right around the time that the terrific "To Live and Die in L.A." was being inexplicably overlooked by audiences, this
was the cover of "Time" magazine.
That was a quarter of a century ago.
So the next quisling who opens their pie hole to whine that nobody could possibly have seen all of this shit coming?
Boot to the head.
Also prattling on that bailing out of the madhouse after the brownshirts stopped validating your parking there twenty years later demonstrates some kind of astute cultural acumen?
Boot to the head.
2 comments:
Some of us have watching this train wreck coming from the beginning. Here in Texas, the right-wing fundamentalists started waging their war against everyone else by getting elected to the school boards and other minor government offices. I mean, come on, who pays attention to school board elections? Some of us did, but most did not. They used these minor government offices as a springboard to higher and yet higher offices. And they were patient. They began their holy war with ascession of St. Ronald of Reagan, although they have always been lurking in the shadows, going back to the John Birch Society. When Barry Goldwater was resoundly defeated, they didn't go away, they just slunk back into their cracks and crevices and regrouped. Then planned their full frontal assault, while no one apparently was paying attention. After all, they were just a bunch of crackpots, that no one would ever take seriously, right?
Well, here we are. Not only are they being taken seriously, but they have managed to take over our government. The Teabaggers are just John Birch rearing their ugly heads again and this time no one is telling them that they stand outside the bounds of common decency.
I am going to couch my response to this in the context of another issue being brought up, the right’s factory of defamation against Islam, but this also includes their factory of lavishly paid spokespeople who create defamation against climate science, evolution, big-bang cosmology, L/G/B/T* community, academics, liberals, tobacco research, etc.
And I am going to couch this in something very pertinent to the 80's, since dear DG brought it up.
Dungeons and Dragons.
Anyone who played Dungeons and Dragons and cannot now believe that the right has defamation factories is not very bright. There was a very lucrative industry of “experts” created to train teachers and school counselors, clergy, parents, and law enforcement that Dungeons and Dragons was a Very Bad Thing that was dangerous Satan-worship involving hard-core drug use, indiscriminate sex, animal abuse, child abuse, and probably dancing, for the purpose of gaining supernatural witchcraft powers.
While main came to the right and proper conclusion that this was absurd, few acknowledge that the real problem was that there was a paying market for lies. The industry was draped in Christianity, and “devout” Christians will never call out another Christian. It overlooks two very important points:
(1) There is a community carefully cultivated to such ignorance that they will pay people to tell them that the teenagers are trying to acquire supernatural super-villain powers through orgies and hits of LSD, because it obviously worked so well for the hippies in the 60’s, and believe it because someone in their authority structure (they paid to tell them) told them.
(2) They can at least come up with the Best. Comic Book. Plot. EVAH!
Anyone who played Dungeons and Dragons in the 80's saw the vocal fundamentalist beginnings of the defamation industry of the right. It is no different than their “experts” who make things up about Muslims being dangerous and dress it up in Christianity.
Mike.K.
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