Wednesday, 16 September 2009
Tyrant
I am aware that some people in America are calling Obama a tyrant, a Hitler and a Stalin. A tyrant, fascist dictator, says one. I am not going to link to the rest of these crackpots, of which the USA seems to have more than a fair share. I am just going to suspect that Jimmy Carter was right in assuming racism as the cause.
Hitler? Stalin? This is serious braindeath, such mind-boggling lack of proportion, intelligence, understanding of history or indeed of anything that it calls for Will redivivus and redoubled. Set a Stalin or Hitler on them, I say. See if they can tell the difference between Obama and a tyrant then.
Between the frothing-nutjobs on the one hand and Pilger on the other I am sure Obama must be doing things generally right.
Me? I am tidying my office, seeing PhD students, editing books, translating them, travelling, speaking, and being, on the whole, rather tired.
*
Many thanks to Billy C in the comments for the link to the full panoply of wisdom in the Washington march that I now insert, since it's good to laugh now and then.
Yup, it's racism all right. The sheer mindnumbing idiocy leaves no room for doubt. There's nothing else left after they've been through the entire gamut of their 'complaints'.
(Exits laughing, albeit with a soupcon of bitterness and exasperation...)
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They aren't just a few crackpots in Yankland -- they are the republican mainstream. Republicans--virtually without exception--are race-baiting scum. Read the whole thing below, but here are some choice excerpts:
"This is not about socialism, as Jones is not a socialist. Oh sure, he's associated with some, and might still be friends with several to this day. And so what? Martin Luther King Jr. associated with socialists and communists because they supported the civil rights struggle and the black freedom movement at a time when the rabid anti-communists were at the forefront of attempts to maintain formal white supremacy. Which is to say that the socialists and the communists were on the right side, and the red-baiters were on the wrong one. Which was also true about the fight for the 40-hour work week, the 8-hour day, the end of child labor, the right of women to vote, and every other advance for freedom and justice in this nation in the past 100 years. But of course, Glenn Beck explained on the radio this past July 4th that he "hates the last 100 years of American history," so I guess we know what side he would have been on in all those battles."
and
"And everything they are saying about Van Jones was what people like them said about civil rights leaders in the 50s and 60s: about Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy, and John Lewis, and Fannie Lou Hamer. They were communists, and revolutionaries, and a danger to the republic. Make no mistake, had they been old enough in those days, Beck and every modern-day movement conservative would have stood with the segregationists, with the bigots, with the mobs who burned the buses carrying freedom riders. They would have stood with the police in Philadelphia, Mississippi, even as they orchestrated the killing of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner. They would have stood with Bull Connor in Birmingham. How do we know? Easy. Because not one prominent conservative spokesperson of that time did the opposite. Not one. That's who they are. And the minute you forget that, the minute you insist on treating them better than they would treat you, the minute you insist on playing by rules that they refuse to as much as acknowledge, all is lost. They do not believe in democracy. They believe in power. White power. They believe in the past. They are Afrikaners, and it's about time we started calling them that."
http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/the-afrikaner-party-draws-first-blood-van-jones-barack-obama-and-audacity-capitulation
Racist scum plain and simple.
"Serious braindeath" is right. You might enjoy the following short clip, if you haven't seen it, in which a Democrat, Barney Frank, finally loses his patience with one of the morons yabbering about 'Nazi' policies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYlZiWK2Iy8
Fuck it.
here also see.
http://blog.hakmao.com/2009/09/15/darwin-film-fails-to-find-us-distributor/
Just heard that that WWWIII is cancelled. Obama has gone and put GWB's European-Defens-Shield-Plan on ice.
Now George, that'll really do the job-nuts, when they eventually find out, when they crash the sofas and the bars, tune into FOX perhaps later tonight.
I mean WWIII (as it would have been called by future historians in their caves and underground cities).
