Listen To The Flower People
At last, all the health reform craziness is winding down. It seemed like we’d never…
…oodstock …oodstock …oodstock [screeching dragster tires] [explosions, Godzilla bellowing]
…aturday …aturday …aturday [sped-up maniacal laughter] [blatting funny car engines]
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn to Houseboats & Tents for “Showdown in Searchlight”
Ach.
So wait. Are we just primed at this point by a term like “Conservatives & Tea Party Activists” to expect sort of a catalogue deraisonné of human folly, or is there something a bit unnerving about the procession of nouns in that passage? Like, if that’s the narration over the opening credits, aren’t we spoiling for an Act Two that opens upon that ur-wingnut condition of slapstick self-tragedy — in an opening montage, for instance, of Spike Jones’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” intercut with X-ray prints of rectal foreign bodies?1
I mean, hmm:
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn into Hoseboats & Pitch Tents for “Chowder Chowdown With Both Hands And a Searchlight”
That actually seems less weird, but I guess I’ve been doing this for long enough that everything seems less weird.
Curtis Dahlgren, RenewAmerica:
You can’t tell the professor much if he thinks he’s funny (part 2)[…] WE NEVER SAID that an asteroid, or hemorrhoids, would hit the moment you signed the FedMed HELLth Bill. What we said was that the pot with the frogs in it would now be put on the front burner.
Fine, I take it back.
It’s being hailed as a “Conservative Woodstock” – a historic event in the tea party movement where thousands upon thousands of patriots will gather in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, NV and demand an end to his term in public office.
This Chex Party Mix on Pop Tarts sandwich that we made is being hailed as a “Junk Food Aire Helado de Parmesano con Muesli en el estilo de Ferran Adrià,” as we just hailed it. Chom-chom-chom, burp, ahh! A historic event in ourselves-made-cuisine-eating history, if we do say so chez us. We demand an end to this glass not having Dr. Pepper in it.
So many people are heading to Searchlight, NV for this historic event (which takes place this Saturday, March 27th) that the local motels and campgrounds are now totally full.
So many drunkards are staggering toward a tent in order drunkenly to insert a light bulb in their rectum that the rectums in that tent are now totally full of that light bulb. Wait, what?
Ah, never mind. Narratives, think pieces, and news stories about the event are turning up, as well as the contemporary right’s signature after-action leavings of blame-engineering, lying accusations of lying, and cowardly tattling.
Above: Needs T.P. for bunghole
“But it says it’s a Woodstock,” one might remark. “As such, are things not ultimately all about the music?” Yes they are, and that’s why we’ve collected this treasury of Searchlight ‘Conservative Woodstock’ performers, as listed in the official program!
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.2
1 In my experience with evenings, whensoever foolishness is invited in for a drinkie, regret will arrive as a montage of imagined self-embarrassments atop Maureen McGovern’s “Morning After,” from The Poseidon Adventure.
That’s a kind of literalism that I can’t stand, by the way, avoiding (e.g.) the radio and TV every New Years Day so that U2 doing “New Years Day” can fail, primarily, to happen to me; and secondarily to begin with those brief piano phrases that it begins with, and then assert that “all is quiet on New Years Day,” creating an alarming Möbius of causality when in an immediately subsequent moment my hand arrives at the switch that makes it be quiet.
It’s almost worse than those brief piano phrases that have for so long warned that Bob Seger’s voice would momentarily emit from the stereo, suggesting an appropriate remedy to the heartbreak caused by itself. “Juh stake the sold wrecker, Zoff the Chef,” Seger’s voice counsels as the switch is arrived at by my hand. “OMG Seger,” I remark as I take from the shelf a number of old records, intending to sit and listen to them by myself because of a lack of the same soul in the kind of music that day.
It’s almost worse, even, than those bars of trebly, oddly hi-hat-driven reggae that have for so long warned that Sting is nigh, and along with him a kind of literalism that I can’t stand. The instruments pause on a chord, and the overtones ring down, and into the gap he appears. “Roxanne,” he announces, for indeed the song is called that. “Hey, what’s this song called again?” I will sometimes ask in the following few seconds of vocal music before another pause comes due. “Roxanne,” he answers before resuming the lyrics, and indeed he speaks truly, for such is the song’s name. “So you say the song is called ‘Rumpity-Bumpy, O! Cucumber Lumber?'” I say as the music elapses again. “RAAAHX-anne,” he grouses, annoyed, rejoining a song that to my mind should have been called something else, because to call it “Roxanne” is to give in to the onomatopœia of the remembered sound — as if many or most death metal songs were to be titled, “CÖÖÖKIE, ÅÅRÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM,” and Black Eyed Peas songs would often be called things like “Ooby-Ooby-Ooby-Ah,” because of the ease with which will.i.am may step onto such a metrical pattern and ride it like an airport walkway all the way through a song and out the back end, onto a pile of unclaimed will.i.ams. As if the name of that perpetual Romantics song of +6 unstopping-already, which is on some new TV commercial again, were “Hey!”
2 Cf. P. Dotty.
hi-hat-driven reggae
Be nice, Gavin. How else are you going to rip the Negro off when your lead singer has a voice as thick as tissue paper?
Not getting out of the boat, and what is it with conservatives that they have to rip the
Negroliberals off by co-opting first “-gate” and now “-stock”?Have they never had an original thought?
The Freeper thread linked above is mostly slap-fighting over whether Palin is sufficiently hostile towards illegal immigrants.
There was one comment:
Chairs and food.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Dude, it’s just like (Book) Burning Man.
“Silly man, we all came prepared with chairs and food. We spent not a penny in Searchlight!”
So…these belligerent advocates of the Capitalist System That Makes Murika Great, and which they accuse the Liberal Fascists of conspiring to destroy, come to a small desert town probably full of hard-working-salt-of-the-earth-type-small-bizness-owners-whose-grandfathers-tamed-the-western-savages-etc-etc and brag about NOT SPENDING ANY MONEY just because a politician they don’t like lives there?
Way to go in getting some public sympathy for your pathology teabaggers.
Way to go in getting some public sympathy for your pathology teabaggers.
The crowd went nuts!
~
At dawn, the Right Brothers will play Bush was Right.
I’m failing to imagine the conservative analog to the Woodstock mud people. This crowd is whiter than white, and so conspicuously lacks mud people.
You forgot this John Aschroft classic in your conservapalooza rundown of rollickin hits.
Sometimes I get the feelin they’re punking us. It’s like they want us to make fun of them.
Sometimes I get the feelin they’re punking us. It’s like they want us to make fun of them.
Don’t worry. That can’t be true unless – yeah, right – you assume that they have self-consciousness and reason.
If we think really hard, maybe we can stop this heatstroke!
I’m failing to imagine the conservative analog to the Woodstock mud people. This crowd is whiter than white, and so conspicuously lacks mud people.
That depends on how “Christian” they truly are.
If we
thinkpray really hard, maybe we can stop this heatstroke!Fixed. Conservatives don’t think.
I’m failing to imagine the conservative analog to the Woodstock mud people.
Jews. That’s if they’re racist enough.
But who am I kidding? Of course they are!
I’m failing to imagine the conservative analog to the Woodstock mud people.
The Jawas?
HOUSEBOATS?!
In the fucking desert?!
How the hell does that work? Is there a man-made lake out there? Is there a derelict houseboat just lying out there somewhere, and some elderly wingnuts found it and said, “Look, it’ll make the keenest clubhouse ever!” and bunked down in there with the scorpions and rattlers?
I get the feeling there are going to be news stories about teabaggers who wandered off into the desert looking for hallucinatory Ronpauls…
NASCAR is conservative Woodstock.
This thing is conservative Woodstock 2.
HOUSEBOATS?!
In the fucking desert?!
Candygram!Landshark!Curtis Dahlgren, RenewAmerica:
Whoa.
i submitted the video from my new album and they didn’t even call me back. :^(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVBHXb6ozFA
a straight up celebration of right wing values and jesus on a dinosaur goodness. and while i’m blog whoring…
http://www.lindsaystewart.bandcamp.com
spare a leftie some nickels, would ya?
Palin:
Real Americans are cyanotic.
blue-blooded Americans.
That’s why they went to Nevada.
Silver.
Colloidal silver.
…aturday …aturday …aturday [sped-up maniacal laughter] [blatting funny car engines]
Bring your lawn chairs, but you’ll only need the edge!
Joseph Schumpeter the great Austrian economist observed that the first thing a man would do for his ideals is lie.[1] Nowhere is this more true than when defending America’s burgeoning social welfare colossus. Deceit is almost a moral imperative. Why should cruel truth stand in the way of uplifting millions who, allegedly, suffer through no fault of their own? Who wants to be the cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge who rigorously fact checks iffy welfare applications?
