Foto by tgw, "It's Downhill From Here On," New York City 2010
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Ah Wilderness! As the Tea Baggers Want to Take Us Deeper Into the Forest
On my HD teevee I get an extra channel from the Warner Bros. folks that is a dumping ground for all the old United Artists/ZIV/MGM teevee shows like "Sea Hunt," "Mr. Ed," "The Outer Limits," and "The Patty Duke Show." These are shows produced from 1960 until 1965 or so, and were the last of the old black & white shows just prior to the advent of color television. The other morning on an episode of "The Patty Duke Show" it seems Patty through one of her "wacky teenage" schemes got a local Brooklyn Heights politician in a bit of hot water at the height of his reelection campaign. The politician came to see Patty and her parents (Patty's father was played by William Shallert who just died this year (2010) at 90). The first thing the politician said on confronting them on the matter was "I'm in a lot of trouble thanks to Patty. Why those radical Tea Party people are threatening to throw me in the Harbor over this."
"The Patty Duke Show" in question was filmed in 1964. The 1964 Presidential Election featured Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson (the Veep when JFK got offed by a conspiracy, some claim, comprising the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and G.W. H. "Pappy" Bush, who some swore was in Dallas on that fateful day) and Barry "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" Goldwater. This was a big Liberal vs. Conservative showdown. It was right in the middle of two disturbing to the ruling White Majority happenings (including the same old Power Elites whose heirs are around today): The first happening was our vaunted armed forces rigged with all the latest hi-tech war toys (remember Robert McNamara's famous electronic perimeter scheme--check out how many millions of dollars were wasted on that fantastic scheme--AND YOU NOTICE I'M USING THE WORD "SCHEME" QUITE A LOT IN THIS EXCLUSIVE DIATRIBE!) were getting their asses kicked by a bunch of pajama-wearing Gooks we tagged the V. C. ("Victor Charlie" to an Morse-code-trained Army man), short for Vietcong.
[A long interruption (this can be skipped): Of course, the Vietcong weren't the general enemy for the US in Vietnam. They were one of three enemies we had there, including Uncle Ho's People's Army headquartered in Hanoi, the Commie Chinese Army, and the Vietcong. The US claimed the Cong was an insurgent arm of Hanoi and the People's Army while Hanoi claimed the Cong were actually South Vietnamese rebels. It was the Cong--they worked out of Cambodia and the mountains of the South--who pulled off the surprise Tet Offensive, the Tet holiday attack on Saigon that finally drove the US Armed Forces turntail in defeat out of their homeland, which had never known any true independence being colonized early as they were by the French, whose fop generals and diplomats and businessmen turned Saigon into the "Paris of the Orient"--remember when we called Asians Orientals? Let's see, seems like it's alright to use racist slang during a Holy Wars. In WWII it was OK to call the Nazis "Krauts" and "Jerries" and the Japanese "Japs" and "Nips"; during the Korean War it was OK to call the Koreans "Slopes" and "Slants"; and during the Vietnamese folly it was OK to call the Vietnamese "Gooks" (a term I believe was first used by US Marines against the Filipinos in the 1920s). And we've always called the Chinese "Chinks," a derogatory word still in common-everyday use when I arrived in New York City in the early 70s. "Hey, let's go to the chinks for lunch." Ironically, my best friend in NYC for years, until his untimely death, was a Black photographer who had been born and raised in Lower Manhattan down on Cherry Street in the projects under the Brooklyn Bridge adjacent to Chinatown. "The chink gangs were we Black guys's major enemies. They treated us worse than the kikies and the micks." Yet if a Chinese person or a Jewish person or an Irish person called my friend a nigger, he was on their ass with all four feet and his oo7 without a preamble. Our pal, L Hat at www.languagehat.com recently ran a post in which he was asking if ever a derogatory slang word, in this case "Gyp" for Gypsy, could be incorporated so into regular language usage that it eventually lost its racist connotation. "Come on, Mr. Salesman, I know a gyp when I see one"--meaning paying that much for what a saleman is trying to sell is a bad deal--to take it would mean you were getting "gyped." As a result of L Hat's post, he got a brace of comments that mostly said, no, "Gyp" is still a derogatory term that should never be accepted as a decent word in terms of common usage in any language. I believe the French call Gypsies "Romas."]
