The Soviet national anthem, as broadcast in 1984 on state television.
Here we see a vision of a mighty empire and a proud people. Here we listen to a soaring hymn to the glories of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In little more than seven years -- on Dec. 26, 1991 -- the Soviet Union ceased to be.
OUR AMERICAN national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," as broadcast in 1984 at the close of another broadcast day for Buffalo, N.Y.'s public television station.
Here we see a vision of a mighty empire and a proud people. Here we listen to a soaring hymn to the glories of "the land of the free and the home of the brave."
In little more than. . . .
Sic transit gloria mundi. Thus passes the glory of the world.
When I saw a link to an outraged post on one of Andrew Breitbart's "news" sites about what horrible things rat-bastard, "delusional" Krauts were saying about tea partiers in their rat-bastard, commie Kraut magazine, I jumped to an immediate conclusion.
I figure that whatever it was the Krauts said to so upset all the Right people, they must be on to something.
And sure enough, though the language was overbroad in parts of the Der Spiegel opinion piece, I thought this part of it could not have been more right.
If not Right.
But what is more appalling still, what is more shocking on so many levels, is the state of the nation -- the political stupidity of entire federal states and systems that seem hell-bent on self-destruction. Europe and the United States are much farther apart than many Europeans think. The US is different, completely and utterly different. Americans have a completely different understanding of social solidarity and the duties of the state. But there are also contradictions. Millions of Americans want to reduce the power of the government, because that's the way their countrymen have always thought. Yet these same Americans want their president to lead them out of crisis. They want railway stations, schools and clean energy, but they don't want to pay taxes. They are the descendants of immigrants, and proud of it, and they oppose immigration.
Decades of prosperity have made the US a lethargic country. And in contrast to Europeans, whose lives and countries have been shaped by war, Americans are accustomed to feeling unique and invulnerable. They therefore react with near paranoia to a powerful China or a black president. Americans know they need change, yet they fear change. Such attitudes may be called schizophrenic. They're certainly a recipe for hysteria.
The older, conservative German demonstrators who have recently been taking to the streets to protest against the controversial "Stuttgart 21" railway station project are the product of demographic change and their own fears. But the German protesters look absolutely harmless compared to America's hate-mongers, gun freaks and Tea Party demagogues who first compare Obama to Hitler and then minutes later to Stalin. They are people so filled with vitriol they can no longer think straight -- people like television presenter Glenn Beck, who says that putting the common good first is "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." Beck has millions of followers, and appears in public with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement, who gleefully pronounces Obama's middle name Hussein as if it were a naughty, menacing word. Just two years ago, such things would have been taboo, and considered below-the-belt by Republicans.
This is the new atmosphere in America, and it is reflected in the Senate and the House of Representatives, two self-confident bodies populated by two political parties that eagerly take turns holding the reins of power. They paralyze themselves with rules that demand unattainable majorities for everything that is important. And even the Constitution irrevocably decrees that a senator from sparsely-populated Alaska has the same rights as a senator from New York.
The German media alternate on a daily basis between talking about "Obama's victory" and calling him a "loser." But often neither view is accurate, because the president has little or no influence over much of what is done, or not done, in the US and its 50 federal states.
Of course the American media is largely responsible for the impression people get of President Obama as well as the state of the nation as a whole. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's TV news channel, has come to specialize in partisan mudslinging. Four of the potential future Republican presidential candidates are on Fox's payroll. The liberal channels are only different -- they are no longer any better. CNN has atrophied into a soapbox for journalist presenters. There is no analysis anymore on American TV, and little news -- only polemical attacks and shouting delivered in 90-second chunks.
SOMETIMES, distance provides clarity. And always, not actually being in the middle of a nervous breakdown is the best perspective for determining that a nervous breakdown is what's ailing someone.
In this regard, Klaus Brinkbäumer has identified the problem perfectly. His German readers ought to be worried that, in this case, the emotionally unstable basket case controls a big chunk of the global economy . . . and, by the way, is armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weapons.
If you're a little girl in Ashland, and if you want to try your hand at junior cheerleading, you can grow up to shake your butt for the astronauts. And if you don't want to shake it for the youth-football crowd, the cheerleader coach will kick your unshaking butt right off the squad.
Because the "shake your booty" cheer is a real "crowd-pleaser." Make of that what you will when 5- to 11-year-old girls are involved.And note that the NBC version of the video package originally shot by Omaha's WOWT television artfully cuts away before the little girls shake their butts at the camera.
