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With the advent of right-wing
radio talk shows and their cable reflections on both the left and right, the art of political satire took a
direct hit. About the only one left who can
make risible mincemeat out of the mental hash served up by politicians of
every stripe is George Carlin, and this because he belongs to no political
party and never votes. Or so he says.
Disengaged from the world, Carlin sees himself as one of those Greek
or Roman gods who sit on high and croak with laughter at the foibles of the
human beings they created. Running a close second are
people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who use witty situational
metamorphoses to expose the chicanery and political hijinks being foisted on
the public. Beyond them, however, what
passes for comedic punditry these days is heard on shows hosted by
buffoonish, agenda-driven mouthpieces like leftist Keith Olbermann and his
“Worst Person in the World” segment or Kevin James, whose rightish intellect
seems unable to infect his mouth with the facts. On May 15, James appeared on
Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” and declared that Barack Obama was another Neville
Chamberlain. When pressed by Matthews to explain who Chamberlain was or what
he had done, James canoodled and cackled to the point that Matthews concluded
that he didn’t know and ended the interview. Not to be outdone by James and
other right-wing apparatchiks is our own John Magliola, who plays music and
rambles though his What draws one to Magliola, I
suppose, is the fact that his outlandishly generalized version of our
national political scene and the world at large has such a conservatively
cornball fairy tale quality about it that you simply can’t believe what
you’re hearing. No fan of Congress, which he
apparently thinks has always been controlled by Democrats, Magliola once noted the anniversary of the
bill that, in 1845, established election day as the first Tuesday after the
first Monday in November. How stupid could they be, he wondered, since we all
know that the first Tuesday always follows the first Monday? Well, not exactly, John. There
are years when Tuesday is the first day of the month. Back in those days, people had to travel
great distances to the polls, and hence Monday was the day set aside for
that. Last week Magliola dug himself
into another hole when he mused that our oil problems stem from the fact that
polar bears have been put on the endangered species list. We shouldn’t blame
oil company profiteering, he said, but rather environmentalists and Congress.
And that’s fine, except that it
was the Bush administration’s own Fish and Wildlife Service and Interior
Department that put the polar bears on the endangered list. They did so
because global warming has so severely affected the disappearing ice floes on
which they depend for survival. Polar
bears don’t drive gas-guzzling SUVs and hence don’t care a whit about oil.
Incidentally, it was Republican President Richard Nixon who initiated the
Endangered Species Act in 1973. In yet another maudlin gush of
discovery, Magliola last Thursday read a Republican flapdoodle claiming that
if Obama or Clinton were elected with a Democratic Congress there would be no
way to limit their spending sprees.
“Think about that,” he chortled.
Maybe so, though he failed to
mention that the national debt at the end of 1999 was $5 trillion. As of While such oral synapses may
cause listeners to eye their radios in disbelief, it is the somewhat oblique
ad hominem attacks on Democrats that are cause for concern.. I have no idea what Magliola’s
motivations are for consistently referring to Barack Obama as Barack Hussein
Obama. Is Hussein a name he associates
with all Arabs or all Muslims and hence with some ubiquitous evil? Is there some racist malignity in Obama’s
history of which he wishes to make us aware?
Why does he never refer to John Sidney McCain or George Walker
Bush? Or why, on the day that Sen.
Edward Kennedy was released from the hospital after a dire prognosis of
glioma, a malignant brain tumor, did Magliola chuckle and ask us to ponder
the fact that, while Kennedy was being lauded as a lion of the Senate, no one
mentioned Mary Jo Kopechne? He then berated a listener who called in to
complain. While the First Amendment thankfully
protects whatever speech Magliola and his politically oriented brethren care
to buzz into our ears, we gain nothing, regardless of our political
affiliation, from speech that advocates or insists on a mean-spirited patois
that only exaggerates the buffoonery of its purveyor. Political satire is one thing.
Willfully overstepping the bounds of good taste is something else
entirely. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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