Beth Ross is not the President yet. At the story's start, she's just a teenager working minimum-wage job at a corndog stand trying to save enough money to get the five million dollars needed to get her ailing father adequate medical care, since being a poor adjunct professor means that he doesn't have enough money to get the surgery that he needed and his insurance won't cover the cost. She's shooting a training video for her job when she does something goofy; naturally her co-workers uploaded the video to the internet where it became viral. Meanwhile, the USA is undergoing a presidential election with two uninspired candidates who are struggling to get votes because they are so similar to each other. As a joke, Anonymous tries to put Beth Ross forward as a presidential candidate, and unexpectedly, she gained considerable votes, particularly from the youth-oriented Internet community since now Twitter voting is available. The election ends in a tie and moves to the Senate, where a candidate has to have at least twenty-six votes from the States to be President. Naturally, there are a lot of "lobbying" for votes between the two candidates, but many States eventually chose Beth to get the highest offer from the two candidates and their corporate sponsors. This results in Beth accidentally getting twenty-six votes, thus becoming President of the United States.
The themes in this comic are dark: Beth's father eventually dies, America is at war with pretty much every country in the world, and you have to pay $50 to get an ad-free experience in hospital. But the comics' dark humor rests in the sheer absurdity of it all. One presidential candidate honestly wants to create "Taco Drones" to give welfare recipients tacos and monitor them. He also wants the poor to be walking billboards with clothes that's essentially taco ads. It's very silly and absurd, but the candidate actually gains votes instead of losing it. Shadowy corporations meet to discuss which candidates are more biddable to their whims, but their faces are shrouded in holographic logos of their company, so you have a bear representing PharmaDuke talking to a chicken representing Big Chicken about Senatorial bribes. A presidential candidate endures a humiliating spanking by a couple of frat dudebros with lots of Twitter followers in an effort to be "cool" and "hip" to the youngsters and gain their votes. Very sad, weird, and funny at the same time.
The comic presents a commentary on modern American life by exaggerating aspects of it into a world that's cheerfully dystopic. I mean, let's face it, who wants to live in a world where you pay fifty dollars to get rid of ads in the hospital? But the cheerfulness and the absurdity of it all is what makes it great political satire.
0 comments:
Post a Comment