We at the Professional Left podcast are beta testing a new, Patreon-sponsored podcast which originally had the working title of Snarkeology (Snark + Archeology) ... until Alert Listener JS suggested the much-better "Snarknado", which remained the working title until my wife said "It's called 'No Fair Remembering Stuff'"... which is better than both previous suggestions, which goes to show, once again, that I'm a genius for getting someone smarter than me to marry me. (Our Angel Nerd Tammy also suggested "Damnesia" which is pretty terrific and also better than both JS's and my initial ideas, but we're sticking with NFRS unless there is a Patreon sponsor revolt :-)
Anyway, the idea behind the podcast is to do what almost no other political or media podcasts does, but which movie, teevee and literature podcasts do all the time: look back at That Which Came Before and give it context. For example, Boogie Nights did not spring fully-formed as a finished product from the mind of Paul Thomas Anderson. It came into being as the result of PTA's genius, plus his teenage obsession with porn, plus the influence of all the directors he admired, plus the willingness of a studio boss to green light it, plus the traumatic experience PTA had had with his previous film, Hard Eight, plus the availability of amazing actors all starting to rise at the same time, plus... plus... plus.
Boogies Nights also had a profound influence on That Which Came After, and that's my point. It seems absurdly obvious and reductive to say that all cultural events exist within a specific cultural context and continuum, and yet within the fields of media and politics, virtually all the Very Serious voices that dominate those conversations are almost pathologically focused on de-contextualizing landmark events.
No literature professor ever said, "Well Raymond Carver's here, so let us never speak of Hemingway or Chekhov again!" and no film critic has ever said "Burn your John Ford box sets. Western genre film making begins and ends with Sergio Leone...oops, I mean Akira Kurosawa... oops, I mean Quentin Tarantino" because that wouldn't merely announce to the world your adolescent ignorance, it would get you laughed out of the academy by your peers.
And yet there are no subjects more aggressively avoided by the Very Serious men and women who dominate media and politics than The Past. Specifically the Republican Party's past: how it came to be the racist shitpile it is now, and how the media enabled it by coddling the GOP when it was in power, and memory-holing its atrocities when it was out of power.
Well, No Fair Remembering Stuff (tm) will change all of that.
Ha, ha, ha. No it won't. But we hope it will be another step in the right direction.
Because Blue Gal and I have been writing about politics and the media since the earliest days of the Liberal blogosphere, so we have vast and detailed archives.
And we were both active and interested in those subjects long before blogging made it possible to hit "Publish" and share one's thoughts with the world. And since the very beginning, "No Fair Remembering Stuff" and "Memory is the Liberal Superpower" have been the spirit of this enterprise. So this seemed a natural next step.
First episode is No Fair Remembering Stuff (NFRS) it tentative entitled Player Development and will drop later this week.
3 comments:
Remembering stuff
When presidential candidate John Kerry asked in debate if he would legislate abortion as a good Catholic as the church teachings he participates in.
Responding that, As a person of the Catholic faith he prescribes to their teachings but as president the United States could not impose his own personal religious beliefs on everyone just because he is president with powers".
Or, Presidential candidate John McCain when asked of abortion stance said, "if his adult daughter was in need of abortion medical attention . He would want her to have the best medical treatment available". But later, McCain changed that position because his party voters in the primary wanted his daughter to not have that best medical attention. He sold out his care for his dither for nutty votes. Not to mention druthers of everyone else.
One of my all time favorite peeve lies I cannot remove from my memory is,
Repeal and replace the ACA with something much better.
But they only voted with their majority in house and senate with Trump president , to repeal the ACA. The money savings was to be used for their tax cuts for the wealthy. There never was a replacement.
When the vote failed in the senate after the Kegger beer party for the House GOP voting to repeal with no replacement. Senate failure caused Trump to fib and tell us, "who would have thought health care was so complicated".
He will release his health care plan in two weeks, and two weeks after that and after that all the way until it all failed. To this day there is no replacement and to think, taking the money (savings_ from a full repeal of he ACA and giving it to wealthy tax cuts instead of adding it to the national debt (which they ended up doing). Levees no funding for the replacement health care plan that would be better (they promised) to actually fund.
Did we (America) when the Trade war with China? About that wall Mexico will pay for? The most brilliant SCOTUS justices ever to be confirmed. They are the greatest legal minds of our time?
Not only does facts have a liberal bias, History is the written liberal bias of memory in which if adhered, to prevent us al from repeating the mistakes of the past and those who reintroduce those past errors into the present to repeat.
It is as watching Putin make his mistakes of the past of others as an ideal worth repeating to gain something Russia once had within its boundaries but squeezed it so hard. it broke loose from that grip to survive. And here is Putin reaching out to grab and squeeze all over again.
A family member in the mid-1990s:
"All you need to be a Democrat is a memory."
R
As I'm sure its been said before that most things started as the flap of a butterfly's wings a thousand years before the event ever happened. Or something like it. Also, nothing happens in a vacuum.
It's just more marketing from those zombies in the marketing department, they just won't stop trying to coat the world in a glaze of bullshit. Please review your Bill Hicks comedy routines from back when, in particular his routine on marketing people.
NSFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
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