06.30.09
Wal-Mart is hoping the alligator will eat it last
The retail giant gets behind TCM’s socialist health-care plan.
Just in time to vote yay on cap-and-trade
The Minnesota Supreme Court decides for Al Franken for the Senate seat. The program director for the failed Air America network and former Saturday Night Live writer puts the Freedom Haters over the top at 60.
The grim reality of totalitarianism is upon us. The internal front in the current world war just became a whole lot harder for the forces of freedom to wage battle on.
That doesn’t mean we give up.
Dude, your fifteen minutes are up
Sanford has reached that point in a scandal cycle at which he compounds the self-embarrassment with each utterance. Goopy group-therapy-speak and detailed discussion of his feelings (his fling was “a love story” but he’s “trying to fall back in love with his wife”) and further revelations of his barely containable horniness. And, of course, some God talk. (What was supposed to be the breakup ws “chaperoned” by a “spiritual advisor,” but then he subsequently went to Buenos Aires to see her again).
Tell it to Oprah, pal. On second thought, please don’t.
Doesn’t he have a really close friend who can get through to him and tell him to resign, shut his pie hole and do his puking all over himself in a counselor’s office?
One thing I’m glad about is that this came to light before the 2012 election cycle got underway.
The Aquarian Totalitarian waxes incandescent
TCM has a lot on his plate, but he’s never too busy to tell Americans what kinds of light bulbs they will use.
06.29.09
Numbers to make your head swim
An important Washington Post editorial entitled “The Debt Tsunami.”
The only comment I’d make on the editorial itself is that the last paragraph smacks of the chin-rubbing east-coast mentality for which publications like the WashPo are famous. This isn’t just a case of TCM failing to get serious about debt in the same manner as previous debt-incurring presidents. We’re talking about a president who, in six months, has blown all previous debt records out of the water, with more wacky schemes coming down the pike seemingly by the hour.
It’s a failure on the chin-rubbers’ part to see that TCM is up to something else entirely besides presiding over what we have all known as the United States of America.
When is TCM cool with meddling?
When it’s in defense of the Honduran president, who tried to unconstitutionally hold a referendum on his continued rule. This puts the TCM administration, by the way, on the same side of this situation as the Castros, Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez.
Could TCM want to see this kind of tactic legitimized in case he needs to use it at some point?
And when is he not cool with meddling? When it might interfere with his messianic fantasies of charming a similar regime in Iran into giving up its nukes. Axelrod says talks with the blood-stained mullahs still possible.
06.28.09
No polar bear experts welcome
There’s some kind of polar bear study group meeting in Copenhagen to draft a report that will go into the UN’s next big “climate change” report. A polar bear expert who has pointed out that the species has seen a population increase to “optimum levels” has been told to stay away.
The EPA spikes data that show the fallacy of anthropogenic global warming, now the UN.
The regime can’t have you know that it’s suppressing the truth before it rams cap-and-trade through the Senate.
It’s beyond something to be angry about
It’s time to be really afraid of this Stalinist regime that has siezed power in what used to be recognizable as the United States of America.
The House passed the biggest tax increase and one-stop curb on your freedom in our nation’s history this afternoon. They did so even as the EPA cover-up of evidence showing anthropogenic climate change to be a bunch of hooey was coming to public attention, thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
These – is people an appropriate word? – hate the fact that you’re free and that you don’t feel desperately dependent on them for your basic comfort and safety. It’s clear now that they will stop at nothing. They never think about the United States of America in the sense the you and I mean that term. They are after something else entirely, and they came a step closer to getting it this afternoon.
I never had any use for anything “green” before this. Now it’s a matter of where one stands in the war we’re in.
06.26.09
TCM thinks he can find all kinds of money for his nanny-state socialist initiatives
. . . but not a penny for the F-22 and F-35 fighter jet programs, which, combined, don’t cost one percent of TCM-care, or the stimulus package, or even the defense budget.
Our masters are in a hurry to ram this thing down our throats because word is getting out that it’s based on a lie
Pundit and Pundette has a nice roundup of links regarding the shift in consensus on global warming and the number of meteorologists and other scientists who are willing to speak up.
Today may be the death-knell for your freedom
I’m not exactly sure what a test vote is, but the America-destroyers won one today regarding the energy bill which comes up for an actual vote later today.
