The World Is Under Siege, & Only Steven Seagal Can Help

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Steven Seagal in Under Siege

1,416 words

The most urgent political advice I can give you right now is not to read James Mason’s book Siege; it’s to watch Steven Seagal’s action flick Under Siege. Although both came out in 1992, the latter is much more relevant to the problems the world faces now — including the main problem, which is that people don’t know what’s real anymore.

In a maddeningly hyperrealistic, pop-culture-poisoned, terminally postmodern world where people “socialize” through glass screens [2] thousands of miles away from one another and can’t tell the difference between movies and life [3], perhaps the most frightening thing about the unfolding blizzard of bombs and half-truths in Ukraine is that it appears to be an unauthorized remake of Sylvester Stallone’s 1985 Cold War classic Rocky 4, with only minor plot and character adjustments.

As the story is being told in Western media, the bad guys are still the Russians, only they aren’t Communists anymore. Heavyweight boxing is still a theme, but we have three heavyweight champs as major players, all of them Ukrainians: current champion Oleksandyr Usyk [4], former champ Wladimir Klitschko [5], and his 6’7” brother Vitali [6], who was not only one of the beastliest men ever to hold the crown, he’s been the Mayor of Kiev since 2014. The Klitschko brothers and Usyk have all taken up arms to defend Ukraine. Having a boxer as Mayor isn’t all that much different from having a black pro wrestler and former porn star [7] as America’s President, as was the case in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

Until this week, Vladimir Putin was a seventh-degree black belt in both judo and taekwondo, but he had the latter belt stripped due to his recent dalliances in Ukraine. Putin is almost a caricature of masculinity, and my all-time favorite passage in the Internet has been deleted from his Wikipedia page but has been thankfully preserved here [8]:

Notable examples of Putin’s macho adventures include: flying military jets, demonstrating his martial art skills, riding horses, rafting, fishing and swimming in a cold Siberian river (doing all that mostly bare-chested), descending in a deepwater submersible, tranquilizing tigers with a tranquiliser gun, tranquilizing polar bears, riding a motorbike, co-piloting a firefighting plane to dump water on a raging fire, shooting darts at whales from a crossbow [9] for eco-tracking, driving a race car, scuba diving at an archaeological site, attempting to lead endangered cranes in a motorized hang glider, and catching big fish.

“Shooting darts at whales from a crossbow?” snorts Steven Seagal. “What a pussy! Hold my beer.”

Steven Seagal has driven a tank during a raid on a cockfighting ring [10]. He has marketed an aftershave called “Scent of Action [11]” and an energy drink called “Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt [12].” Despite his morbid obesity, he effortlessly tosses around aikido opponents [13] as if they were rag dolls. He engages in wildly sensuous Chechen mating dances [14]. He’s a Buddhist who was once declared to be a deity [15] by a Tibetan monk. He has fearlessly eaten giant carrots [16] offered to him by Belarusian dictators. It’s a documented fact that if you read the following list of Seagal movies while burning a candle and looking into a full-length mirror at midnight, your testosterone level will raise 250 points:

Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, Under Siege, Black Dawn, Belly of the Beast, Out of Reach, Submerged, Kill Switch, Urban Justice, Pistol Whipped, Against the Dark, Driven to Kill, A Dangerous Man, Born to Raise Hell, Maximum Conviction, Force of Execution, Gutshot Straight, Code of Honor, Sniper: Special Ops, The Asian Connection, The Perfect Weapon, Cartels, and China Salesman.

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You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here. [18]

Here I was, wasting most of my life ironically enjoying Sylvester Stallone’s entire oeuvre on a never-ending loop, confident that he represented purely distilled cinematic douchebaggery, and all this time I’d ignored Steven Seagal, who epitomizes toxic masculinity to the point where everyone who’s ever seen his movies, women included, gets prostate cancer. At least Stallone was vaguely aware that he was a douchebag who made indefensibly cheesy movies and could stand some good-natured ribbing [19] about it on SNL, whereas the boundlessly humorless Seagal refused to do a skit where Hans and Franz beat him up [20]. Whereas Stallone’s Rocky sometimes lost the bout and would nearly lose even when he won, Seagal’s action-movie characters were notable in that his assailants hardly ever offered any resistance at all. Seagal effortlessly plowed through all of them like an electric mower cutting down grass blades.

