Monday, June 07, 2004
"There's a signpost up ahead...
You are entering the 'Twilight Zone'"
This one I can't help following up on because of the timing. What with the gushing spring tide of hero worship, fawning personality cult inspired bathos, and wafting billows of flowery historically challenged gah-gah in general (de mortuis nil nisi bonum), issuing forth from the spellbound company store media Pollyanas' as it applies to the corporeal exit stage Right of our sanctified former national hood ornament Ronald Wilson Reagan. Caveat emptor.
Xan, writing below ~ see: Cracked Pottery, Sunday, June 06, 2004 ~ points to a Daily Kos item regarding one Vernon Robinson who, it would appear, perhaps, fluttered from the same incubated nest which managed to hatch such exotic whippoorwills as "born-again Confederate" H.K. Edgerton.
In any case, that's beside the point. What really interested me was rebel Vern's "liberal" use of Rod Serling's distinctive "voice" to advance his own excitable boing-eyed lost cause. And, as Xan points out:
Which is certainly dead on accurate. Vernon's ad rips off Serling's "voice" to advance such xenophobic fright night excerpts as this beauty below:
They, they, they, "these aliens". You know how it goes. I don't suppose that Vernon Robinson is aware that Serling was Jewish, and grew up in an era when antisemitism and the lynching of off-color "they" types among many "Confederate Southern Americans", including many of the pork barbeque gobbling morons inhabiting the Dogwood State, was considered fine family values sport. No seh, I don't suppose he does. Because, I suspect Vern is also himself a pork barbeque gobbling moron. Not that I have anything against pork barbeque, or gobbling, or the Dogwood State, or even morons for that matter, but when ya get em all together at one picnic and begin waving the flag of "Confederate Southern Americans" around, well, you've got yourself another gobbling moronic pork stuffed monster altogether. The kind of bigoted low-bred moronic monster state Rod Serling loathed, and spent his career impaling on the barbeque spit of the public imagination.
Vernon Robinson's scurry for moronic monsterdom in North Carolina's 5th district, and his bastardization of Serling's legacy, is just one more small example of the kind of dismembered fraudulent chop shop historical reality that attempts to confuse and strangle any honest observation or discussion of cultural and socio-economic progress on today's mainstreet American political stage. And the simple minded corporate brewed moonshine being currently pimped to the American public by the corporatist cheap labor conservative plantation-state romancers in TVNews-o-mercial-land, especially as it applies recently to Ronald Reagan's cheerily defrosted pied piper personality cult legacy program, is just one more pathetic sad and absurd example of the kind of escape from critical journalism and honest analysis that threatens to deliver us all back to the days of George Creel's cooked-book propaganda Committee. And or worse. (Hell, what am I saying - we may already be there.) Oy.
Ironically, Rod Serling was once Ronald Reagan's next door neighbor. I'll bet Boss Vern "Rebel Yell" Robinson didn't know that.
Rod and Carol Serling were neighbors to Ron and Nancy Reagan way back when Ron and Nancy were feathering their all electric nest in Cally-forn-i-ay's Pacific Palisades. Listen:
Golly, I wonder if Vernon Robinson's 'Lost Cause' cousin fucker Congressional campaign will reproduce that slice of historical heritage for the benefit of their "born again Confederate" twilight zone denizens?
Heh! I don't think you'll need an astrologer to figure out the answer.
*
This one I can't help following up on because of the timing. What with the gushing spring tide of hero worship, fawning personality cult inspired bathos, and wafting billows of flowery historically challenged gah-gah in general (de mortuis nil nisi bonum), issuing forth from the spellbound company store media Pollyanas' as it applies to the corporeal exit stage Right of our sanctified former national hood ornament Ronald Wilson Reagan. Caveat emptor.
Xan, writing below ~ see: Cracked Pottery, Sunday, June 06, 2004 ~ points to a Daily Kos item regarding one Vernon Robinson who, it would appear, perhaps, fluttered from the same incubated nest which managed to hatch such exotic whippoorwills as "born-again Confederate" H.K. Edgerton.
