Versión Español
So I’m sitting in my living room enduring yet another viewing of the movie Twilight: Breaking Dawn (part one). Luckily part two isn’t on this evening as well. The teenage-girl obsession with the story of a high school girl, her best guy friend — who moonlights as a werewolf (pardon the pun) — and her major crush and the main male character who just happens to be a vampire is perhaps the most annoying thing any father could ever have to endure. I have two teenage daughters and I have been “twilighted” nearly to death.
The films are based on a four-book series by author Stephanie Meyer. The story line focuses on a teenage girl named Bella and her crush Eduard “the good vampire” Cullen (description mine). The other suitor for the lovely Bella is her best guy friend Jacob, the love-sick werewolf. The parallel of the Bella of Twilight fame and the Belle of the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast does not go unnoticed, but I digress.
A Metaphor for More
Suddenly it hits me. While Stephanie Meyer may not have intended it, the movie has a secondary meaning: teaching children to love blood-sucking vampires — AKA, the government. Not just any government though, big government and communism. How else can you explain love of big government, socialism, and communism but to compare it with love of a vampire? He may suck animal blood, but he’s hot and means well.
Think about it. Eduard’s family is made up of supposedly good vampires. Sure, they and their ancestors may have sucked human blood in the past, but that’s all behind them. Now they only suck animal blood to survive. Distant relatives and are other clans, however, continue to suck human blood, and while they abhor what the other vampires do, of course all vampires have a right to exist — sort of.
Government, like vampires, sucks the very lifeblood out of people and nations. It has done so for centuries. Yet we continually hear that just because overbearing government has killed in the past and communism has slaughtered upwards of a 100 million people, it’s the other communists and socialists. Apparently, we can never say they did not have a right to exist; they just messed up the application.
Now, however, we will do it the right way. We will still suck blood, but only animal blood. You know, the blood of the bad guys, the exploiters.
“Who cares about a few furry libertarians and freedom fighters anyway? They stink, carry bugs, and generally mess things up. So we will just suck the blood of animals, but never humans. Okay? Besides,” say the advocates of socialism, progressivism, and communism, “we mean well.”
Naïveté and All-Too-Popular Masochism
This romantic irony of self-destruction and love for dangerous things is the only way I can figure men like Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro can get elected (not that those were necessarily free elections). They are strong, thanks to the power of the state and a few well-oiled and organized thugs, and they talk a good game about fighting the evil capitalists. They also promise to help the poor, who are supposedly about to get crushed under the dangerous car of capitalism. That reference is from the first Twilight movie, for the uninitiated.
And, for whatever reason, the people trust them. They buy into the “don’t judge me because my ancestors were blood sucking maggots” plea. They believe in the “hope and change” that socialism and communism always promise; they believe in it as religiously as the fundamentalist, neoconservative Christians believe in their faith. In fact, the adherents replace blind faith of religion with blind faith in the goodwill of something that has killed almost as many people as God did in the Old Testament.
That’s all socialism and communism is: a teenage crush, reinforced by isolation and propaganda, and what totalitarian regime would be complete without brute force?
In the movie series, Bella abandoned the love of the werewolf protector and surrenders to the blood-sucking Eduard. I won’t give away the whole ending, in case you have thus far been spared the torture of watching all the movies. Yet, isn’t that what humanity has done time and time again, surrendered the protecting love of freedom (even if it can be violent from time to time) and given way to the blood-thirsty vampires of big government, just because they are cute and promise not to suck all of our blood?
Grab your garlic, stake, and crucifix people; we might need them all soon, as our friends and Venezuela have learned far too late.
