1. FUTURE AMERICA: You may recall that I recently discussed our
possible fascist-robot future in this engaging video chat about RoboCop with Gerard Perry (directed by
Matt Brandenburgh)...
2. CANADA: ...and
next we’ll likely post one on 300: Rise
of an Empire, with asides about (centuries-later) Islam. Luckily, we will not be discussing the touchy
topic of Islam in Canada like
my acquaintance Ezra Levant, who Gerard notes is in trouble again.
3. THE INTERNETS:
Gerard and I have other trouble-making
acquaintances, though, including a partly New York-based cabal of mischievous young
anarcho-capitalists, spawned by what we like to call a Facebook “Trollboard”
but now out in public as the blog Vulgar
Libertarians.
4. NORTH KOREA: And
all of us in turn know the
legendary Michael Malice, whose new book on the villainous Kim Jong Il Gerard
reviews here.
5. VIET
NAM/ALBUQUERQUE: The aforementioned libertarians are the ones who sometimes
get depicted as politically-naughty characters by mainstream society, but in a
sane world, wouldn’t the
character who Bryan Cranston begins portraying on Broadway today -- namely,
Lyndon Johnson -- be seen as far scarier than we are, indeed, scarier even than Walter White?
6. AIR FORCE ONE:
This year marks not only the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act but
likely the fiftieth anniversary, per journalist Ronald Kessler, of LBJ bragging
to two governors: “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200
years.” Again, who here is the truly
vulgar one?
7. THE GHETTO: And
before you make the inane, cultural-context-dropping argument that it should be
OK for white people to say it if black people can say it (an argument I have
never bought), please note that even rappers have standards of etiquette -- and
some have
even begun to lament, like Allan Bloom and so many before them, that today’s artists
are forgetting the ideals embodied by the classics.
8. THE MARKETING
DEPARTMENT PRETENDING TO BE GHETTO: Far worse, if you ask me, than a rapper
having a gangsta persona for the duration of a song or two, is a current Converse
sneakers video ad that non-ironically asks, over moody black-and-white filmed
images, that we imagine how wonderful it would be to turn the world upside down
and shake all its lunch money loose, since “they aren’t going to just give it
to you.” It even ends by asking the world,
“How much have you got?”
I guess Converse has decided to appeal directly to the
pro-violence, pro-theft crowd. Grotesque
-- and as cynical as it gets.
9. OLD-TIMEY AMERICA: Of course, why
should I expect dimwitted ad execs hawking sneakers to understand the
underlying moral and legal rules that make their economic existences possible? Conservatives don’t get it either. Here’s a former Bush administration official,
Robert W. Patterson, denouncing
markets and the growing libertarian trend within conservatism, while praising
the authoritarian, trust-busting, government-growing -- and, yes, very racist-imperialist
-- Teddy Roosevelt.
10. UKRAINE AND OTHER
“BLOODLANDS”: And as eternal reminders that things could always get worse, here
(h/t Ronald Radosh) are Hitler and Stalin, compared and contrasted by historian
Tim Snyder (who is a good thing to come out of Brown, and now Yale, and who
wrote the book Bloodlands about the
slaughter on all sides in that region during and around WWII).
Overall, though, I’d say we should do less fretting about
the vulgarity of the masses and more about the outright psychoses of their murderous
“leaders.”
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