Instrument of change

This is the only instrument of change that consistently works.

Anything or anyone else using the term should not be trusted.

Don’t insult The Joker

Saw this posted on a light pole at the intersection of highways 98 North and 60 West in that hotbed of political activity Bartow, Fla. today.

I guess the sign first been popped up in California in August, at least according to this report.

As a political statement, this is blatantly offensive. Think what you want about the President, but there is no freaking way the Joker is a socialist! That’s just ridiculous.

The Joker is obviously more of an anarchist; possibly a nihilist, in The Big Lebowski sense of the term.

So, in review: Obama as socialist, go for it; just slowly back away and leave the Joker out of it.

By the way, if you want to make the Obama-as-Socialist kind of statement, combine Obama’s picture with this guy. If you don’t know who this guy is, I suggest you stop making political statements that are offensive to the comic book sensibilities in all of us.

Phrase of the Day

more about “Phrase of the Day“, posted with vodpod

Read this story on CNN.com today about the above SNL sketch and Obama and learned a new phrase: Comedy-Industrial Complex.

Cool. I don’t know if this is a new phrase or not, but I can tell you that it doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, nor is it found in Urbandictionary.com.

However, I did find a chapter entitled “Showmen is Devoid of Politics: The Roots of Pseudo-Satire and the Rise of the Comedy-Industrial Complex” found in the 2008 book Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy turns Democracy into a Joke by Russell Leslie Peterson. (It actually sounds interesting.)

Also, a Nov. 4, 2008 Slate.com article by Thomas Schaller wondered if an Obama win would be “The end of the satirical industrial complex?“

In the Slate.com article, the author wrote that

Bush’s rise to power this decade contributed significantly, if not primarily, to the emergence of what Stewart has called the “satirical industrial complex.” The complex’s roster includes Stewart and his late-night Comedy Central cohort Stephen Colbert; the “Saturday Night Live” troupe, which has experienced its own surge during the 2008 presidential race; and sundry other parodists and comedic agitators ranging from low-key Tom Tomorrow cartoonist Dan Perkins to Chris Rock, who recently quipped that President Bush has “fucked everything up so much, he’s even made it hard for a white man to become president.” (Pardon the language.)

And finally, the blog “How to Save the USA” defines the comedy-industrial complex as “obnoxious left wing comedians who turn politics into a joke.”

However you define it or understand it, the comedy-industrial complex seems to be a byproduct of one of the underlying biases of electronic media, particularly television (upon which I assume the comedians wield their power): Everything on television eventually becomes entertainment. 9/11 becomes a plot-line. Politics becomes a punch-line. Thank you Neil Postman.

It really doesn’t matter who is in power. With the country so divided, even if you make 50 percent of the people angry, you’ll make 50 percent happy.

How do you think Rush and Beck remain so popular? (And, yes, I’m placing them on the fringes of the comedy-industrial complex.) It’s the age-old Archie Bunker syndrome. Archie Bunker was a stereotype and created to mock traditional middle-class men. Half the people turned in to laugh at him … but the other half turned in because he was exactly like someone they knew, or said exactly the things they felt. In other words, he was both a rallying point and a punch line.

Thirty years later, I give you Rush.

Wow, sorry for the rant.

Anyway, new phrase: Comedy-Industrial Complex. I love it.

Use it three times in the next 24 hours and it will become a permanent part of your vocabulary.

Republicans: Look on the bright side.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s missing act and admission to an extramarital affair sure does make some good tabloid fodder.

The bad news: This is the latest black eye for the down-and-out Republican party.

The good news: No one likes Republicans now anyway … so, if you’re gonna get bad news, now’s the time to get it.

So, thank you Gov. Sanford. The party could not have taken this in 2012.

Now … disappear.

“Cool points” for Ron Silver?

Heard that the actor Ron Silver died late Sunday. Bummer. He had an active career, but I remember him most from the Charlie Sheen B-movie The Arrival and the TV show Veronica’s Closet. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. But then again, does it matter?

At least I remember.

One thing that stuck out, was the article about the death in the New York Times. Silver was politically active and politically all over the radar, campaigning both for Clinton and later for Bush II and Guiliani. He refused to be categorized.

However, the article ends with this quote from his brother:

“Ron’s politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics,” Mitchell Silver said. He paused and added: “He told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end.”

It seems a little out of place to end the article like that. My right-wing friends would blame the quote on the liberal media and its agenda. My left-leaning friends would probably just roll their eyes to that accusation, which the right-wingers would take as validation for their argument.

As for me, it just seems weird. I realize that Obama has a lot of cultural currency these days, but is aligning your dead brother with the president going to earn him some “cool points” from people who don’t like his politics? It shouldn’t.

Instead of worrying about his political pedigree, we should honor the fact he was politically active. Whether you agreed with his politics or were confused by them is irrelevant — just like who he voted for last November. What should be celebrated is the fact he was politically active in a time when grandstanding and finger-pointing eclipses the process of politics.