THE WEEKLY SCREED, 5 December 2007

The Godzilla Imperative
by David Benjamin

GREAT NECK, N.Y. — I looked at President Bush’s press conference Tuesday and I saw a broken man. Thanks to a seditious National Intelligence Estimate fomented by his turncoat intel crew, Dubya’s anti-Iran rhetoric had shrunk from “World War III” to “covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activities.” The leader of the Free World had gone out hunting Godzilla and ended up in a pillow fight with Barney.

I invoke Godzilla because, when you think about it, ever since the Russians got The Bomb, Godzilla has been — especially for Republicans — the enduring emblem of U.S. foreign policy. Just about every slapdash movie monster, from Harry Truman to Dubya’s dad, was a metaphor for the Soviet menace. And since Bush #41 inadvertently slew the beast, America — especially the G.O.P. — has been desperate for an enemy big enough and atomic enough to resuscitate the sweet paranoid simplicity of the Cold War.

We thought we had the Next Big Enemy in Osama bin Laden. But it’s hard to cast al Qaeda as the heir to World Communism as long as Osama stays holed up like Punxsutawney Phil in the burrows of Waziristan. After all, if Godzilla doesn’t come out of the water and start stomping on Tokyo, he’s just so much plankton. Besides, Osama lacks the key weapon that every Big Enemy must brandish. He doesn’t have The Bomb.

The best — OK, the worst — thing about those good old 20th-century Big Enemies was that they had The Bomb. The Bomb gave birth to Godzilla, and Godzilla was pop culture’s answer to worldwide atomic terror. For all its bloodshed, blacklists and red scares, the Cold War inspired the film industry to launch a flood of cheesy, scary, so-bad-they-were-good creature features. In most of them, the sustaining premise was that somehow, some normal varmint had stumbled into a radiation puddle and mutated into a weapon of mass destruction, often with the ability to reproduce exponentially without the R-rated necessity of sexual intercourse.

The grim lesson of every such film was that even if the Russians didn’t rain H-bombs all over the planet, it was still possible that some accidental nuclear leak would send, coursing into our sewers, up through our toilets and into our bathrooms teeming hordes of giant mutant ants, giant mutant crabs. g.m. triffids, g.m. spiders, an attack of leeches the size of a VW microbus or a swarm of 200-pound praying mantises. A variation on this theme was your solo monster, like Rodan, the giant mutant pterodactyl, or that terrifying (but yummy) 50-foot blonde. The subtext, which eluded me throughout my dimwit childhood, was that each monster symbolized World Communism. Picture Nikita Khrushchev as “The Blob!” (By the way, the creepiest movie of ‘em all, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” doesn’t count because “pod people” actually stood for the anti-Commie “good guys.” Picture Dick Nixon coming to life in your basement.)

Of course, the Barry Bonds of giant mutants, the quintessential Big Enemy, was — is! (still alive, still making movies) — Godzilla. As long as America had Big Enemies like Soviet Russia and Red China, Godzilla had context. He embodied the dangers that haunted our Cold War lives. Any minute, like The Bomb, he might suddenly appear, mocking our complacency, sweating roentgens and squishing us like toy cars and cardboard stadiums.

The golden, simple, bygone era of Big Enemies made it practical for America to prop up small, unsavory allies like the Shah, the Guatemalan junta, the death squads of El Salvador and the authors of apartheid. Any tinpot dictator willing to shake his fist at Godzilla was Uncle Sam’s bosom buddy.

But then, without proper warning, the Cold War thawed. Supposedly, this was a blessing— all those dancing Berliners, right? But it left U.S. foreign policy in the lurch. Most Americans couldn’t remember life without a world-hungry ideology that threatened to crush every man, woman and city bus under its triple-toed totalitarian feet. With Soviet expansionism a relic of history and Red China turning into everybody’s favorite toy store, America’s Commie-fighters desperately sought a new Godzilla.

(Even the beloved movie monster suffered. The big-money 1998 Hollywood “Godzilla” with Matthew Broderick turned out to be — pardon the term — a bomb because Godzilla wasn’t a metaphor anymore. He was just a big green special effect.)

The Bush regime has been obsessed by the Godzilla quest. Its first nominee was an “Axis of Evil” composed of three nations who either ignored or hated each other. But Korea, Iran and Iraq all had The Bomb… or, they were gonna get The Bomb. Right?

Well, let’s see. North Korea couldn’t really afford a Bomb. And last year they agreed to drop the whole idea, for the equivalent of beads and trinkets. Iraq, despite the fact that we’ve bombed the country back to the Stone Age and wasted a trillion bucks there, turned out not to have any nukes at all, nor even a credible nuclear physicist. We went to Baghdad looking for signs of Godzilla and found nothing but the GEICO gecko.

But the Bushies kept auditioning Godzilla manques, including something they called a “World Caliphate” and an “Islamofascist” conspiracy. Talk about Bombs!

The Bush people’s last, worst Godzilla candidate — Iran — might be the biggest boner of all. After years of frantic hype about Ahmadinejad the Nuclear Madman, Dubya’s own people up and announced that well, no… Ahmadinejad doesn’t have the Bomb after all. And the grownups won’t let him build a Bomb.

This is hardly Godzilla-level material. It’s barely Mothra.

American International Pictures, the U.S. distributors of Godzilla flicks and producers of creature features like “The Brain Eaters” and “Night of the Blood Beast,” had barely cleared the Fifties when they moved on to Edgar Allan Poe and “Beach Party.” They just couldn’t think of any more radioactive monsters scary enough to thrill an audience of jaded juveniles.

Maybe it’s time for Dick & Dubya to take the hint?