In a blatant display of cronyism, President Bush recently commuted jail time for former Vice Presidential Aide Scooter Libby, a perjurer convicted by a jury of his peers. The president's approval ratings are presently so low that he probably figured it didn't matter anymore, so just help out this friend of a friend, or more likely he didn't even care what the general public thought. By the way, when Bill Clinton gave out his pardons, I thought it was equally sleazy. If the government really wants to be serious reducing corruption, the pardon power needs to have some checks attached, because it is clear to me the pardons are not used for justice but rather to help out friends, in most unjust ways.
However, filling me with a deeper cynicism today are memories of the the original Transformers movie, on my mind because the new one opens today.
It's hard to not be cynical when your childhood hero was killed off in an effort to promote new merchandise. Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Prowl, and many more, all victims of the pursuit of profit. What does it matter if you break a 5-year old's heart? You use your two-hour commercial to introduce new characters that will become new toys. I grew up fast in 1986.
John Swansburg wrote a piece in Slate, entitled "Why the original Transformers movie is better than the new one", and alt Here in an excerpt:
To use a phrase I learned the day I saw Transformers, "Oh Shit!" No one ever died in these shows. Even in G.I. Joe, a cartoon about a special U.S. Army strike force, no Rattler was ever shot down without the pilot first safely ejecting. But in the Transformers movie, the death toll was jaw-dropping. More than a dozen marquee characters are dispatched in the film, among them one of my personal favorites, Starscream, the Decepticon malcontent always scheming to relieve Megatron of his command.
Of course, all of this bloodshed had a specific purpose—to move toys. In the commentary track on the 20th-anniversary edition of the movie, Flint Dille, one of the writers, explains he was instructed to eliminate much of the existing product line to make room for the new characters Hasbro was planning to sell me. I already owned Optimus Prime, after all.
As a 9-year-old, it hardly occurred to me that this robot bloodbath was a marketing ploy. It just blew me away. Witnessing death on that scale was shocking to a sensibility that had been nurtured on white-knuckled but always successful repair operations by the trusty Autobot mechanic-medic, Rachet.
I think of the boardroom meeting that must have went down with the idea to kill off a bunch of characters, and I want to spit. Presidential pardons really don't affect my life; at most I'll scream at the TV. But at the time of the original Transformers movie, I really loved those Autobots, and it's disgusting that the Hasbro executives did not give two shits about me or my friends. I truly believe this is one of the purest forms of corporate greed: causing millions of children tears just to make more money. The powers that be didn't care about the general public, either. They probably never saw the crying or probably never thought about it. I'll never forget that.
Finally, as I think every year, "thank you" to the people of Morocco for being the first nation to recognize the independence of the United States.
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