Truth and Illusion, George, You Don't Know the Difference.

The title of this blog is a quote from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and applies to too many people these days. Some mix up the two--truth and illusion--in search of fame. The father of the balloon boy perpetrated a hoax in order to gain publicity and has probably damaged his son's perception of reality in order to get on reality TV.

Another example is Fox News' resident whacko Glenn Beck who can't tell TV images from real life. Or at least his television persona can't--I don't think he believes half of what he says. In a recent segment of his show, he called on America to harken back to the days when we all got along and believed in the same basic principals. To illustrate his point, he showed two TV commercials from the late 60s-early 70s when he was a boy: the Coke ad with Mean Joe Green taking the beverage from a young fan and then rewarding the kid with his sweaty, stinky jersey; then the Kodak commercial with Paul Anka singing "Good morning, yesterday/You wake up and time has slipped away..." while home movies of Christmas and other holidays unspool.

There is something basically screwy about using TV commercials to illustrate an ideal past. They're advertisements used to sell a product. They create an idealized, unreal image in order to get you to associate that warm fuzzy feeling with the product so you're plunk down your two dollars and get the soda or the film (now obsolete) or whatever. Plus, it wasn't that ideal a time anyway.

Beck is about my age, maybe a little younger. I can remember that era and America was torn apart by Vietnam and Watergate. We weren't all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" (except for my younger brother who liked to croon that tune because he knew it annoyed the hell out of me). Also, blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities groups weren't exactly dancing a jig over how wonderfully and equally they were treated.

Beck then proceeded to tell a long convoluted metaphor about America being like a teenager who disobeys his parents' curfew and is now at a party where everyone is drunk and he knows he's going to be punished. He'll have to spend the next Saturday night grounded (read be more fiscally responsible). Okay, I'll concede it's a legitimate point, but it's corporate America that's been overspending, not the average citizen whom Beck was addressing. Then he actually began to cry (again!) I can tell he's acting when he tears up like that. He's almost as bad an actor as Spencer on The Hills.

This goon has also compared the Obama administration to Mao's China for advocating volunteerism with the cooperation of Hollywood. So volunteerism is evil all of a sudden? That's a bit of a leap. And here's another one--Obama is giving too much power to these psychos by launching this "war" against Fox. He should just ignore them. By targetting them and freezing them out of certain stories he's driving up their ratings and giving Murdoch and Ailes a legitimate beef.

Mad Tea Party

(Sung to the tune of "Edelweiss" from "The Sound of Music"):

Right-wing goons

Looney tunes

Every tea party you show up

Flat earth

Obama's birth

You make me want to throw up

That little ditty occured to me last week as the coverage of the Sept. 12 Tea Party march on Washington unfolded and the inflated numbers were rolled out. I got especially enraged when I saw that Fox was promoting the event as if it were the Second Coming and then had the nerve to take out a full-page ad in the Washington Post asking the rhetorical question: "How could ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and MSNBC miss this story?" Forget the fact that all five of those networks coverd the event to one degree or another, what really made my blood boil was remembering when I marched on Washington--TWICE--as part of a gay rights protest and we got almost NO coverage from anyone--zip, nada, snoozeville. Our numbers were given short shrift by almost every news outlet--the ones that did cover us--and I will bet you any amount of money that if there were some objective, reliable way to count the marchers, we drew just as many people, if not more, as these loony birds. How come no one said "How could you miss that story?" And when gay people march again later this month, there will almost no coverage--AGAIN. You know why? Because we're not backed by big political interests like the Tea Pot Domers are (I just coined that one, like it?)

And now it's revealed a Fox producer was directing the crowd in one of her shots to cheer and yell. OK, maybe they would have been excited anyway, but Foxy lady, you're not supposed to manipulate the story you're covering--in any way. That's called titling the story towards the outcome you want--not being fair and balanced, you know, your network's motto.

