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| A soviet poster--no brainwashing in the USA |
From Lance Mannion:
http://lancemannion.typepad.
I suggest you read this because as is typical of Lance, he makes a very elegant detailed case of a point which is already pretty obvious to anyone who still has a realistic perspective, and some sense of empathy--but who in most cases cannot stand up to professional harangue-ists such as Hannity or Limbaugh. The point simply boils down to no man is an island. The people who think they did it all themselves drive to work on roads paved with the work of men fooling with asphalt when it's 120 in the shade--or when it's zero and blowing 50, and there's a fine slick you can't see till you're riding it to glory. These people, who are convinced that they did it all themselves, sadly include a majority of our elected representatives, and 99.9% of the Republican Party apparently. Mr. Mannion writes excellent essays not only on political subjects, but on many other subjects. I suggest after you read this piece you send him a little green. He certainly deserves it.
After the collection offering, if you have the stomach for it, go check out this link as well:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/
Racism is like an electrode sticking out of the racist's head, for them what's infected (which plainly includes millions of Americans). It's a sickness, a disease. The Right Wing might even agree that it's a societal disease, when they're at the Club or watching Belmont in the slop. But in the public world, oh no. They see those electrodes glinting in the sun, and they know all they need to do is touch the hot wire to them and they have millions of votes for whatever it is they need votes for. And so they do, again and again. Now and again, the Right finds a black guy who gets that it can be lucrative to be a black racist. Or who simply falls into the one-man-is-an-island intellectual mistake. Possibly Mr. Cain is of the latter variety--he thinks, from his lofty perch, that he made all them damn pizzas himself, toiling without rest, day after day, no breaks, no time off, till his bootstraps got him to the moon, to a place where he could even in fantasy run for President and not be laughed at as a joke. Possibly Mr. Clarence Thomas, Supreme Justice for Life, is of the former variety--a very smart black man who understood early on that conservative black men were a scarce commodity, and who was willing to participate in President George H.W. Bush's racist joke on America. Speculating about individual motivations is a fool's game in any case. Maybe Mr. Murdoch just wants to make more and more money.
Whatever the reasons, in this Media Matters highlight of one little Fox News moment, already passed, already evaporated, we see the spark of the electrode skillfully applied. How tragic for our country. This procedure occurs daily, possibly hour by hour, even minute by minute, if you consider all the right wing talk radio shows. Around these parts, we even have local lobotomists to augment the various network varieties. It's an endless flood, reinforcing unconsidered beliefs, reminding people that they needn't change anything, ever. As time has progressed, so new strategies have developed--strategies which successfully obscure the obvious with further, more sophisticated lies. How can there be racism in America when we have a black President? How can Clarence Thomas, a black man, be a racist? Voila. Meanwhile, let's all celebrate Martin Luther King Day and then move on, nothing to see, back to work.
I happened to watch the film "A Family Thing" last week. Here's a link to a review:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Family_Thing_%28film%29
It's a very simple premise, and quite likely happens more than people care to admit. And the question is, so what. I don't know what happened when the movie came out 15 years ago. We were already so splintered as a country that it wasn't a deal like "Look Who's Coming to Dinner," which is still remembered as some sort of milestone. This is a movie about good people who let love conquer hate. It is possible. The sad fact is that we have whole television networks and radio networks devoted to the premise that love will not ain't no way conquer hate.
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