The second happening in 1964 that was upsetting the White majority was the apparent success of the Civil Rights Movement and Johnson's pushing the Civil Rights Bill toward its eventual passage. Truman's integrating the US Army had caused Strom Thurmond and his Racist Dixiecrats to pull out of the 1948 Democratic Convention and form their own party with Good Ole Boy Strom "I Got a Kneegrow Daughter" Thurmond as their presidential candidate--the man the great American Mississippi Patriot and Humanitarian Trent Lott said that today we'd be better off if he'd'a been elected president back then. I give a big YAHOO to that idiotic suggestion--you tell 'em Trent. The Dixiecrat Party was the racist move by Southern Democrats that eventually led to the Racist Conservative takeover of the Repugnican Party who got Dwight David "I Love Playing Golf Better Than Being President" Eisenhower (these turncoats called themselves "Dem-IKE-crats") and Richard Nixon (a California whack job) elected in 1952 over sophisticated hypocrite Adlai Stephenson--like Obama, a creature of Chicago and Illinois politics. These racist Democrats switching to the Repugnican Party saw the first ever Repugnicans elected to state and national offices in all the Southern Racist States since Reconstruction Black Republicans were elected to office Down South after the Civil War when the racists were Democrats! Oh yeah, that's how fucked up our political institutions are. They are obsolete, of course. And so's our Constitution. Obsolete. And obsolescence is the main reason for Conservatives--the laissez faire--anti-change--anti-progressive. Conservatives and especially the Conservative nutjob radicals will stand and die for obsolescence.
The result of the 1964 election was a huge landslide win for Johnson and the Democrats, the largest landslide win in the history of US presidential elections (yes, I'm sure it had something to do with JFK being assassinated in November of 1963)--totally wiping out the Conservative opposition to the point the pundits of the day were talking about the Repugnican Party maybe being put out of business the Dumbocratic victory was so impressive.
Since all Conservative bullshit has always seemed to boil up out of California politics, it's no surprise to find that the John Birch Society, the original rightwing nutjob branch of the Conservative movement, was started in Orange County, California, the county just south of L.A. County, whose seat of county government is Anaheim and whose main juvenile-fun attraction is DisneyLand--a rightwing "fantasy" enterprise that has risen to its current cartoon-market domination--to the point Disney now not only owns ABC but it controls Broadway shows here in New York City through its Show Production division, that which gave us the current longest-running hype job on Broadway, "The Lion King," a White concept of Disney-invented African legends. In all of Disney's cartoon-movies (now called animated movies), the anthropomorphized characters are subservient to kings and queens and princesses and princes--some of those human-animal hybrids George W. Bush, our never-elected most criminal and murderous president yet, used to talk about in terms of stem-cell research ("Messin' with God's perfect creations")--Spoiled-brat Bush, a man who to this day runs around FREE as a bird--a man who through his follies led us into 2 unwinable wars and drove us down into a 3 trillion dollar (grave-like) debt--a debt the Teabagger assholes are now blaming on honestly elected President Obama--the FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT ever--the first Kneegrow President of a United States that population experts say by 2050 will be a "Brown" nation--which means, according to White racist logic (Tea Party logic), that the White Man's America will be taken over by Browns, i.e., CATHOLICS...Latinos...Mexicans (Whites in Texas, Arizona, and California have called them "Wetbacks," "Messkins," "Pepper Bellies," "Spics," "Pachucos," and "Braceros"), Central Americans--like Guatamalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans--and South Americans--like Colombians, Brazilians, Ecuadorans.
