A schoolmate of mine, a Christian conservative, once insisted that the reason our public school teachers informed us about Eskimos leaving their aged on the ice to die was to prepare the way for doing something similar to our oldsters.
That seemed like quite large dose of paranoia, to me. After all, also in public school we learned that Aztecs cut the hearts out of those they sacrificed to their gods. The pyramid steps of Teotihuacan ran red with blood. We were told this, I thought, because it was true. Could there have been an organ harvesting agenda behind the history lesson?
Seemed unlikely.
Before asserting a major conspiracy, it strikes me as worth addressing, openly, all aspects of the problem that might give birth to such concerns. Was euthanasia of the elderly in the future? Probably only when I get old, I thought, darkly. But seriously, why would it be considered?
Because of the expense, of course.
But whose expense?
This is lightly touched on in Thomas Sowell’s recent column, “A ‘Duty to Die’?”
Well, today I watched one such unintentionally hilarious (and notably revolting) “ridiculousness”: a John McCain television ad encouraging completion of “the danged fence.” In case you haven’t seen it or you have but want another snicker at McCain’s expense, here it is:
I often wonder the process by which commercials and political ads with such phony, contrived premises are approved for release to media markets. Does anyone really take seriously an actor dressed in doctor’s garb explaining the health benefits of the drug he or she is touting? Is this ridiculous, pretend, scripted conversation between McCain and some (possibly authentic) jack-booted tax leech any different? I picture some advisor or media consultant pitching the idea to his team, and instead of being laughed out of the room, those around the table exclaim, “Oh yeah! That will work!” and the project leader green-lights it with a confident “Let’s make it happen!” Somehow the commercial makes its way past the politician’s consultants and advisors without being vetoed, and finds itself in front of a focus group which… responds favorably? Unbelievable. I find such ads insulting prima facie. The contrived nature of the commercial combined with the claim that “the plan’s perfect” and “it will work this time” comprise its “hilarious” aspect.
The revolting aspect, of course, is the call to militarize the border (with National Guard troops), add another 3000 Border Patrol Agents, and wall up the border. This “perfect plan” fits with what I warned about in this post, specifically:
This isn’t to say that the United States doesn’t have an immigration problem. It does; or rather, it has a problem which the mass-invasion of the Mexican lower class exacerbates, namely the massive welfare state. “Fighting immigration” is simply another misguided, alleged “solution” to yet another unintended consequence of government interventionism. It’s stunning that Americans haven’t learned how dangerous it is to empower the government to “make them safer”, given the War on Drugs, which has left the Bill of Rights decimated, led to the incarceration of more citizens than any other country (both nominally and per capita), and taken the lives of many innocent people and their pets:
It’s certainly delusional to believe that militarizing the border won’t lead to similar atrocities — violations of person and property — and for what? All this so that the insidious welfare state doesn’t have to be dismantled? How sad.
The fury over Arizona’s new anti-illegal immigration law continues at a brisk boil, and it couldn’t come at a better time for filmmaker Robert Rodriguez. The 41-year-old Texan, himself of Mexican descent, is known for his gritty and graphically violent movies set in Mexico and featuring protagonists who seek bloody vengeance against those who have wronged them. Like his friend and collaborator Quentin Tarantino, Rodriguez is a fan of the pulpy, culturally exploitive action films of the 1970s; part of the fun of Grindhouse, the double-feature he and Tarantino directed, were the over-the-top trailers for films which didn’t exist…until now, at least.
Rodriguez has now expanded one of the trailers, for a film called Machete, into a full-length feature starring Danny Trejo, a fixture in many Rodriguez movies, including the family-friendly Spy Kids series in which Trejo also played a character named Machete. I hope parents don’t confuse that Machete with this one, however, as the new “illegal” trailer makes clear (warning: NSFW language and violence). In the new film, Machete is a former Federale and migrant laborer who drifts around Texas looking for work. He is hired by a businessman (played by Jeff Fahey) to kill a corrupt senator who’s trying to kick all of the illegal immigrants out of the state. But it’s all a setup; Machete is the patsy for a deeper conspiracy to whip up anti-immigration hysteria so that tough new laws can be passed without much protest. Machete then goes on the signature Rodriguez rampage of killing bad guys and scoring with hot women. As the voiceover in the trailer says, “They just f***ed with the wrong Mexican.”
