Dignity, schmignity! Who am I kidding, the man is shameless! Watch in slack-jawed boredom as Glenn Beck interviews himself, in a kind of idiotic (or demented, if you prefer) Swedish Chef impression.
Glenn Beck lost his mind (and the vast majority of his audience and influence) a while ago, but has Beck the showman lost his mojo, too?
He’s not even trying here. Well, he’s trying to take up airtime, I guess, but not much else. I can’t imagine too many people, not even stupid ones, would subscribe to this, or continue their subscriptions if this was the quality of the programming they would receive for their hard-earned dough. There aren’t enough hours in the day and this doesn’t even rise to the occasion of lame.
Slavoj Žižek might just be the world’s foremost intellectual prostitute, but it still feels novel to hear him riff on these bulwarks of relatively recent mass culture, not to mention relate “Gangnam Style” (“your first reaction is maybe, ‘fuck them stupid Koreans’”) to his beloved Jacques Lacan.
And who’d have thought he’d seen Kung Fu Panda five times!
A Craigslist ad from the infamously post-industrial city of Youngstown, Ohio advertises a sad DIY gamer’s “Personal Gaming Module” for $2,500, with the following specs:
Personal Gaming Module. aka “The Box”
Weatherproof Camo Exterior
Solid construction.
Custom seating for one or two adults.
900 watts 5.1 Dolby Digital surround with fiber optic connections.
100 watt powered subwoofer.
HD LCD TV on adjustable Omnimount
XBox 360 with protective enclosure.
Rubber lined spill proof floor.
Black fleece inner wall lining.
A/C and Heat.
Steel casters for easy moving, around garage, driveway, etc.
Original Model available. One of a kind Military Theme.
Serious inquiries only.
$2500 delivered within 100 miles of Youngstown.
I want to rag on this thing as the nadir of a gormless gamer culture, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Maybe it’s the fact that I admire ambitious utopian projects, and this feels akin to one. It could be the opus of a dreamer, someone with tenacity and a resourceful mind.
Maybe it’s the solidarity I felt with gamers ever since that year of unemployment after college, spent doing virtually nothing but applying for jobs, accruing mass, and playing “Twilight Princess.”
Maybe the idea of sequestering technological entertainment in a creepy fallout shelter leaves me concerned for the socialization of its would-be inhabitants. The ”Custom seating for one or two adults“ feels like some sort of tragic Waiting for Godot optimism. And don’t even want to speculate on why they might need a “Rubber lined spill proof floor.”
Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s in Youngstown, Ohio—a city so depressing its latest survival technique (in addition to hydrofracking) is bulldozing its abandoned houses like the amputation of gangrenous limbs.
I don’t really know, but the thing leaves me with an uneasy melancholy, so I’m just going to hope that whoever ends up with this creation, this audiovisual womb, is soothed and entertained to the fullest extent.
Papa’s got a brand new conspiracy theory: Glenn Beck, the teary-eyed, former alcoholic Mormon “patriot” and multi-millionaire conspiracy theory media mogul believes (or, rather, *ahem*, says he believes) himself to be the target of, what else, a conspiracy to call him a conspiracy theorist.
Heavy meta!
It sounds like I am making this up. I am not making this up. Via Raw Story:
Conspiracy talk radio host Glenn Beck [see what he did there?] said Tuesday that he isn’t sure why he’s been labeled a conspiracy theorist in the media, but he’s pretty sure it’s the result of a “concentrated effort” somehow coordinated by the White House.
Building on his theory that CNN secretly orchestrated an incredibly awkward moment between host Wolf Blitzer and an atheist survivor of the Oklahoma tornadoes, Beck told listeners on Tuesday that it’s just another example of the media’s conspiracy to push a hidden agenda, in this case atheism.
“The media has their own agenda,” he said of CNN. “And if the media has a storyline, it just writes it in. And currently the storyline is ‘conspiracy theorist.’” Then, without irony, he asked: “Why is it a concentrated effort now to label me a conspiracy theorist?”
Fantabulosa! The man surely knows how to enthrall his audience of cud-chewing cows, does he not? They subscribe to this shit, baby! Pay the man a monthly fee to put stupid ideas in their heads. It’s genius, the best gimmick for separating fools from their money since televangelism or Scientology!
