re: #186 No Malarkey!

Civil War has sparked a lot of discussion about what exactly it’s about. The Director Alexander Garland deliberately kept contemporary US politics out of it. Though it’s easy for me to see a lot of Trump in Offerman’s hated President in his third term, I imagine that consumers of rightwing media would see Joe Biden, who they are told is a totalitarian dictator. The terrifying death squad leader played by Jesse Plemons would be a Trump supporter in our reality, but the movie doesn’t tell us which faction, if any, he supports in the war, or if his death squad is just opportunistically using the chaos to engage in some local ethnic cleansing. The movie is more about how civil society collapses in war generally than it is about American politics and that is true, but it is also and maybe primarily about the journey of young photojournalist Jessie. Spoilers in box!

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There was a RTS game released back in ‘05 called Shattered Union that involves the player as a general leading one of the various factions in a Second American Civil War. The backstory for the game is that a presidential candidate with historically low polling manages to win the presidency, leading to increased tension and strife among the various states. When he runs for reelection four years later, he ends up “winning” after several presidential candidates are disqualified from holding office through “surprise” Supreme Court ruling. The capper is that a nuclear bomb is detonated in D.C. on Inauguration Night, not only decapitating the government but also throwing the nation into disarray. Within days of the bombing, Texas and then other states announce they’re seceding while a UN force moves to occupy D.C. and begin rebuilding the government.

Since the game’s so old, it’s not much of a spoiler at this point, but once your faction (either a state coalition or the UN “peacekeepers”) defeat all the other factions, you find out that the party actually responsible for the bombing and the subsequent civil war…was a group of Russian oligarchs who wanted to remove the US from world dominance in order to rebuild their own country’s power.