[lbo-talk] Don't sweat the Evangelicals

[Carl Remick]

>From: "Marvin Gandall" <marvgandall at rogers.com>
>
>On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
>FRANK RICH
>New York Times
>November 14, 2004
>
>.... The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is 
>among
>Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like
>the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug
>consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over 
>MTV.
>William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The
>Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears.
>Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and
>in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.

This is rich, so to speak -- about as stupid an observation as Chomsky's 
notorious remark that the US is "incomparably more civilized" than it was 40 
years ago.

What wonderful news!  Our ability to wallow in "excess and vulgarity" 
remains untrammeled despite the left's catastrophic failure to inhibit 
America's global war making or the ever more inequitable distribution of 
wealth.  I myself find US mass culture disgusting for the most part -- an 
unrelenting assault on human dignity and an appeal to what is most base in 
people.  MTV in particular is a prime example of what Thomas Frank has 
called the "commodification of dissent" -- for all its Woodstockian 
stylistic flourishes, MTV is mere money machine that is about as dionysian 
as the Financial Accounting Standards Board.  I see nothing to celebrate 
here at all.

Carl

P.S. Apologies for any chronological weirdness in my list replies.  Al Qaeda 
has apparently wormed its way into Hotmail's servers, and I've been having 
endless headaches with email delays recently.  At some point I guess I'll 
have to change to another email service ... or just send the list postcards 
(tasteful, of course).