Nevertheless, if a contest were held for “lying to do good,” today’s radical tenured professors would be Olympic champions. Since academic outsiders seldom observe this breathtaking “well-intentioned” mendacity, let me offer a case study of this dubious munificence. A recent New York Times story recounts a group of University of California-Berkeley professors endorsing spending billions for early childhood intervention to help struggling Hispanics. According to research on 8114 infants, they found while Hispanic children are intellectual similar to other American toddlers at age two, they quickly fall behind linguistically and cognitively. This gap then widens with age and, according to the research, is not a result of poor nutrition or parental neglect, the usual alleged culprits in cognitive gaps. Nor does poverty fully explain the divergence since even poor whites outshine Hispanics.
The difference, it is alleged, is a purely environmentally-caused “disparity” that must be “attacked” before these youngsters mess up in elementary school which, in terms, means lower incomes etc. etc. In other words, being below average mentally is akin to, say, stunted growth due to a dietary deficiency and thus, at least in principle, remediable. Whether this gap is nature, nurture or some mix is irrelevant since there is nothing about environmentally caused phenomena that makes them particularly remediable (doubters might review the history of US public housing). It is all very simple, and in the words of one author, “The reading activities, educational games and performing the ABC’s for Grandma — so often witnessed in middle-class homes — are less consistently seen in poor Latino households.”
The Berkeley professors’ call for yet more early childhood intervention is hardly a voice in the wilderness. The Times also quotes Eugene Garcia, an education professor at Arizona State University who admits that the reason why Hispanic kids so quickly fall behind whites is unclear but this uncertainty hardly deters him from likewise recommending early intercession. Carmen Rodriguez, director of Columbia University’s Head Start Program concurs: toddlers from low-income families are doomed unless they receive early intellectual stimulation. Indeed, this early childhood intervention strategy to narrow learning gaps is the academic orthodoxy regardless of the advocate’s race or ethnicity.
And Washington hardly objects. President Obama’s appropriately named stimulus package included $3 billion for Head Start and Early Hard Start to help young parents simulate their children’s mental development and not even skinflint Republicans object. Given the tough job market for recent college grads, perhaps unemployed English majors will explicate the hidden patriarchy in Three Little Pigs to wide-eyed stimulus deprived Hispanic toddlers.
Now for a few facts from that awful, cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge:
Early intervention has not worked and nothing suggests that tinkering and extravagant funding will reverse these failures. Head Start began in 1965, it has to date absorbed $167 billion, it is relentlessly scrutinized (annual assessments are legally required) and the failure verdict is indisputable. Similar disappointing results even occurred in much smaller labor-intensive projects where youngsters intellectually lagging behind their peers received daily intellectual stimulation. One such intervention began at three months of age and transpired for seven hours a day, five days a week. When the children were a bit older they attended a “stimulation center” from 9:00AM to 4:00PM every day of the year. Alas, by fourth grade the value of this intensive intervention had vanished.[2]
A 1985 US Department of Health and Human Service analysis found that the Head Start program’s claim of long-term benefits were exaggerated, and this included increases in cognitive test scores and academic benefits plus such non-academic benefits as reducing crime, teen pregnancy, and unemployment.[3] Another study of Head Start completed in 2006 using a random assignment experimental design with 5000 children did show some initial progress (using some 41 indicators of cognitive impact) but, yet one more time, the intellectual benefits vanished by the time children entered first grade.[4] And these two studies are typical.
What apparently fuels this optimism is not science but mass media accounts from the likes of Newsweek desperate to find magic bullet solutions to racial/ethnic differences. Further add entrepreneurs hawking IQ-boosting gimmicks to anxious parents (e.g., Mozart CDs for infants). Perhaps these Berkeley professors based their ideas on the hype commonplace in children’s stores catering to well-educated parents.
How can academics at respectable institutions get away with this mendacious fantasy? Why has the New York Times reporter (James C. McKinley, Jr.) passed on the “Will it work?” question? What about the guardians at the Maternal and Health Care Journal where the study will be published? Surely these experts are familiar with the term “literature review” and if they had done the required work the folly of their recommendations should be obvious. This is almost the equivalent of the Berkeley Geography Department embracing a flat earth.
There are important lessons here. Obviously, the ideologically infused analysis suggests that the desire to expand the social welfare state, even if by quackery, has become so ingrained in certain academic departments (and the New York Times) that it resembles a religious faith. Nobody challenges the assumption that a racial/ethnic difference that favors the white middle class is “a problem” requiring government-funded solutions. Everything is just “compassionate” belief coupled with a moral imperative to spend government money. So much for erudite professors ridiculing anti-science creationism — different gospels for different folk.
The Head Start “solution” also betrays economic illiteracy. Is government-funded talk-to-kids-with-bigger-words intervention the superior tactic to close cognitive gaps? What about reducing taxes on small businesses so Juan and Juanita can become entrepreneurs and with the newfound cash move the family to a middle-class neighborhood so Juan Jr. can play with more linguistically advanced kids? Perhaps the family’s newfound wealth could finance horizon-expanding travel versus having a social worker give Juan Jr. a second-hand account. If, as the author’s claim, poverty is a key reason for the lack of intellectual stimulation, why not instead use the billions to cut taxes for the ambitious poor instead of hiring more government workers to meddle in family life?
To be frank, the “well intentioned” professors just don’t care about Hispanic kids. Expanding the social welfare state is paramount. Nor is it self-evident that Hispanic parents want to be pre-empted by outside “experts.” These Berkeley professors are merely honoring politically correct gods, and squandering billions combined while ignoring opportunity costs as irrelevant. Just imagine a Berkeley professor of Education announcing that cognitive differences, regardless of source, are probably intractable and so Hispanic youngsters, like every other human being, must make the best of one’s ability. And why risk totalitarian tinkering with family life to achieve racial/ethnic proportionality in America’s prestige professions? So, given the failures of past intervention efforts, Juan’s parents may be better advised to inculcate their son with a strong work ethic, good habits and insist that he find a suitable occupation and, with lower taxes thanks to eliminating wasteful spending, Juan Jr. can prosper.
Yes they are, and that’s why we’ve collected this treasury of Searchlight ‘Conservative Woodstock’ performers, as listed in the official program!
Speaking of Lloyd Marcus, check out his latest post and accompanying cartoons.
You can download your Lloyd Marcus ringtone for just $2.99.
I know what you’re trying to do – you’re trying to make me click on those video links to see if the music is as shitterific as I imagine.
Naw. Ganna. Happen.
Them waters is full of wingnut candiru!
Speaking of Lloyd Marcus, check out his latest post and accompanying cartoons.
Ramming and cramming. These folks have some real hard-core fetishes.
Serious, that cartoon is pr0n-errific.
you’re trying to make me click on those video links to see if the music is as shitterific as I imagine.
I was startled at the shittasticity of them. They’re really quite shit.
It’s to be expected at such a craptastic event.
~
“Silly man, we all came prepared with chairs and food. We spent not a penny in Searchlight!”
Except for that $300 to fill up the RV’s tank.
Just true, blue-blooded Americans.
Even as a metaphor, doesn’t “blue blooded” mean royalty?
Sarah FAIL-in speaks.
The Conservative Woodstock? With,as the NYT reported “thousands” of attendees?
Um, at Woodstock there were hundreds of thousands of people. Like at the immigration rally last week in DC. Which I don’t remember getting reported in the Times with pictures of the speakers and quotations from the participants.
All of theses assholes want “their” country back. Where are those left over bumper stickers from the 2000 election that said “you lost, get over it” (about an election that we won by 500,000 votes) I want one.
Sarah Palin is a blue blooded real American.
Frank Rich is worth a read.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opinion/28rich.html?hp
A-yup.
Wait, the text links to videos like the Crispy Ambulance one? No, those are for real. Not bad in any objective way, although tastes in thickly stylish ’80s music are liable to turn against a lot of the bands I like any old time now…
Frank Rich is yet more proof that liberals are objectively anti-white.
“Searchlight is a census-designated place (CDP) in Clark County, Nevada, United States. The population was 576 at the 2000 census.”
Damn, what an achievement for those Motorhomes full of teabaggers to have jammed Searchlight. With their chairs and food and all.
And I’m tired of this bullshit about Palin’s ability to draw a crowd. She gets at most a few thousand, and that’s for something free, and heavily promoted beforehand. The Grateful Dead got ten times that many campers fifty times a year for three decades. Hell, Carrot Top regularly gets more than Palin.
That was cold, dude. Cold.
You think that’s cold, try this: Carrot Top makes more sense, too.
Wow. From the NY Times:
Where do they get money for that? And permits? No EIS filed for that?
Great. Perfect for brushfires. And I love the fact that the Tea-Party’s chosen method of demonstration involves the over-consumption of gasoline. Huddling under a blanket in the dirt doesn’t seem like a great experience to me – isn’t the age demographic of the Tea Party pretty old? They’re not going to take too many nights on the ground in the dirt.
Egg update!
