"Steinbeck’s message, I think, was that there are worse things than injustice, even when the stakes are very high. And one of them is fanaticism — the kind of by-any-means-necessary mentality that’s willing to grind ordinary human decency, and honesty, into the dust in the pursuit or some supposedly higher moral purpose."
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March 27, 2005
Billmon: Outside Agitators
Comments
will repost this just this once:
I dunno, seems this whole thing is pretty representative of the synergistic ghost dance between the government and the media. For me it’s taken on the fascination of something akin to Mary Hartman Mary Hartman or maybe Twin Peaks, minus that beautiful foreboding sound track. Essentially, there is no news to this story, aside from the dead-end appeals, all we’re really left with here is a kind of endless politics as entertainment audition on par for the Gong Show. Like much melodrama there is that central seed of human frailty and of death (real here) to anchor the whole show to something both plausable and personal — which, because the story is itself catatonic, can only live on the spin which begets yet more spin. Obviously the Rebublicans new all this and with a drooling media in tow, figured they would get all the best parts in a passion play that could, without much risk, redeem the (largely) shattered compassion image. Unfortunatly for them, and like Mary Hartman and Twin Peaks before, which never caught on with those people, because those people were the proverbial butt of the joke (and they knew it), the Repubs have been caught red handed in bringing their most fanatical, wacko, and deluded front and center on national TV.——- GONG.
Posted by: anna missed | Mar 27 2005 10:40 utc | 1