NATHAN, YOU BASTARD! I've got a cold, my head is filled with cement (big improvement really, yesterday it was filled with battery acid), and it hurts like a bitch to laugh out loud. But you went and posted this quote anyway. Oh well, I don't suppose you knew about my head and all.
Speaking of historical (hysterical?) revisionism, the other day I read something in the local fish-wrap's editorial page about how leftists during the Vietnam war got extra special leniency from American courts when they were being tried for "bombing laboratories" (I only remember one laboratory, actually) because protesting the war was politically correct. I swear, no kidding, that's what it read. Made my eyes bug out to read that.
> Yet today, if you say the "wrong thing," you suddenly have legal
> problems, political problems, you might even lose your job or be
> expelled from college. Certain topics are forbidden. You can’t
> approach the truth about a lot of different subjects. If you do, you
> are immediately branded as "racist", "sexist", "homophobic",
> "insensitive", or "judgmental."
Right there what this Weyrich fella is saying is that racism, sexism and homophobia reflect "the truth." Thus, the "truth," according to Weyrich, tells us that a.) women are way inferior to Christian Whitemen, b.) nigras are too, and c.) homos are, argh ack grrrgh KILLEM ALL! Whoa! Glad you spelled that right out for us, Weyrich you f*****g lunatic.
This is how I read Weyrich's letter. On the surface, it sounds like Weyrich and his racist, sexist, homophobic troops are throwing down their guns and running for cover. It would be nice if it were the case but it's not. Hell, no, they still are scheming as hard as ever to get a Taliban majority elected. This letter of his is just a deliberate snow job. Weyrich is spouting this incredible nonsense for two reasons; to lull the "left" (from where he stands, that's about two thirds of the American public) into relaxing and dropping their guard, and to excite his followers by playing upon their self-pity and sense of being a persecuted minority. I can believe that Weyrich would like lots of obtuse Bible-thumpers to buy into his absurd, whiny fantasy. But I really can't be so optimistic to convince myself that Weyrich or any of his fellow professional ideologues actually believe this crap himself. No, this is propaganda and nothing else. Weyrich speaks with forked tongue. I don't intend to let my guard down for a second.
I want to talk about television.
> ...The same thing is happening in other areas. Some people are getting
> rid of their televisions.
Seems like that would be a mistake on Weyrich's part to encourage this tendency, as TV is clearly the servant and tool of capitalism. On the other hand, he probably realistically does not in the least expect his disgusting racist, sexist, homophobic followers to kick their hopeless, universal TV addiction - he's just saying this for effect.
In addition to this I just read (in that page to which Curtiss Leung referred, http://www.crusader.net/texts/bt/bt02.html ), that TV as we know it is a Marxist plot, created with the evil intent of wiping out our classic Western culture. (How true! Back in 1910, all [white, male, hetero] Americans were well-read intellectuals who whiled away their spare hours reading Plato and Euripides in the original Greek. Now we're, most of us, sub-literate "Baywatch" watchers. Why, even some of the finest minds of my generation openly admit to being "Buffy" fans. Good Lord, How We've Fallen.) But hey wait! it turns out we Satanic Kommies do not control TV - advertisers, that is to say, exceedingly wealthy capitalists trying to market their wares for profit, do. It is glaringly obvious that TV exists to sell stuff. That's all it's there for.
This is so simple: TV is a great big business, and any business stays in business by keeping the customers satisfied. Customers are, by definition, the people who lead with the cash. TV watchers, who get the shows they watch for free, are NOT the customers. It's advertisers who pay. Most people to whom I've made this observation (and I've thrown out this none-too-deep notion out in front of lots of people) are surprised at first by the assertion that they are not the customers. Don't the networks seem to go to a lot of trouble to keep the viewers happily tuned in? But when I say, "He who pays the piper calls the tune, and it's the advertisers, not the watchers, who pay," usually convinces them, as it's simple common sense. The advertisers are the customers, so they determine, one hundred percent, what get shown on TV and what doesn't.