HERE'S SOMEof the story from the Today show on NBC:
“It just felt wrong. I don’t know why,” Faylene Frampton said Wednesday during an interview on TODAY with Tamron Hall. “It just didn’t feel it was a cheer that was appropriate for kids of my age or younger.”
The sixth-grader from Ashland, Neb., says she complained to cheerleading coach Tina Harris in the past that she did not feel comfortable with the cheer, which is number 33 in the squad’s 44-cheer routine.
The cheer calls upon Faylene and younger members of the squad — including some in the second grade — to turn their backs to the bleachers, bend over, and move their pelvises from side to side.
The cheer had been used in the past, but Faylene says never liked doing it and told the coach so. So when Harris gave the signal for “shake your booty” on Oct. 10, the third-to-last game of the season, she decided it was time to put her foot down — both of them, actually — and take a stand.
Faylene, the oldest and most senior of the junior cheerleaders, refused to do the cheer and was sent home. Later, her father was informed by the coach during a phone call that Faylene was being benched for the last two games for disrespecting the coach.
(snip)
Coach Harris told the local NBC affiliate that she didn’t find the cheer sexually suggestive or objectionable, but nonetheless dropped it from the last two games. She added that no one had complained about the cheer before, and that explaining the controversy, and her decision to bench Faylene for the remainder of the season, was difficult.
BUT NOT as "difficult" as just not having little girls shake their butts at adults in the stands of an elementary-school football game.
"Shaking it" is one thing. People dance; little kids dance. It's cute when they do.
But little girls, some as young as 5, turning their posteriors to the stands -- bleachers filled with adults -- and "shaking it" at the crowd is entirely another.
As a Catholic who has worked with kids at church -- and as someone who has completed the now-mandatory "safe-environment" training -- that is not something I'd be comfortable letting high-schoolers do for an audience, much less forcing preadolescents to do under penalty of banishment. Maybe if everybody were doing the "Hokey Pokey" or the "Chicken Dance," but certainly not chanting "Jump! Shake your booty! Jump! Jump! Shake your booty!"
In other words, what the hell is wrong with this overgrown teenager they have "coaching" little girls in Ashland how to be cheerleaders?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist -- or an astronaut -- to refrain from teaching junior cheerleaders how to "shake it" like junior streetwalkers.
If you were alive in 1987, I don't think there was any way you didn't hear Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again."
If you were male in 1987, there probably wasn't any way you were going to forget Tawny Kitaen, either.
AS A MATTER of fact, this was a pop-culture reference that made it -- big time -- into Bowling for Soup's 2004 video for "1985." (And, no, that's not an older Tawny Kitaen in the video. The actress' name is Joey House.)
I'm with Debbie in the video. There are worse places to be stuck than 1985. Or 1987, for that matter.
I was starting to think that Great Britain had locked up all the good political parties.
So imagine my delight to see that, in last night's New York gubernatorial debate, the only candidate who made any sense whatsoever was Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party.
Not only that, if you go to the party's website, you'll be greeted by the most danceable campaign theme song ever. A stone-cold jam.
From what little I could tell from the above video, The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party is the most entertaining thing to hit Western politics since this:
That's right, the rent is too DAMN high. Especially on landless peasants.
Jonah Goldberg is fond of railing about "liberal fascism" -- in fact, he wrote a whole book about it called . . . wait for it . . . Liberal Fascism.
No doubt, there are liberal fascists. No doubt, there also are conservative ones -- including lots of people Jonah Goldberg likes to hang out with. No doubt.
But what about more interesting social and political forms of deviance. Like, what if Jonah Goldberg put together a panel of conservative policy wonks -- and we're talking a regular right-wing version of the Adams College Tri-Lambs here.
And what if one of Jonah's nerds was hell-bent on, er . . . revenge.
There's no bigger mojo in this perilous, unforgiving jungle of job hunting than a college degree.
In an economy like this, a degree from a respected institution of higher learning can mean the difference between a safe haven among civilized, productive people . . . and sitting in a big pot amid hungry cannibals, wondering "Is this water getting hot, or is it just my nerves?"
No, you can't overstate the importance of a college diploma. Take this one, for example (above).
No, take this one.
Listen, it takes four years and a lot of money -- money you likely don't have, not these days -- to get that piece of paper that tells super-picky employers "Me am smart. Me can does job!"And in a world where nobody knows what tomorrow may bring . . . in a world where you need to grab an elusive position while the grabbing's good, you don't have four years to putz around getting "educated."
