Call and Response

at the Church of the Robot Pimps* ** -- UPDATED 8/20 ***

So, one of Andrew Breitbart's local hatchlings wrote about Ray Bradbury.

Oh boy!

It was a small thing, really. Internet ephemera that will come and go. But it caught my attention because it was such a tiny, mingy gem of professional wingnut Goebbelspeak -- such a nearly-flawless example of the absolutely mechanical compulsion that drives Conservatives to pluck literally any issue out of thin air and then mangle it beyond recognition it in order to bash Liberals -- that I thought it would be worth taking apart to show how all the scummy little moving part work.

Were you to simply read Warner Todd Huston's article in any of the dozens and dozens of Conservative disease vector media outlets which happily pick up and pass along such poison, here is what you would find.

Let's start with the headline:

"Sci Fi Giant Ray Bradbury Slams Obama’s Era of Big Government"

And what does the author impute his headline to mean?

"You see, Bradbury did not say he’s against “government.” ... It is possible to be against welfare spending, the so-called stimulus, and Obama’s ever growing tendrils of Big Brotherism without thinking that government shouldn’t help fund a space program. Further, Bradbury did not state that only government can get us back to the moon, either."

So, according to our local Breitbart-knockoff, Obama is the sinister author of a Big Brother Government, and it is against Obama's Insidious Liberal Triumvirate of "welfare spending, the so-called stimulus" and "Big Brotherism" which the nearly-90-year-old science fiction Grand Master was inveighing.

So, is any of that actually true?

Nah.

How do I know?

Because it says so in the very first sentence of the LA Times blog/article to which our local Breitbartlette was referring:

"Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City."

So what specifically is it that Ray Bradbury is pissed at the President about?

Conveniently, the article makes that clear in the second paragraph:

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

Well, shit, I'm pissed about it too. Yes, this filthy, America-hating Liberal of the First Water could (and has) done thousands of word on both the pragmatic, dollar-and-cent value of sending human beings to space, as well as how vital it is to the human soul to have crazy, awe-inspiring, long-term goals to shoot for.

Hell, the space program's educational and technological spin-offs alone are enough to justify tripling our investment.

So what does any of that have to do with ""welfare spending" or "the so-called stimulus" or "Big Brotherism"?

Nothing, of course. Nothing whatsoever. Just another steaming bit of offal dropping off the assembly line at the Breitbart Conservative Lie Factory:



Now as to Mr. Bradbury's general complaint that "There is too much government today" based on what he actually said, there is no real way to suss out exactly what he might have been referring to.

Bimetalism?

Rural mosquito abatement?

Cops, such as the one who busted him for daring to go pedestrian in LA in 1951?

In an interview, Bradbury revealed that the inspiration for this novel came when he was walking down Wilshire Blvd. with a friend and a police cruiser pulled up asked what they were doing. Bradbury answered "Well, we're putting one foot in front of the other." The policeman didn't appreciate Ray's humor and he became suspicious of Bradbury and his friend for walking in an area where there were no pedestrians. After some arguing the policeman told them to go home and to not walk any more. Bradbury said "Yes, sir, I'll never walk again."

The subtle Masonic villainy of "The Food Pyramid"?

Fuck if I know, but I don't believe it would be a huge stretch to imagine that the author of the intermittently-banned "Fahrenheit 451" and drum major for public libraries would be extremely concerned about things like the USA Patriot Act, secret prisons, rendition, torture, illegal wiretapping and the jackboot of the federal gummint on the throat of American librarians.

In other words, all of those grotesquely totalitarian legacies of the Cheney Administration towards which the Right was so giddily, volubly and unforgivably hospitable...and against which the Dirty Fucking Hippies raged virtually alone and in vain. (Hey, Tea Baggers: Where were your fucking rallies then?)

And against which we still rage, still virtually alone.

Ah but we must remind ourselves that we are no longer in the Real World, but deep inside the fetid bell jar of the Breitbart Universe, where every stale, 30-year-old Bircher beer fart has already been lustily re-breathed and re-farted a million times, and inconvenient facts and history that completely invert your bullshit theses can all be just...wished... wished... wished... awaaaaay.

And because we are spelunking through Breitbartian dreck, we must also remember that the attack is only half over.

That having invented an imaginary Conservative superstructure beneath a few passing remarks by Ray Bradbury, to go the "Full Breitbart" Mr. Huston must now proceed to invent an equally imaginary Crazy Left horde who apparently militate tirelessly against poor ol' Ray and against which Mr. Huston can then vent his bottomless spleen.

Here are Mr. Huston's own words, with emphasis added here and there as the mood suited me:

"Naturally the misinformed, and those unable to think clearly—by that I mean liberals—think that Bradbury is an old coot that is off his rocker."

What Liberals, Mr. Huston? Where?

"How can he say we should be going back to the moon but still be against “big government,“ they fume. "

"They"? Again, who the fuck are "they" and from which corner of your cardboard box basement anti-Liberal fort Panic Room are "they" whispering all of this to you?

Oh Jesus. Tell me you didn't assemble your entire Big Liberal Broadside Hissy Fit out a few, unattributed, anonymous sentences from the comment section of some random fucking blog post.

"This is a simpleton’s point, the sort of idiotic, childish taking point that one would expect from halfwits like Keith Olbermann or Media Matters."

I did a complete search of Media Matters.

Ray Bradbury's name has never been mentioned.


