You Struck The Tsar!

When


It


Changes.

This is a metaphor.

There is a moment near the end of "Nicholas & Alexandra" when -- if you didn't know how the story ends -- you finally realize the Romanovs are truly doomed: the moment when a guard slaps the tsar (link here.)

The slap itself is nothing -- far worse violence has unfolded both on and off screen during most of the preceding 14-hour movie run-time -- but, like Rick's little nod to the band in "Casablanca", what it represents in terms of a radical change to the trajectory of the protagonists cannot be understated. During all that has gone before, the royal family and their retainers had been protected by an invisible shield which no one dared penetrate -- the accumulated weight of hundreds of years of political and religious mythos.

However much his circle of protection constricted and however much of his liberty and property was stripped, centuries of sermons and cossacks had flogged this fact into the Russian soul: if you screwed with the tsar, something Very Very Bad would happen. The royal family was all that stood between order and Universal chaos, so the least you could expect was that Almighty God would drop a bomb on your head.

Absolutely. Positively. Automatically.

Ah, but when a guard finally slaps the tsar...nothing happens.

And when no wrath from On High is forthcoming -- when the tsar is shown to be merely a man -- the last, thin protective shield around his family collapses. In that giant moment, the previously unthinkable became suddenly thinkable...and history -- at least as it was represented cinematically -- changed.

On the Left, I would argue that history just changed in an equally big way, although you can be forgiven if you didn't notice. In America, reporting on what Left actually thinks is virtually nonexistent due to the Left's long and intolerably embarrassing record of being right about almost every big issue to come down the pike for the last 30-40 years. Instead, all we hear about are the sinister antics and motives of the whatever is plopping off the assembly line at the Straw Man Factory today: for the brainwashed slugs on the Right, the Left is forever a fictional cabal of "committed Marxists" whose dark conspiracies are responsible for everything that has ever gone wrong since Eden; for the spineless pussies in the Center, the Left is a fictional bunch of "unreasonable fringe-types" against whom they have been trained to automatically heap gratuitous opprobrium every time the Right fucks them over again.

For, y'know, "balance".

The truth is, despite mainstream press attempts to sledgehammer this debate back into the same, suffocating Sister-Soulja-Base-versus-the-Reasonable-President straight-jacket (Bernie Sanders who?), this last bit of "hostage taking" over tax cuts for billionaires has changed things on the Left the same way that the Presidential election of 2004 changed things.

What happened this week was that the GOP finally dropped its last fig-leaf and with it, any pretense of a conscience.

In 2004, the Cheney Administration offered the imbeciles, cowards and bigots who despised this country enough to re-elect the worst president in American history an ample supply of flags and bibles and "Boot in their ass"-themed country music behind which they could hide when called upon to justify their truly spectacular desecration of every American value they purported to admire.

Granted the rationalizations that the Party of Personal Responsibility offered up were patently ridiculous, but as always they Right found that if they just backed their phony excuses up by screaming "Why do you hate America?!" loud enough, the sheer decibel level of their lies could blot out any reasonable attempt to rebut them.

This time, the Party of God has left them nothing. Not a shred of ideological camouflage. Not a single economic entrenching tool with which to dig themselves a plausible spider hole. Nothing.

And this is what changed. 2010 will go down as the year that the lies which have sustained the Right for 40 years finally got too ridiculous and top-heavy to be maintained, and the GOP just gave up pretending that it is anything other than a cesspit of thieves and fascists and lunatics.

And the media shrugged.

After two years of constant lying and intractable, public, reactionary opposition to everything in the name of nothing but clawing their way back to power over the corpse of the American Dream, 2010 became the year the Right got tired of half measures, pulled out a gun, jammed it right in the face of national security, the United States military, the poor, 9/11 first responders, the families of those blown to bits by BP, and the unemployed and shrieked "Gimme the money! "Gimme the money! Just gimme the fucking money!"

And the media smirked.

This was year the Right finally stepped its depravity fully and nakedly out of the cage and into the spotlight (video no longer available)  sending the media and the White House scurrying away in a frenzied search for... cranky Liberal purity sluts to blame it on.

This was the year when the Right unapologetically reached out and slapped the American people hard and publicly across the mouth just because they fucking well could.

And nothing happened.

Nobody stood up and yelled "Liar!" during one of Boehner's speeches. No rallies featuring grifting mama grizzlies or people in funny hats packing assault rifles were held to denounce the GOP. None of the Very Serious People who are supposed to stand steadfastly on the side of the American people against such nakedly anti-American rapaciousness could rouse themselves to do a fucking thing but whine about what sanctimonious pricks Liberals are.

And the last, thin protective shield around the fantasy that we can coexist with the monsters on the Right and the cowards in the Center finally collapsed and died.