From the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
So much for Troofus’s argument that liberals are unemployed losers while conservatives are productive members of society:
No jobs, plenty of time for Tea Party
I always preferred this version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzSVoNlb3ME
Egg whites and yolks dripped from the bus’s windshield wipers as the convoy arrived on site, but it wasn’t possible to verify who threw the eggs.
Sounds like a job for Orly Taitz!
~
Tea Party Express, which said its bus was egged by Reid supporters
Yet another report – a Tea Partier claimed the truckstop waitress that poured coffee into his saucer was a Reid supporter.
In further news, a Tea Partier was victimized by a Reid supporter who beat him to a curbside parking space at Wal-Mart.
Did you miss the life-size tableau vivant of the American eagle crying over the smoking twin towers and the figure of Jesus arising in the background? Or was that just a momentary psilocybin flashback? Or — was it both?
Actually, if someone wrote up skits for Orly Taitz, Private Eye! that would be pretty funny.
Hey, you remember the famous photos of the ‘flower children’ literally putting flowers into the rifles of the National Guard troops at the 1967 anti-war protest at the Pentagon?
At Oddstock, they put guns on all the flowers.
“Yet another report – a Tea Partier claimed the truckstop waitress that poured coffee into his saucer was a Reid supporter.”
So they go to Reid’s hometown, to confront Reid, and are upset to find people who support Reid working in a truck stops there.
No wonder they can’t accept the fact that hey lost the election. These people actually believe that everyone has an obligation to agree with them.
Only if you’re a TruPatriot into Williamsburg theme park cosplay.
Wow, they wiped out the available hotel rooms in a town that’s barely larger than my high school graduating class. From little acorns… whoops, wrong metaphor.
Also, from that NYT article that g linked:
He’s also getting Social Security benefits.
“Hey, you remember the famous photos of the ‘flower children’ literally putting flowers into the rifles of the National Guard troops at the 1967 anti-war protest at the Pentagon?”
I can’t find a link to Root Boy Slim’s “Used to Be a Radical” so this will have to do:
Used to be a radical
Pissed on the Pentagon
Put flowers in the soldiers guns
Took LSD on the White House lawn
BTW, Root was a frat brother of GWB at Yale.
Sez La Palin: you are like so many of my friends and my family, including my own husband, just independent, not registered in any party.
So Todd left that secessionist wingnut party, huh?
BTW, Root was a frat brother of GWB at Yale.
Root Boy Slim >>>>(times a jillionty) GWB.
Never Forget!
~
Yes they are, and that’s why we’ve collected this treasury of Searchlight ‘Conservative Woodstock’ performers, as listed in the official program!
“Roger Hedgecock.” Heh.
Also, I’m certain that headshot of Victoria Jackson is at least 25 years old.
The group brought in a small fleet of bulldozers and dump trucks a few days before the rally to regrade about 20 acres of land just outside the town’s main street, expecting that 10,000 people would show.
The rally was held on the property of Startel, Inc. It’s a gravel pit. The guy who owns Startel also owns Vista Landscape and Rock Supplies, the company that did the leveling and sand filling for the event. They also sell Custom Bar-B-Ques, which might be of interest to a certain friend.
He’s also getting Social Security benefits.
As is the guy in the video at the San Francisco Chronicle piece linked in the post.
Not Woodstock, BIGGER than Woodstock.
Judging from the reported lack of porta potties, they probably took shits on the flowers.
Not Woodstock, BIGGER than Woodstock.
Yes, by ConservaMath™ which lets you use terms like “Moral Majority” with a straight (pinched) face.
Whoa, Chronicle link switch up. Here’s the piece that features the guy on Social Security.
his event symbolizes for more than the WOODSTOCK of the 60’s,
Yup, a bunch of corpulent white people sitting on their asses in lawn chairs, watching “entertainers” nobody has ever heard of is, like, TEH MOST IMPORTANT THING EVAR.
In this moron’s defense, Woodstock II was pretty fucking lame.
Ah, Wingnut cultural jealousy is so very delicious. NotSoBreitbart calls himself a Merry Prankster; DC tourists riding to PAC-organized protests on corporate-sponsored buses call themselves “a grassroots movement”; Beck throws the mantle of MLK over his own shoulders; a few thousand (cough) RVers opt for a weekend in the stinking desert to shake their fists at a Senator most of the country has never heard of and it’s “Woodstock” (note: CPAC tired to pin that label to themselves too, just a month or so ago).
Sorry, guys, sympathetic magic doesn’t work– you can’t “name and claim” yourselves into cultural significance. Some comparisons can only be made by other people.
I suppose we should be cheered by the fact that Le Nuttes de Wing are finally conceding their loss in the Culture War by prancing around in 60s counterculture masks but it only brings us closer to the day when some twunt will claim to be the “conservative Laurie Anderson” and that shit’s gonna make me mad.
And permits? No EIS filed for that?
REAL MEN dominate nature.
contains just the right dose of cromulence
Can we just go ahead and skip to Teh Conservative ’68 DNC?
Confederate Wankee wonders — “Kin they make one’a them hurrkane proof, so as’n it don’t fall over?”
I’m very curious about the 2012 Republican Vs TeaTard Convention.
I’m very curious about the 2012 Republican Vs TeaTard Convention.
Old people rioting is an ugly sight.
Can we just go ahead and skip to Teh Conservative ‘68 DNC?
Chicago RNC 2012: a bunch of old white bigots get beaten by the Chicago police.
~
Can we just go ahead and skip to Teh Conservative ‘68 DNC?
Please, no – because they’ll for once be consistent with the original and use a DNC instead of their own little whoremongering get-together.
I’m very curious about the 2012 Republican Vs TeaTard Convention.
Old people rioting is an ugly sight.
Somebody will stub his toe running to the corndog stand, and they’ll call it their Kent State.
Somebody will stub his toe
Veiled foreskin holocaust reference?
Or, ya know, their 1968 DNC. Need MOAR COFFEE and reading comprehension skills.
Do not go gentle into that frothing site,
Old white guys burn and rave at close of day;
Whine, whine against the irrevelevance of the right.
NotSoBreitbart calls himself a Merry Prankster
SHUT. UP. For real?
I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Beck throws the mantle of MLK over his own shoulders
I’m somehow envisioning this as Glennbeck digging up King’s corpse, skinning it and throwing the hide over him like a wingnut Ed Gein.
Only crazier, you know.
You know he’d do it if he could, too.
This was one of my faves. The guy that designed it openly admitted he was coopting leftist imagery because the right had nothing that was usable.
It’s being hailed as a “Conservative Woodstock”
How come it can’t be hailed as a “Conservative Altamont”?
SHUT. UP. For real?
For really reals. And fairly often, too.
“Beck throws the mantle of MLK over his own shoulders”
Why do I envision Beck on a knee, head down waiting for a staffer to come drape the mantle on him? Then surge to his feet once the mantle is on shouting, “AMERICAAAAAA!!!”. But instead of dancing like James Brown he stands there and cries.
I still love the thought of Butthurt being stalked by Cockpuncho, the cock-punching llama.
The guy that designed it openly admitted he was coopting leftist imagery because the right had nothing that was usable.
Yeah, I can imagine that imagery like this wouldn’t go over well.
Silly man, we all came prepared with chairs and food. We spent not a penny in Searchlight!
Why does that conjure up an image of a man standing in the middle of the road, pants around his ankles, holding a chair, a flashlight, and umbrella, and a thermos, and shouting: “I don’t need you! I don’t need ANYTHING! Except….this chair. And…this flashlight. And this umbrella. And that’s ALL I need! I don’t need ANYTHING ELSE! Except for this thermos…”
Ligeti and Jerry’s Kids. Awesome, Gavin.
Link FAIL. Blerg.
For really reals. And fairly often, too.
So, what Merry Prankster would he be? Definitely not Neal. Too faggy.
I managed to track it down.
It wouldn’t have looked too good to the general public, but it probably wouldn’t have bothered most of the teabaggers. Almost none of them objected to the raised fists because almost none of them knew what it meant, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them didn’t know what a fascist salute was either. Invective aside, the great majority of these guys are genuinely profoundly ignorant.
Every day is Conservative Altamont.
BTW, at Balloon Juice yesterday they were coming up with alternative names for this event, and Galtamont and Laughingstock seemed to be leading the way. But I have to give equal props to Vacuumslayer’s Book Burning Man.
I heard another one somewhere, can’t remember where, but:
Burning with Impotent Rage Man
A conservative Woodstock without any music is very appropriate, unless Prussian Blue was there.
I like Galtamount.
Almost none of them objected to the raised fists because almost none of them knew what it meant, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them didn’t know what a fascist salute was either.
Yeah, I was actually surprised that they didn’t have a problem with that poster being slightly communist-looking. Which is weird to me, because I don’t think you need explicit understanding of what that type of imagery traditionally represents for the association to pop up in your mind, you know? I guess it makes sense that they are as aesthetically illiterate as they are actually illiterate.