Well, friend, I can help.
For the low, low price of $2,500 -- less than the cost of one year at a cut-rate public institution of higher learning -- you can bean official 1984 graduate of Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.
Upon receipt of an envelope stuffed with cash, or a U.S. Postal Service money order (no checks, please), I will send you this bachelor of arts degree in journalism from Louisiana's flagship university. A journalism degreewill open to you the doors of a lucrative profession.
Or, if you prefer, this authentic LSU diploma also is an excellent entrée to graduate studies or law school.
And you can be more than yourself not in four years, but in just the time it takes the mailman to bring me your payment, then deliver to you your official Louisiana higher-ed diploma. (One caveat -- it will be immensely helpful if you can pass for a 49-year-old man. The degree is from 1984, after all.)
I KNOW . . . I know. Right about now, you're thinking, "Favog, this is fraud!"
Well, of course it is, you twerp! This degree is from LSU, which is (DUH!) located in Louisiana, and fraud is how things work down there.
For instance, Louisiana voters every four years elect the most plausible-seeming crook out of a field of several crooks, and then the newly-elected crook fraudulently pretends to govern, and the citizens fraudulently pretend to care.
Each year, the fraudster-in-chief brings his plan for not governing before a bunch of less-accomplished frauds (this is called the Legislature), and they pretend to deliberate over shyster pieces of legislation, then sell their votes to the highest bidders, and it all eventually results in the fraud of a governor signing the fraudulent legislation into a joke of a "law." Then things really get screwed up.
There's a method to this madness, and it is this: You can't run on a platform of "fixing" things unless things first have been rendered completely FUBAR. It's like the water cycle, only government. It's a very "green" process, actually.
Now, under this "government" thing in Louisiana, politicians pretend to set up institutions of elementary, secondary and higher education. Of course, none of them educate anybody worth a damn -- that would screw up everything. Remember, in the economy of government-by-fraud, a little education is dangerous . . . and a lot is g**damned catastrophic, you bloody fool!
Besides, education is among those things that must be "fixed," so politicians can run for office on a platform of lying to voters lying about wanting "fixes" about actually "fixing" them.
Did you get all that?
SO, don't think of purchasing a used degree from me as "fraud," per se. Think of it instead as obtaining a perfectly valid college degree the same way LSU student athletes do. Or legislators' brothers-in-law. One or the other.
It's just the "Louisiana way."
One caveat, however. Act quickly, because the perceived worth of this genuine 1984 LSU journalism BA is likely to decrease markedly next summer. That is due to the havoc unfortunate economic circumstances are playing with the state's official Ponzi scheme, which in some states is referred to as "the budget."
This disruption -- bravely papered over for several years through truly heroic fraudulence on the part of Gov. Bobby Jindal and legislators -- most likely will mean debilitating budget cuts, thus rendering plausible deniability impossible if some suspicious potential employer were to wave a newspaper in your face, screaming "That LSU degree of yours ain't worth s***!"
But that's why I'm letting this authentic LSU diploma -- complete with a leatherette case at no additional charge -- go for just $2,500, a full 75 percent off the regular price. You still get a real college degree, with a good eight to 10 months to parlay it into a decent job.
I, meantime, can recoup something out of the thing while there's still some value left. In Louisiana, we call this "Everybody wins!"
You do a little somethin' for me, and I do a little somethin' for you. It's a system that works . . . if you don't worry too much about the meaning of "works."
But, once again, act now. Sooner or later, Gov. Jindal will return to the Gret Stet from his 49-state "GOP: Fool for Me" concert tour, the legislature will convene . . . and LSU will turn into a pumpkin at 12:01 a.m., July 1, 2011.
NOW THAT'Sjust between you and me (wink). It won't reallybe Louisiana State Community College until the carpetbagger feds make 'em change the name because of damn-Yankee "truth in advertising" laws.
So buy today! Remember, "what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
Long ago, in a universe far away, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web.
There was a primitive Internet in this primitive universe, and there were extremely slow telephone modems, and there were Commodore 64 computers, too. Likewise, there was a service called Quantum Link.
A few years later, you would know it by a more familiar name -- America Online. Which is now AOL.
Which is kind of peripheral to what we do on the Internet.
Once upon a time, though, this promotional video was selling us what we imagined to be a George Jetson world, and today was barely imaginable.