I have always said that I can't see my people, White People (the Power Elite in this country is all White--mostly White US Males--though it is ironic that the world's richest individual, Senor Slim, is a Mexican!), giving up their ruling powers without a ferocious battle. I believe this country will divide in half before it becomes a Brown Nation. And certainly before it becomes a Black Nation. I don't see enough union among Brown peoples for them ever to vote as a bloc--I mean, come on, Puerto Ricans and Cubans and Mexicans don't really get along, though they do share a lot of culture. Also, how well do the Latinos and Blacks get along? I was taught in grade school Civics that the United States was a melting pot culture. That impressed me. Of course, the White concept of that melting pot meant only certain ethnics were considered right for the mix. At the time of the founding of this country...well, then we all know the truth about that, don't we?
These Teabaggers are openly racist, in the true wiseguy White people sense of the term. If there are Blacks in the Tea Party, they are definitely not normal Blacks--what Black person in this country is an honest Conservative in the White sense of the term? What Black person in this country would welcome a return to slavery? The basis of Conservative philosophy is cheap labor for White industry--and since they are also "strict Constitutionalists" it means they consider Black Americans still as only 1/5th human beings.
I notice a lot of these upsurging Teabaggers are wacky babes, like in New Hampshire; like in Nevada; like in California; like in Arizona; like in Alaska--ex-executive babes some of them--all of them strong advocates of Sarah Palin's off-the-wall prescriptions for her kind of USA.
You can relate this Teabagger movement to the Reagan movement back in the sixties when the State of California, one of our dumbest states in the Union, elected second-rate actor Ronald Reagan as its governor. At first the mainstream Repugnicans, they called themselves "moderate" Repugnicans then, were searching for a middle-of-the-road way of countering the Dumbocratic landslide that put Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson in the White Man's House and gave the Dumbocrats 4 years of domestic progress but foreign disaster--the domestic progress coming via Johnson's Great Society movement.
The first thing the middle-of-the-road Repugs did was start castigating the Goldwater-Conservative connection and trying to get the party to reject those kind of Hollywood Conservatives, whose next assault would come after Jimmy Carter whipped middle-of-the-roader Gerald R. "To Chew Gum or Walk" Ford in 1976--our Bicentennial year--in fact, Jimmy trounced Jerry pretty badly. [I insert a question here: Why is there a Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Aspen, Colorado?][Also, another question, when is the George W. Bush Library going to be built by We the People?] Then Jimmy Carter fucked up and was blamed for the Iran hostage situation and an embarrassing bungled attempt at a military rescue of those Embassy folk--we've probably forgotten that incident by now. I remember all the anti-Iran bullshit that went on in those years--like signs in deli windows saying they didn't sell Iranian products--or Middle-Eastern-looking business owners with signs saying "We Are Not Iranians Here." It was in the 1980 election that the Repugs caved in and let Ronald "Raygun" Reagan and George H.W. "Pappy" Bush take over the middle-of-the-roaders and trounced them out of favor in favor of Bush-baby rightwing Neo-Cons from the University of Chicago--why Reagan Conservatives pissed off old moderate asshole Nelson Rockefeller so much he shot 'em the bird while on the floor of the House. And, by God, Reagan and the John Bircher Conservatives bullshitted their ways into the White Man's House--and horribly by a larger margin than Big Balls Johnson had beat Barry "I Like to Dress Up Like an Injun and Do War Dances" Goldwater. [There's a Goldwater relative currently advertising his law practice on national television--he's fishing for medical malpractice suits--his office address is Phoenix, Arizona, so you know he's one of Barry's kin.]
So We the People rushed Ronald Reagan into office and from then on We the People have been paying the consequences. Conservatism doesn't work. It's whole effort is to put a cap on the common man's standard of living, to drive it down, to drive down the economy, to drive down the dollar, all in favor of corporatist practices and executive orders meant to move the wealth out of the Commonwealth (New York State is a Commonwealth) and into the Private Wealth--INDIVIDUAL WEALTH, which is the reason we are now becoming a Plutocracy, which means anyone making less than $200,000-a-year is considered Lower Class. Veblen called the Lower Class our Primitives; he called the Leisure Class (the Power Elite) our Predators. As Primitives, the Lower Class is considered to be reverting to barbarism, while the Leisure Class (the Predators) is chauvinistically patriotic and socially respectable. Veblen taught us back in 1899 that the "office" of the Leisure Class "in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent" [page 137, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1963 Mentor Books edition].
