Saturday, May 09, 2009
DAWN OF A DUD. How goes it in the culture-war think tanks of the Right? S.T. Karnick considers at Big Hollywood several edu-macated theses on the popularity of zombie movies. But this is all padding, and Karnick eventually sweeps it aside for his own theory: No, none of these explanations gets to the essence and explains the enduring appeal of this cultural phenomenon over the past four decades.
I think the causality is the other way around. Both the zombie appeal and the swine flu fears are caused by two things: the news media’s increasing use of scare tactics in trying to lure audiences, and the socialists’ continuous use of fearmongering to press for political power. Should readers wonder at the notion that Shaun of the Dead and such like are meant to stir citizens' deep, secret fears of the philosophy of Charles Fourier and Eugene Debs, he explains he's talking about fear of Alar in apples, nuclear war, the "housing 'crisis,'" and global warming, which are all equally ways in which "the socialists and their media satraps continually raise fears of everything conceivable." This is "sufficient to account for the dominant sense of unease and constant fear one can see among much of the contemporary American public." Clearly the man has never read a week's worth of the New York Post.
If you're still not clear on what this has to do with zombie movies, here's Karnick's kicker:The irony is that for the public to give in to this scam would be the one sure way for the zombies to win. To recap, Karnick starts with an alleged attempt to understand why people like zombie movies, and ends with him characterizing his political opponents as -- well, not zombies, since his opponents, following his logic, cause zombies; maybe he means the mysterious zombie pathogen. Maybe he means people are afraid they'll be bitten by Al Gore and begin to believe in global warming.
Or maybe he doesn't mean anything at all except that zombies are a bad thing and he is thus excited to associate them with socialists (that is, liberal Democrats), and Big Hollywood has very forgiving publication standards.
To make matters worse, he drags Mencken into it:In their neverending quest to wrest more power by creating what H. L. Mencken correctly characterized as an endless series of hobgoblins requiring a socialist elite’s powers to destroy, the socialists and their media satraps continually raise fears of everything conceivable... Naturally he doesn't link; this is from Mencken's In Defense of Women, and the passage from which it comes doesn't mention socialists at all, and is explicitly about the starting and conduct of modern wars, which Mencken attributes to modern civilization "especially under democracy." But I don't think Karnick was purposely misleading his readers; he clearly lost the thread back when he was asking, "How many words do you want?" Culture warriors don't have to think too hard about metaphors; free association is what they're all about.
7:06 PM by roy edroso
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Friday, May 08, 2009
IRONY-POOR BLOOD. American Power responds to my mockery, and others', of ridiculous rightblogger posts about race by saying that we're the real racists. My title, "Black Comedy," is apparently some sort of slur, perhaps one that suggests people of color are a sub-genre of comedy and satire. And Tbogg's Sambo picture really ticks him off. Nobody ever show this guy Blazing Saddles, or he'll be calling for hate crimes legislation.
"Note too," AmPow thunders, "yesterday's leftist bigotry in Matthew Yglesias' slur against heterosexuals as 'breeders.'" I didn't know Matt was gay! I'll have to stop sending him pictures of Megan Fox, then.
"The truth is that leftists don't care about the advancement of minorities," says AmPow, "they care about the advancement of their own power." I'm afraid he misreads us -- or maybe just me; you guys might be attracting job offers from high Administration officials with your aperçus and japes, but my phone never rings. I'm only in it for the laughs, and I thank American Power for keeping them coming.
12:58 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, May 07, 2009
BEN & JERRY'S OPPRESSED MY RIGHT TO HAMBURGER ICE CREAM, AND OTHER TALES OF MODERN CONSERVATISM. At RedState, Dan McLaughlin demonstrates that conservatives don't approve of all the blessings of the free market. Take, for example, a billboard company that refused to host a sign saying Obama is pro-abortion. The company made the Christers change it to "pro-abortion-choice," which would seem a caution to avoid arguable slander -- like saying Roosevelt caused men to die by sending them into World War II, rather than saying he was pro-death. Not the way everyone would play it, but that's capitalism, comrade: their boards, their choice.