So, what Merry Prankster would he be?
A Merrie Melodie prankster
Newsbutsers!
I tells ya Gavin, these MMfA people are trying to steal your turf.
~
So, what Merry Prankster would he be?
A Merrie Melodie prankster.
FYWPreth
You cowards. I WATCHED the videos. Well, most of some of them. And some of ALL of them.
Patriotism is pornography for these people. It doesn’t matter what the lyrics are, as long as they include the necessaries (tits, beaver, etc.) for auto-stimulation. And for the gals, images of waterfalls, teary children, and–go understand people–a lot of guys in 18th century coats and wigs.
Come on, Godwin. Can’t we invoke the Nazis NOW?
Pere Ubu, I’m using that MLK bit in my next book. I’m gathering such fine material here.
Kids, maybe it’s because I haven’t had my faggotty socialest tea yet this morning, but I’m in a reflective frame of mind, or Overton Window of mind, if you prefer, or maybe I’m just a big fan of D. Fenestration, the suicidal philosopher. But yo, what light banter through yonder window breaks?
We don’t watch the teevy at my house. We don’t get cable, and the Instrument of Looking At in our living room is a monitor only. It doesn’t have a receiver. So no broadcast television. We watch everything on DVDs or that newfangled computy.
Not very interesting so far, you say. AH! But my wife, my immortal beloved, she is a television writer. So every now and then we have to sit down and watch a bunch of shows on DVD to catch up on what the cool kids are doing. Last night was such an occasion.
As we’re watching various rubbishy festivals of on-the-nose hoohah, it occurs to me that it really is the media we have to blame for the situation we’re in. Sure, the corporations &c are upstream, it’s all their fault, &c. but the media is doing the heavy lifting.
These shows we were watching: among them, True Blood. The entire cast is young and fit and everybody’s just crazy about fuckin’, except dear old grandma, who provides the quaint oldster moral center for all the youngsters to revolve around while everybody around them is dyin’ or fuckin’ or suckin’ on blood. There are the wacky Negroes that just want to dawg each other’s hunnies but are scairt stiff of danger, the good ole boys who ain’t got a lick o sense, the fanny-wiggling fag with a heart of gold, the silent, suffering admirers… Every goddamn obviousness in the world, plus of course the courtly, smoldering vampire who keeps his head tilted down so his eyebrows intersect his pupils, to make him look more intense and whatnot.
This stuff is so predictable, so obvious, ad yet, it’s exactly what’s wanted. The media is a giant rat pellet dispensing machine. Watch some commercials, get a pellet. It has to be the kind of pellet you like, or you won’t stay put, so every show is a refinement of the previous one, always turning on a diminishing spiral of self-referential beat-hitting, so that when we’re watching a scene from True Blood, it’s actually an insider reference to a scene in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but if you don’t know that, the True Blood scene seems flat and obvious. All the nuance and texture comes from something off-screen, a reward for loyal entertainment-watching.
Because we don’t watch the teevy, we don’t get the dog whistles buried in all the programming. I think the perfect analogy is watching a 3-D movie without the glasses: everything’s a little blurry and we wonder why they keep poking things directly at the camera.
I didn’t set out to talk about vampire shows, however. I wanted to say that what we do at Sadly is primarily making mock of some of the marginal, easily-decoded message-makers in the media landscape, the “pro-am” category as found with pornography, people that make money doing it, but who are amateurs by any standards. Bloggers are particularly well-represented in this regard.
However, there is a vast sea of what appears to be relatively benign stuff out there that is actually hammering the same rotten messages home, pouring endlessly into American households, filling everyone’s brains with nonsense. I discoverd this on an airplane, because there weren’t nothin’ to do but watch the shows on the headrest in front of me.
The Discovery Channel does a lot of military shows, sci-tech, and covers expensive hobbies. The History Channel is all about Glorious War. But the real zingers are things like Travel, Home and Garden, Food… All of these channels celebrate the most grotesque consumer excess. Especially HGTV, where a bunch of utterly gormless fuckwits pour immense sums of money into the ugliest residences imaginable, aided by caricatures of the hardworking, honest contractor jest doin’ his job right. Follow all this with a 20-minute infomercial.
Recall that the Tea Partiers and all the rest of these fooze watch inordinate amounts of television, because they’re retired, on disability, or unemployed and living at grandma’s house so they have to watch what she wants to watch. They soak up hours and hours of this apparently benign background stuff all day. They’re not ONLY watching Fox News and Glenn Beck. That’s why it’s so effective.
They watch six hours of yearning-TV: some guy getting his 1968 Thunderbird restored to showroom condition; some 25-year-old kid that works at Best Buy and his brand new wife trying to decide which immense McMansion they want, the one facing the Rockies, or the one with two Olympic swimming pools; some guy going around beating food challenges along the lines of “eat this twelve-pound bacon cheeseburger with a one-gallon milkshake and win a handjob from the thinnest waitress in the place;” twenty variations on the foibles of rich and famous people wallowing in luxury and privilege unimaginable even in Ancient Rome; and only THEN do they switch over to Beck.
Where they hear all about why they’re not personally enjoying all this stuff: cause of us libruls, coloreds, faggortzes and so forth. No mention that the young couple default on their mortgage about a month after the cameras stop rolling, or the guy eating the nine-foot hoagie needs heart surgery at the age of 30, or the guy with the restored T-Bird lost his job, and so on. In teevyland, “happily ever after” is real. So these swollen old assholes watch this stuff, do the very simple math, and think they’ve been screwed out of the good life the folks on HGTV are enjoying.
So what do they do about it? “Descend” on Washington occasionally. Or drive in the RV out to the desert to listen to Sarah Palin say something. Ad they think this is the same as action, because it comes on the TV and they look so brave and strong and numerous that merely being an extra in a Fox News segment makes them feel like they’re the real thing, real Americans, real good. Then they go back home to Dog Pecker, Indiana, still seething with righteous indignation, and either surreptitiously key the Mexican family’s minivan down the block, or write long, long screeds to post on websites that make fun of them, like this’n here.
That’s what I think, and now I’m exhausted.
The true genius of this piece is the casual reference to Beavis & Butt-head (in the “need TP for bunghole” photo caption).
Mike Judge was about 15 years too early. His parody of know-nothing teabag conservatives really stands the test of time.
I’m going to jump in the lake, just like Billy jumped in the lake!
Looking at the photo at the top of this story, makes me wish I had the sun-screen concession. Bet Searchlight, NV is going to be all sold out of calamine lotion.
Seriously, what kind of person sits in a gravel pit under the noonday sun in the middle of a desert for fun?
Man, I have wicked logorrhea this morning. Must have been the word salad I ate last night.
Book Burning Man is awesome.
This whole thread is full of win.
How about LOLapalooza?
You cowards. I WATCHED the videos.
Because boiled frog absolutely needs mango salsa.
Tea Party RV’s parked in formation…
Aisle of white?
Spengler Dampniche–sounds about right.
The potential of humanity was killed (at least in our society) a long, long time ago. Twentieth Century America was the perfect storm of foolish luck, greed, ignorance, mass media, corporatism, and religion. We never stood a chance.
Spengler Dampniche said,
March 28, 2010 at 18:20
This reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while–how TV frames interactions and what authenticity means in a world viewed through the eyes of a heavy TV watcher. But that’s another issue.
I do think that advertisers (with the help of Republicans) have succeeded in tying the American Dream to consumer goods, and have made excess consumption a God-given right, damn the consequences.
But I also think there’s a wider story to look at, which includes the American Dream in the context of a shitload of racial and class issues. But whatever the causes may be, it’s clear that these people expect a certain type of life and need someone to blame when they don’t have it. Since they’re not very smart, they believe the propaganda of the exact people who created their misery through economic policy and the dissemination of the idea that acquisition is a virtue.
I have a couple questions that have nothing to do with the article at hand, but are just to remedy my own shocking illiteracy when it comes to computers and all those confusing Internets;
1) How do you do that thing where you indent a whole block of text between two lines, instead of simply putting it in quotation marks like I usually do?
2) How do you turn part of your text into a URL (e.g, when the blue text reads “the biggest country in the world” and the url redirects to an article on Russia)?
3) How do you bold or italic? So far I’ve been either capitalizing or writing between two asterisks.
Thanks in advance. Do feel free to point and laugh.
Actor212: “Have they never had an original thought?”
I think “Conservativapalooza” was taken.
And semi-OT, but where were these jackasses during Bush’s half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion/giveaway?
And totally-OT, but I like linking to political things like this once in a while on my Facebook page; I come back a few hours later and find I have 1-2 less “friends”…nice bit of spring cleaning, that.
Trollapalooza? Palinocalypse Now? Brays of Rage?
Hahaha, Chris!
[blockquote]blockquote text goes here[/blockquote] (But use angle brackets, i.e. shift , and . key, rather than square ones.)
