The “immigration debate” may be over for now on Capitol Hill but it’s still simmering at YouTube, the real site of serious exchange in this country! Browsing the comment threads on this remix Army recruitment ad is an essential part of the viewing experience.
Remember: The Army is more than a job; it’s an adventure; because you never know what crazy shit you’re going to be ordered to do once they got you!
Did you hear about this study? The one by the Pew Research Center, released in April, that compared folks’ “knowledge levels by news source”? If you don’t know about it, here’s the tag line: Regular viewers of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report know more about the world than viewers of Fox News. A lot more.
By Pew’s reckoning, John Stewart and Steven Colbert boast the biggest percentage of fans with a “High” knowledge level of important leaders and current events: 54 percent. Devotees of Fox News, like one Richard Bruce Cheney, Vice President of the United States of America, turned in a woeful, and dead last, 35 percent “High” mark. When it comes to naming members of congress, Supreme Court justices, or even their own states’ governors, Foxers hit about as many bull’s-eyes as the Veep’s Perazzi quail gun. “We Report, You Decide,” indeed.
But the news outlets with the biggest percentage of “Low” knowledge users were “online news discussion blogs.” Thirty-seven percent of those who listed blogs as their news sources rated “Low,” edging the 35 percent of Foxers who couldn’t tell the difference between John Roberts and Joe Millionaire.
In other words, there’s a whole lot of stupid out there on the netwebs.
Take heart, though, blogophiles. Yes, a lot of blowhards have turned from talk radio to T-1 lines. And sometimes the comment threads on USA Today articles read like a convocation of Roger Ailes-addled yokels. But if you can’t beat ‘em, you can at least laugh at them. And no one laughs at the swollen, suppurating ranks of the “101st Chairborne” quite like the gentle people at Sadly, No!
When Lord Byron said, “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song,” he may not have had the epically foolish 26%-ers over at Blogs for Bush in mind, but he would surely approve of the gleeful deconstruction wrought upon them daily by Sadly, No!’s resident bards. Gavin M, Retardo Montalban, Bradley S. Rocket, and the other SN! satirists are to the web what John Stewart is to cable news.
I’m not even going to try to describe the Polonium-strength barbs they toss at bloggy nincompoops like Debbie Shlussel, Micheal Medved, and Jonah “Doughbob Loadpants” Goldberg. Just go to the site yourself and check it out. I think you’ll agree that Gavin, Retardo, et all perform an incredibly important social function: like an online superfund-site team, they scour the nether reaches of the American cyber-Id so that we don’t have to, digging into the worst political Love Canals out there. And with satire in place of hazmat suits, they show us the toxic dumping ground that our national discourse has become.
Oh. And they’re funny as hell, too.
A big story this week was the findings of a poll on the political views of people ages 17 to 29. The nation’s papers reported that, according to the poll, young people were much more likely than older people to know which end was up! Or, as some put it, that young people were more “liberal” in their views.
For one, young people believe that the sham healthcare system the insurance companies have fitted our country with totally sucks. They also believe that immigrants should be neither persecuted nor prosecuted and that politicians have to deal with massive immigration from Latin America as an ongoing fact of our national life and a good thing, too. They also don’t think any gay person crazy enough to want to get hitched should be denied the right to do so. Such a gay person should instead be applauded and provided with a free bottle of champagne courtesy of the vice president.
There were only two real surprises in the poll results. The first was that young people are generally more optimistic about the eventual conclusion of W’s war in Iraq, that the Iraqis and the Americans together will manage to steal victory from the jaws of defeat after being set up to do the opposite for the last five years. The New York Times reported, however, that young folk traditionally feel more positive about military action as it’s happening, that they felt the same way about Korea and Vietnam. Maybe that’s because it’s always all their high school pals over there actually fighting these wars, blowing up and getting blown up.
The second sort of surprise was that the poll was a joint effort of the New York Times, CBS News and MTV. MTV? That’s right, good old Morbid Television. It’s just more evidence that (a) whenever adults like the stuffy bunch at the Gray Lady think of youth, they think: “Um, kids… what about MTV? Can MTV find us some kids to call?” and (b) that MTV is so uncool that even MTV has given up even pretending to be cool anymore. In fact MTV probably had some of the next RealWorld cast making the polling phone calls as part of their “real world” professional training:
“Dude, help me out, I’m so totally hung over and sexed out, but if you were, like, gonna say thumbs up or thumbs down about immigration, you know, like what would it be?”
The Supreme Court decision today on two school segregation cases is a crazy retreat from the national policy of desegregation set in place by Brown vs Board of Ed in 1954. Given the altered balance of the Court over the past decade, though, it is a retreat that is both totally shocking and not surprising. What we have is de facto segregation. Are we really ready to get back to an era of legal segregation as well?
There’s a twistedness about the justification for the ruling, where dismantling Brown is seen as a hopeful move that positively reflects the hard-earned progress we’ve made as a society toward colorblindness. The thinking goes something like: “We don’t need to desegregate the schools anymore because we’re not racists anymore! Any inequality based on race in America is a fading artifact of the sins of our past. We’re just not like that anymore. Inequality no longer really has anything to do with race. So let’s not continue to introduce skin color into the curriculum of our schools. The young people, they’re not like that today. Lets let the kids be kids.”