Then I did a Google Search of "Keith Olbermann" and "Ray Bradbury" and outside of Mr. Huston's own feculent bit of fake journalism ricocheting through the delicate digital minarets and wide, stony canals of Teh Internets

there is no indication whatsoever that Keith Olbermann has ever mentioned Mr. Bradbury.

Which is a shame as more people should read him.

Then again, in the Age of Limbaugh it has become almost a matter of Pig People etiquette to gratuitously slam an Olbermann or a Media Matters every time they take a dump. Exactly like, say, a "good German" in the 1930s reflexively cursing Jews for his every ache and sniffle.

Haters...Signify!

Mr. Huston continues:

"I am sorry for all those simpleminded lefties out there upset at Bradbury..."

OK, at this point there ceases to be any psychological distance between what Mr. Huston is saying in his article and the rantings of some withdrawal-stricken junkie thrashing around the floor of a CTA bus and raving about the imaginary devil-rats in his pants that are biting his naughty bits and screaming terrible things in his ears.

Except, of course, that the paranoid keening of random junkies is not useful grist for a well-funded Right Wing Hate Machine which must be fed 24/7/365.

"I am sorry that they are not sophisticated enough to understand that the warnings of this aged elder statesman of the literary world are worth considering."

What do you mean you can't hear the devil-rats!?

They're all around us!

And they fucking hate Ray Bradbury!

"The unthinking lefties chastising Bradbury also focused on the seeming incongruity of a celebrated science fiction author being against the permeation of machines in our lives. How could he be against fantastic machines and be a sci fi writer they burble.

"Clearly these people have never once read a Bradbury book."

First, this here Liberal got his first Bradbury book pressed into his hands by a kindly 5th grade teacher 1,000 years ago and never stopping reading and loving the man's work.

Second, there is a big, tasty helping of konservative kultural kizmet coming up, so hang in there.

"And I leave you unthinking lefties with Bradbury’s line above..."

Yeah, pal, we get it. You really, really, really don't like those dirty kikes Liberals and their international Jewish conspiracy Commie President who are secretly behind every bad thing that happens.

Message received.

So I looked across Teh Internets for these awful Liberals.

High and low I looked.

Left and right I looked.

Through Wordpress and Blogger and Drupal I looked.

And you know what?

Outside of a few, unattributed, anonymous sentences in a comment section, the only actual post or article I could locate anywhere implying in any way that Uncle Ray had perhaps gone irretrievably Koo-Foo-for-Cocoa-Puffs did not come from some frothing, nonexistent anti-Bradbury Liberal vanguard...

...but was instead to be found nesting quite comfortably smack in the anthracite heart of the Randite Right.

From Nick Gillespie at "Reason" magazine:

Ray Bradbury Hysterical Theater: We Got Too Much Gummint, Too Many Internets, But Not Enough Moon Colonies! UPDATED AUGUST 17!

Nick Gillespie | August 16, 2010

The inspiration for one of the worst movies of all time (Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451) and a pretty good one (Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes), and a bunch of better and worse books, has gotten into the Grandpa Simpson zone of Larry King-esque observational complaints. Here's author Ray Bradbury in hypoglycemic overload:

...

Thanks, Ray, for making your work more difficult to access, you Luddite old fart.
...

Nick Gillespie, whose publication describes hims as "...[a] libertarian and doctor of literature, who...is injecting [Reason magazine] with a pop-culture sensibility."


Nick Gillespie, who, as it turns out, also happens to be one of Mr. Huston's fellow contributors to Andrew Breitbart's Big Government Miscreant site.

Which -- according the Commutative Law of Wingnut Guilt-by-Tangential-Association -- means that, in addition to being an elite member of the hardcore Randite Right...

...Nick Gillespie is also somehow a Dirty little Muslim Commie.

There will now be a short pause while the entire Universe laughs at Mr. Huston behind his back.


Seriously, outside of Mr. Gillespie's stiff-arm, I can find no record of any liberals out there anywhere who are upset by something that one of the last Grand Masters of science fiction (or speculative fiction, or magical realism, or whatever you want to call what Uncle Ray does) had to say in some LA Times article. Truth is, almost nobody noticed -- or really cared -- what Ray had to say about "too much government" until one of Brietbart's ideological rentboys decided to use the old gentleman's shouty opinions to mule in another assload of the Right's depraved ideological cancer.

And as much as reading this tripe ticked me momentarily off, I could not help but also be deeply amused by the irony of the words of Ray Bradbury being hijacked by a typist who (like virtually everyone still hunkered down inside the Conservative nattering classes) has devolved into some kind of mindless automaton.

A device which -- regardless of circumstances in the Real World -- endlessly, iteratively regurgitates its pre-programmed talking points...

...in a synthesized human voice...

...to a dark, crumbling auditorium devoid of anything but other mindless automata...

...who, in turn, rotely regurgitate back their squeaking, chittering approval.

Frozen inside an endless, fog-bound midnight, it is forever Call and Response time at the Church of the Robot Pimps.**

A dismal, nightmarish and ultimately terribly sad existence.

Almost like something out of a Bradbury story.

* Original Photo from here.

** (h/t "The Paper Chase")


*** Commenter Twinky P* correctly points out that Rumproast and Whiskey Fire each did posts taking exception to Uncle Ray's comments. They did "spank his butt" a bit -- mostly focused on Bradbury's apparently cranky tone -- but strangely no one rose to defend (or even mention) the Kenyan Usurper's Insidious Liberal Triumvirate of "welfare spending, the so-called stimulus" and "Big Brotherism". Also no fatwahs were declared.