The Teabagging Tea Partiers are simply disruptive fools. They supposedly model themselves, the same as the Tea Partiers mentioned in that 1964 episode of "The Patty Duke Show," after the Boston Tea Party patriots--White aristocrats who dressed up as Native Americans...but, you know that story. It was all about being overtaxed by the King of England, the crazy idiot fop George the III. Ever since then aristocratic Whites have been opposed to taxes on themselves--taxes are for the Lower Class--today's Consumers.
I find the Teabaggers cartoon funny. As though they are created in the Disney animation studios in Taiwan or wherever they are these days. I know "The Simpsons" is drawn and animated in Taiwan. The Teabaggers are jokes, but they are deadly jokes. They are White jokes. They are spoilers not serious contenders. Of course, they are highly promoted by our corporate media--CBS, owned by Hollywood's Paramount (formerly Pictures) Industries; NBC, owned by General Electric (now teaching nuclear secrets to the Indians (India Indians)--remember, George W. Bush traded nuclear secrets to India for their mangoes?); ABC is owned by Disney; and Fox is owned by Aussie asshole Rupert Murdoch. No chance at any truth in any form getting through those commercial-corporate media.
We are the world's leading weapons of mass destruction producers; we are the world's largest weapons dealers; we are the world's greatest wasters of natural resources; we have been involved in wars since the White Man first landed on this Red Man's land and started aristocratically claiming it for his own. Every ten years we go to some kind of war. Wars with England and France and Native Americans and Mexico. Even a big bad war amongst ourselves. Then a war with Spain over the phony battleship Maine fiasco. Then invasions of Central America...the Philippines...occupation forces in China, Japan, South Vietnam, South Korea--WARS--wars to end all wars and then more wars--a couple of real big-deal World Wars--and then Truman and his Atomic bombings ("Hey, those bombs only killed 300,000 Nips--but look at the American lives it saved--and after all, how do you compare one saved American life to the loss of 300,000 worthless evil Godless Japs?") and his police action in Korea--and then the Vietnam War--and on and on it goes.
There is not much PEACE in our history. I was born during World War II. I remember clearly the Atomic Bomb--I recall the Trinity site test--I recall the famous blowing up of Bikini Island in the South Pacific with an Atomic Bomb! Why it was the United States of America that brought all those Euro-trash scientists to this country for the Manhattan Project. We invented the nuclear bomb! And then after WWII, we smuggled in top Nazi scientists, especially top-dog Nazi weapons of mass destruction designer Werner Von Braun--who later headed NASA--our space program--and the NASA headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, is named for him. Without Nazi scientists, we couldn't have gone to the Moon. How hypocritical is all this! We are an obsolete nation of hypocrites. We don't practice what we preach, not even our Christian religion practices what it preaches--"Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men"--"fuck Women," I assume. Remember, this male-ruled nation couldn't even pass an Equal Rights Amendment. Remember when the Conservatives were saying the Equal Rights Amendment was against America ideals and would lead to such anti-American institutions as Femism, legalized prostitution, women rushing out to get abortions, Lesbianism, Amazonia?--to Conservative males women belong in the kitchen, the bedroom (naked and waiting in bed), and the maternity ward at the local hospital!
These other-side-of-the-coin assholes have always been around (remember, there's two sides to every problem). Think about it, the Conservative Republican Corporatists Plutocrats have been in control of our political institutions for most of the 20th Century and now through most of the 21st Century. One might could opine that this country is naturally a RIGHTWING NUTJOB nation. At least the country is split 50-50. So go on and ignore these idiots and maybe soon you'll look up and President Sarah Palin will be giving her inaugural address--along with her running mate--how 'bout Joe LIEberman as her main squeeze running mate--he seems to be one of those full-blooded Americans who gets a bone on when he thinks about bangin' Sarah. Me, I say she's lousy in bed, though her daughter seems to have inherited her nymphomania from somewhere. [I know, ladies, there's no such thing as nymphomania, but, hey, I'm just goin' along with the flow.]
theWobblygrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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