Saturday, September 1, 2012

Artistic Expression from the Left




ONE TERM MORE!


The video above, a professionally produced take off on one of the songs from Les Mis, is billed as “A Political Parody.” What we think of it is unimportant. We’ll leave that to your imagination. 

What you think of it could be interesting.

The video was sent to us in an email by a long time crypto-Communist correspondent, now age 90, who still wants to believe that Walter Duranty was telling the truth, and that the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia was a rousing success unconscionably defamed by the greedy Capitalist pigs who’ve kept the Western Bloc in chains and ignorant of their tragic plight all these years.


The letter in response from one of his friends –– presented below unedited and unexpurgated –– is a Classic Leftist Utterance. We hope you find it as stimulating, entertaining and informative as we did.  ~ FT



Dear, Fellow Freedom Fighter,


Thanks very much for sharing this. It encapsulated for me why, tragically, President Yomama is going to be a one termer and a new and oppressively religious Dark Ages will descend upon the Land.


Fortunately America is large and diverse enough to survive it... as it survived McCarthyism... as it survived Nixon... I hope.
But for you and I, the political reality and moral climate during our last years will be bleak as a result.


I was thrilled and proud of the USA when the first Negro (ok, technically mocha) was elected President during my time on the planet and am still hoping to see the first First Man when Hillary takes office in 2017... though she will likely divorce swingin' dick Bill before inauguration if she’s half as smart and vindictive as I think she is.


However  this video was so effete, so polysyllabically hyper-intellectual that while the ultra-libs stay busy congratulating themselves on its magnificence, it has no impact on the voting masses and, if it actually got distributed, would simply work against Democrats and play into the right wing's well-founded Hollywood and Media Elite themes..


It trumpets (and sings) of the philosophies and initiatives which have made liberals pariahs in their own land despite being far more faithful to the Constitution than any Conservative.  


We are far more concerned for, vigilant toward, and protective of Freedoms and concerned for the blood of our servicemen/women than any chickenhawk Teabagger. 


But thanks to deceptive marketing and lowest common denominator pandering by, ironically, the evil geniuses of the Republican elite like Rove and the Sununus, no average Joe or Jane knows or cares about that.


On that chickenhawk point –– did I just hear Romney in Tampa promise to invade Iran and start a trade war with China?  Thought so!


The lyrics here boast of political nightmares like the Dream Act which are rallying the opposition effectively because they are in fact destroying the cultural and legal underpinnings that have made America both distinctive and a meritocracy –– thus a productive, and a science-loving world leader. Instead, they champion the elements that steadily erode those values and practices and have us on a fast track toward third world status:  (1) affirmative action minimum standards instead of equal opportunity to qualify by demonstrating excellence and effort (2) endorsing and rewarding illegal immigration instead of belated uncharitable but realistic enforcement.  Jumped the line?  Go to the back. No amnesty.  No reward.  Sorry...


And on this last aspect, Liberals have always operated under the delusion that we have unlimited financial resources for every "nice to have" generous gesture they can conceive. Even if we once did, we no longer do.  Every illegal sitting down in a University classroom on a scholarship or even in-state tuition break takes that seat away from the child of an American coal miner or disabled veteran or ________.  This feeds the "Obamas and libs hate America" sentiment.  And here you sing its praises.  How out of touch can one ideology get?


Yes, Romney and Ryan are racist, misogynist, homophobic offshoring bullies and despoilers of nature in egalitarian suits. The delusional, brainwashed masses want to be like them... or at least their present images of them.   They just want the rich part...nor the "how did we get it" part.  Have to be forced to see that as well.


Romney and Ryan daily provide the ammo.  They must be exposed as the untrustworthy unAmerican liars, haters and hypocrites they are.  The right is very effectively  demonizing Obama on the blogs as a liar when he is not. Time to launch daily fifteen second ads airing exclusively on sports, soaps, and Fox labeling them liars and giving current examples.  For Ryan's speech it could have been any of a half dozen examples emphasizing that he voted for the bills he derided and sucked at the stimulus tit.  


For Romney tonight, not so many ... other than repeating the big lie that OBama is cutting 700 million or billion or whatever from Medicare –– same lie Ryan trotted out previously.  Then craft a vicious below the belt ad: "despite what you said at the convention, Mitch, we admired George Romney and you're no George Romney" showing how George was a moderate inclusive Republican who would at least discipline and possibly disown Mitch for aligning with hate monger teabaggers.  And then a series to caricature Mitch as a wolf in sheep's clothing –– his physiognomy is ideal for that and any attempt by the RNC to respond in kind could be seen as racist.  


