“TOMORROWLAND”
LIBERAL DOOMSDAY MYTHOLOGY WITH MOUSE EARS
By Don Feder
Remember when you could go to a Disney movie without being smacked in the face with political correctness? “Tomorrowland” will make you long for those days of yore.
It opens at the 1964 New York Worlds Fair where a 10-year-old boy named Frank shows a rocket-pack he’s built to a man at a Pavilion, who turns out to be a recruiter for Tomorrowland. He’s given a souvenir pin by a childlike robot and goes on a ride that whisks him away to another dimension.
The inhabitants of Tomorrowland and are geniuses; or, at the very least, optimists who haven’t lost their capacity to hope and dream (aw!). The inter-dimensional Jetsons do cool stuff that will ultimately benefit all of mankind (double aw!).
Flash forward 45 years. Another young dreamer, this time a tech-savvy teenaged girl, gets a button which will transport her to Tomorrowland. But, it runs out of power. The girl-robot from 1964 takes her on a quest to find Frank, now a grumpy, middle-aged hermit who was exiled from Tomorrowland for inventing a machine that predicts the end of the world, down to the day, hour and second.
As Frank (played by veteran Hollywood leftist George Clooney) and his new friend examine the device with a countdown clock, various monitors show pictures of what’s contributing to the big adios for planet Earth: Global Warming (illustrated by disintegrating icebergs); overpopulation (teeming masses huddling on crowded streets); nuclear war; and, “poisoning the environment.”
Frank explains that humanity could have averted impending doom but became complacent or resigned to its fate. The rest of the movie is even harder to follow, or swallow, but concludes with the standard Disney happy ending. Even the critics who trashed the film gave it top marks for indoctrination. “Don’t Hate ‘Tomorrowland’ for Asking Us to Be Better,” whined the headline in the Village Voice review.
Quite coincidentally, all of the left’s doomsday scenarios are designed to get us to embrace its worldview, including more government control of our lives, massive public spending and deindustrialization. Regarding “climate change,” Hollywood does a better job of advancing the cause than Al Gore, National Geographic and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change combined.
In Clooney, Disney found the perfect ambassador for “Tomorrowland”. Check out Progressive.org to see what he thinks about anything.
The actor was featured on a 2006 cover of Vanity Fair (along with fellow deep-thinkers RFK Jr., Gore and Julia Roberts) for the magazine’s “Special Green Issue: A Threat Greater Than Terrorism – Global Warming.” Clooney thinks terrorism is both overrated and our fault. Our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan ended up “creating an entire generation of people seeking revenge,” Clooney grumbles.
A heavy donor to both Obama campaigns, and personal pal of the president, in a 2012 interview, Clooney described Obama as someone “who is smarter than almost anyone you know, who’s nicer and more compassionate than almost anybody.” By Hollywood standards, that might be true.
Consider liberal end-of-the-world fantasies without 3-D glasses.
Overpopulation
Thomas Malthus (the original Malthusian) thought the world was overpopulated in the early 19th century, when its population was 900 million. He confidentially forecast the imminent collapse of civilization, unless war and starvation thinned the herd.
In 1969, when there were 3.5 billion of us, Paul Ehrlich predicted mass worldwide starvation in the 1970s as population growth far outstripped food production. That that didn’t happen hasn’t fazed him in the least. Now that we’re seven billion plus, he says that in a few years, we’ll be eating our dead. Pity we can’t eat failed theories instead.
Everybody on earth today could live on half an acre of arable land, though many prefer high-rise apartments or condos.
Almost half the world’s population lives in countries with below-replacement fertility. In 1960, worldwide, the average woman had five children in her lifetime. Now, the average is 2.53 and falling. Japan and Russia are already losing people.
The founding editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, initially, Stewart Brand was an avid Ehrlichian, who said anyone who’s thinking of having a third child “ought to go hungry for a week” to see what they’re doing to humanity. Today, Brand asks, “What if large population is not bad but is good?”
Every advance in human history – from the Industrial Revolution to the computer age – has paralleled robust population growth. But, since the Black Plague of the 14th century, we have never experienced global population decline, which could happen as soon as 2050. Even now, Western nations are aging at an alarming rate. It will be interesting to see how fewer and fewer workers manage to support more and more retirees, and how civilization will be maintained with shrinking populations, especially in industrialized nations.
Global Warming
Since recordkeeping began in 1920, Boston has experienced 4 of its 5 snowiest winters in the past 21 years. The winter of 2014/2015 broke all previous records with a little over 9 feet of snow falling on the Hub.
In 2013, a group of climatologists who set sail for Antarctica to document the effects of Global Warming had to be rescued when their ship got stuck in ice that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Antarctica’s ice cap is expanding, confounding the vaunted computer models. Professor John Turner, a climatologist with the British Antarctic Survey, admits: “The world’s best 50 models were run and 95% of them have Antarctic ice decreasing over the past 30 years.” Instead, between 2011 and 2014, it reached record levels.
There’s no convincing evidence of significant man-made Global Warming, just computer models that can’t possibly be wrong. Over millions of years, the earth has periodically warmed and cooled due to everything from solar activity and volcanic eruptions to receding or advancing glaciers. Greenland was so called because 1,000 years ago, the land was green. Its cooling was not due to Vikings driving SUVs manufactured in coal-fired plants.
Nuclear War
Now this is a distinct possibility, due largely to the left’s blind faith in negotiations with lunatic regimes capable of blowing up the planet.
On June 1, The New York Times reported that only a month before the deadline for a deal to divert its nuclear program to peaceful purposes, “International inspectors have reported that Tehran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel increased about 20 percent in the last 18 months of negotiations, partially undercutting the Obama administration’s contention that the Iranian program had been frozen during that period.”
Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton observes: “The administration’s efforts are both legitimizing the regime, which is a tragic mistake, given that it’s still the world’s largest financial supporter of international terrorism. It also legitimizes the nuclear program, which really paves the way for Iran to become a nuclear weapons state at a time of its choosing.” Thanks in part to the man who is smarter than almost anyone you know.
“Tomorrowland” is liberal scaremongering with Mouse ears. The left tries to terrify us into embracing its coercive agenda – like massive taxation and regulation (ostensibly to combat global warming) and abortion and subsidized contraception (supposedly to fight overpopulation).
The 2012 film “Iron Sky” (subtitled “The Reich Strikes Back”) was about Nazis who’ve been hiding on the dark side of the Moon since 1945 building super-weapons, eventually invading the earth. Space Nazis? Too bad Disney missed that apocalyptic scenario.
Editor’s note: Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com. This story can be found on the GrassTopsUSA website at http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df060815.html. This article is reprinted by permission.