McLaughlin is incensed, but though his rage draws him into the subject, he seems to realize that he isn't going to get far with a column about how unfair it was that a company exercised content restrictions on its own properties. How then to express his anger without also seeming to attack freedom?
His solution is ingenious: ignore the company that refused to raise their billboard, and instead yell at liberals as if it were their fault: You may remember the flap over the Secret Service limitations on where protestors could set up near George W. Bush, and the wailing about “free speech zones” being an unconscionable restriction, etc. I have yet to hear anybody (1) complain about the Secret Service’s policy since Obama took over or (2) explain how the policy changed, as I suspect it has not. Like so many routine government activities, it’s only objectionable when it’s Bush...
The same people calling for displaying graphic photos of interrogation of detainees or who want soldiers’ coffins on the front page of the newspaper without the consent of their families are the ones who are horrified by the idea that any image should be displayed of abortion, the ones who even recoil at showing pictures of live unborn children in the debate. Or maybe he's saying that abortionist hippies now run the American billboard industry. It's hard to tell.
Bonus points to McLaughlin for reviving the old illegal-vs.-immoral argument in a new and breathtakingly clumsy way:A digression: when Sarah Palin talked recently about the choice to keep her youngest child, liberals argued that this was a concession - isn’t it wonderful, some of them argued, to live in a country that allows such choices? Um, no. Using cocaine and driving drunk are illegal, but we still speak of not doing them as being moral choices. If a teenager from a bad neighborhood refuses to join a gang, we can celebrate the positive moral choice without saying, “isn’t it great to live in a country where teenagers get to choose whether or not to join violent, drug-dealing street gangs?” No, it’s a tragedy. When it comes to abortion, "choice" is just a crime for which we haven't figured out how to arrest you yet. Yessir, conservatives are going to pick up a ton of support from women in the next election. Keep rebuilding, Trike Force!
8:21 PM by roy edroso
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DOES ANYBODY REMEMBER LAUGHTER? Legal Insurrection explains how his obsession with Presidential mustard tells you all you need to know about Obama and liberals. He also uses the phrase "thou shall not mock Obama's mustard." Joining the fray is RedState Moe, who explains that people who make fun of him automatically lose, because -- well, just because.
This is a great example of what makes these guys fascinating. They're so humor-averse that when someone mocks them, they never, ever think about joking back -- they either sputter in outrage or launch windy explanations of why it is in fact you who are ridiculous, and then retuck their shirts. It's like they all grew up thinking Frank Burns was the hero of "M*A*S*H."
6:08 PM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, May 06, 2009
BLACK COMEDY. RedState is reaching out to black people. Don't believe it? Here's the proof:Dear American Blacks: Unfortunately they're doing it at RedState, so very few African-Americans will read it. Which may be just as well...Sometimes — no, actually always — the true friend is the one who tells you what you don’t want to hear. The one who does not indulge you, the one who will neither promise you nor give you candy and other bennies. Instead he tells you to sit down and eat your green beans and spinach — and if you want that nice car, then quit whining, get an education, earn a good job, and earn that nice car. ...because they sound less like their friends and more like their parole officer.
The subject is a D.C. school voucher program which Democrats have opposed. This they portray as a fulfillment of said Democrats' desire to keep black people down. Having proved this by assertion, they continue to talk turkey to their imaginary black friends:I ask you to consider, why is it that you hate Republicans so much? Apparently they expect their friends of color to forget about decades of Southern Strategy and concentrate on what appears to be a Terry Southern Strategy, though in their case the satire is probably unintentional.Republicans do not know how to approach you. Democrats and the Democrat-dominated press have misled you and stoked up your wrath to the point that you will not listen to us.