Here's one ready for lampooning (most everyone even involuntarily loves humor and it would offset the vitriol) –– Romney mocked OBama for "working to slow the rise in the oceans (ironic venue for mocking that  with the State of Florida likely to be more than half submerged in 100 years at current rates)  and heal the planet" and seeking contrast Romney pledged vaguely "to help you and your family."  How?  By teaching them all to swim?


Like it or not, fair play or not, Democrats must tear those slick suits off them in a hurry or lose the White House.  And it is going to take claws followed by  brass knuckles not the contemporary leftist version of Bohemian Rhapsody to do it.    More voters have watched a single rerun episode of Dukes of Hazzard than bought tickets for all the operas and Broadway shows of the past decade.  This video was a nearly complete "feel good" waste of time and resources.  OK, motivate your base if you think you need to.  But you are tied and sliding. You've gotta show some on the other side the error of their ways.  Fast.


And don't blame the fucking messenger.


Or go ahead if you must.


Free speech etc.


We told you it was a classic, didn't we? 

Were we right? You be the judge.

Interesting what he said about The Dream Act, though, wasn't it?



~ FreeThinke





36 comments:

  1. Nothing beats righteous mixed with hypocrisy to REALLY sell a political message!

    And crypto? I'm an ABSOLUTE Marxist! The utopian END, not the corrupt and discredited MEANS. ;)

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  2. Freethinker, you one of those misguided souls who thinks the Holodorma was an economic rather than an ethnic motivated genocide?

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  3. More voters have watched a single rerun episode of Dukes of Hazzard than bought tickets for all the operas and Broadway shows of the past decade.

    ---------

    Many voters can play the complete Bach canon but have never seen a foreign film or listened to Coltrane.

    They are just as limitied.

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  4. How the mighty have fallen... "one day more" becomes "one term more" becomes "dictator for life" with these people. ;)

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  5. and duckman, you oversubscribe to the "benefits" of foreign influence.

    ...from the Jowett summary to Plato's "Laws"

    The Laws are confessedly a Second-best, an inferior Ideal, to which Plato has recourse, when he finds that the city of Philosophers "Republic") is no longer 'within the horizon of practical politics.' But it is curious to observe that the higher Ideal is always returning (compare Arist. Polit.), and that he is not much nearer the actual fact, nor more on the level of ordinary life in the Laws than in the Republic. It is also interesting to remark that the new Ideal is always falling away, and that he hardly supposes the one to be more capable of being realized than the other. Human beings are troublesome to manage; and the legislator cannot adapt his enactments to the infinite variety of circumstances; after all he must leave the administration of them to his successors; and though he would have liked to make them as permanent as they are in Egypt, he cannot escape from the necessity of change. At length Plato is obliged to institute a Nocturnal Council which is supposed to retain the mind of the legislator, and of which some of the members are even supposed to go abroad and inspect the institutions of foreign countries, as a foundation for changes in their own. The spirit of such changes, though avoiding the extravagance of a popular assembly, being only so much change as the conservative temper of old members is likely to allow, is nevertheless inconsistent with the fixedness of Egypt which Plato wishes to impress upon Hellenic institutions. He is inconsistent with himself as the truth begins to dawn upon him that 'in the execution things for the most part fall short of our conception of them' (Republic).

    And is not this true of ideals of government in general?


    You helped throw the "western canon" OUT of the University curricum... and NOW you want us to imitate the FAILED states around us? Please. What are you thinking? Only members of the Nocturnal Council are allowed to travel abroad.... for good reason.

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  6. Thank you for the glimpse at the unvarnished paleo-left.

    Now I understand why the adopted political correctness and took up anathema causes like pro-immigration and Islam supporting.

    You gotta dress up something that ugly or it'll be dead in a generation.

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  7. Well I loved the song if only because it was set to One Day More (Les Miserables has always been my alltime favorite story, even before the Broadway production).

    This needs to be set against both parties, because neither of them are going to make anything better.

    I'm sure Ducky will vehemently disagree with me, probably even call me stupid because I'm apparently too blind to see the transcendent righteousness that is the Democrat Party, but the fact of the matter is that both parties are fraught with contradictions and ridiculous policy points.

    Both parties are designed to keep career politicians in business. They don't care about representing Americans, nor do they care about America actually getting better. They both want things to stay the same because they both profit off of everything being screwed up.

    Democrats profit off of government being a haven for waste, fraud, and abuse, while the Republicans profit off of people's fears of America losing it's moral compass.

    Both of those result in more votes. The parties aren't about the common good: they're about keeping their memebers' pockets lined.

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  8. How refreshing to know that, in the eyes of the Left, I am a member of the delusional, brainwashed masses! Why am I one of those members? Because I don't support Barack Hussein Obama.

