Run! It's an old liberal!

Don’t feel like ex-Texas Ranger John Reid if you’ve never heard of Frances Fox Piven. Neither had I. Blessed with a ‘Caldwellian’ IQ so high that I’m virtually unemployable, somehow Frances Fox Piven escaped my ginormous butterfly net. Reluctant to make excuses; let’s just say I wasn’t up to speed on burning sociological issues in 1966. Although a precocious nine year old, I failed to read Professor Piven’s The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty. I was probably too preoccupied trading Beatle bubble gum cards with Mary Alice Turley. (Mary Alice was ape over Paul and I was obsessed with Ringo, correctly deducing that he was the brains behind the operation).

A year later The Monkees replaced The Fab Four’s hold on Mom’s pocketbook. Hopefully this doesn’t sound too boastful, but I was Oakland Park’s only fifth grader to own authentic Monkee Wear. My tight striped pants and extra wide black belt (with equally wide buckle) distracted the usually shy Terri Combs away from the fraction’s dark mysteries. She whispered, “Muck, you’re so mod.”

The next day Billy James, Dale Knottraub and I formed a band. Although neither Billy nor Dale owned authentic Monkee Wear, both wore pointy black Beatle boots. Pointy black Beatle boots were cool but cumbersome if participating in recess activities, like running down girls and kick ball. Always the trend setter, I wore Chuck Taylor All Stars, even if the canvas icons could not be seen because tight, striped, pocket-less and very flared Monkee pants covered my little feet.

Billy was half Gypsy and half Oklahoma Indian. He marched to a different tom-tom. It was Billy’s idea to name our band The Comanches. I was looking to incorporate words like groovy or far out; Dale didn’t care as long as he was the lead singer. Mrs. McCune let us lip-synch I’m a Believer during music class. It was The Comanches' first and last gig. Billy moved on to pellet guns; Dale soon developed an all-consuming passion for rocks. After an afternoon of soul searching, I finally admitted that wearing Monkee pants greatly inhibited physical activities -- such as bike riding and bending over. As for my musical career, my parents made me take Hammond organ lessons from a giantess. I was later granted a pardon when I said the organ sounded like “dead people groaning.”

Had I traded my usual reading/ogling -- Mad Magazine and Dad’s not-so-cleverly stashed Playboy(s) -- for The Nation, maybe Professor Piven’s ungodly leftist assault on America’s economic system might have made a lasting pre-pubescent impression. Glenn Beck, who was two when Piven published her traitorous article, was obviously the wonder of Mt. Vernon, Washington. The future Victoria Jackson of progressive conspiracy theories pegged Professor Pevin as an anathema the same year high school freshman Rush Limbaugh could finally make poo-poo in the stool.

But it is odd that infant shock jock prodigies like Beck always time travel back 40-plus years to warn right-wing extremists of current left-wing extremism. It’s been some time since the Weather Underground planted bombs or the Black Panthers freaked out whitey. The SDS hasn’t overrun campus property since Maude made her sassy television debut. It’s scary to think what dirty deeds Glenn knows (God speaks through his chalk) the Grange have planned. Could be that 1893 will be a living hell for fat cat bankers and railroad men.

an ongoing conversation II

The Fox News narrative is coming together. It goes like this:

The massacre in Tucson that left six dead and thirteen wounded, including Congresswoman Giffords, is the act of a lone madman. Efforts by liberals to politicize the shooting are grossly unfair. Attempting to cast Jared Lee Loughner as a rightwing extremist is absurd; if anything, Loughner is a lefty. His Face Book page listed the Communist Manifesto as a favorite book, along with Mein Kampf, We the Living and Peter Pan. And he smoked pot. When you combine Marx, Hitler, Rand, Barrie and Tommy Chong you get the typical communist/anti-communist fascist Objectivist druggie, who is quite possibly a pedophile; in other words, a typical liberal Democrat. Loughner’s only redeeming quality is a fondness for semi-automatic handguns with extended round clips; (he must have acquired this positive trait from reading Hitler and Rand). However, had Loughner’s library included Going Rogue or rightwing propaganda published by Regency Press, drawing conclusions from what a madman wrote on his Face Book page is an irresponsible rush to judgment.