[url=http://blog.3bulls.net/?p=3486]the biggest country in the world[/url] (But use the angle brackets, not square brackets, aka the >.)
[i]Italics remark goes here[/i] (But use angle brackets, i.e. shift , and . key, rather than square ones.)
~
Conscious-less Objectors?
Better yet, Unconscious Objectors?
Also, I was laughing at the guy wearing the yellow barrel/teabag until I saw those beautiful and shiny port-a-potties lined up behind him. The real Woodstock didn’t have those…the Tea potties even have ladders going up the side for the slop-bucket brigades.
1.
2. The Russian Bear!
3. bold, italics,
strikeRemove the spaces separating the alligator mouths from the things next to them. That last one wasn’t requested, but it is a tricky little beast.
1) How do you do that thing where you indent a whole block of text between two lines, instead of simply putting it in quotation marks like I usually do?
Type (without the quotation marks) before the text you want to quote. Type when you’re done quoting the text.
2) How do you turn part of your text into a URL (e.g, when the blue text reads “the biggest country in the world” and the url redirects to an article on Russia)?
Type then the text. When you’re done, type . (Same dealio with the quotation marks, of course).
3) How do you bold or italic? So far I’ve been either capitalizing or writing between two asterisks.
Italics= and then around the words. Same for bold, but with a “b”
Thanks in advance. Do feel free to point and laugh.
HA HA! (Nelson voice). Anyway, here’s a basic HTML primer.
FYWP you fucking douche. That shit showed up in the preview!
Anyway, that link will help explain, I think.
Awesome, totally fucked that one up. Once again with feeling. Change the square brackets to gator mouths.
1. [blockquote]text[/blockquote]
2. [a href=url]The Russian Bear![/a]
3. [b]bold[/b], [i]italics[/i], [strike]strike[/strike]
Awesome, totally fucked that one up.
Nah, I think WP just likes to format anything remotely resembling HTML.
Yes, and I had forgotten that.
T&U, agreed re: race and class.
This is the legacy of the Baby Boomers, the last overwhelmingly white, middle-class generation in America. They’re happy to wrap themselves in the mantle of youthful idealism that arises from a review of the late 1960s, but really, the whole hippie, peacenik, civil rights crowd was a tiny fraction of their number. Their presence is amplified because it’s seen as emblematic of the period. The people doing the damage today, the Tea Partiers and their offspring (the Jesse James Libertarians), were the vast lumpy-proletariat of that time. They were pro-war, anti-nigger, and very much opposed to the Dirty Fucking Hippies. Now they’re all that, and old. And their promise was never fulfilled. They’re nobodies, when everybody told them they were going to be special.
So they’re really, really angry.
Re: consumerism, these same people have been thoroughly indoctrinated to spend their money, to gather the trappings of “the good life,” which exists only en tableau — rather like the pictures of massed prizes on gameshows. A washing machine, a car, a popcorn maker, and a suite of living room furniture, all arranged on a pedestal with a showgirl posturing in front of it. I think that’s why there’s such a mania for holiday decorating. “Look how awesome Christmas 2006 was, over 5 million lights on 200 strings, plus that inflatable Santa Claus with the reindeer.”
The tableau in their minds, the thing they strive for, was fixed sometime around 1986. So what’s happening now threatens every part of that. Fags, coloreds, even women are appearing around the edges of the previously ideal frame. They can’t afford to keep collecting the Franklin Mint Classic Car series or the Collectible Indian Dreamcatcher Ornaments for the Christmas tree. The Barcolounger needs updating, and they can’t afford that either, and the RV costs so much to gas up. This is all seen as a betrayal of them personally by everybody else collectively, as if their horrid little ticky-tacky dream-life
was supposed to be a kind of national civic project.
And all of this is heavily promoted (although no longer subsidized) because it makes dumb fucking heaps of loot for corporate interests.
Down with the Man, man!
“tea potties!” AHAHAHAHAHA!
html tags
It’s easier to use blog editing software to write your post.
Be aware that the accursed “Preview” is capricious and tricksy and doesn’t accept certain tags.
Hey all you so totally not Republicans welcome to a so totally NOT Republican fundraiser!!
TEAPARTY!! Also!
That’s right! We so totally hate the Republicans just like the rest of the Planet!!
TEAPARTY Forever!!
There could be an FBI/Homeland Security raid on End-Times Christian militia group in Michigan right now, reports a local website:
RE: tags, I’ll say it agin, firefox has a lovely extension called bbcodextra that gives you stuff in the drop menu to do all your tagging. The only fault I’ve found so far is the strike tag in the regular html menu is just the “s” and doesn’t work here. The strike tag in the xhtml menu uses the “del” tag, and works fine.
Also, ascii numbers for “gator mouths” are 60 and 62. You should, wfp willing, be able to illustrate tags by “andnum”ing them. Thusly, <wevs>. I fully expect this to fail miserably due to the sheer mean-spiritedness of wp, regardless of the cooing assurances of preview.
Bummerfest?
Livestock 2010!
“Listen to the Flower People” is a good reference for this scene, but “The Sun Never Sweats” is a great reference for this scene.
Little known fact about W2. The mud people started showing up well before it started to rain. Turns out they got that way sliding down a muddy hill.
Behind the poor, overworked port-a-johns.
Yup.
The rain was a blessing.
<i>italics</i>
<blockquote>indented quote here</blockquote>
<a href=”http://fake.tld/page/about/russia.html”>them crazy Rooskies</a>
PROTIP: If you want to show angle brackets in your sample HTML tags while learnin’ teh n00bs you have to use the character entities < (less than) and > (greater than).
ANNOYINGSHOWOFFTIP: If you want to show HTML entities while learnin’ the helpers who are trying to learn teh N00bs you have to use the & (ampersand) entity.
NOWYOUREJUSTBEINGANASSHOLETIP: There are a shitload of named entities like the ones above, and many more besides that can be created using their Unicode hex or decimal codepoints.
They were pro-war, anti-nigger, and very much opposed to the Dirty Fucking Hippies. Now they’re all that, and old. And their promise was never fulfilled. They’re nobodies, when everybody told them they were going to be special.
I think this is a good observation. In a way, they represent everything bad about the Baby Boomers (they’re self-centered, entitled, etc), but haven’t accepted the progress that came along with those traits.
So, while they’re out there stomping around and pouting about “their country,” people my age are wondering if we’ll ever see the money we’re putting into Social Security back, worrying about how we’re going to take care of our veterans and the old folks, and thinking about how we’ll cope with climate change. The next few decades are going to be a shitshow, all because of the political cowardice and greed of people like them. Thanks, you selfish assholes.
Spengler, I think that’s a large bit of it. I’ve often noted that the more wingnutty a group is, the more their arguments relate to television in place of real life. Torture defenders point to Hollywood movies and 24, “good old days” nostalgics don’t describe 1950s life, they describe early 60s television shows such as Mayberry, people complaining about the collapse of social values almost inevitably decry that “those people” are showing up on their television shows and news channels.
I think the reason though is sort of a combination of several things. First the simple fact that what we haven’t seen personally on any large level becomes easy to believe all looks like media depictions. Don’t know any gay people? Easy to believe their all swishy clothes-whores. Don’t know any black people? They must all act like gangsta rappers.
And then you combine it with several factors, chief among them white flight, the deliberate attempt to run away from diversity back in the 50s and 60s and create white palaces of people only of a conservative middle-class religious white persuasion, thereby greatly decreasing the chances they would run into someone who would threaten those preconceptions allowing them to solidify.
After that comes in-group phenomena like religions many of whom in the rise of fundie culture were selling the idea that knowing someone not like you or daring to think at all about getting to know someone not like you was a literal sin that would prevent your family from getting to the promised land. Suddenly living an empty life in the suburbs wasn’t just “safe” and good for the consumerism you mentioned in your takedown, but also now morally upstanding. Wanting to live, to evolve, to experience were now heresies. The only true life was a life surrounded by possessions, never changing, waiting to die.
And then came factor three, change. The diverse centers they ran away from continued to evolve, the people they hid away from by fleeing from counter examples and by consuming “proper media” continued existing. Media eventually became unable to continue ignoring them though they sought to make them safe for consumption, but these are people who ran away from having to know about the them. Suddenly they look around and that permanent bubble that was supposed to sustain them has been breached. There is that house-flipping asian guy, that one brown-skinned doctor and that gay couple who walk their dog right past your house and all these “kids” (people over 10 years younger than them) who don’t seem to share any of their values.
Not to mention that what was modern and hip back then is now more so with the victories of the past. It was pretty bad when the darkies wanted segregation to end and be in your schools, but now they are in your middle class jobs and claiming to be the president when no one you knew voted for them? And it was already bad when women were thinking they had a right to say no to sex to their lawfully wedded husbands, but now some aren’t even marrying at all, or marrying other girls and more and more are acting like they actually want careers? And not only that but these changes have breached the fantasy of the suburban kingdom. And laughing with each other in neighborhood bbqs.
