O P I N I O N
NOT THAT PROFOUND
By Nathan Graziano
One of my favorite activities of the holiday season is watching “The Twilight Zone” marathon on the SYFY Channel, which begins at 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve and runs through New Year’s Day. This year, I sacked out on the couch for 14 straight hours and have exactly zero regrets about it.
However, given the country’s current climate, the show itself felt slightly superfluous, seeing that we have been living through a particularly terrifying episode of “The Twilight Zone” for the past year.
Picture the swirling vortex as you listen to Rod Sterling’s deep voice: “Meet Donald J. Trump, a failed businessman and former reality television star, who was re-elected to the office of president after leading a failed insurrection attempt against the United States government because he was too small and thin-skinned to accept the results of an election that he clearly lost.
“Mr. Trump’s followers, however, still believe all of this lunatic’s lies and celebrate his fascist rise and prejudice dog whistles. But Mr. Trump’s lies don’t exist in reality, rather in a darker corner…of ‘The Twilight Zone’.”
In fact, there was an episode that aired in Season 4—when the episodes ran for a full hour—titled “He’s Alive,” starring an extremely young Dennis Hopper, from 1963.
In the episode, Hopper plays a young neo-Nazi leader named Peter Vollmer, who is struggling to get people to listen to the hate-filled speeches he delivers from the street corners. For some reason, other than a small group of like-minded followers, no one is interested in listening to his populist and racist MAGA…I mean, neo-Nazi rants.
Then a dark, mysterious figure appears as a mentor to Vollmer and dispenses invaluable advice on how to get the working class to buy into his hate speech and propaganda.
Once his message starts to gain some traction, this mysterious mentor tells Vollmer that he needs to find a martyr, someone from the movement who Vollmer will need to assassinate then blame the movement’s opposition for the martyr’s death, stoking the anger and outrage of its audience.
Does any of that sound vaguely familiar? And spoiler alert: the mysterious figure reveals himself to be none other than Adolf Hitler.
As is often the case, it seems as if the creators of “The Twilight Zone” had a crystal ball. This is far from the only episode that seems to accurately predict the future, but to be fair, the playbook that Hitler and Trump and other dictators have used is fairly well-worn and obvious to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of history.
Still, every time I turn on the news lately, it feels as if I’m watching another episode in an endless marathon of “The Twilight Zone1,” where the objective facts in any given situation are manipulated by one man whose followers blithely swallow his every lie.
For example, in an episode titled “Wag the Dog,” Donald Trump and his new world order launch military strikes in Venezuela—while threatening Cuba, Mexico and Greenland—then announce that the United States will be running the foreign country while, at home, subsidies for the Affordable Care Act expired and millions of Americans will be watching health insurance premiums bloat and momentarily forgetting about the heavily redacted Epstein Files where the president prominently appears.
In another episode titled “Bury the Lead,” on New Year’s Eve, House Republicans release the transcripts special counsel of Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, where he said under oath that there was “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election” in order to “prevent the lawful transfer of power;” meanwhile, Americans wear adult diapers into Times Square and wait for the ball to drop and cheer on another year.
It is “The Twilight Zone,” indeed.
- I wrote this before today’s murder of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE agent. ↩︎
You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com.