    The video is quite slick. I'm sure that my father-in-law, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal atheist, would approve. Does he hold Mr. AOW and me, both of us people of faith and political conservatives, in such low regard? Probably -- although, if he does, he covers it fairly well.

    Does the Right hold the Left is such low regard? Not to the extent indicated in this post.

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  9. 'm sure Ducky will vehemently disagree with me, probably even call me stupid because I'm apparently too blind to see the transcendent righteousness that is the Democrat Party,

    ------
    No, I'll just remind you that I despise Obama and can't think of an election featuring two bigger amoral greed heads.

    The difference? When Obama boosts your wallet he'll leave you bus fare home.

    Now what are we going to do about it? If we keep on with this D vs. R stupidity we're just going to get screwed over.

    Let's start by admitting the Entire system is broken and we better find a way to restore some semblance of democracy.

    Let's get the money out of the system. Make some noise about the shit bums sitting on the supreme(LMAO) court.

    Their powdering our asses and making us focus on freaking Clint Eastwood babbling a few bromides to an empty chair.
    You're young. WAKE UP

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  10. ... and that isn't meant to snap at you, Jack. You are about the most clear headed of this little posting circle.
    You seem to have some things figured out.

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  11. @Farmer -- You helped throw the "western canon" OUT of the University curriculum...

    ------
    Oh, when did I do that?

    I'm an advocate of making it a little larger. Not confining painting to the 17th century and the Impressionists for instance.
    Not limiting the film canon to inferior American films.

    What you mean to say is that YOU feel the university should be a mausoleum with Freethinker as rector.

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  12. "Many voters can play the complete Bach canon but have never seen a foreign film or listened to Coltrane.

    Coltrane rocks! Miles Davis was the man, and Dizzy Gillespie... Oh man how I loved the be-bop!

    And Big Band Jazz... Maynard Ferguson, the Chairman of the Board of jazz trumpeters.

    Damn how I miss my days of of old plating jazz trumpet. Jazz... America's only true original artistic musical art.

    Huh Ducky....

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  13. I think America has often done music right.

    The last fifteen years or so have been pretty barren.

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  14. "And we are here as on a darkling plain
    Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
    Where ignorant armies clash by night."



    AMEN, Matthew! AMEN!


    As I've been blest to know for several decades, there is more truth in [good] poetry and music than in statistics.

    ~ FreeThinke

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  15. I didn't know that you were such an Egyptian, ducky... DeNile, DeNile, DeNile.

    The Spirit of '68 destroyed the Western canon. Are you repudiating it now?

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  16. As for the mausoleum, hey, send the university profs overseas and allow THEM to select foreign ideas to be imported and retransmitted to students... but to import it DIRECTLY viaconema and let the masses choose... THAT is a recipe for thecultural confusion that we're drowning in today.

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  17. ...and music in the last 10 years (alternative indie) has never been better.

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  18. The best music could never improved upon or surpassed. It's value is ETERNAL.

    The error of "Progressive" thinking is that the present ought to function with such dynamism as to make the past "irrelevant."

    I'm not sure Ducky really qualifies as a true "Progressive," because he does -- occasionally -- show understanding and appreciation of established classics.

    He couldn't be more wrong, of course, in his appraisal of my "mentality." No one has been more pleased than I to see regularly scheduled performances of American operas written within the last fifty years beautifully produced and performed by our local opera company -- a significant "provincial" house.

    And few people have spent more time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York than I, who have been completely absorbed with wonder, fascination and occasionally a measure of delight during my many visits there.

    The food in the cafeteria there was the only disappointment. It was always extraordinarily ordinary and uninteresting in direct contrast to its surroundings.

    I'm sorry, Ducky, but I dutifully went to many "foreign" films, and suffered along with the invariably depressed and depressing characters on the screen. It wasn't the subtitles that bothered me so much as the tone.

    Sundays and Cybele was one of the notable exceptions.

    Life is NOT what happens to us, it's what we choose to MAKE of what happens to us.

    In case you haven't noticed, I am sick and tired of all the puffed up outrage and indignation however well deserved it might be. That is why I spend more time these days using poetry, music and anecdotes and less in political diatribes.

    ~ FT



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  19. Take from the best and make it better.... perfect.

    Don't take from the base and repeat their mistakes.

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  20. What is the spirit of '68, Farmer?

    How can you destroy the canon? It's still there, Farmer.

    To many people listening to junk like Les Mis is the problem.

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  21. I'm sorry, Ducky, but I dutifully went to many "foreign" films, and suffered along with the invariably depressed and depressing characters on the screen. It wasn't the subtitles that bothered me so much as the tone.
    --------
    Then you never went to many. Unless you were a total Bergman freak.

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  22. Dumb too, now i see.

    ducky is certainly your namesake.