So they run away again, but now they are in a retirement community, the stench of death and decay lingers on their senses and the nice clean streets of a past now hazily replaced with years of TV watching seem dirty and torn.
And then as you say, some nice man on the TV promises that it can all be brought back. Give some money, rant at some hippies, stand in line for books from the Sarah and the Glenn and they can send you back to when it all made sense.
So yeah, I think it’s a combination of this and what you reported. Looking in envy at “perfect” uncomplicated lives as their own life turns to shit and the resentment that comes from having finally after so many years of running seeing and hearing from people you were promised you’d never have to see and hear from.
The darkies and the homos and the uppity women and the godless are now everywhere, they stole your bastion, your perfect suburb castle with its perpetual white middle class dream and now there they are on the TV never suffering from rheumatism or being abandoned by kids who don’t want to deal with them anymore and the funny man who sounds like the good pastor and is reliably white and male and religious offers you a magical formula by which it can all go away.
Spengler Dampniche said,
March 28, 2010 at 19:29
I’m a Boomer. Generally speaking, I think the significance of generational differences is way overrated, but in this case I think you’ve pretty well got these guys pegged.
Eep, my turn at ultra long post. Sorry.
ROTIP: If you want to show angle brackets in your sample HTML tags while learnin’ teh n00bs you have to use the character entities < (less than) and > (greater than).
Ah HA!
Hey, you wouldn’t want to do this website-building assignment that I’ve been avoiding, would you?
Testing
Testing
Testing
TestingOutstanding! Thanks to all, and thanks for volunteering the “strike” thing, I didn’t even think of it but that is indeed a useful one.
Oh, and to make it clear (I always get into trouble when I talk about Boomers), I know that there are plenty of Boomers who are just as passionately concerned about the issues I posted about earlier. And there are plenty of Gen Xers and Gen Yers who are selfish assholes. Boomers just changed our concept of individuality, for better and for worse.
If you were born in November of 1959, does that make you a boomer? (Asking for a fiend.)
~
http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2010/03/09/land-of-the-mostly-free-home-of-the-occasionally-brave/
A guy who thinks Han Solo and Indiana Jones live in the real world. The fact that he idolizes Harrison Ford is funny because Ford is a guy who came out against the Iraq war back in 2003 (long before it was fashionable), supports gun control, opposed the recall of Gray Davis, is a friend of Bill Clinton and, when asked about his religious views, once jokingly answered “Democrat.”
1946 and 1964
Boomers are usually considered 1945-1964, though people born 1955-1964 are sometimes considered part of “Generation Jones” because they’re really too young to remember or to have experienced a lot of the defining moments for Baby Boomers. My mom was born in 1959 and she hates being called a Boomer, so YMMV.
kingubu,
And there’s always the full unicode list for even more fun and frolic.
Of course, they only give you hex #s, so you need to &#x instead of just &#.
Even though they don’t all work, browser support and whatnot, the dingbats and misc. symbols pages are sort of spiffy.
Woo-hoo. ☃☠☣☻❤❽☎
Of course, now we can make the “my bum is warm” emoticon ͝♨͝ as well as use the shithouse troll symbol, ‘scuse my☝
Also, what I said before about wp fail.
I always thought the cut-off was around 1960 or maybe slightly later, even for fiends.
I was born in 1962 and I don’t really consider myself to be a boomer.
I was 5 years old during the “Summer of Love” and 7 when Woodstock happened.
If you were born in November of 1959, does that make you a boomer? (Asking for a fiend.)
The usual cut-off, as noted above, is 12/31/64. My birthday was in December of 64, so I have the choice of rounding up to be with the selfish bigots, or rounding down to be with the idiot children.
Dahlgren: “It’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” — Ronald Reagan
Not only was Reagan a prime example of somebody who knew so much that wasn’t so, Dahlgren got the quote wrong.
And from g’s link, “No jobs, plenty of time for Tea Party,” a Social Security recipient who says if the government “quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own”(and who apparently blames Reagan/Bush for job losses…), and a lady who QUIT HER JOB to become an unemployed tea-partier. These people are so disconnected from reality it’s frightening.
I usually think of boomers as born between Hiroshima and the Kennedy assassination, but that’s me. I don’t really think of my bro, ’61, as a boomer though. Go figure.
I think the problem with boomers boils down to sheer numbers. They are such a large bloc that they manage to dominate the culture. Combine that with a fetishized childhood during an economic boom, the self-centered petulance that having had things come easy can engender, a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of myopic hindsight and revisionism of the days of said childhood and the desire to return to a past that never happened, and the effects of the ME! generation are not so hard to understand.
If it weren’t for the power of numbers, they wouldn’t have been able to skew so much their way while shitting all over everything else. Perils of democracy, I suppose.
These people are so disconnected from reality it’s frightening.
Hi, you must be new here.
Spengler – I was around and semi-conscious when all that 60’s stuff was going on, and you expressed the situation quite well.
The people I despised as fools back then are the same ones I despise now, only they’re old. And, alas, not any smarter or wiser. Should be easy for young wolves to take down.
Their corporate overlords…now that’s a different story. Any whippersnappers got a plan for dealing with Rupert Murdoch and the FOX empire, other than hoping he’ll die soon and the castle will be cracked from within by underlings fighting for supremacy?
or rounding down to be with the idiot children.
Hey!
Actually, I kind of have that same issue. Most of the time I’m grouped with the cynical slackers, but sometimes I’m thrown in with the co-dependent attention whores.
More from the gravel pit:
If you’re going to pretend to steal the community organizers’ playbook, pretend to steal the whole thing.
This.
A recent example: if you consume only conservative-approved media the the Dem’s health insurance bill was dead, dead, dead on the day that Scott Brown was elected in MA. By their narrative, Teh Pepul rose up and sent a message that couldn’t be ignored, Obama and the Dems had failed on their signature issue, the Tea Party had proved its power and could only gain in strength in the lead up to the mid-terms. But all that dancing and chortling and presumption never accounted for the fact that a one-vote switch in the Senate really didn’t change all that much and so, when the Dems just went ahead and finished the already-almost-complete process, they were ripped from the bubble once again.
In sure, from where they’re standing– where the bill was already dead and that was evidence of X, Y, and Z– seeing the bill pass probably did feel like the world came crashing down. Everyone they trust told them that it couldn’t happen.
As I’ve said before, FOX’s great sin is against their own audience, for painting narratives that don’t sufficiently account for the real world.
No jobs, plenty of time for Tea Party
Notable quotable:
Wingnuts’ brains must be sort of like that fabric in The Man With the White Suit— and we may see the catastrophic breakdown Real Soon Now.
But it was also a missed opportunity
It was total incompetency, sounds like.
They are such a large bloc that they manage to dominate the culture.
I think this is true. I remember listening to a letter from a Gen Xer to the Boomers on To the Best of Our Knowledge, and he talked about how Boomers “suck the oxygen out of the room.” Of course, this prompted Boomers to wail that we’re insufficiently grateful for the social advancements they made. I don’t think they even realize that they’re doing it. Honestly, I think one of the big reasons why Obama did so well among youth is that he wasn’t re-living the culture wars of the 60s.
Hi, you must be new here.
Hi! Wait, what?
Seriously, though, it never ceases to amaze me. You’d think it would, but it’s just so unbelievably absurd.
Also, I tried to comment at your blahg yesterday but no joy, skunked by the google log-in.
Who is this tigris person?
Also, I tried to comment at your blahg yesterday but no joy, skunked by the google log-in.
I’ll give Mr. G a stern talking to. If you sign in for any blog you can tell goog to leave you signed in and forget about the issue for a couple of weeks. Unless, of course, you’re troofless, posting from an elementary-school library while your mop and bucket stand idle.
“Honestly, I think one of the big reasons why Obama did so well among youth is that he wasn’t re-living the culture wars of the 60s.”
Which is why all this terror about Obama being “the black president” who “only won because he’s black” and is “a black nationalist” who “rabidly hates white people” is so fucking out of place. Obama won precisely because he DIDN’T run as the black candidate, but as the candidate of a post-racial American in which skin color didn’t matter and as a symbol of racism overcome.
Even in the Democratic primaries, a man who ran as simply “the black candidate” would never make it close to being selected.
Honestly, I think one of the big reasons why Obama did so well among youth is that he wasn’t re-living the culture wars of the 60s.
Good thing nothing like teh c-w thinghy is happening now.
~
Cerberus: WORD!
As for the following comments, except those dealing with how to make strikethroughs for greater justice, I’d like to be clear (especially for Snorghagen, AKA “Oldster,”) that I’m very specifically not damning the entire generation. After all, the various transformational movements I cited are all Boomer efforts.