Make that ninety nine percent. When a feed store sells a cattle rancher feed for his cows, you really can't assert with a straight face that the cows are the feed store's customers! But if the cattle rancher puts rocks and gravel, instead of hay, in front of his cattle, they won't eat it, they'll starve, and the rancher will lose money rather than making a profit. Similarly, when the TV customer, the advertiser, determines the content of the "show" itself, that is, the filler part between commercials, he is required to present something that we TV-watching cattle who make up the viewing audience will willingly choke down.
Make that ninety eight percent. Another dilemma for the TV customer is that your typical corporate executive is no more capable of writing and filming an entertaining fiction show to serve as filler between commercials than I am capable of playing bass like Mingus. All too often he finds himself forced to hire actors and actresses of dubious sexual and ideological purity, but considerable physical beauty, to keep his audience glued to their sofas. That's show biz! And as much as that executive may despise and distrust the creative artists in the TV business, he has to go to them to get scripts and stuff. Even during the Joe McCarthy days, the TV industry still had to sneak those Kommie script-writers in the back door, because they had to get scripts somewhere, and Republicans just plain can't write screenplays. (During McCarthy's tantrums there were dozens of scripts attributed to, I forget the psuedonym but it was some Hispanic-sounding name, I think. This was an open secret, right? At least all the insiders in the TV and movie business must have been aware that they were buying material from the very people on McCarthy's black-list. I'm sure they must have recognized specific black-listed writers by their writing style.) This means that the script-writers themselves have a limited scope to express sentiments that may be subversive to the interests of the advertisers, though that latitude is tightly circumscribed.
Make that ninety seven percent, because finally, the products of the TV networks are censored by governments. If not, imagine the kind of raw, undiluted pornography we'd have seen on Fox TV this last year - for example, prime-time studio reenactments of Oval Office blowjobs, complete with close-ups, stop action and instant replays - and think about the ratings they'd have generated, think about the hypnotised bugeyed hordes who'd have lined up to see redhot lurid smut like that, think of all those viewers sponging in advertising material through those dilated pupils; it's got to break an ad-man's heart to contemplate the lost opportunity, if only! But alas there is a limit to what even Rupert Murdoch can get away with putting on viewers's TV screens.
Here the TV customers, the advertisers, are openly at war with Weyrich's sex-fearing fundamentalists. They are constantly pushing the censors's envelope, because every shocking new bit of hitherto unseen TV lewdness translates instantly into millions of dollars in advertising revenue. (E.g., the first TV show starring gyrating topless dancers who are actually undercover vice cops will have killer ratings. The second's ratings will be so-so.) But isn't it a bit of a stretch to accuse the executives of America's biggest corporations of being Marxists on a secret mission? No, though the TV customers qualify all too well as Satanists, you can't accuse the TV customers of Marxism, not hardly, not when their anthem goes:
Give me money, that's what I want
That's what I want, that's what I want
That's what I want, oh yeah
That's what I want
PS to Frances - just say NO!
PS to Angela (rc-am) - I got to thinking about your reply, but I'm still thinking about it. You want to know something weird I dug up upon reflection? The idea of watching TV is that you are supposed to project yourself into the personality of the good-guy character, or at least that you are supposed to root for him. When the good-guy is in peril, we're supposed to perch on chair's edge. When he is righteously angry, we are supposed to be too. When he triumphs, we're supposed to fist the air and yell, "Yeah! I won!" Conversely, we're supposed to hate the bad-guy. Right? Now here's what's wrong with me as a TV consumer. When I see the good-guy, I fail to empathize, because what I really always see is a puppet on the hand of an advertiser. And I am allergic to advertisers, hate 'em all. So I just can't enjoy TV shows the way, as a loyal American, I ought to do. Thus it would be phony for me to claim that I am above TV-watching, in the same way it would be phony for a blind man to claim that he's too noble to enjoy the low pleasure of gaping at Playboy centerfolds. But what's weird is that I do react "properly," viscerally, sweat, nerves and all, to the bad-guy. So at least while I'm watching, they suck me in with that aspect. I think I need to get my head examined. Or maybe I just need to continue what I do now, which is basically, never watch TV at all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net