Wednesday, October 31, 2012

This Day In Stupid

It's an embarrassment of riches (or maybe the other way around), folks, but it really comes down to two worthy entries for the coveted title of "Okay, I Still Don't Get It -- Tell Me Why Again Is This A Story?":

  1. Apparently former famous FEMA failure Mike "Dookie" Brown, now an enormously successful nobody out in radio palookaville, has decided that Obama responded too quickly to Hurricane Sandy. Sure, and while we're at it, why don't we take hair-care advice from Donald Trump? I thought this growler had been flushed half a decade ago. Do your duty, America -- flush twice.
  2. I honestly don't even understand this one. Not even a little bit. Hopefully someone out there can explain it to me. Why are the friendly folks at Nice Polite Republicans taking a break from their usual Morris the Cat voiceovers to apologize to a four-year-old? Why is said four-year-old so overexposed to political campaign coverage, do her parents belong to some weird politicult (see what I did there?), or worse -- are they part of the Rmoney ground game? Is this bawling kid supposed to personify a nation's frustration at having its "choices" so tightly circumscribed, they're almost frustrated enough to put down the deep-fried Twinkies and do something about it? Could this whole thing be a contrivance to distract morons from what the actual choice, such as it is, is really between:  A) a wholly-owned subsidiary of an ineffably corrupt financial system; and B) a completely demented Republican party?

    I guess we're all just supposed to commiserate at the wretched burden of being forced at gunpoint to decide whether or not we want affordable health care, whether or not we believe women are breeding units to be used at Richard Mourdock's discretion, whether or not we want to bomb Iran, whether or not we want Wall Street to gobble up what's left of the crumbs we're still allowed, whether or not we think a soulless corporate gazillionaire job-harvester is the right person to bring back the jobs he sent to China, whether we want numberless galoots and snake-handlers calling in their chits when their man weasels his way in. It's just so unfair, when all we really want to do is lay in bed with a tub of Nutella and watch people open storage sheds. Boo-hoo.
Now then, from the other end of the spectrum, I always like to see jackasses get a come-to-Jebus moment and actually make some use of it. Such is the case of Chris Christie, who mere days after lampooning Obama's supposed lack of leadership skills, managed to swallow his pride (along with the rest of that baked ziti -- you knew we were going there) and be a good governor and advocate for his state. Christie deserves a lot of credit for that, enough to damn near make up for the other two sacks of nothing, Brown and that kid (actually her parents).
at

2 comments:

  1. daver11/1/12, 2:09 PM

    You're taking this all wrong, Heywood:

    Forget the fucking NPR angle.

    This is a little girl (not unlike my sisters at that age (50 years ago)) speaking from the heart for all of us:

    Mommy, please make it stop. I'm tired of Bronco Bamma and Mitt (sob).

    Did you watch the 22 sec. video? It is to-die-for cute.

    It'll be over soon, darling, then we can all take a nap, ok?

    (ok mommy (sniffle)). {-:


    ReplyDelete
  2. Heywood J.11/1/12, 11:54 PM

    No, at face value, I agree with you -- it's just a little kid crying. Cute and shit. I get that part of it.

    But that's not why it's a "story". And yes, forget the NPR side of it.

    There's a couple things at work here. One is the obvious, that either the kid is losing her shit over a few minutes of NPR, or Mommy is completely overexposing the poor kid to political coverage (not to mention uploading her small child's emotional breakdowns for mass consumption). Either way, there's something wrong there.

    Second is the meta issue of, as you sympathetically point out, the kid "speaking....for all of us". That's the part I object most strenuously to.

    She's a little kid. We are adults. We have agency, free will. We can change the channel, refuse to participate, extricate ourselves from the machine. If we fail to do any of those things, we shouldn't be complaining, crying "make it stop" like helpless toddlers.

    It won't be over a day or a week or a year after next Tuesday. Because it's never over. Because we won't stop feeding the machine.

    This was not a from-the-mouths-of-babes moment of wisdom. It's an air-filled pastry, a contrivance to distract and salve self-wounded consciences. It's just another Pogo moment, whether or not we recognize it as such.

    I do agree that I'm probably over-deconstructing a fairly simple moment, because the whole thing just grinds my gears, for several reasons. But at the same time, the folks that made this a meme are failing to deconstruct it enough.

    ReplyDelete