If there is a place for racist scum to congregate, it will be closer to the Republican Party HQ than to the Democrats' though I remember George Wallace was a Democrat. The difference between the two otherwise seems to come down to Big Government v Small Government, Health Care v. all the insurance etc. These seem to be the frothing issues. Oh yes, and the glorious state of honest folks' teeth as opposed to the dire state of communist pinko scum's teeth, as in the UK. There's always a lot about teeth.
Otherwise, it's a big place, the USA, so you expect nutjobs to be louder, bigger and frothier. If you got all the nutjobs from Russia, Eastern Europe, Japan, China and the USA together, that would be one big gathering of froth. Not that I rule out anywhere else - New Zealand, Lichtenstein, The Faroe Islands, let alone Brazil and the whole of Africa - it's just that the obvious tends to come to mind first.
Nice link, Will (your top one particularly).
Spot the black man and ask yourselves the question, would you want any of them amongst your friends and family. Me? I'd be ashamed of their ignorance and even more of their blatant racism. I won't swear but that doesn't mean I don't want to. It's from amongst these nutters that another Lee Harvey Oswald may appear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUPMjC9mq5Y
That's a great clip Will. Thanks. I already knew about the 1996 image (that dark "grain of sand held at arm's length"); it made a triple-page spread in the National Geographic around that time; blew, as they say, my mind. I even stuck it into a poem in my first collection.
Will, thanks for the clip. Truly amazing, and if that doesn't touch something inside you, nothing can.
Just back from another day out, Will. That is a marvellous short film. Thank you. What's that Pascal line "le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie" - in other words, the eternal silence of those infinite spaces gives me the willies.
Well, yes, but, or is it 'and'? 'And it doesn't' is the alternative answer because it is, after all, rather extraordinary that we can sit here and reflect and talk about it, equipped with consciousness and all that. Given all those billions and squinchillions of galaxies.
That may be why Pascal took the great gamble on God. OK, he says, the chances of there being a God are a squinchillion-to-one, but what is there to lose? You don't get any comfort out of the rest of the squinchillion. Might as well go for God. Credo ad absurdum. Etc.
What is there to lose? Well, there is some. One could lose every shred of sense one ever had, like those 'folks' on the Washington march.
It puts me in mind of the great Primo Levi story about the element Carbon in his The Periodic Table. Do you know the one? One of the best possible stories about the other end of the scale. Beats anything Will Self has had to say on the subject.
I know the Levi story about the carbon atom is the one The Periodic Table that sticks in my mind. Fabulous end to it too, best use of a punctuation mark I've ever seen.
Yes, that's the one Mark. The Melancholy of Resistance, the terrific novel I translated from the Hungarian László Kasznahorkai, ends in a similar way, though this time it's enzymes and physical decomposition.
I take it you won't be ordering a US CONSTITUTION WATCHDOG T-SHIRT from www.glennbeck.com/ George ;-)
I have a small collection of presented T-shirts from Literary Festivals (mainly Irish) and publishers (well, one a gift from New Directions), but I feel a bit of a prat wearing them (except at the festivals named on the T-shirts, of course...)
"I feel a bit of a prat wearing them". Hey, George, with the above Glenn Beck t-shirt you'd feel like some kind of security nutjob; it features a big dog on an official looking badge. You could patrol the Fens and put the fear of the Right WINGED God into all those Obama socialist-commie-fascists and students slinking around and frighten all the grannies in Cromer.
"The wonders of evolution are far more subtle and far more fascinating than the coarse fabrications of those repositories of the ignorants called sacred texts; forgivable 2000 years ago as a means of trying to understand our physical environment, but quite inexcusable today."
Quote on evolution- Jonathan Meades :: Off-Kilter ep2 2/6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEE-vaUezQE&feature=PlayList&p=07095A1A3C8A9985&index=1&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL
Why does Meades stop at 2,000 years. There are sacred texts going back 35,000-40,000 years, for what else is a cave painting of a man's hand on the roof in the darkness in the back of the cave where the mysterious echo, perhaps the voice of some supernatural being, was to be found?
Of course, contrary to Meades, the belief in 2,000 year sacred texts alongside modern science and evolution theory is also in itself evolutionary and is therefore perfectly excusable.
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