If you watched the Nebraska-Texas football game Saturday, it became clear to you that something was horribly wrong with the Huskers.
Of course, we all chalked it up to nerves. To anxiousness. To the Huskers letting their brains slip into R (Revenge) before ever engaging in D (Drive the @#$%!*% ball down the #$%!@*+&! field, you jerks!).
Face it, we just chalked it up to Husker coaches yet again letting Mack Brown and his Tejas 22 get under their skins and into their heads.
Of course, we are fans. That means we are wrong. Horribly, embarrassingly, ignorantly and knuckle-draggingly wrong. Just ask NU Coach Bo Pelini.
No, really. Coach Bo explains it all in Sunday's Omaha World-Herald.
IT WASN'T emotion, or nerves or anything like that. See?
Bo Pelini says the outside influences did not factor, that emotion played no role Saturday for Nebraska and that the Huskers again lost to Texas only because they failed to make plays.
A mountain of evidence from this 20-13 UT win suggests another conclusion: that NU wanted it too badly.
How else to explain the three dropped touchdown passes? Or the opening seven minutes that included uncharacteristic missed tackles and a key fumble by senior Roy Helu? It led to a 10-point hole from which NU never climbed.
“A terrible start,” said Pelini, who dropped to 1-4 in October home games as the Nebraska coach.
AND HUSKER receivers dropping something like 873 passes during the game -- about four of them sure touchdowns? It couldn't be nerves, or . . . PSYCH!!!
Nuh uh.
In this doomed series of Big 12 heavyweights, frustration climaxed for Nebraska on Saturday as Texas improved to 4-0 in Lincoln since 1998.
The Longhorns (4-2, 2-1) won for the ninth time in 10 games against NU as a conference foe. UT denied the Huskers and their fans of the moment they all so desired: redemption against Texas before the Huskers bolt next year for the Big Ten.
Barring a December rematch in the Big 12 championship game, they'll never meet again as league foes. And if this is how it ends, what a disappointment for Nebraska.
“Losing to anyone is not a good feeling,” NU defensive end Cameron Meredith said. “but especially Texas.”
The all-too-familiar scenarios played out often for Nebraska on Saturday.
Notably, there were the drops by Rex Burkhead, Niles Paul and Brandon Kinnie. All three passes were thrown well — the first a Taylor Martinez pass on the opening play of the second quarter; the others from Zac Lee, who replaced Martinez midway through the third quarter.
“It's pretty obvious,” Pelini said. “We had our opportunities to make plays. We didn't make plays. They did. They won the football game.”
BUT NOT making the plays, in which "not making the plays" means "dropped every thrown football laid perfectly into your outstretched hands?" And knowing for sure -- after all, Coach Bo said -- that it wasn't AT ALL due to . . . PSYCH!!!
Well, then. This could be serious, and it seems to me -- given the unlikely repetition of such specific inaction by skilled professional student athletes -- we need to start looking at environmental and medical causes.
Perhaps so many dropped passes could be traced to identical symptoms spread among a number of Nebraska players. (In this, we can use the Longhorns as our "control group." They spent only 24 hours or so in Lincoln, and they exhibited few of the symptoms associated with affected NU players.)
Several things come to mind as a possible reason for so many dropped passes Saturday -- and, indeed, so many fumbles by Nebraska throughout the present football season. The likeliest place to start would be some kind of numbness and/or paralysis in players' extremities, particularly the hands.
Now we're thinking diabetes, nerve damage, ministrokes, Reynaud's disease, peripheral artery disease (Thanks, pharmaceutical TV ads for the heads up!) . . . or multiple sclerosis. A mass outbreak of one of these maladies, however, is highly unlikely in this case.
What we need is something that would cause these symptoms in significant numbers within a group, and cause these symptoms virtually simultaneously. Something that's not nerves, or excessive emotion, or . . . PSYCH!!!
Searching Internet medical databases up and down, I could find only one explanation, and it is indeed a frightening one. In fact, as soon as this post goes up on the blog, I'm firing off an extremely urgent E-mail to the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, with a copy forwarded to Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman.
LIVES ARE at stake, and I'm not talking about some unhinged Husker fan doing something stupid to a player or a coach.