But, ladies and gentlemen of the court, your honors, oh that it were so! It is not so! Have y’all been down to the Ninth Ward lately? Anyone?
Some of the best most accessible and nearly realtime coverage and analysis of the decision can be found at Slate, written as an email roundtable by the site’s legal analysts Dahlia Lithwick and Walter Dellinger. In anticipating today’s ruling, Dellinger related his experience as a white junior-high student in Charlotte, North Carolina:
“It was just past midday when a knock on the classroom door aroused me from my post-lunch slumber. The assistant principal, standing just outside the partially open door, carried on a whispered conversation with our fourth-period teacher. At conversation’s end, our teacher closed the door and turned (in my mind’s eye, in slow motion) to face the class. Our distracted chatter dropped to a hush as we noted his ashen face. I believe I remember, 40 years later, his exact words:
‘Children,’ he said slowly and deliberately, ‘the Supreme Court has ruled. Next year you will go to school with colored children.’”
He concludes that email by underlining the insane logic of basing an argument for segregation on Brown, which is how it turned out today:
“Looking at today’s cases from the vantage point of the Brown decision, the idea that the Supreme Court would condemn the valiant efforts of the Louisville community is extraordinary. The people of Louisville want a community that is not separated by race, beginning with a school system in which white and black children learn to know one another.
“Brown condemned a system of Southern racial apartheid, a system of racial domination and subordination. It is the worst form of literalism to believe that the cases now before the court can be decided by the fact that the phrase “classifying by race” can be used to cover two radically different notions. Only by blinding oneself to history and common sense can one assume that the use of race to maintain the monstrosity of the Jim Crow regime of the South and the use of race to achieve an integrated society in Louisville are one and the same.
A couple years ago Michael E Ross wrote a good primer on Brown to mark the 50th anniversary of the decision.
British wag Brendan O’Neil at Spiked went hard after Bono last week. It was a case of a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun. The subject was Bono’s stumping for aid to Africa with the big-time government leaders at the G8 summit. Bono, according to O’Neil, is a not-cool wrinkled rocker on a messianic mission and a neo-colonial self-appointed savior of Africans who’s actually doing Africans more harm than good. In the end O’Neil endorses the ideology espoused by London neo-punk band Bono must die! “Yes, that would be a good start.”
Firing into the barrel like that, O’Neil manages to hit on some key points, things I at least am thinking about vaguely every time I see Bono’s grizzled bespectacled mug smiling at an African kid or shaking the hand of an African leader or fighting the good fight among narcissistic Baby Boomer western leaders. For egg-sample:
“Bono’s rise shows the role that Africa plays for many people today. For politicians and celebrities alike, Africa has become a stage for moralistic posturing. Campaigning on African poverty is something that ‘gives me a sense of purpose, something to work for’, writes a contributor to the issue of Vanity Fair on Africa that Bono guest edited. Or as Paul Theroux bitingly argues: ‘Because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth.’ Indeed, we could just as easily ask what earthly right the G8 itself has to discuss and determine what should happen in Africa’s poorest countries. Like Bono, no G8 leader has ever been elected by the nations of Africa…. Bono is only the most successful of many ‘Mr Africas’ around today.”
“Bono’s rise has also been facilitated by the unholy marriage of politics and celebrity. No political campaign seems complete these days without a celebrity fronting it or even forcing it through…. Bono did not smash down the gates of the G8 to gain entry. Rather, he was effectively invited in by G8 leaders who hoped that the celebrity crusader would add a touch of grit and glamour to their shallow and self-serving debates on Africa. Even Bono’s haranguing of the world leaders had its benefits, since it allowed the G8 to present itself as being nail-bitingly responsive to African demands (as represented by Bono of course) and it may have won them a new, potentially younger audience in the shape of celebrity-watchers and the MTV crowd. When even discussions of ‘ending poverty’ require a celebrity to front them, you know that celebrities truly do rule the Earth.”
“Bono is a celebrity colonialist. His patronising campaign to single-handedly ‘save Africa’ is actually damaging the continent. It is painting Africa as a pathetic place whose wide-eyed, infantile populations need a loudmouth rock star to fight in their corner. His disregard for anything resembling an electoral process (‘I represent a lot of people in Africa’) lends weight to the prejudice that African leaders are peculiarly corrupt, and thus it is best to leapfrog straight over them – – as does his demand for ‘anti-corruption measures’ to be attached to all forms of aid to Africa.”
That’s all good stuff. Yet O’Neil gets caught up in his own faith in the power of the electoral mandate. He keeps asking in effect: “What is Bono doing there among elected officials who the voters of the world have asked to represent their interests.” Fact is, the world’s elected officials — in the U.S., in Britain, in Africa, everywhere — are now and have been for centuries worse than woefully ineffective when it comes to doing any good in the world. They haven’t only failed to alleviate unnecessary suffering in Africa and most of the other countries on the planet; they have been the main ones driving the plunder and neglect at the root of human misery time and again. Bono’s agenda may be messianic, his persona comic. But I say let him and Angelina and Bob Geldoff and the rest of the pop-culure court jesters put a fire to the politicians. It can’t hurt.