Glenn Beck is so gangsta, motherfucker, countin’ those stacks o’ Benjamins!
Is it an absolute truism that the most strident, vociferous homophobes are always self-hating closeted gays? Judging from the dozens upon dozens of anti-gay Christian activists and conservative pols who have been “outed” over the years, it would seem to be an immutable law of that particular brand of assholism.
And speaking of assholes, Liberal radio host Alan Colmes very nearly got rabidly anti-gay, hate-filled Christian hater Bryan Fischer to admit to something truly hilarious on his show the other day.
Read between the lines of this exchange:
Colmes: Have you ever had a gay impulse?
Fischer: (Laughing) Alan, I am not going to talk about that ...
Colmes: I’m just wondering ...
Fischer: Alan, I’m not going to go there. Give it a rest Alan ...
Colmes: It’s a simple yes or no question.
Fischer: We’re not going to talk about that.
Colmes: Because maybe if you’ve been able to overcome your gay impulses and you’ve been successful in doing it, you could be a model for other people you’d like to see act the same way.
See what he did there? Standing ovation!
Fischer: The focus here, Alan, is that everybody experiences sexual impulses that if they acted on those impulses, it would destroy them.
Colmes: Well, can you give me an example from your own life? What would be some of yours?
Fischer: You’ve experienced them ...
Colmes: I have?
Fischer: I’ve experienced them. Every man, every woman has experienced certain sexual impulses that, if they acted on them, if they conducted themselves by yielding to those impulses, it would destroy them. Ask Tiger Woods about that.
Nice try, Bryan, but he’s asking YOU.
Colmes: I don’t think I’ve ever had sexual impulses that would destroy the society or the culture or make me a deviant in some way. I honestly don’t think that’s ever happened, even in your eyes, so I’m surprised. I wonder what impulses you’re talking about. If you’ve had them, I’d love to know what they are.
Fischer: Well the focus Alan is on sexual conduct, sexual behavior, not on sexual impulse ...
Colmes: So you won’t tell me whether you yourself have been able to overcome a gay impulse?
Fischer: Alan, give it a rest.
Getting a little squirmy there, are we Bry?
What’s Fischer hiding? It is, as Colmes said during the conversation, a simple yes or no question. He knows what the answer is, just like anyone else would and yet curiously, he chose not to say. Somehow I think that if the answer was, ahem, a straightforward “no” he would have just said “no” without hesitation.
But he didn’t. You don’t need to be Alex Jones (or much of an amateur psychoanalyst, either) to draw certain observations from this unintentionally revealing exchange…
Hopefully this question will dog Bryan Fischer around for the rest of his fuckin’ life… or at least until he’s caught with a “traveling companion” he met on Grindr…
If you’re much under the age of 35 you probably have no cultural memory of Morton Downey Jr. whatsoever, but he (and Joe Pyne, an earlier, slightly less-obnoxious pioneer of in-your-face television) is the very direct progenitor of the confrontational style of Fox News and reichwing talk radio we have today. The Morton Downey, Jr. Show was where the talkshow format merged with professional wrestling (and all that implies). After his example, the dam was burst forever on politeness and niceties in televised discourse. “Mort” was Network‘s Howard Beale come to life as a snarling, chain-smoking firebrand.
When The Morton Downey, Jr. Show first started airing in the New York metro area in 1987 on WWOR, the “super station” operating out of (not so) beautiful Secaucus, NJ, I was briefly into it, simply because I had never seen anything like it, or the shouting, spitting-mad, red-faced, veins-bulging lunatic who hosted it, not to mention his mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Neanderthal audience! Oy vey.
Initially, at least, it was riveting, trainwreck TV, but I soon went from watching it most nights (if I was home, which was admittedly rare in those days) to only watching it when someone really kooky, like Lyndon LaRouche, say, was going to be on it. Eventually The Morton Downey, Jr. Show seemed like it was all Tawana Brawley, Curtis Sliwa, low rent porn girls and too-samey high-volume, spittle-flecked tirades against “pablum puking liberals.” All the time. After a while you kinda “got” it and the novelty wore off.
For a brief moment he was everywhere (The Today Show, playing himself in movies and on TV, People magazine, even scaling that true pinnacle of pop culture success: being parodied on SNL) but Downey’s star—and the ratings of his syndicated talkshow—crashed and burned pretty fast. I think the rest of America got sick of him as quickly as we New Yorkers did. All told his rise and fall took under two years. In 1990 Morton Downey Jr. filed for bankruptcy.