The most wonderful thing about Steven Seagal is how unaware he seems to be about how he appears to other people. He is so utterly devoid of humor that he’s the funniest man who ever lived. He’s like Andy Kaufman’s brash and clueless nightclub singer Tony Clifton, but with everything else inverted — this time around, the entire audience is in on the joke, while the performer is the one who has no idea what’s supposed to be so funny.

It gets even funnier — until you start thinking about it — when you realize that Seagal and Putin have enjoyed an enduring bromance [21] for about a decade. And since I’m at a point where I’ll believe anything I hear because I no longer believe anything anyone says, I wouldn’t be too surprised if Putin and Seagal were to pool their martial-arts skills and offer to fight Usyk and the Klitschkos live on pay-per-view in front of the entire world to determine who gets to keep Ukraine. If the budget allows, throw in some bikers for this real-life apocalyptic action movie, too: Seagal, a world-renowned blues guitarist [22], once played a concert for the Night Wolves [23], a gang of Russian separatists and Putin loyalists, in occupied Crimea.

Putin was reportedly introduced to Putin about a decade ago by Bob Van Ronkel, an American businessman who serves up Hollywood stars to Russian oligarchs for the right price. In addition to Seagal, Van Ronkel has also connected Jack Nicholson, Woody Harrelson, Lara Flynn Boyle, Paul Anka, Jim Carrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John Malkovich to Eastern European billionaires willing to fork over the rubles to rent a dancing American clown.

One wonders how much they paid for Paul Anka.

Putin and Seagal reportedly bonded over their mutual love for martial arts.  By 2013, the Kremlin had requested that the Obama Administration designate Seagal “an honorary consul of Russia in California and Arizona, with a view to being a key intermediary between Moscow and Washington.” The request was ignored. In 2014, Seagal told an interviewer that Putin is “one of the great living world leaders” and expressed approval of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which would in 2017 lead Ukraine to issue a five-year ban on Seagal from entering their country.

In 2016, Putin issued Seagal, whose paternal grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants to America, a Russian passport [24]. Two years later, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry appointed him to the unpaid honorary position of “special envoy to improve Russia’s ties with the United States.”

Although I have tremendous respect for Vladimir Putin, if he unironically admires Steven Seagal, I may be forced to reconsider. But a writer for the Spectator [25] suggests that Putin is merely trolling America by elevating their most idiotic celebrity as an example of the country’s irredeemably “lowbrow culture.”

Last week, Joe Rogan faced scorn after he fell for a fake news report [26] about Seagal fighting for Russia in Ukraine, writing, “If I had to guess the plot of this fucked-up movie we’re living through, I would say we are about 14 hours from the arrival of the aliens.” Rogan deleted the post when it was revealed that the article photo did not depict Seagal in Ukraine; it was a still shot [27] from his 2017 film Cartels. “I deleted my earlier post about Steven Seagal being in Ukraine,” Rogan wrote, “because it was parody, which isn’t surprising, but honestly it wouldn’t be surprising if it was true, either.”

On Monday, in a conversation [28] with FOX News Digital, Seagal refused to disavow Putin. Instead, he pled for peace, implying that this was a conflict between brothers:

Most of us have friends and family in Russia and Ukraine. . . . I look at both as one family and really believe it is an outside entity spending huge sums of money on propaganda to provoke the two countries to be at odds with each other. . . . My prayers are that both countries will come to a positive, peaceful resolution where we can live and thrive together in peace.

It’d be nice if the chubby son-of-a-bitch had named this “outside entity,” but I guess we won’t find out until the sequel.

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