It’s the vast majority that didn’t accomplish shit, don’t accomplish shit, won’t accomplish shit, and will never accomplish shit that I’m talking about, and yeah, as Justme notes, it comes down to sheer numbers. The white birthrate is stalling, the OTHER birthrate ascendeth, so in thirty years we’ll have a whole new generation of asshole cranks ranting and raving about the kids on their lawns.
I’m 43, so I’m year 1 of Gen X. Which has always been a completely meaningless designation. I use generational tags (boomer) for convenience, not because they have any special significance. After all, people are born all the time, not in waves — the notable exception being, of course, the Boomers, cresting as we speak in a tsunami of tstupid.
Shameless blargh-whoring – go to my blog to see who I met today.
shorter ‘American Heart’
FLAGWARWARFLAGFLAGWAR obama FLAGWARWARFLAG etc.
if you consume only conservative-approved media the the Dem’s health insurance bill was dead, dead, dead on the day that Scott Brown was elected in MA. By their narrative, Teh Pepul rose up and sent a message that couldn’t be ignored ….
In sure, from where they’re standing– where the bill was already dead and that was evidence of X, Y, and Z– seeing the bill pass probably did feel like the world came crashing down. Everyone they trust told them that it couldn’t happen.
This helps explain their crazily disproportionate outrage; the ones who can’t accept that they were just plain wrong(most of them, apparently) assume this is therefore undeniable proof of the unconstitutionality of the the Dems’ actions. All evidence feeds the narrative, and the narrative shapes the evidence.
Demographics are avatars of a change
Metaphor fail. Does that mean anything?
If you were born in November of 1959, does that make you a boomer?
I believe the technical term is “old fart”.
It’s like a Bruce Nauman piece.
Kind of.
Which is why all this terror about Obama being “the black president” who “only won because he’s black” and is “a black nationalist” who “rabidly hates white people” is so fucking out of place.
Yes. It’s also why trying to tie him to Ayers and screaming about the radical left and Saul Alinsky didn’t work. Do you think the average 25-year-old knows about the Weather Underground, and if they do, really give a shit about it? Saul Alinsky died before a singly Millennial was even conceived.
Shameless blargh-whoring – go to my blog to see who I met today.
Looks like my first boss. What’s he doing out west?
Man, that sums it up. These fuckwits are so insulated from thinking, they don’t understand that “rules” are the same thing as “regulations,” which they’ve been told are “restrictions.” Maybe it’s because tey can’t look things up in a dictionary because they won’t touch a book with “dick” in the title.
Good thing nothing like teh c-w thinghy is happening now.
The irony is that it’s being perpetrated by THE SAME FUCKING PEOPLE.
Who is this tigris person?
And has anyone heard from tigrismus lately?
J— said,
March 28, 2010 at 21:08 (kill)
Ooh, you’re going to get such a… well I don’t know but it’ll be BAD.
If you sign in for any blog you can tell goog to leave you signed in and forget about the issue for a couple of weeks.
That’s what I figured, but NO. Logged in, can post at other places, but not yours. It doesn’t matter, whatever I said was probably dumb anyway but I can’t remember.
Unless, of course, you’re troofless, posting from an elementary-school library while your mop and bucket stand idle.
Hey, I still have some of my treef.
Ooh, you’re going to get such a… well I don’t know but it’ll be BAD.
Internet tough guy, huh? Must be one of those little grunty malebeast.
Logged in, can post at other places, but not yours
I truly am a master
bakerblogger.Speaking of blargwhoring, if you’re all sick of looking at that box of crassly commercialized cereal on your coffee table next to the bong, get you hence. You’ll need a large-format printer, some scissors, and some of that yummy paste they used to give us in kindergarten. Make your own offensive cereal box and leave it around for GREATER JUSTICE!
Naturally the blog is not mine; I do not wish to have to switch nyms again for purposes of anonymity.
Yes. It’s also why trying to tie him to Ayers and screaming about the radical left and Saul Alinsky didn’t work. Do you think the average 25-year-old knows about the Weather Underground, and if they do, really give a shit about it? Saul Alinsky died before a singly Millennial was even conceived.
*waves*
Hey, mus-less…just for you: http://voicesandelectrons.blogspot.com/2010/03/then-tell-me-if-youre-mute.html
If I wasn’t so busy shitting all over everything, I’d have more time for self-centered petulance and fetishizing my childhood.
It’s always good to remember that generational stereotypes are usually bullshit. I have a lot more in common with lefties a third my age than I do with wingnuts who went to school with me.
No, no, I didn’t think you were. And I’m not especially condemning it or defending it. For things like politics, II don’t think ‘generations’ are very meaningful groupings at all… usually.
Internet tough guy, huh? Must be one of those little grunty malebeast.
Nope, WITCH. Or so I’ve been told. Something similar, anyway.
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/10/pulling_it_out_of_your_ass.php#comment-590259
white flight, the deliberate attempt to run away from diversity back in the 50s and 60s and create white palaces of people only of a conservative middle-class religious white persuasion, thereby greatly decreasing the chances they would run into someone who would threaten those preconceptions allowing them to solidify.
Fortunately we have the Intertuba now to let us surround ourselves with like-minded opinions and convince ourselves that our world-views are widely shared, without even leaving the room!
Just true, blue-blooded Americans.
No sign of Palin in Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage or the Almanach de Saxe Gotha. For shame!
St. Trotsky, Pope-in-Avignon said,
March 28, 2010 at 21:28
Yes. It’s also why trying to tie him to Ayers and screaming about the radical left and Saul Alinsky didn’t work. Do you think the average 25-year-old knows about the Weather Underground, and if they do, really give a shit about it? Saul Alinsky died before a singly Millennial was even conceived.
*waves*
Well, yeah, I knew about them, too, though I was a little older than 25 at the time. But do you consider your political/historical knowledge to be “average”?
“I don’t need you! I don’t need ANYTHING! Except….this chair. And…this flashlight. And this umbrella. And that’s ALL I need! I don’t need ANYTHING ELSE! Except for this thermos…”
“And my dog…”
*grr*
“Don’t need my dog…”
Hey, mus-less…just for you: http://voicesandelectrons.blogspot.com/2010/03/then-tell-me-if-youre-mute.html
No worky. I do remember what I said, though, on the Hitchcock post, so I’ll post it here because, hey, why the Hell not?
Big Bad Bald Bastard said…
Hey, the presence of crows is a good thing, because it means the absence of West Nile virus.
What if they all have fevers and stiff necks?
Oh, hell no. I was about the only kid in my class paying attention (which made it all the more funny when I was the one dropping out for a G.E.D.), and even I’ve got empty spaces in my knowledge base (like who the fuck Alinsky was) so I can bet pretty safely that my peer group doesn’t have similar information, nor does it really care all that much most of the time.
As I’ve said before, FOX’s great sin is against their own audience, for painting narratives that don’t sufficiently account for the real world.
(Did the itals work?)
Like religion, in other words. But it’s a feature not a bug. Fox couldn’t care less about its audience’s ability to successfully navigate the real world. Fox is in the business of instilling anger and fear (which their audience loves, since it makes one feel more alive than does feeling ordinary I’m-just-another-schmuck quiet desperation), and then to deliver those feeling sorts to their advertisers.
Similarly, the message of Teabag America to its citizens is: You’re patriotic for feeling pissed off and envious. Which means you’re better than those who you feel inferior to, or who make you feel helpless.
Period. Teabag America is a machine that produces weather. The Repubs think they can control it. And, to an extent, they can, so long as they feed it. Repubs’ message to the angry, indignant Teabaggers isn’t, “Let’s solve these problems!” Instead, it’s “These problems are liberals’ fault!” (“So you stay angry, San Diego.”)
In any case, I was just waving to act as a example case there, T&U. Even though I know who the Weathermen were, it still didn’t fucking matter to me, because all of those people are fucking geriatrics by now (please forgive me, Sadlynauts that were in that age group). So being scared of them is like being afraid my grandpa is going to take down the system.
Trolls excepted, I’d say the average political/ historical knowledge level on this here blog is about 99% higher than in the general population. Not sure that’s a good thing.
Those who are not ignorant of history are doomed to experience it again while the ignoramuses repeat it.
That right there is a money quote.
N__B MUST CHANGE HIS COMMENT FORM.
N__B MUST CHANGE HIS COMMENT FORM.
To what?
I’m afraid that’s true. I’ve had several ‘Oh shit, here we go again’ moments.
In Blogger go to Settings>Comments.
Then fiddle with Who Can Comment? and Comment Form Placement. I’d change the former to Anyone and the latter to one of the other things like full-page or pop-up window.
Word verification option’s further down the page and is pretty good at spam prevention.
Demographics are avatars of a change
Metaphor fail. Does that mean anything?
Not to me. Maybe they mean “harbingers” and just wanted to use the word “avatar” on account of it’s all trendy and tiger-stripey blue with glowing freckles these days.