* irritability[Pelini brothers (Bo and Carl) --R21] * anxiety/nervousness, often with difficulty in breathing[NU fans at Memorial Stadium] * restlessness[Ditto] * exaggerated response to stimulation[Pelini brothers] * fearfulness[NU fans in stadium] * emotional instability [Pelini brothers] -lack of self control[Bo Pelini] -fits of anger, with violent, irrational behavior[Pelini brothers] * loss of self confidence[Entire state of Nebraska] * indecision [Offensive Coordinator Shawn Watson] * shyness or timidity, being easily embarrassed[Entire state of Nebraska] * loss of memory[What were we talking about?] * inability to concentrate[Jenn Sterger is HOTT!!!!!] * lethargy/drowsiness[Entire Nebraska offense] * insomnia[Who can sleep now?] * mental depression, despondency[Are you kidding me? If you're not depressed, you must have flown in from Tejas.] * withdrawal[Leave me alone.] * suicidal tendencies[Life has not been worth living since 1998.] * manic depression[Fiddle dee dee! After all, tomorrow is another day!]
* numbness and tingling of hands, feet, fingers, toes, or lips[Taylor Martinez, NU receiving corps] * muscle weakness progressing to paralysis[NU offense] * ataxia[?????????] * tremors/trembling of hands, feet, lips, eyelids or tongue[Husker receiving corps during game; NU coaching staff after game.] * incoordination[Husker offense] * myoneural transmission failure resembling Myasthenia Gravis[NU receivers -- couldn't see the football coming.]
SEE WHAT I mean? Mercury poisoning. It clearly affects the entire Nebraska football team, and probably everyone spending any significant time on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus. Possibly it could be a statewide crisis, I am not sure at this point.
We was robbed? Hell, no. We was poisoned!
This is urgent, and it is incumbent upon the state government to act immediately.
Unless, of course, the state's political and bureaucratic establishments are, at this moment, flying into fits of rage and trying to beat up one another, thwarted, however, by lack of coordination, paralysis of the extremities and an inability to see straight.
In other words, an average mercury-poisoned day at the office.
Look at your calendar. It seems to have reverted to Nov. 20, 1982. And if you can read this -- congratulations. Your computer, and the Internet, have managed to stay somewhere in the 21st century. You will be able to watch the wildest finish in the history of college football, and the unlikeliest end to one chapter of one of history's most intense gridiron rivalries.
Joe Starkey has the play-by-play for the Cal radio network. The Stanford band has the . . . well, just watch.
Starkey: Awesome, flow of emotion back and forth, great football. Well, this is some show I'll tell you. And now the Bears in a seemingly impossible situation. They have only one time-out left. They pretty well have to run it back... to save the game and boy, talk about a heartbreaking way to lose....But what a great way to win if you are a Stanford fan. 8 seconds to go, 35 yard kick by Harmon. [Nauseating Stanford fans and band heard in the background.] It'll go right up there with Langford's kick in '74, which was further of course...a 50-yarder at the buzzer.
The Bears' problem is...that although the kick-off will now come from the 25 yard line, it's unlikely that Ford can get the ball and get out of bounds far enough upfield to set up one try at the field goal. What a recovery by Stanford; you have to give them all sorts of credit. 4th and 17 at their own 13 yd. line, and it beats staring at them in the face, and they saved it. They pulled it out. What a show.
Alright here we go with the kick-off. Harmon will probably try to squib it and he does. Ball comes loose and the Bears have to get out of bounds. Rogers along the sideline, another one...they're still in deep trouble at midfield, they tried to do a couple of....the ball is still loose as they get it to Rogers. They get it back to the 30, they're down to the 20...Oh the band is out on the field!! He's gonna go into the endzone!!! He got into the endzone!! [voice quite hoarse at this point] Will it count? The Bears have scored [CANNON GOES OFF] but the bands are out on the field.
