Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Remakes often get an undeserved bad rap. Some vastly outshine the original. The best are often far from literally faithful -- they reset the parameters of the original, for sparkling contrastive effects. After all, as Hegel might point out, some scripts play better as farce than as tragedy.

Case in point: my favorite screwball comedy is a remake: "His Girl Friday", as you prolly know. Howard Hawks took the fantastic script of "Front Page" more or less intact, but he got Grant to be the sociopathic editor and cast a gal as the star reporter.

Which brings us to another remake, the '08 prez run. This one superficially looks like a weird inverted remake of '68, but I fear 'twill prove only a doleful echo of that cataclysmic election year. We got a role inversion and a party reversal, but that ain't likely to be enough, now is it?

Mother Clinton as the man from San Clemente, and the Republican party as the sodden hack-infested vehicle of history, too successful for its own viability -- and yes, there's the bit about the fall of the beast that rings a reversal too: imagine the fury in the penthouse if this end scene spells happy days ahead for bums not Babbits.

But it won't, will it? If you hope to see this ex-juggernaut of American fleece politics take a porch-hound beating from the people it conned for 28 years... forget about it. We gotta look out another 4 years for the real topsy-turvy, a '12 that's no remake but a path breaker, a '12 that avenges '72. Here and now, this whole playout. through St Hill's consecration by the voting mudpeople majority, looks to be nothing but a nasty ass-twisted boring predictable remake, a bomb run from here to November next, maybe the nastiest bomb run since Dick's own streak to re-election victory culminated with a literal bomb run we now call "Christmas over Hanoi".

Nothing seems likely to produce a Clean Gene moment -- Tet, or a rockin' till he's whacked RFK, or a shot to heaven MLK, or the riot in Chi, or anything but the Hilhouse in the final spotlight shot. This after all is the coming apart of the Republican party, not the Great Society party. This will be like a Disney remake of MGM's Cleopatra, where riots, if they occur, will be simulations that'll show up outside some recount room in Canton, Ohio -- riots in white shirts and ties, riots staffed by a gaggle of Newt Gingrich clones.