The Ongoing Adventures of Captain Obvious - Part 1

Captain Obvious sez: “Words Matter”.

Gimme a “D”!
Gimme a “U”!
Gimme an “H”!

Sure it’s fun to work Tom Friedman over like a birthday piñata. Captain Obvious renders himself so irresistibly mockable primarily because he is such a slow and shallow gladhander.

His mastery of the world is as thin and flimsy as a sheaf of Cling Wrap, but he manages to reap a heaping pile of filthy lucre because his Intellectual Bubbleboy Client CEOs – who make pop-up idiot books like his and such incisive, Kantean tomes as “Who Cheesed My Move” mandatory reading for the worker drones, who, I assure you, scan them once while using the shitter for key sentences that they can use when cross-examined by the boss (I just yell “Splunge!" myself, and it seems to work just as well) and then use them to make the holiday hearth-fire burn a little cheerier – are the only people even more clueless than he is.

Friedman’s books and columns are, by and large, a series of Shouting Out Loud that-which-has-long-been-painfully-obvious-to-everyone-else interludes. They are him, running breathlessly onto the tired gray pages of the NYT, to announce that he has stepped into the virgin soil of an alien land and has returned to tell all: that he is having a Neil Fucking Armstrong Moment of Transcendent Discovery...when all he has done is wander across a busy downtown intersection that has already been traversed by thousands or millions of his betters – daily and for years.

That’s a given.

However, in this case, The Captain has hit on the right formulation, even though he is almost entirely looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

Words matter, Tom. Yes indeedy they do. So I’m going to expend a few looking closely at your column in two parts.

Part 1 – The making of the mock. The japery. With such a fat, slow-moving target, it seems overkill. Then again, that fat, slow-moving target is occupying incredibly valuable real estate on the Pinnacle of (what passes for) American Journalism, so I don’t feel too much remorse.

Part 2 – more serious matters. Friedman’s right: words do matter, but in a world where American stands alone as a hyperpower, in a war on extremism, American words matter most of all, and taking on American words it where Capitain Obvoious and his Slinky-Spined crew conspicuously fail us all.

His article begins with the following paragraph:

“I wasn't surprised to read that British police officers in white protective suits and blue gloves were combing through the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds for clues to the 7/7 London bombings. Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. And I won't be surprised if today's bombers also sampled the literature there.”

If you want to read the rest of it, here it is.

For most of the rest of the article, I have taken the liberty of very lightly editing it; a service which I render to the NYT for no addition charge, and the symmetry of the subject matter is so fucking obvious, that it all I had to do was transpose a few words and concepts and it fit snug as a Trojan, Tom.

A Ribbed, French-ticklin’ Trojan, Tom, for extra pleasure; like thousands of tiny fingers urging you to quit fucking around and go after the Beam in Uncle Sam’s Eye before it’s too late.

And remember, this is for entertainment purposes only so, as Letterman used to say, please, NO wagering.

July 22, 2005
Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide
Written By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Excerpted and lightly re-written by driftglass

...
the Right Wing Pravda Press not only sold hatemongering Regnery Neocon literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was "the sole distributor of HateRadio, a collection of hundreds of U.S.-based radio stations that spread lies and hate to the American Public for profit. The Hate Radio features apocalyptic battles between Real Americans and Liberals. One these themes -- Heterosexual Defense -- has as its stated goal a world 'finally united under the Banner of Conservative Christianity.” To accomplish this, Christopaths must seek out and destroy the Feigeles."

Guess what: words matter. Bookstores matter. Radio matters. FoxNews matters. But here is our challenge: If the Christopathic problems we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within the Republican Party - a war between freedom-affirming real Americans against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?

More than just put up walls. We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.

I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way. I want the names of the Christopath extremists who runs “God Hates Fags" websites and conducts hateful, confrontationa attacks on the sick, the weak, the dying and the dead -- and their families and friends -- published in Tom Friedman’s New Your Times Column, demanding that Republicans repudiate them.

I want the Conservative Christian Reverends who blamed the 9/11 attacks on feminists and queers and the ACLU outed as the terrorist-enabling prick that they are and denouced on the floor of the United States Senate and in public proclaimations from the White House.

I want the Conservative Christian Lawmaker and Party Leader who blames Columbine on teaching Evolution in the classroom and who wants to turn over ALL the Holy Lands to Israel because that is a precondition for the Second Coming...I want that man and his fucktard followers driven into the Political Desert and shunned in David Brooks’ New York Times column.

I want the Conservative Christian Reverend and Politicians who said that “activist judges” are the greatest threat to America in history -- greater than a "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings" -- shamed into silence by the GOP.

Alas, life is more complicated than that, isn’t it Tom. Consider this paragraph from your actual column:

“Sunlight is more important than you think. Those who spread hate do not like to be exposed, noted Yigal Carmon, the founder of Memri, which monitors the Arab-Muslim media. The hate spreaders assume that they are talking only to their own, in their own language, and can get away with murder. When their words are spotlighted, they often feel pressure to retract, defend or explain them.”

So Part 2 let’s talk about words and swords and how you and your brethren have sold out your country and failed us all so tragically.