The real victims are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and every other rightwing pundit exercising his or her rights to incendiary free speech-for profit. Of course, brief condolences to those the Democrat lunatic murdered.
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This is the reason I stopped satirizing conservatism -- or whatever the fuck Fox is peddling. It’s certainly a constant drum beat of fear and loathing. I’m only half-joking when I write that it would be a seamless transition should Ailes replace Glenn Beck’s Woodrow Wilson/Progressive Fascism conspiracies with Manson’s Helter Skelter. Nuts is nuts. How did the party of Reagan become the party of Limbaugh? At what point did the Republican Party decide to let Clear Channel and Rupert Murdock run the show? There’s no rational explanation why national Republican leaders should fear pissing off a radio shock jock with a well-publicized arrest for prescription drug doctor shopping. What’s Limbaugh going to do if a Republican Congressman refuses to apologize for being truthful about the self-proclaimed Emperor’s nakedness, fire him? The subservient relationship between Limbaugh and supposedly serious lawmakers is a combination of Conrad’s Lord Jim and Kingsly Amis’ Lucky Jim. Thomas Pynchon is the only writer alive who could capture Republican Party politics with the right touch of post-modern absurdity and dense complexity.

The brandy must be refreshed -- and there is always more dirty laundry.

an ongoing conversation

I did something today that I haven’t done in seven months: I listened to Rush Limbaugh.

I stopped tuning-in because of a personal commitment to consciously limit my exposure to mendacious propaganda. I couldn’t do anything about the dark overtones that permeates political discourse, but I could tune-out premeditated malevolence. I’m embarrassed to admit that I wasted so much time wondering what lies the Father Coughlin of modern American conservatism would weave. Even though I knew Limbaugh was too clever to openly espouse his racist contempt against minorities or overtly encourage violence, I kept hoping for an unguarded Lonesome Rhodes moment when his inherent ugliness would be impossible for devoted sycophants to ignore. I forgot that two decades of dehumanizing human beings have anesthetized his brainwashed self-loathing audience.

Because Limbaugh -- and others who have traded decency for lucrative careers in dog whistle politics -- have saturated civilized conversation with divisive contempt disguised as “intellectual honesty” there is no longer a clear line separating acceptable from unacceptable speech. Hiding behind the First Amendment, the purveyors of what Dave Neiwert has labeled “eliminationist rhetoric” cry foul if called out for insinuating an existential enemy known as liberalism seeks America’s destruction. The traditional media gives them a pass, pretending there is a false equivalency between rightwing violence-laded language and what little remains of leftwing mass communication. Conventional Beltway wisdom insists on pretending “both sides do it” whenever an obvious example of unscrupulous venality becomes too toxic for easy dismissal. Bill O’Reilly was never held accountable for his constant slurs against the late Dr. George Tiller. Referring to Dr. Tiller as a “baby killer” for providing women legal abortions, O’Reilly played the victim card after Scott Roeder, a seriously disturbed pro-life fanatic, executed the doctor in his church -- for Christ's sake. After all, O’Reilly didn’t actually pull the trigger. He was simply exercising his rights to free speech by describing Tiller as a mass murderer. Who could argue that Joseph Stalin and Dr. Tiller didn’t share the same monstrous history? Only “pin headed” liberals would take “cheap shots” at O’Reilly for drawing such an obvious conclusion, right?

I listened to Limbaugh today to hear how the godfather of hate radio blamed last Friday morning’s carnage on me, a gun-adverse liberal. Like the rest of his well-financed “intellectually honest” true-blue patriots, Limbaugh is worried the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords is focusing unwanted attention on how he made his fortune. Because he and every other so-called conservative flame thrower share a common lexicon, Limbaugh is nervous public outrage could cause Beltway enablers to abandon the “both sides do it” equivocation. Worse yet, nervous Republican politicians might distance themselves and stop providing legitimacy for his stock-in-trade: vituperative personal attacks. Because Limbaugh has never been anything but a semi-educated shock jock/provocateur, he has always needed the veneer of establishment political power to embellish non-existent credentials. Without elected officials pretending he is Bill Buckley’s intellectual heir, the Wizard of Oz self-constructed persona floats away.

It is a dilemma he shares with Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, ad nauseam. I doubt if they could write a book, much less debate policy issues with any discernable expertise. Remove them from their hermitically-sealed cocoons, and the most widely admired conservative icons would be more adept at remaking the “Road to Bali” than addressing the country’s vexing problems.

I’ll continue this discussion tomorrow. It’s late and I need to finish laundry before Beloved slides home. Writing is a hobby; housework is my vocation.