So I propose this: how about listening? How about listening to what Republicans have to say, instead of what the Democrats say we say? How about listening to what we have to say before booing us out of the building? Black people have apparently been very unfair to them, yet RedState continues to reach out:We received not one ounce of gratitude from you, but we did it anyway. And we will continue to do what is right for America, for whites, for blacks, for Latinos, for Republicans, for Democrats, for today, and for the future.
Join us. Consider it, anyway. There. Now they can say they tried. Let it be on their heads.
Unsurprisingly, the commenters seem in the main to be white people, full of explanations for black recalcitrance ("Blacks have had generations to figure out that they are to come to heel when the Democrat master blows his whistle").
But there is one "Unrepentant African-American nationalist, Unapologetic African-American conservative" who suggests that "the segment of the Black community that preaches and practices most the conservative ideas of self-reliance, entrepreneurship, economic opportunity, and strong families and morals is what is termed the 'militant' segment of the community." He endorses "the positive self-help message and practices of Louis Farrakhan."
This excites the brethren, and if they were at all serious about this we might expect them to bring their case directly to the Nation of Islam and with them make common cause. Then they could engineer a hybrid of the Million Man March and a Tea Party. It would be even better if, as Black Panthers used to do before Reagan made them stop, they carried guns.
What a pity it is that they're not serious; our politics would be so much more interesting.
11:57 PM by roy edroso
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Tuesday, May 05, 2009
ANOTHER BLOGGER ETHICS PANEL. Amity Shlaes, author of a book about the wretched failure of the New Deal, starts her new Bloomberg column by complaining of leftblogger incivility aimed at such blameless targets as Michele Bachmann and Eric Cantor. I have to admit, I was excited to see this. I have toiled lo these many years documenting the abuses of the rightwing blogosphere, and would have liked to compare notes with someone from the other side.
Alas, Shlaes only leads with three examples, and then moves on to her real theme, which is how bad the Obama is and FDR was. But she drags the bad-blogger schtick through the whole thing ("So here’s a new motto: more leadership, less bloggership"), to suggest it is evidence that the present Administration "isn’t comfortable yet at the summit of political power," and hence must order Josh Marshall, Matthew Yglesias, and Allison Kilkenny "out on a mission of distraction, trying to prove that everyone else is too far to the right."
It's noteworthy that, at this late date, people like Shlaes think bloggers are only making fun of them because the Obama Administration directed them to do so. We've been razzing them since before there was an Obama Administration. But Shlaes has made a good living for years as a conservative operative, and has only rarely acknowledged the less-credentialed voices out there -- as in this 2005 column of hers, in which she discourses on DNC Chairman Howard Dean: "Howard the Hound goes for blood, and his party values him for his following among bloggers." That's not very civil, but then she didn't feel she needed to be: her column goes on to explain how Blue Dog Democrats are going to destroy Howard the Hound's liberal dreams -- "rescue the party," in her terms -- and send him and his wretched bloggers into deserved obscurity.
Clearly things haven't worked out for Shlaes, and now in the ruins she senses that Howard the Hound and his bloggers have pulled a fast one on her. So she rails against the coalition that, she imagines, hectors her and her buddies to this day. Though she has disappointed me, I'd be a churl not to thank her for placing my kind near the center of the groovy socialist revolution. It's as close to power as we are likely to get.
8:39 PM by roy edroso
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Monday, May 04, 2009
ARLEN SPECTER WRAP-UP over at the Voice. The rightbloggers still think it's a great thing for their cause. A big part of the reason is that they're accustomed to see everything as a great thing for their cause. But though I am tempted to dismiss this, like many of their puzzling sentiments, as a brain chemical issue, I sense a plan forming: they're really thinking realignment -- Goldwater '64, perhaps, or Jeb Davis '61; they consider the Republican Party too liberal, and are content to reduce it to a rightwing rump in preparation for a a big takeover. Everything depends of Obama washing out completely, and as we've seen they're full of faith that he will.
Of course counting on happy accidents hasn't been working too well for them lately, but the great thing about fatalism is that it is eventually always rewarded, if rewarded is the right word, one way or the other.
11:26 AM by roy edroso
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