Snorghagen: I bet after a certain point, folks like you just want to be able to tattoo “Who Could’ve Foreseen” on the faces of everyone who didn’t see shit coming ten miles away.
Logged in, can post at other places, but not yours
count yourself lucky.
N__B has a blog??!
Word verification option’s further down the page and is pretty good at spam prevention.
a little spam might spice up N__B’s blogg.
Maybe they mean “harbingers” and just wanted to use the word “avatar” on account of it’s all trendy and tiger-stripey blue with glowing freckles these days.
I thought ‘harbingers’ too, but that’s not right either, since Rich was trying to describe demographics as a driving force of change.
I am shocked, shocked to find the NYTimes hiring functionally-illiterate writers who are more concerned with the vividness of their imagery than with its meaning.
We’d need to start manufacturing a lot more tattoo ink.
I thought ‘harbingers’ too, but that’s not right either, since Rich was trying to describe demographics as a driving force of change.
Huh. In that case I got nuthin’. And I too am shocked, shocked to find the NYTimes hiring functionally-illiterate writers who are more concerned with the vividness of their imagery than with its meaning. But column writers have long been a bit breathless for my taste – I don’t think I’ve read them much post-1990 or so.
count yourself lucky.
I posted it here instead, and considering the quality of said comment I’m thinking he should have considered himself lucky under the circumstances. However he’s done it and will have to live with the consequence of being bowed down under tremendous drifts of blathering piffle as have been other formerly fine blogs. SAD.
Spengler, no need to repeat you or others, you are absolutely right.
Television has done more damage to our society’s humanity than any other device I can think of. It social isolates people even more so than the internet, placates them and programs them.
As the demographic that advertisers have determined are most willing and able to spend on stupid shit sold in grocery stores, strip malls and whatever other means, the entire television media is cowed to pandering this portion of society. They pander to the point of lying and isn’t that part of selling anyway?
Like a salesman that grooms his potential hit for months, these people are the greatest suckers alive, thinking themselves brilliant, productive and worthy of owning the bulk of cultural direction in society.
White folks have co-opted every damn thing that has come through the pike in this country from the very folks they claim to despise, that will threaten their cultural purity, such as jazz music, hip-hop, barbecues, porches on the fronts of houses (came from the African slaves), call and response spirutuals, to even important technology and inventions.
These people truly believe they are the shit and the substance of the American identity because that ‘truth’ is broadcast into their ignorant ears constantly.
They also have a raging contempt for books. I can’t tell you how many times people marvel at the fact that I haven’t graduated college but have a library of at least 2,000 books, play the piano collect art and genuinely love living a life of learning but live in the city and haven’t a dime to my name.
What? Say you? They have no shame about traveling across the desert to protest their hatred of government programs to a government that simultaneously feeds them and wipes their hemorrhoidal asses. They earned it.
You and me, we didn’t so we just need to like, shut the fuck up and go away already.
Please excuse my poor grammar, I write while being interrupted by interlopers asking me dumb questions whilst the Beatles is thumping in my headphones.
That excuse works right?
Joseph Schrombone, the great Austrian economist, teacher of Rainer Schlarinet and protege of Hans-Jurgen Schaxophone, observed that the first thing a man would do for his ideals is change them. Nowhere is this more true than when defending America’s burgeoning, efflorescing, mushrooming socialest halfbreed muslin welfare cheat cadillac juggernaut colossus oh fuck it.
Anyway.
I was just thinking though that the people who are all “56% of the country is against HCR and no Republicans voted for it and blah blah blah” can’t really be the same people who constantly point out, like a fourth grader who gets beaten up by his classmates and believes it’s because they are jealous, that the US is a “republic and not a democracy” as if that made sense to say, can they?
that the US is a “republic and not a democracy” as if that made sense to say, can they?
And when you ask those people how that republic works when you want the reps to know what you need, they git all, “wait til the next election and shut the fuck up.” kinda thing, because protestin is an unamerican, librual leftie, pinko commie thing to do.
Until some fool in a Rascal scooter decides he wants to be a rightwing hippie type which he knows is so cool these days, like the American flag duct taped to the back of his scooter chair.
adfasdf my comments are eaten
Really, the rethuglicans are desperately trying to control the damage the teabaggers might do to the incumbent neocons. they throw organizers and cash at them, hoping to keep them stimulated enough to show up on election day. hoping dick armey is really in control, but twunts like JD Haworth are threatening the party structure, and the wants of unaffiliated voters
“hoping dick armey is really in control, but twunts like JD Haworth are threatening the party structure, and the wants of unaffiliated voters”
Like you are saying that the Republican’s tattered old letterman’s sweater is coming unraveled from the bottom and the collar is just wincing in fear as the strands release into the wide open space of anarchy?
“HELLth”! I get it! Ha ha hahahahaha haha ha ha ha HA ha HAHAHAHA ha ha ha! HELLth! HA HA HA HAHA hahahahahahahaha! Because ensuring that people don’t die of treatable conditions in the most obscenely wealthy nation on the planet is exactly the kind of thing Satan would come up with to torture people! Ha ha hahahahaha ha ha! HELLth! HELL! Ha! HA HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA JUST END THE FUCKING WORLD NOW PLEASE GOD.
Don’t worry Jack, you’ll stop spinning as soon as the sweater is fully undone, then you can rest.
You have to admit that “HELLth” is the cleverest rightie wordplay since “porkulus.”
Quite more stock than wood, I’d imagine.
I have seen a real live X-Ray of the Aqua Net up the bum. Like an actual original or duplicate of the film in question. Insanity.
Stay away from the brown
acidshirts.aw man!!! I am a Liberal, and this depresses me. It’s bad enough that the Right Wing has all the best looking gals, did you ever see Ann Coulter: va va voom!!!!, and the brightest thinkers like Professor Glenn Beck and Billy, the Kid Kristol, and they have some of the fattest and reddest faced people who do not appear to do anything for a living like Breitbart and Erickson,
but now the truth is out: the Right has the most talented musicians also!!!!
I knew they had the next generation of talented Negros, like Clarence Thomas and Lloyd Marcus, but the USS of A, which means we will be the USSR except we will keep our “of” mysteriously, showcases two of this country’s most talented young performers in the seedy looking 60 something tea-bagger and his 50 something blond bombshell woman.
If Tea baggers throw a real Woodstock, and they have entertainment like this, I am afraid I will join them…
Maybe fatso the Drug Addict Hedonist Three time divorcee Family Values Bachelor Non-Father will make a new recording of “That Mule, Old Rovers, and Me”.
We can only hope….
“..and all around entertainer, Lloyd Marcus”? As they say on SNL. “REALLY?, REALLY?”
And he is NOT African American. No he is a dancing Negro in front of an all white audience
How pathetic.
Not getting out of the boat, and what is it with conservatives that they have to rip the Negro liberals off by co-opting first “-gate” and now “-stock”?
Have they never had an original thought?
The Shadow can only mock, it cannot make.
Why didn’t they just call it “Stockstock” (or “Woodwood”)?
Either way, it was for those colloquially known as “deaf as a post.”
(Or dumb as a Bush.)
Old people rioting is an ugly sight.
Molotov Ensuretails.
If they held it at night with some burning torches, it would probably resemble the Nuremburg Rally.
—–
The Wingnut Cheer & I-Feel-Like-They’re-Fixin’-To-Die Rag
Gimme an T!
T!
Gimme an B!
B!
Gimme an A!
A!
Gimme an G!
G!
What’s that spell ?
TEA PARTY!
What’s that spell ?
TEA PARTY!
What’s that spell ?
TEA PARTY!
Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs our help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Cuz commies are making us a fascist land
So burn their books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I’m dumb as canned ham,
Next stop is fascist land;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Rally round Orly Taitz,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! they’re all gonna die.
Well, come on armchair generals, let’s move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and get those reds —
The only good commie is the one who’s dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I’m dumb as canned ham,
Next stop is fascist land;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Rally round Orly Taitz,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! they’re all gonna die.
Huh!
Well, come on Wall Street, don’t move slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go.
There’s plenty good money to be made
By destroying the economy but have your bonus still paid,
Just hope and pray that at the next meltdown,
You and your money get out of town.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I’m dumb as canned ham,
Next stop is fascist land.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Rally round Orly Taitz,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! they’re all gonna die.
Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack up and go to fight fascist land.
Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
Give ’em hell and tap into your hate.
Who will fire that inevitable shot,
To send that boy back home in a box.
And it’s one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I’m dumb as canned ham,
Next stop is fascist land.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Rally round Orly Taitz,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! they’re all gonna die.
Their corporate overlords…now that’s a different story. Any whippersnappers got a plan for dealing with Rupert Murdoch and the FOX empire, other than hoping he’ll die soon and the castle will be cracked from within by underlings fighting for supremacy?
Start harassing Congress to bring back the old FCC rules against media conglomerates?
Cerberus, I’m confused, when did you meet my in-laws?
But in all seriousness, well said.