Propagand-ish

Lately I've been a bit misanthropic, and this wouldn't normally worry me save the momentary realization during the film last night that being Sweeney Todd has its particular attraction for me that is, well, troubling.  Ha.  Seriously, whilst sitting at the movies last night, awaiting the unholy number of trailers for films I have already seen a million times or have never wished to, I was taken aback by the level of programming going on these days.  I'm no slouch and I'm certainly not naive to the fact that we are the unwilling recipients of sales pitches at every single turn; however, I resent the fact that I've paid (and not a little) to go to the movies - in theory to support the film industry - and then I'm still forced to sit through advertisements.  The worst of this arrived last night in the form of a music video by the band 3 Doors Down, promoting the National Guard.  Not just a snatch of a song - oh no - but the whole fucking pseudo-patriotic song, which was then also pitched in the form of a free MP3 on the national guard website, and they were giving away free CDs of the song at the movie theatre.  Are they fucking kidding me?  I'm so incensed by this that I can scarcely find the words to describe it - for all the paranoid future fantasies like 1984 or even The Matrix or something like V for Vendetta, or hell, even Brazil, that people claim is entertaining because of its distance from reality, I'm starting to think that it's entertaining because it's ~not~ far from reality at all.  The pure fantasy element of the man in the Guy Fawkes mask blowing up Parliament with an Underground train is the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy that I latch onto.  What if we could simply play Sweeney Todd and rid the world of the stupid and pointless and make meat pies out of them?  I'm only being partly facetious; I'd like to find the people who came up with the 3 Doors Down/National Guard marketing campaign and send them up for the closest shave they've ever known.  Them, and the folks who decided that an elephant with a British accent, who's married to a centipede, is a means by which to sell us air fresheners.  Part of me hopes the Revolution is on the way.