I didn’t really know that much about his life, but I found the new documentary about the angry father of trash TV, Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie directed by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger to be absolutely engrossing. It’s a well-made, well-researched film that tries to figure out what made a freak of nature like this tick. There is no simple answer, as the film demonstrates.
No, Morton Downey Jr. was no “Lonesome” Larry Rhodes, but he harbored a burning desire to become more famous than the domineering father he hated (“Daddy issues” evidentally loomed large in his life). He spent most of his career casting around for his niche, at first as a singer and songwriter (Dean Martin is seen praising a young Downey’s talents in a vintage clip) and then as a radio jock. Eventually he would be talent spotted by former MTV exec Bob Pittman, who wanted to do a “new” Joe Pyne type program.
His act was a shtick to a large extent, but Downey was also more or less true to his own (sometimes shifting) beliefs. Still his producers could feed him lines in pre-production meetings that he would parrot verbatim. Above all he was a showman, and during a break, he would often tell a guest he’d just insulted, spat upon and kicked off his show that they’d done a great job!
Mort’s talent for getting noticed deserted him about 18 months into his brief moment of fame and he was soon resorting to attention grabbing stunts like cutting his own hair and drawing a (backwards) swastika on his face in an airport bathroom, claiming that some skinheads roughed him up. That Downey was able to pass a polygraph test about the made-up incident and his far-out claims shows his capacity for self-deception.
Évocateur does a fine job getting near the bottom of what was obviously a bottomless pit of psychological misery (segments where Downey’s poetry is read aloud provide unexpected revelations of his self-loathing). If you remember the Loudmouth, or even if you don’t, without him there would be no Glenn Beck, no Molotov Mitchell, no Dana Loesch… it’s Mort’s prescient angry DNA that still informs rightwing media today and his influence seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. With appearances by Beck, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Sally Jesse Raphael, Chris Elliott, Gloria Allred, Alan Dershowitz and Pat Buchanan. Downey’s friend and frequent sparring partner Al Sharpton appears in clips from the show, but he didn’t participate in the doc for reasons that will be quite obvious once you’ve seen it.
Downey was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996 and had one of his lungs removed (but, true to form, not before he appeared on Larry King Live the very night prior to his surgery!). He died in in 2001.
OK, I know this will come off as a little harsh, heartless and probably as deeply lacking in compassion or empathy, but let me say that, first of all, someone needs to say it, and why not me? Although I’ve lived in New York City since I was 6 (well, with a few breaks here and there), I was actually born in Oklahoma City. And even though I do acknowledge that it’s distasteful to mention this “so soon,” it has to be said now, before the vote goes to Congress.
So here the fuck it is: NO EMERGENCY FUNDS FOR OKLAHOMA. There, I said it. Sorry, but fuck ‘em. Why do I say this? Is it simply because their scumbag senators (Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe) dragged their feet for MONTHS on voting for aid for New York and the Sandy-impacted areas here in the Northeast? Yeah, that’s part of it. A big part of it. Is it because both of them ultimately voted AGAINST Sandy-aid to this area? Yeah, that’s a big part of it, too. But it’s more than that. Much more, and soon you’ll see it too, so give me a minute to make my case…
The first thing that should be noted is that Oklahoma is one of the biggest, fattest, Federal-funds gobbling hobo states in the nation, receiving $1.36 in federal funds for every dollar in taxes it pays to the federal government (It’s also the 10th least unionized state with 5.5% union membership). Meanwhile, my state, New York, received just 79 cents back for each dollar that we paid, and we paid a helluva lot more in taxes than Oklahoma did. In other words, it’s fair to say that New York keeps Oklahoma afloat. We pay to keep Oklahomans employed and we pay to keep up their infrastructure via the federal funds Oklahoma vampirically sucks out of our state, to the detriment of our students and our fucking roads. And yet, Oklahoma senators were stupid enough to vote against Sandy aid? Huh?WTF?Please don’ hit me massah I’ll get back in de house!