There were flags all over the place. Wait and see what happens; we don't know who won the game. There are flags on the field. We have to see whether or not the flags are against Stanford or Cal. The Bears may have made some illegal laterals. It could be that it won't count. The Bears, believe it or not, took it all the way into the endzone. If the penalty is against Stanford, California would win the game. If it is not, the game is over and Stanford has won. We've heard no decision yet. Everybody is milling around on the [crowd and Joe getting very, very loud now] FIELD!!! AND THE BEARS!!! THE BEARS HAVE WON!!! THE BEARS HAVE WON!!! Oh my God, the most amazing, sensational, traumatic, heart rending... exciting thrilling finish in the history of college football! California has won...the Big Game...over Stanford. Oh excuse me for my voice, but I have never, never seen anything like it in the history of I have ever seen any game in my life! The Bears have won it! There will be no extra point! Hold it right here, don't anybody go away....[crowd roaring wildly]
After just about everybody on the kick-off team handled the ball, Kevin Moen finally did it. And he ran through 15 members of the Stanford band, nobody tackled him. The Fool!....Glenn Shapiro, our statistician, has just held up a card and it says the truth. The Stanford band just cost their team that ball game. The Stanford band ran out on the field, it left all the defenders in an impossible situation to get to the Bears carrying the ball. They couldn't tackle 'em. The band, in effect, served as extra blockers, the official had no choice but to let the play go as was. The Bears have scored on the kick-off, brought it all the way back. At least 5 men handled the ball on one lateral after another. I thought Rogers was dead at one point. He got rid of the ball [CANNON GOES OFF, CROWD GOES WILD] I believe it was Kevin Moen that Jan said that scored the winning touchdown as the kick-off came from the 25 yard line. This place is like it has never been ever. Stanford can't believe it.
I don't know about you, but I'm taking this as a really, really bad omen.
Mrs. Cleaver is dead of rheumatoid disease, having departed this mortal coil with her alter ego, Barbara Billingsley, at age 94 in Santa Monica, Calif. Ward et June n'existent plus, and the Beaver -- and all the rest of us -- gently weep.
She is survived by Wally and the Beav . . . and about 72 million Baby Boomers steeped in all things Leave it to Beaver. The New York Timesfills in the details:
From 1957 to 1963 and in decades of reruns, the glamorous June, who wore pearls and high heels at home, could be counted on to help her husband, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), get their son Theodore, better known as Beaver (Jerry Mathers), and his older brother, Wally (Tony Dow), out of countless minor jams, whether an alligator in the basement or a horse in the garage.
Baking a steady supply of cookies, she would use motherly intuition to sound the alarm about incipient trouble (“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver”) in their immaculate, airy house in the fictional town of Mayfield. (The house appeared to have no master bedroom, just a big door from which Ward and June occasionally emerged, tying their bathrobes.)
Along with the mothers played by Harriet Nelson (“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet”), Donna Reed (“The Donna Reed Show”) and others, Ms. Billingsley’s role became a cultural standard, one that may have been too good to be true but produced fan mail and nostalgia for decades afterward, from the same generation whose counterculture derided the see-no-evil suburbia June’s character represented.
Ms. Billingsley, who had nothing but respect for June Cleaver, was a former model and career actress who was married three times and spent part of her career as a working single mother (of two boys, at that).
Yes, she acknowledged 40 years later, her role was a picture-perfect reflection of the times. “We were the ideal parents because that’s the way he saw it,” she said, describing the show as the world seen through the eyes of a child.
SO JUNE CLEAVER was an ideal, as opposed to "realistic." So what? We need ideals, but now we only have dysfunction as our guide.
We live in an age that ridicules the wholesome likes of Ward and June Cleaver. The thing is, once upon a time there were real Wards and Junes. Maybe not perfect, but if you watched Leave it to Beaver closely, neither were Ward and June.
But they were there; they tried hard, and they cared deeply. They believed in decency, in virtue, and they expected that Wally and the Beav would, too.
How naive. Successful civilizations, however, are built upon such naiveté.
Our present one, such as it is, has no such naiveté left. And I think losing the physical embodiment of that ideal -- a woman who worked hard, loved much and did the best she could in real life, as well as behind the TV screen -- is some sort of an omen.
OF COURSE, I can't prove that. That's how omens work; you're never sure till after something bad is in the rear-view mirror (along with the omen).
This one thing is sure, though. We need more June Cleavers -- more Barbara Billingsleys. But now we have one fewer.
That's ominous right there.
While we're waiting for whatever's going to happen to happen, here's the rest of the 1963 final episode of Leave It to Beaver.
From what I can remember of my college American-history coursework, this would be at least as nasty as any cartoon ever drawn of an American president by an opponent who absolutely, positively hated his guts. Maybe a little more nasty.
It's as nasty as anything the Federalists aimed at the Democratic-Republicans. As over the top as anything the Know-Nothings threw at . . .well, anybody. As nasty as anything a South Carolina Democrat threw at Abraham Lincoln before South Carolinians unilaterally declared him Not Our President and shot up Fort Sumter.