By this evening we should know whether totalitarianism and permanent economic decline are our future or whether the United States of America has a chance for a phoenix-like return from oblivion.
This thing is another one of those thousand-plus page behemoths that no legislator has had time to read because the commandantes say it’s urgent to pass it now. Neal Boortz made a good analogy a while ago on his radio show. He said they are in a hurry for the same reason a burglar is in a hurry while he’s in your house.
Michael Jackson, R.I.P.
I’ve often cringed at admitting it over the years, but the guy was a cultural game-changer. He loomed over music, fashion, sexuality and the spiritual void in the public’s consciousness for thirty years.
I say “cringed” for what I hope are obvious reasons. His impact was, on the whole, not a good one. He went beyond the arrested development observed in such detail in Diana West’s book Death of the Grownup and Joseph Epstein’s essay “The Perpetual Adolescent.” What Michael Jackson mainstreamed was a regressive escapism, a retreat into unsustainable and almost infantile fantasy.
The Jackson phenomenom started out, as we know, as a subset of Motown. That was not destined to last too long. For one thing, the tension between the Jackson patriarch, who had used up the hours of his sons’ childhoods drilling their musical licks and dance steps into them, and Berry Gordy, founder of the Motown empire, was palpable and demanding resolution. Also, the golden age of Motown was really over by the time Gordy signed the Jackson 5, the first act to come out of the family. Gordy had moved corporate headquarters out of Detroit in the wake of the 1967 riots and relocated in Los Angeles, which was in the process of becoming the place where all music went for homogenization. The early Jackson 5 hits were penned by a songwriting team called “The Corporation,” but, while they were solid turn-of-the-decade R&B, had none of the distinctive qualities wrought by the golden-era Motown tunesmiths, such as Holland-Dozier-Holland, who had moved on by then, or Strong and Whitfield, or Ashford and Simpson, or Smoky Robinson.
In any event, the main point of the act was the cute little kid with the pipes and the moves fronting the group. He was Frankie Lymon in bell bottoms. He set in motion the kind of American Idol relationship we have come to form with celebrities of the musical type. It was inevitable that a Saturday morning TV catroon based on him and his brothers would come along in short order.
By the mid-70s, when the group had left Motown and signed with Epic, its music was saddled with the irony of being fairly discernable as Jackson, but, since it had set the table for the direction of 70s R&B some half-decade earlier, not all that distinguishable from most other contemporary product.
Then came the relationship with producer Quincy Jones. Jones, of course, could produce a housefly buzzing and make it hit-worthy. A veteran harking back to the big-band era (he played in a Seattle unit in the late 40s that included Stanley Turrentine and Ray Charles), his producing career covered work with artists ranging from Big Maybelle to Frank Sinatra to Leslie Gore. Work under his own name showed that he was pointing the way to that whole smooth-jazz / urban-contemporary bag that continues to permeate the landscape today.
That’s pretty much what he crafted with Michael on the Off the Wall album in 1979. The point was to showcase the emergent young man, who was now lanky and lean, with chiseled features and an adams apple, a slick showman who looked great in a designer jacket.
Then came Thriller. The cover photo promised more of this direction, but the content inside indicated the onset of the regressivism mentioned above. The fluffy metrosexualism of “PYT,” the dumb riff that provides the hook for “Beat It” and the song’s public-awareness-announcement admonishment to the kids to walk away from street fights, and the cartoonish horror movie evocation of the title tune suggest that Jacko was moving at least back to the maturity level of his first public persona some twelve years earlier, and maybe even to something less developed still. (”Billie Jean” is, from a musical standpoint, the record’s best song, but its lyrics are about wanting desperately to be absolved from responsibility.)
At this point, he was such a good dancer and his “growing-up” process had been the focal point of such public fascination for so long that hisstardom was assured.
Doubts began to spread, however, as the nose became more pointed and the skin more blotched witheach surgical procedure. Record sales dropped off for subsequent albums. More and more eyes began to roll as giraffes and the like populated his ranch, Neverland. Then came the scandals – the short-lived marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the begetting of kids with a woman with whom he clearly didn’t have a normal intimate relationship, bizarre behavior with his kids, and allegations of pedophilic seduction with other people’s kids. Massive debt. The selling of Neverland. The years in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, sisters LaToya and Janet forged careers, churning out workmanlike modern R&B and behaving like tarts, which goes with the territory in modern R&B and dance music.
