In 1985 I was a teen and that year the movie Weird Science came out (also the Breakfast Club). The “plot” if you can call it that, is that two lonely geeks use their computer to create a girl by feeding various magazine articles and stuff into it. It was a funny, mindless, mildly raunchy in a mid 80s kind of way, movie with cameos from Robert Downey Jr and Vernon Wells, the crazed biker with a mohawk in The Road Warrior, and is part of the cult legacy of 80s film. What got me thinking about that movie was this new video from the Republican Party that declares “Democratic” Socialist Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the future of the Democrat party:
I have made this point before that she is really the ultimate Democrat for our time. She is female, she is a minority, she is young and compared to most Democrat women she is fairly attractive and telegenic (as long as she isn’t talking).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might possibly be the world’s first living meme. It is like the guys from Weird Science fed a bunch of memes into a computer and out popped a living person that decided to run for Congress as a natural next step from a bar-tending gig. The meme became flesh and dwelt among us. I can’t tell if she is really just not very smart or she just can’t speak extemporaneously but you can see when she is off script at all that she momentarily panics and is searching for a talking point. I don’t think she really understands the issues at all, she just has a preset response to questions. It is pretty low hanging fruit to make fun of her but on the other hand she is about to enter Congress, making laws impacting hundreds of millions of people, and her ideas that are just dumb and misguided now will quickly become dangerous.
As the lines between politicians and celebrity continue to blur, expect to see more people like this in power, people who are pretty much just walking, talking memes. We aren’t far away from seeing a real life President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.