It's late at night and I may ramble a bit here: I don't think Carter was right saying an overwhelming motive behind the anti-Obama vitriol is rooted in racism. Some of it is for sure. But a lot is based on fear that the repubs are ginning up. Fear that this big bad boogie man Obama will take away their insurance and cars and guns and country music and grits and NASCAR races and fatty foods and trips to Disneyland. They'd do that if Obama was white, but his being black adds to the fear for some people.

I heard Glenn Beck say he thought John McCaine would have been worse for the country than Obama. What? He said Mccain was a crazy progressive like Teddy Roosevelt. What a whacked out sense of history. Teddy broke the trusts and helped the average working man--the people Beck supposedly loves and wants to elevate. Now we see his real agenda--keep the proles in line, let the corporations control their lives, as long as it's not big government. Also these tea baggers may form their own third party. Oh please, oh please, do it! Do it! Split the conservatives right down the middle and give the Dems the White House and Congress for sure. This was based on an iterview with some former Rep strategist who believes this whole nutbag movement is based on frustration and dissatisifcation with government in general.

Obama explained it really well on Letterman tonight: this whole economic and health care mess is the result of too little government regulation in the first place (under repub adminsitrations) and now these dimwits think as little government as possible is the answer. Just let private enterprise and capitalism run wild and do whatever the market will bear. You know where that will lead? back to the 18th century before unions, anti-trust laws, Medicare, Social Security, etc. etc. right where Fox, Beck and O'Reilly want us.

Piling On Palin

I just had to share this lovely conversation from Fox News via The Huffington Post. I will not sully my laptop with an actual link to Fox. Contributor Liz Trotta (I think she was the genius who used the adjective "terrorist" to describe the Obamas' fist bump) slams Sarah Palin as inarticulate and uneducated. It's obvious the host is trying to get her to agree with him that the liberal media is being unfair to Sarah. But Liz is standing her ground, asking what would William F. Buckley--obviously one of her heroes--think of this nitwit as the standardbearer of the conservative movement? She goes on to commit the heresy of saying Maureen Dowd has an actual case when criticizing the soon-to-be ex-governor. Liz also calls Palin flaky. The host prods Liz to tow the party line by saying these liberal elite types are going too far, calling the gov. crazy and unbalanced. But Liz doesn't budge. Good for her, Trotta is actually being fair and balanced, just like Fixed Noise's all-too-often-ignored motto.

On Countdown earlier in the evening, the guy who wrote the Vanity Fair article commented that she just "wasn't having fun anymore." Hey, my job isn't exactly a barrel of monkeys every minute, should I resign in the middle of a project? He went on to report Palin would get easily bored in staff meetings and when the topic veered from an issue she cared about or the mundane details of actual governing would creep in, her attention would wander. Plus, she was exhausted from all that commuting to Juneau. Poor thing! You're breaking my heart.

Now I'll have to buy that article.

Why Fox Is King

During the furor over the murder of Dr. Tiller, the abortion provider in Kansas, I figured out why Bill O'Reilly is number one in his time slot and why Fox News is having its best year ever--cringeworthy though that fact may be.

O'Reilly makes it so easy for his audience with his Talking Points, superimposed on the screen for all to see. After Tiller was shot in church, O'Reilly explained why he was not to blame for inciting the lunatic who pulled the trigger. His reasons were one-sided but they were clear and easy to understand. And they were right there on the screen so you didn't have to think about it. Fox and O'Reilly are popular because they tell the viewer what to think. Right is right and wrong is wrong and there is no pesky grey area. People find that comforting with a president who relies on nuance, doubt and cognition rather than his gut like his predecessor. "This is the right thing to do, I'm 100 percent sure of it," W seemed to say. "Look, nothing in life is certain, but this seems to be the best approach,"Obama projects.

O'Reilly takes the doubt out of every issue--he's right and that's all there is to it. Johnnies sitting on their couches and swilling their beers can just turn on Fox to get their opinions. They don't even have to listen to get them, Bill puts 'em right there on the screen for them to write down--if they can write.