with the readers and comic book publishers abandoning them for other genres (which ultimately led to stories about pirates being the most popular genre of comic book by the time the 1980s rolled around). While the government’s gratitude to the comic book publishers for having inspired people to put on capes and tights and fight crime shielded the industry from some of its more censorious critics (such as Fredric Wertham, whose crusade against comic books is implied to have been nipped in the bud), the foibles and failings of these same “heroes” in capes and tights (some of whom weren’t very heroic at all) took a lot of the fun out of reading about the likes of Batman and Superman.

Flash forward to the events of September 11, 2001, and I remember reading an article later that same year about how a handful of authors who happened to have written stories in which aircraft crashed into skyscrapers (intentionally or otherwise) had reacted to seeing some semblance of their stories occurring in real life. One of the authors lamented how in his story, he’d (otherwise pretty accurately) described all the media hoopla and public outcry that he’d expected would occur over hundreds of people losing their lives in such a terrorist kamikaze attack. I also remember the Dave Matthews Band’s song “Crash” being taken out of circulation on radio stations for a while, the box cover art for the video game Red Alert 2 (which originally featured the WTC towers as a backdrop for a Soviet invasion) undergoing some last-minute alterations, and Disney likewise re-doing some of its animation on Lilo & Stitch.

Now, of course, we’ve got loads of fiction about worldwide outbreaks to compare against an actual pandemic. Most of the fictional plagues were a lot deadlier, causing civilization to collapse because not enough people survived to run it; what I wonder is whether any of those made up stories anticipated anything like the more gradual (though still rather rapid and deadly) socioeconomic and political decay our civilization has suffered from this pandemic. About the closest I’ve seen any fiction come to anticipating the absurdities of our time would be Demolition Man‘s portrayal of a wussified future in which people are afraid to touch each other and an incompetent “evil Mr. Rogers” kind of guy (who even looks a little bit like Joe Biden) has somehow been put in charge of running things.

(Of course, if any more of that movie’s predictions come true, that means someone even worse will soon dispose of Biden and take his place. Here’s hoping it wasn’t too prescient…)