Message from The Department Of Public Efficiency: An Introduction and Why Autism Has Freed Society from Film Reviews

The VCR Czar

Greetings, citizens of Olympia! I am your recently appointed VCR Czar, and it's my humble regret to inform you that your movie opinions, and consequently, movie reviews have been eliminated. After terminating your government job, we are looking to optimize your private life as well. The current administration believes that mere opinions of film are inefficient by design, and through the genetic mental expansion programs offered by the MMR vaccine1, a single Autist can now process the entire library of all movies ever made to give a cohesive and, more importantly, correct interpretation to any given film.

“The Great Houses of the Landsraad often employ Autists to make these kinds of deductions.”

It pains me to report there are those within the shadow-cabal of radical conservatives who conspire to keep this power for themselves, and have started a far-right propaganda campaign to put people to sleep to the possibilities of this new reality. The rightist agenda aims to keep you unvaccinated, oblivious, and for obvious reasons, not Autistic. They don’t want you to have the spatial awareness to remain undefeated in Tetris, nor the eidetic memory to remember exactly where you left the TV remote in Jason’s mom’s basement while smoking mids in 2002.

“Radical far right cabal meets in 2017 to discuss the Ko-Dan armada’s attack of Rylos.”

We get it. You followed HHS warnings about vaccine safety and now, as a result, you lack the mental calculus required to compute on demand with perfect accuracy Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with literally any actor from Giovanni Ribisi to Jennifer Tilly to Sid Haig to Kathy Najimy. You will not be able to recall verbatim and without error every single line of dialogue from every episode of Beakman’s World, despite not having watched it for over 30 years. Your fallibility is why you have only opinions, and why We are offering this to you, free of charge, as a public service. With the amount of free time you have from being recently terminated from the other non-critical government positions, you’ll want to be watching more movies, and I, the VCR Czar, will be prioritizing films on free streaming platforms, since you…uh–don’t have a job.

This is not to say there isn’t a small margin of error with Autism. Occasionally, an Autist is released without the “savant” neurology installed. If you happen to see this person, please call the authorities immediately so he can be picked up, disassembled and decommissioned.

“Idiot-savant accidentally released without the savant part. Be aware of defects.”

We look forward to correcting your opinions in the near future!

1.      I am intentionally self-satirizing here, and although it runs contrary to how the humor of satire functions, I want to make something perfectly clear here as I worry not having this declaration is potentially dangerous: vaccines absolutely do not cause Autism. Andrew Wakefield's MMR vaccine study, which is the backbone of ALL modern anti-vax rhetoric, has consistently and repeatedly been scientifically disproven. Brian Deer’s reporting is the most comprehensive debunking of Wakefield's claims, and if you would like to know more, hbomberguy has a fun video essay on the subject here: https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc?feature=shared

If you are a parent who has not, or is considering not vaccinating your child/children against a preventable disease out of fear of Autism, you are a bad parent. Despite my troubles with ASD (most of which could have been mitigated via keener public awareness of what ASD is, or not having every facet of life in America tied to the profit motive), if I could choose to live my life again without it, I wouldn't consider it for a second.