In any case, that's beside the point. What really interested me was rebel Vern's "liberal" use of Rod Serling's distinctive "voice" to advance his own excitable boing-eyed lost cause. And, as Xan points out:
[simulated on account of Mr. Serling has been dead for some time now, and would no more have done an ad on behalf of this bozo than the man in the moon]
Which is certainly dead on accurate. Vernon's ad rips off Serling's "voice" to advance such xenophobic fright night excerpts as this beauty below:
[NOT] ROD SERLING: "They filled our criminal court rooms and invaded our schools. They sponge off the American taxpayer by clogging our welfare lines and our hospital emergency rooms. They've even taken over the DMV. These aliens commit heinous crimes against us like Maximiliano Esparza who raped a nun and strangled her with her own rosary."
They, they, they, "these aliens". You know how it goes. I don't suppose that Vernon Robinson is aware that Serling was Jewish, and grew up in an era when antisemitism and the lynching of off-color "they" types among many "Confederate Southern Americans", including many of the pork barbeque gobbling morons inhabiting the Dogwood State, was considered fine family values sport. No seh, I don't suppose he does. Because, I suspect Vern is also himself a pork barbeque gobbling moron. Not that I have anything against pork barbeque, or gobbling, or the Dogwood State, or even morons for that matter, but when ya get em all together at one picnic and begin waving the flag of "Confederate Southern Americans" around, well, you've got yourself another gobbling moronic pork stuffed monster altogether. The kind of bigoted low-bred moronic monster state Rod Serling loathed, and spent his career impaling on the barbeque spit of the public imagination.
Vernon Robinson's scurry for moronic monsterdom in North Carolina's 5th district, and his bastardization of Serling's legacy, is just one more small example of the kind of dismembered fraudulent chop shop historical reality that attempts to confuse and strangle any honest observation or discussion of cultural and socio-economic progress on today's mainstreet American political stage. And the simple minded corporate brewed moonshine being currently pimped to the American public by the corporatist cheap labor conservative plantation-state romancers in TVNews-o-mercial-land, especially as it applies recently to Ronald Reagan's cheerily defrosted pied piper personality cult legacy program, is just one more pathetic sad and absurd example of the kind of escape from critical journalism and honest analysis that threatens to deliver us all back to the days of George Creel's cooked-book propaganda Committee. And or worse. (Hell, what am I saying - we may already be there.) Oy.
Ironically, Rod Serling was once Ronald Reagan's next door neighbor. I'll bet Boss Vern "Rebel Yell" Robinson didn't know that.
Rod and Carol Serling were neighbors to Ron and Nancy Reagan way back when Ron and Nancy were feathering their all electric nest in Cally-forn-i-ay's Pacific Palisades. Listen:
Serling, a World War II paratrooper, had long since been persuaded of the futility of the war in Vietnam when I talked to him that day in January.
[...]
Serling, at the time, was a member of Dissenting Democrats of California, a group that supported Sen. Eugene McCarthy's bid for the party's presidential nomination.
[...]
Serling was living in Pacific Palisades, California at the time. His next-door neighbors were a Hollywood couple, Ron and Nancy Reagan. The Serlings and Reagans shared a properly line and not much else.
"He waves," Serling told me five years later during another visit.... Not the kind of wave, Serling hastened to add, that meant, "Gee it's great to see you."
The woman who would, less than a decade later, run the White House with an iron hand and the help of an astrologer, was even less tolerant of Serling’s liberal views.
"Nancy Reagan would have blown up the battleship Maine if she'd been around," he said.
In any event, the Serlings removed to Interlaken on Cayuga Lake in 1973. Two years later, Rod, a chronic cigarette smoker, died during open heart surgery in Rochester. He was 50. [Source: Congress remains in the Twilight Zone, by David Rossie. (July 31, 2000)]
Golly, I wonder if Vernon Robinson's 'Lost Cause' cousin fucker Congressional campaign will reproduce that slice of historical heritage for the benefit of their "born again Confederate" twilight zone denizens?
Heh! I don't think you'll need an astrologer to figure out the answer.
*