By the time people hate their government -- and its leader -- so much that they're depicting the president of the United States as an Islamic suicide bomber, a stereotypical gay man, a gangster and a Pancho Villa-knockoff Mexican bandit, I think it's safe to say the country is sitting on a powder keg. And here comes a bunch of tea-party crazies knocking flint and steel together.
ACCORDING TOThe Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, the billboard came from the “constitutionalist libertarian” mind of "artist" Paul Snover. He told the newspaper he wasn't "allowed to say" who bankrolled it.
The billboard, erected along the I-70 Business Loop between 28 1/2 and 29 roads sometime Monday, depicts the four “Obamas” sitting around a table with playing cards showing only sixes bunched in groups of three.
Also on the table is a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a liberty bell, a toy soldier and a statue of Justice holding a balance.
Beneath the Obama caricatures are numerous rats, some of which are labeled as the IRS, trial lawyers, the EPA and the Fed. Sitting above all that is a line, “Vote DemocRAT. Join the game,” which is positioned between two vultures, one of which is labeled the U.N. and the other with the name Soros, a reference to George Soros, a major national Democratic financial supporter.
THE ARTICLE in The Daily Sentinel also gives us some idea of the contempt Snover -- who has described himself as a supporter of tea-party organizations and Glenn Beck's "9/12" movement -- has for the country's duly-elected government:
“The Constitution has been thrown in the trash and burned by our very own government and we the people watched TV while America burned! The enemy is not at the gate, it is a cancer within our own borders,” Snover wrote on the Mesa County Second Amendment Task Force website. “From what I have learned of history and what I see going on in all levels of government, I can but conclude that there is no constitutional republic any more, only a sick tyrannical twisted dictatorship."
IS THIS what tea partiers see as "American values," as opposed to "Marxist" ones?
That Grand Junction billboard and its creator's paranoid screeds are what "patriots" think is appropriate public discourse today? Goodness, what would tea-party favorite John Adams say about this kind of thing?
I think I have the answer to that.
He'd call it sedition, and they'd all be in jail right now.
Be careful what you ask for when you "take back America," people. You just might get it.
Not surprising, not by a long shot, but discouraging nevertheless.
Last night, this account of the Delaware U.S. Senate debate went up on The New York Times website. It describes the knives-and-bludgeons gutter fight between tea-party pin-up Christine O'Donnell and her Democratic foe, Chris Coons, where we see the candidates defined, on one hand, as the Red Menace and, on the other, as a papist puppet ready to impose the will of the Vatican upon an oppressed American public.
I can't waitfor Nov. 2, can you? From The Caucus blog on the Times' site:
Christine O’Donnell, the Republican Delaware Senate candidate, and her Democratic opponent, Chris Coons, hurled personal attacks at each other in a nationally televised debate Wednesday night.
A feisty, aggressive Ms. O’Donnell called Mr. Coons a Marxist whose beliefs came from a socialist professor and said he would “rubber stamp” the policies of the Democrats in Washington. Mr. Coons raised questions about whether Ms. O’Donnell’s faith would drive her positions on social issues like abortion, prayer and evolution.
Pressed by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, Ms. O’Donnell refused to say whether she believed evolution was a myth, saying that “what I believe is irrelevant.” As she did throughout the first half of the debate, Ms. O’Donnell quickly tried to return the focus to Mr. Coons, saying, “I would argue there are more people who support my Catholic faith than his Marxist belief.”
THE DESPAIRING thing about this account isn't that politicians play fast and loose with facts. The despairing thing about this account is that it's, I believe, a pretty fair illustration of exactly how divided, embittered, hateful and raring for a fight we are in America.
Back in September, I thought Jimmy Carter probably was engaging in some slight hyperbole when he said the country is Civil War polarized.
"This country has become so polarized that it's almost astonishing," he told NBC anchorman Brian Williams. "Not only with the red and blue states, President Obama suffers from the most polarized situation in Washington that we have ever seen -– even maybe than the time of Abraham Lincoln and the initiation of the war between the states."
THE MORE I think about it, though, the less I think the former president was engaging in hyperbole.
We've gone through bad times in this nation since 1865. We've fought over communism and Vietnam and civil rights. We muddled through 1968. The constitution survived Watergate.
Back then, however, we had a center -- both socially and politically. We had some degree of bipartisanship, a working across party lines, in the nation's capital.
NOW, we have two extremes. The center did not hold, and there's no Abraham Lincoln in sight.