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  23. Well Farmer,I don't think Leo Strauss' cabana boy is the last word although we can give him credit for dumping all over John Locke.

    To me, the likes of Nietzsche and his low rent popularizer Rand have done more to destroy imperatives than an liberals you can name.

    But as I say, the canon's still there. Just have to seek it out and do your best to ignore what the market sells as culture.

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  24. ... or better yet, Farmer, create your own.

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  25. John Searle, the Berkeley philosophy professor and former proponent of the ’60s radical Free Speech Movement wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

    Searle wasn't Leo Strauss' cabana boy... and unlike yourself seems a bit "regretful".

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  26. A canon w/o its former "authority" to compel its' universal adoption and study will do nothing to reinvigorate the rot that the Spirit of '68 has left in its wake.

    The tide has ebbed, and naught but rotting flotsam remains, stinking up the beaches.

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  27. ...but then again, what was I thinking? How can one who never takes responsibility ever be expected to experience regret?

    sorry for wasting your time, duckman.

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  28. A tribute to the duckman. May he never settle on a sticky surface.

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  29. " ... this video was so effete, so polysyllabically hyper-intellectual that while the ultra-libs stay busy congratulating themselves on its magnificence, it has no impact on the voting masses and, if it actually got distributed, would simply work against Democrats and play into the right wing's well-founded Hollywood and Media Elite themes."

    This is in many ways an apt criticism of the video. However, I would not call it :hyper-intellectual." Instead, I would call it an orgy of spiteful, childish, self-indulgent denigration."

    The performers are excellent as performers. Too bad their talents have been put to such poor use!

    Didn't anyone notice the expression of conceited, self-absorbed, pseudo-righteous wrath on their faces? The aura of militancy in their demeanor?

    Once again, this is Cultural Marxism's CRITICAL THEORY at work gnawing away at your vitals in one of its many guises.

    Didn't you notice that there is not ONE positive, CONSTRUCTIVE idea or sentiment in the entire -- much-too-lengthy -- musical diatribe?

    This is the essence of CRITICAL THEORY -- incessant, relentless, unyielding, unreasoning, uncompromising VILIFICATION. The Hallmark and primary modus operandi of the LEFT.

    ~ FT

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  30. As I think I just pointed out....

    Sartre’s representation of the Furies differs from that of Aeschylus in that, instead of attempting to avenge the crimes committed, they try to evoke guilt from those who committed them. Sartre does this to reiterate the importance of amenability; he wants to prove that remorse should only be felt if one believes the act committed is wrong. By acting in what he believes to be a righteous way and killing the king and queen, Orestes takes responsibility for his actions without feeling any remorse for them.

    Responsibility w/o remorse...

    ...of course, disavowing ALL responsibility is the opposite of existentialism.

    Critical Theory that disavows responsibility is simply a destructive and self-indulgent conceit.

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  31. Nothing new under the sun, Thersites.

    Endless rehash with a few "stylistic" variations, that's all.

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  32. I still say self reliance, personal responsibility, and hard work dedicated to achieving ones goals is the recipe for a fruitful and rewarding life. IMO it is one of the universal truths Free Thinker. Some, perhaps a majority of progressives might disagree.

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  33. that works in a free, laissez-faire society, Les, but not in a Marxist Dictatorshit.

    What we seem to have now is weird sort of Crypto-Marxist Plutocratic Oligarchy.

    I can't stand it anymore. Frankly, I'm burning out. Very very few seem to have the faintest grasp of what's going on. It's beyond frightening.

    I did everything right, saved, invested carefully, made a good deal in real estate, inherited a considerable fortune a few years ago, and should be "sitting pretty," but the dirty bastards have conspired to pull the rug out from under the feet of people like me who have acquired a modest-but-significant degree of wealth, and should by all that's holy be able to live out the remainder of our lives with no greater concern than the [considerable] problem of staying alive as long as possible -- outside the confines of a nursing home.

    If the Oligarchs get away with robbing us of all we have, I won't want to live any longer. I'm 72, nearly blind, arthritic, and very VERY tired.

    ~ FT

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    Replies
    1. I understand, and agree. Perhaps it is why at 60 and having time (being unemployed temporarily) I have started powerlifting training again, am contemplating a MAJOR career change, have changed political affilatoon, and will continue to fight the bastards on my blog and every way I can.

      I simply refuse to be spoon fed the BS by the two fascits parties of American. If I eventually go down I will do so in a flaming blaze of resistance.

      Simply put I've had it with the BS from leaders in both mAjor pArties. Until America wakes up, gets back to basics, and realizes leaders like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson should be taken seriously NOTHING is going to change.

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  34. ... and well suited to one of your generation .

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If your aim is Vilification ––
Other forms of Denigration ––
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Determined Obfuscation ––
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