The cable-show coverage last night was more than I could bear. Lengthy discussions on the cultural significance of his one-glove look. Reactions from some of the most scurrilous pop icons to come along in the years since Michael on how he influenced them – scumbag no-talents like like Madonna and Wyclef Jean.
Many real heroes died this month in Iraq and Afghanistan, but our nation is reduced to finding something, anything, to say about the King of Pop – and a third-rate actress best known for her smile and her hair, and a guy who sat in a chair andplayed straight man to the Tonight Show host for thirty years – that will make us feel like our 24/7 obsession with these empty graven images is justified.
06.25.09
Trading in our freedom and prosperity for a worthless, dreamy vision
Waxman-Marky will be put to a vote in the House floor for tomorrow.
The Sanford matter
The guy can put on a heart-wrenching presser, can’t he? It was brimming with the requisite deep respect for the initial good intentions of his mistress to repair her own marriage, oozing with remorse for the spouse, sons, staff and state he let down, drenched in on-the-knees humble yearning to find a way back to spiritual health.
My favorite kind of movie is the noir-era morality play. Double Indemnity, A Place in the Sun, High Noon, Casablanca. They hinge on a moment in which a moral choice is set before someone with unmistakable clarity.
A lot of life is boring or exciting or stressful or interesting or funny or gratifying or whatever, but once in a while, it is uncompromisingly demanding. There are points along the vector at which we are called to make choices that tell God everything He needs to know about the quality of our souls. It’s not a matter of the “deep,” “complicated,” “untamed” nature we express as humans. The heart having its reasons and all that. that’s using the poetic stuff as a smokescreen for unvarnished spiritual failure.
What should Sanford do? He ought to resign as governor, completely remove himself from the public arena, and focus on the supremely uncomfortable work of repairing his role in his family.
At this point, a certain kind of BN reader will no doubt be interested in seeing if I have anything to say about Newt Gingrich, for whom I have expressed admiration on many levels. For the record, I think his failings in this regard disqualify him from seeking the presidency or other high public office ever again. I am curious as to how he and his daughter Jackie Cushman, with whom he recently wrote a book on the basic principles for a happy life, have forged a close relationship, given Newt’s tawdry treatment of her mother. Anybody out there know the inside scoop on this one?
I am also willing to believe that Newt’s conversion to Catholicism is his sincere desire to learn how to face his Lord squarely in all his shame and sinfulness and seek real forgiveness.
It’s also important to state that the behavior of a Sanford or a Gingrich in no way has anything to do with the principles they assert and defend in the realm of public-policy and cultural polemics. Free-market economics, a foreign policy that accounts for enemies, and, yes, the championing of Judeo-Christian values, are good and immutable whether espoused by saints or scoundrels.
When it comes to putting those principles into law or executive policy, though, we must insist on that being done by people who hold themselves to a higher standard than adulters with good minds and intentions.
06.24.09
Summer starts hot
North Korea threatens to wipe the United States off the globe if we – well, what? Enforce the sanctions that the Six-Way Talk parties got the UN Security Council to enact?
There are three current aspects to the North Korean situation: the Myanmar-bound Kang Nam, which we have good reason to believe is carrying a cargo of weaponry, which has just passed Shanghai, and is being shadowed, but not stopped and boarded, by the USS John McCain, the two journalists, whose fate is now directly in the hands of heir-apparent Kim Jong Un, and the upcoming Taepodong-2 test, aimed in the direction of Hawaii.
The regimes in Iran and North Korea are watching each other to see how best to taunt TCM. Is there any real question as to why the level of testing and taunting of the US president has gone up dramatically this year?
The effete and mush-headed gushers, the climate-change Kool-Aid drinkers, the Fairness Storm Troopers and the remnants of the hippies may have thought, and may still think, that TCM is some kind of “light worker,” a being so oozing with enlightenment and purity that a few utterances from his radiant mug will make turn the world into Big Rock Candy Mountain. The world’s thugs have no such illusions. They smell weakness and know that this is the moment to go for it.
If we squeak through this summer without experiencing truly unthinkable developments, we’ll still have the issue of a seriously diminished United States to deal with. The one blessing will be that TCM will be rendered so ineffectual that we won’t even bother to look to him as the go-to-guy for handling truly important stuff. There will be a vacuum that, hopefully, some truly American figure can fill.
It will be late in the game for such a realization, but that’s better than not realizing it at all.
