Musings 10/29/13
We need a name—a handy label—for those times in life when your righteous cause is spoiled by idiots. It’s very difficult to criticize the presidency of Barack Obama, for example, and have it gain any traction because half of the people who publicly criticize the president are being overtly racist. The Affordable Health Care Act does not suck because it’s socialist. It sucks because it’s not socialist enough. The solution is the single-payer system. But that argument also has been smothered.Here’s another: Condoleezza Rice has been named to the panel that selects the teams that will play for the college football national championship, yet if somebody were to say that she doesn't deserve this or any other type of institutional position on account of she's a war criminal, the argument would get no attention because some dumbass named Pat Dye commenced the entire Rice debate by muttering, in the unfortunate hearing distance of somebody other than his hound dog, that she shouldn’t have the job ‘cause ladies don’t understand football.
We need a name for that.
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The Tea Party represents perhaps a final crisis of Conservatism. Some have attempted to use the philosophical assault by Ted Cruz and others to try to make the old-fashioned Taft/Eisenhower conservatives look more “moderate,” and of course then, more “sane” by comparison. I don’t see it that way. That the long-standing belief in limited government has stood up so poorly to this challenge from its most unhinged adherents should help to discredit the entire philosophy. The Conservative movement survived McCarthyism because Senator Joe was an increasingly-unfocused drunk, but this political animal will be just as opportunistic and a lot more disciplined. Cruz represents the final reality behind faulty conservative ideas. You can’t have a small government about fiscal matters and also have a small government about social matters because of capitalism’s irredeemable nature. Civil liberty requires a humanity that capitalism doesn’t and cannot possess.
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I once talked to the radiant actress Marcia Wallace on the phone. In my radio days, I called her and connected her for an on-air interview involving one of the many fundraisers she did in her life to help combat cancer. She was a native of Creston, Iowa.
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Moeller TV Festival 12 is coming to Des Moines Saturday, December 7th, and right on cue, new research from England indicates that watching TV makes you a better person, more altruistic. Researchers report (in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology) that viewers become more likely to emulate characters that evoke “admiration and aspiration,” but for this to be the case, the viewer has to first take time to reflect upon that visual text and their viewing experience. So the larger problem is not getting people to watch television, but forcing an attention-deficit culture to take the time to think about it. That’s where my brother Aaron and I come in. The Moeller Television Festival, making the world a better place since 2002.
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It’s time that movie stars Nicholas Cage and Leonardo diCaprio get out of the dinosaur collecting business. It’s impeding science. You don’t see Harrison Ford going to dinosaur bone auctions. And that’s probably because he played the guy that famously said “It belongs in a museum!”
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This op-ed, submitted to the New Statesman in England by actor Russell Brand on the topic of overthrowing our corrupt political system, demands to be read. It's incisive, thought-provoking, outrageous, and seriously the most fun you'll have reading any item this week. Cheers to England for producing a star with the social conscience of Russell Brand. Our movie stars steal dinosaur bones.
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"It belongs in a museum!"
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It’s hard to beat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series being played in the early part of a century.
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That mega-trade involving mega-millions of dollars last year between the Dodgers and the Red Sox-- a major salary add-on for L.A. and a major salary dump for Boston, created an extraordinary impediment to other MLB teams trying to win the World Series.
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Quote of the day: Russell Brand, 10/24/13, in the New Stateman, "Now there is an opportunity for the left to return to its vital, virile, vigorous origins. A movement for the people, by the people, in the service of the land. Socialism’s historical connection with spiritual principles is deep. Sharing is a spiritual principle, respecting our land is a spiritual principle. May the first, May Day, is a pagan holiday where we acknowledge our essential relationship with our land. I bet the Tolpuddle martyrs, who marched for fair pay for agricultural workers, whose legacy is the right for us to have social solidarity, were a right bunch of herberts if you knew them. “Thugs, yobs, hooligans,” the Daily Mail would’ve called them. Our young people need to know there is a culture, a strong, broad union, that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive. At this time when George and Dave pilfer and pillage our land and money for their oligarch mates, at this time when the Tories are taking the EU to court to stop it curtailing their banker pals’ bonuses, that there is something they can do. Take to the streets, together, with the understanding that the feeling that you aren’t being heard or seen or represented isn’t psychosis; it’s government policy.
"But we are far from apathetic, we are far from impotent. I take great courage from the groaning effort required to keep us down, the institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order. Propaganda, police, media, lies. Now is the time to continue the great legacy of the left, in harmony with its implicit spiritual principles. Time may only be a human concept and therefore ultimately unreal, but what is irrefutably real is that this is the time for us to wake up."
posted by CM @ 8:58 PM
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