At least a good pimp knows to sweet-talk his working girls when he needs to keep the cash flowing. But Senators Tom Coburn and Jim Inhoffe are incompetent boobs. Their reverse NIMBY shit is for the birds: What happens in their backyard isn’t as important as what happens in mine? Come on up to New York and say that to our faces (Peter King is a moron, but he’s right some of the time...).
Let me pause for a second and consider that not all of Oklahoma supports that incredibly hypocritical Repuglicant policy. There have to be some counties that recognized just how insane and self-defeating their bullshit policies are.Right? WRONG. Lookie here. Yep. All Oklahoma Counties voted for Romney. They were ALL “red” counties. (And both Senators, of course, are Repugs. I didn’t bother looking up if there were any Democratic Congresscritters, though I think there might be a couple.) Let’s also remember that Romney wanted to abolish FEMA. That’s right. Every Oklahoman county voted for the dumb scumbag that wanted to kill FEMA. So let’s give them what they wanted: NO FEMA FOR OKLAHOMA.
Now you’d think this is bad, almost a case to vote against aid to Oklahoma, but here’s the kicker. The real thing that makes me fuckin’ angry. Let me put it simply…
If I built a shack on, say, active train tracks and then, shortly thereafter, my shack was demolished when a freight train came through, how would you feel if I asked you for some money to rebuild my shack on those same goddamn train tracks? Without a doubt you’d say, “Fuck Off.” Well that’s what we have in Oklahoma City, and believe me I know: Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Texas Panhandle are all a part of “tornado alley” here in these United States. Remember The Wizard of Oz? That was Kansas, kids, right next door to Oklahoma. In other words, they get lots of tornadoes there every year and everybody knows it. It’s not a surprise, and maybe not (arguably) due to global warming or anything. And yet they’re playing Russian roulette again and again and again, very frequently losing. And they want us to bail them out? (Fun fact: Oklahoma building codes don’t require basements because it’d be more expensive.) New York, meanwhile, has NEVER been flooded before. New York flooding? NOW THAT’S A FRIGGIN’ DISASTER and yet, Oklahoma voted against aid to New York? And now they want US to bail THEM out… AGAIN?
Fuck that. No aid to Oklahoma for the tornadoes. Sorry, folks, you shot off a couple of rounds at your golden goose and now we’re gun-shy.
Newt Gingrich must be politicking hard for this year’s Captain Obvious prize… Exactly who does Newton think he’s talking down to in this video? Or does he really think that he’s somehow got a “point” to make about the supposed (huh?) confusion (again I must ask: HUH?) over what to call today’s newfangled smart-phones…?
Or is Newt just confused?
I’m confused. But the most confusing thing of all is why this pointlessly pointless video even exists… Is there a prize if you come up with something better than “smart-phone”?
It got liked by over 68,000 people. In case you’ve got a 2x4 wedged in your eye socket, let me spell it out to you, the “people who vote for a living” are African-Americans, who proportionately outvoted Caucasian Americans for the first time ever in 2012.
It would be (too) easy to whip up an editorial tirade about this, but why bother when the “party” is going to be over soon enough anyway?
The glaring twin ironies at play here seem to be missed entirely by the dum-dum tea baggers: First, that the folks who consider themselves Tea partiers correspond pretty faithfully to the same demographic who still read newspapers in printed form and who are receiving, or who soon enough will receive Social Security benefits and Medicare.
Why not try to elect Republican candidates who will cut your own benefits so that billionaires can amass greater and great hordes of cash? Psst, hey Tea party people, the Republican party wants to cut benefits for white seniors too! [And guess what: SO DO MOST OF THE FUCKING DEMOCRATS—INCLUDING OBAMA!]
I don’t think those ‘baggers have really thought any of this stuff through.
The other thing is, who will replenish the Tea party ranks when these dickheads die off? Will this message resonate much with all of those recent college grads with debt up to their eyeballs, and no job prospects that pay higher than ten bucks an hour?
Either Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has been successful in her life-long effort to convert her brain into a 3 lb mass of snot or else she has finally seen the error (and hypocrisy) of her ways and converted to the holy light of Islam!
Isn’t it amazing that Bachmann now agrees with Osama bin Laden and other, lesser Jihadis who truly believed that they were on the side of God in delivering judgment to the US on 9/11/01 and in Benghazi? I mean, she’s claiming that those events were God’s divine judgment, right? So did the perpetrators of those attacks.
