Wednesday, October 26, 2005

DO REPUBLICANS READ? I MEAN LITERATURE, NOT JUST ANN COULTER SCREEDS? OH, YES, THEY CERTAINLY DO.

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Do you ever wonder how someone as obviously unqualified to hold an office higher than church deacon can be elected president (of the United States)? Clinton made it look so easy that voters thought they could trust just anyone-- so they did. It isn't merely that Bush can't communicate or even that he's intellectually lazy or uncurious or uneducated or unintelligent. He's basically failed at everything he's ever attempted in his entire life and there was never any reason to believe that he was about to turn things around. Even if both the 2000 and 2004 voting results were compromised and he lost both elections, as most people who have looked into it seriously are now certain, many millions or people did vote for him. Are they all stupid? All unable to discern between reality and propaganda?

Sometimes I blame it on the rise of the electronic media. People are bombarded by paid propagandists like Limbaugh and Hannity and O'Liely and Boortz and Savage 24/7, all singing from the same daily talking points memo. Eventually they think there must be something to all that crap if everyone is saying it. And then there's TV, the laziest medium ever, geared for people with low, and rapidly dropping, attention spans. If only people read more...

And then today I saw this: “This book is one of the worst books I have ever read. I got to about page 3-4.” It's an Amazon review (not ironic) of Henry Miller's 1934 masterpiece TROPIC OF CANCER. Do you think the writer of this review might fall prey to the not so subtle blandishments of a later-day Josef Goebbels like Karl Rove? Take a look at a collection of Amazon reviews of some of the greatest books ever written and then think about how Schwarzenegger, Bush and the GOP are working furiously to undermine public education. An educated public would never vote for them. People who write reviews like this, who think about literature like this... that is the real base of the Republican Party.

4 Comments:

At 12:38 PM, Blogger KenInNY said...

The other day I was too busy, and probably too scared, to take a closer look at a headline I saw fleetingly somewhere, saying--if I read it right--that 60 percent of the people don't believe in evolution.

It does appear that--ironically, in the age of "reality" TV--we have drifted so far away from contact with the real thing that people truly feel free to believe whatever makes them feel best, and that there truly is no such thing as objectively observable and verifiable reality.

After the votes on evolution are tallied, what will we be voting on next? Gravity? Or is the earth perhaps flat after all? (Boy, that must make our poor planet a tough target for the sun as it travels around us. Well, I guess next we can vote to see whether we really need light and heat from the sun to survive.)

K

 
At 2:18 PM, Blogger Agi said...

Good find! Man, those are some daft reviews. The person who reviewed Slaughterhouse-Five complained that Vonnegut's alien abduction plot was not realistic or probable. Duh! It's fantasy! It's not supposed to be! What idiots...

 
At 3:03 PM, Blogger 333 said...

You know, its funny. I wrote a blog about this very same topic yesterday, but with a different twist. A confession if you will. I certainly have to say this is right on and there is MUCH more explaining to do on this topic. I could dedicate an entire month of blogs to this topic.

The headliner yesterday was :

The media is on the attack, Democrats beware.

It seems obscure, but if you read it, you get the idea. That is my comment for this blog... Find me at www.americathestolen.blogspot.com

Love ya H & D! heh!

C3

 
At 3:17 PM, Blogger DownWithTyranny said...

My pal Bob sent me this little poem (put together aesthetically by WASHINGTON POST writer Richard Thompson out of actual GWB quotes). Maybe these Repug reviewers should just review things like quotations from their Great Leader:

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked is our children learning?
Will the highways of the internet become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I'm a pit bull on the pant leg of opportunity.

I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope.
Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!

 

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