The economy is as bad as it has been since World War II, people are hurting, people are scared, we're post-9/11, we're at war, we're all going broke, and the sexual revolution has laid waste to the American family. And on top of all that, we're at loggerheads over mutually exclusive notions of "how shall we live, then."
And we hate one another. We really, really hate one another.
Hang on. It's going to get ugly before whatever happens, happens.
All we need is a spark. God only knows what that will be.
THEN CAME the Macintosh in 1984. It had something called a "graphical user interface." It also had something called a "mouse."
You could click on an icon representing what you wanted or where you wanted to go.
It was a miracle. Look!
TECHNOLOGY. What would we do without it?
That's a great question. Just don't ask Steve Jobs.
Twenty-six years after he made the world safe for personal computing, he'd rather that you just don't bug him. Or Apple.
A college journalism student learned this the hard way when Apple media relations screwed her around, and she sent an E-mail to the top of the pecking order. That would be Jobs. After the Apple boss deigned to send her back a snotty-tot reply, a brief exchange ensued, and then Jobs got the last E-word: "Please leave us alone."
OK, people, we're breaking some news tonight on the ol' blog.
Tribune seems to have moved quite quickly after the recent misfortune of its chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams. New to the post at Tribune Tower in Chicago is Scout the Dog, who did some thing or another for Revolution 21 in Omaha, Neb.
Scout wasted no time chasing his tail, and his paws hit the ground running in the Windy City. And we've obtained -- exclusively -- his first memo sent to all Tribune hands (and paws) this evening:
From: Scout the Dog Date: 10/13/2010 20:32:37 To: Tribune Co. Subject: WEDNESDAY EVENING WONDERING
IT Seems to me that we have to be much more relational with our mediaconsimer base, as we endeaver to AFDI in building a new-media paradime.
Why is it that we only target our media products (and they are producks, we seek to exchange media info and coolness for the consumers media dollars) at such a small smattering of our potensul audience? In this we are being elitist, and elitist aint gonna cut it in the new media age when you can learn everything you need to know on in the Twitter scape? This is whacko -- hello?!?!?!? -- people, and if you can't get out of the way of the Future, then it is gonna run you over like The Bad Car when you miss his tyre by just a little bit(e).
I've seen what happens when you get run over by The Bad Car, which is the revolutionary future, and you don't want to be the rodekilled, believe me. Lead the revolutionshary foreces and AFDI re: the Future New Paradime, or get the HELL OUT OF THE WAY!!!
So what Im proposing we actualkly start actually AFDI RIGHT NOW is aiming more content toward our canine readers and viewers. THSI IS AN ENTIRE MASSIVE UNDRSEVRED MARKET HERE!!! AND WE AR LEEVING DOLLARES ON THE TABLE BY NOT REACHING OUT TO FIDO. OR REX.
I know this subjecct intematntely. Somone with the name of Scout should.
I'm seeying a show on WGN AMERica called Who Let the Dogs Out? -- WOOF! -- and it would start with an actual f***ing stampede of dogs running straight at the camera barking and barking, and then we do a quick cut to picturees of bitches in Heat (uh oh . . . I hope I dont get in troubble like Lee Abrams . . . HAHA) and then we have the exercize segment where we put up pictures of cats and we all run and run and run and try to jump through the TV screen to get the.m
That would be an excellent cardio workout -- can we get federal heath-grqant money to partially fund the production of this. AFDI! Lets' get on it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And the we could introduce variety into this daily segment by substituting other prey for the very pedestrian feline scumsuckers. I'm thinking right noiw
about rabbytes and other bad interlopers we find in our yards when Master lets us out!
We can make this happens ASAP if we just AFDI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm also envissionying making our daily news[papers more canine freindlee as part of our antielitist agenda this quarter. We all don't actually read the newspaper but we all can use the newspaper, and printing helpful targets on it for the young paper-trainers. This especially would start targeting our struggling newspaper business toward a much-needed younger demographic -- we have to start growing that demo people!
We can't rely on old humans forever if our properties like the Chicago Tribune are still going to be around in 2020. Dogs! Are! The! Future! AFDI! Make it so!
This is onlyt a very very small part of the innovation that needs to be happening in the Tribune orgianization. We need to be forward thinking, outside the box thinking and antielitist thinking to achieve our goals for future growth and to once again lead the media world as we put our minds toward AFDI!!!!!!!
I will continnue this theme in next week's Wednesday Evening Wondering as we explore the concept --- and I think this will be a real winner -- of Dog Whistle Radio for our FM stations!!!