The real fun may be in seeing this movie played out against an all-too-real backdrop of anti-illegal immigrant hysteria. The senator in Machete, played by Robert DeNiro, uses rhetoric not much different from that heard by officials such as Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, who warned of an epidemic of cop shootings by illegals after one of his deputies was wounded by suspected drug smugglers near the border. No evidence of such an epidemic exists — only one cop in Arizona has been killed by an illegal immigrant since 2008 — but the amplification effect of non-stop media coverage lends credibility to Babeu’s histrionics.
Then there’s the condemnation of forcibly removing illegals from the country, and the rallying of immigrants by Machete’s compadres to fight back, echoing the political and cultural backlash against Arizona’s new legislation. Even professional sports have gotten in on the act; the Phoenix Suns wore “Los Suns” jerseys on Wednesday to celebrate Cinco de Mayo and take a swipe at the immigration bill.
Whether Machete is just a Mexploitation flick using illegal immigration as a pretext for a gory revenge fantasy, or represents a deeper political statement by Rodriguez, won’t be known until the film is released in September. Of course it can be both; politics and pop culture often make strange, not to mention lucrative, bedfellows. Such is the wonder of American enterprise!
You’ve seen this story about a thousand times by now. Hard-hitting author pulls no punches in his/her newest book which exposes the elite for the scum they are.
My favorite part of this piece of ideological tripe is its title, which you have also seen about a thousand times before: ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Damaged Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.Is anyone in America not sick of this formulation by now? “Catchphrase: How This Thing I Hate is Stupid and Did Some Things I Disapprove Of.” Granted, these authors have absolutely nothing new to say, so it behooves them to give their best effort on the cover of the book.
But seriously, authors, how about we lighten up on how seriously we take our books. Not only will no one care about them in three years, but it’s not like they are even standing out in the market anymore. In less than twenty minutes of searching on Amazon I came up with these titles:
God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It
Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream
Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence”
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All
Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches
Big Lies : The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth
The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy
The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right
Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else
What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America
Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America
Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church
The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy
Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy
Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance
Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America
The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal
Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin
Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation
Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America
Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
. . . and I was nowhere near exhausting the supply of titles bearing this meme. I really despise this fad in publishing and writing, as should all true Americans. In fact, you can pretty much live by this rule of thumb: any book containing this kind of trope for its title is not worth reading, period.
The new website, “Honor Freedom,” is an example of conservatism at its most witless. It is an attempt to organize Americans to rehabilitate the reputation of George W. Bush.
The site’s author makes much of this “war president” and his alleged contributions towards our “freedom,” but what I remember about Bush is this: Prior to 9/11/01, Bush hardly uttered the word “freedom.”
His campaign chant may have been “A new freedom,” but it was just as duplicitous as Woodrow Wilson’s so-called “New Freedom.” That is, it had little to do with freedom. Wilson defended “free enterprise” when running for office, but defined this mainly by being a trust-buster. (Dubious honor in that.) Bush was for “free enterprise” mainly by pushing for decreased tax rates, but once in office he increased regulations, subsidies and encouraged the spendthrifts in Congress. (His veto power lied dormant, for the most part; federal spending ballooned.)
It’s mere pretense to suppose that increasing foreign military involvement abroad increases our “freedom.” But Bush wrapped himself up in the word, after 9/11, pretending that terrorists could take away our freedoms easier than could the government that he himself headed. The 9/11 attack, remember, took away lives, not freedoms as such. It was the government response — his response — that managed to take away freedoms.
And thus Bush played into Osama bin Laden’s game plan. Osama had extrapolated from his work in undermining the Soviet Union that, by organizing attacks upon America, the U.S. federal government would so overreact as to jeopardize its own position, transforming imperial America into imperious America, making it truly loathsome and thus easier to raise recruits among opponents, converting them to terrorism.
George W. Bush thus served as Osama bin Laden’s Useful Idiot. His reputation deserves not rehabilitation but a more thorough and generally acknowledged destruction.
