…But Were They Ever Really Gone?
We’ve seen sons of bitches like these many times before, going back as far as the 1970s when skinheads boomed in Great Britain.
Lunkheaded, proudly uneducated, gleefully hateful fireplugs with shorn pates and a pathologically misguided sense of patriotism, right wing hoods started marching in the streets of working class England back then to protest hippies, what they viewed as “socialism,” dark-skinned people, and anything else that didn’t remind them exactly, precisely, of themselves.
Now they’re swinging their Doc Martens, their torches, and their fists in Poland, calling for…, well, and end to everything that isn’t white and gloriously Polish in that eastern European nation.
[Image: CNN]
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Poland, recall, is where the Nazis felt most comfortable parking their death camps. Connection? Hard to say, but keep in mind the Third Reich didn’t site its Final Solution crime scenes in Czechoslovakia or Greece, although they could have, easily.
Some 60,000 right wing nationalists took to the streets yesterday in Warsaw, muscling in on Poland’s Independence Day festivities, calling out, “Death to the enemies of the homeland,” and demanding the country return to its mytho-religious roots.
Further proof that today’s right wing wave of shitthought is not exclusive to our holy land and that President Gag is not the illness but the symptom of a worldwide resurgence of of the kind of ugliness that we’d figured had gone out with scratchy, grainy, old black and white newsreel clips.
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The Root Of The Problem
Bullion
My friend, the actor and director Wm Bullion, tosses out this observation in the wake of the recent deluge of sexual impropriety accusations being made against dudes in high places:
Perhaps there is something inherently wrong about the accumulation of power…
My only amendment? Scratch the Perhaps.
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We Should All Be Veterans
Something that Col. John Tilford pointed out to me when I had him on Big Talk back in September: Since the military draft was ended in January, 1973, many, many Americans have not been placed in close quarters with other Americans from different states and regions, of different races and religions, speaking different accents and dialects, having had different educational backgrounds, coming from a variety of economic strata — in other words, being forced to see what a huge heterogenous nation this is.
Tilford
Not that the draft during the Vietnam era was at all equitable. It wasn’t that rich kids got their SSS letters and had to serve, or those whose pops had pull were powerless before the call of conscription. But During World War II and especially after Harry Truman integrated the Army in 1947, scads of American males had to learn how to get along with, sleep with, shower with, die with, eat with, and look forward to getting out alive with white, black, brown, red, and yellow tinted people. College boys had to share mess with high school dropouts. Alaskans had to listen to the snoring of Floridians, and vice versa.
That imposed intimacy, short-lived as it may have been — the US military became the enclave of minorities and the poor right around the time we began sending up to half a million soldiers to Southeast Asia — had, as an unintended consequence, a democratizing, an equalizing, effect on millions of young men.
Bill Clinton was the first president in nearly 50 years not to have served in the military. Since then, only George W. Bush donned a uniform and he took the Vietnam-era escape hatch from combat by volunteering for the Texas Air National Guard, a path for many privileged young men in the Sixties and early ’70s.
How different our public political discourse might be if we’d had a draft — a fair draft, a universal service requirement for all young citizens — all these years.
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Louis Székely
Obsessive
Now that I think about it, Louis CK did talk a lot, a lot, a lot about his pud.
Whether he’s whacking off in the basement next to the water heater in one gag or miming jacking off for long minutes in another (yeah, he did do that), his junk plays a lot in his comedy and, apparently, in his overall life.
Smoke. Fire.
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