Has Anyone Seen Kevin Smith Lately? Or: Why I Can’t Tell What’s Real Anymore

You know the scene. The camera pans down on a crowd in front of a Catholic church. A gaudy banner is haphazardly strung up across its doors,

“Catholicism WOW!”

Cardinal Glick is introduced over a loudspeaker, and the late, great, George Carlin walks out in his priestly duds. The small, drably-dressed crowd claps.

Mr. Carlin, blessed be his name, as Cardinal Glick, begins to explain the sad state of the Catholic church’s image. The answer, he explains over ho-hum organ music, is Buddy Christ. A totally chill bro, winking, pointing at you, and giving you the thumbs up. The organ music gets loud and a chorus of hallelujah wafts from amongst the pop-art Catholicism Wow! posters.

You can picture the carnage that comes later. A town laid to waste by Ben Affleck (who later changed his mind and decided criticizing religion is, in fact, racist) and Matt Damon in armour and wings.

The brilliance of Dogma, from the beautiful mind of Kevin Smith. It’s absurd, hilarious and entertaining. It’s a fantastic story, peppered, as is the Smithian way, with cameos by people you would never expect to see in this movie. It ends with Alanis Morissette, a Great Canadian Sore Spot, as God.

You laugh. You turn it off. You go to bed in the very same world you woke up in. Nothing has changed, save for a few laughs.

Because it’s not real. It’s not real. Thank God, #NoHoly, it is not real.

It won’t ever be real, right, GM?

Wrong, motherfuckers. Wrong. Enter Kim, the fuck, Davis.

Kevin? Kevin, are you there? Silent Bob? This cannot be real…

Try as you might, there is no cuddly, bearded man in a trench coat exchanging looks with a skinny-ass, long-haired pothead anywhere in the crowd. There are no mutterings of snootchie-bootchies, there are no cat-calls about getting your nipples flicked by a fat man in an overcoat.

No, horrifyingly, this is not a Kevin Smith movie and we can deduce, due to the overwhelming lack of Richard Geres, Tommy Lee Joneses or Scoot McNairys, that this is no movie at all.

This, my fine heathen friends, is fucking real.

This is the news that seeps out of the ‘Murica like Exxon sludge at the bottom of the gulf. Only it’s not a slow trickle like your incontinence. It’s forceful like brain rape. It’s like America has set out to brain rape the rest of the world.

It’s every second post on my Facebook feed. Every one and a half on Twitter. It’s every third on Google+, but let’s face it, if G+ weren’t a ghost town, it’d be a lot more. It’s on every YouTube channel and dominating the front page of Reddit. It’s on CBC News, CTV News, BBC News, Russia Today and there’s probably even an obscure reference at the bottom of the monthly newsletter sent out to premium members of the fucking, goddamn, #NoHoly Communist Party of Canada.

In a perversion to end all perversions, one of the greatest songs to have been released in my lifetime blares over a loudspeaker. A frumpy, matronly woman waddles out with ass-length Christian hair. Hair that, incidentally, had been cut for the first time in prison when her cellie (who called Kim, “wifey”) snipped a lock to remember her by. She’s choking back tears of triumph, not just because she is Free At Last, but also because the only reason she survived her harrowing five days in prison, was a promise she made as Wifey that there would be no jodie sportcoats on the street.

A relic named Huckabee holds her hands high in the air, and signals to his life partner to bodycheck Ted Cruz. As a Canadian, Ted really ought to have seen that coming, to be for realz. White crosses dot the cheering crowd, being waved about like the disembodied heads of Adam Sandler on sticks in Happy Gilmore. That’s when you notice Jed Clampett and half expect to hear someone pickin’ a banjo,

“Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed, And then one day he was shootin at some food…”

Wait. Wait. That ain’t Jed. That’s Mr. Wifey… and this… is fucking real.

Kimster shakes and trembles like she’s being fingered by the Jeeboner himself.

“Oh God!” She screams with her chubby little hands balled up… “Oh God!”

When she finally regains composure, and lets out a long, heavy, “Oh, I love you awwl so muuuch” in true Kentuckian Hill People dialect, the crowd goes fucking wild.

“We’re with Kim! We’re with Kim! We’re with Kim!” The drooling masses manage to shout in unison and Huckabee wipes a fake tear from his cheek.

She tells the frenzied inbreds that she just wants to give God the glory (you have the power to do that, Kim?) and thanks his people for rallying around her in this trying time. She shouts, forced, as though it’s scripted,

“And you are a strong people!”

As Kim and her husband Joe leave the stage, he waves his straw hat with a patch of green visor at the crowd.

“Cut! that was fantastic!” You half expect to hear. You think to yourself, what’s that old saying? What’s that line?

Why does the dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter than the tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.

This is not Wag The Dog.

This is not a set.

This is not the Two Minutes Hate.

This is a very real display of sheer hatred. A celebrated display of hatred. An applauded display. This scene is about destroying people’s lives. It’s about a refusal to recognize love as love. It’s a perversion of culture and the destruction of human rights and every second of it is bringing tears of overwhelming sadness to very real people.

It would be funny… it really would be… If only it were not fucking real.

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#humour #lgbt #LGBTQ