"Approved Narratives"
I just found this written by Matt Taibi in our local online expat newspaper.
America's Political Left Has Abandoned Its Roots
It isn't that long but touches on numerous really important issues in America today. I'd argue that there are at least four even more issues he brings up. One is what I chose as the title for my essay. Like confirmation bias, I see this popular trend and tool of both parties as really dangerous.
The following teaser comes at the end of his article about the media and it's culpability in aiding the creation of the American Flustercluck:
The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.
For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).
Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?
I have to run outside to do a few things now that we have a break in the rain. It's been warm and dry so the rain is welcome but I can't miss the opportunity offered. I'll look in later.
Before I go here is a bonus round question for you. Who is it from?
All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.
We’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. The willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. There is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.
These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy. These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others.
That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path -- the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.
I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.
Comments
State of the Union speech 1980
by Jimmy Carter, U.S. President
Well played
That's five bonus points to your account. Don't spend them all in one place.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
@vtcc73 It was a bonus on one
It was a bonus on one of Micheal Moore's DVD's that I had checked out from the library. Gave me chills.
Its a shame, and a sham (due to Reagun's treasonous dealings with Iran) that he wasn't re-elected.
Carter isn't entirely innocent though, the great wave of "de-regulation" "started" on his watch... I'm sure many other members are far far more versed on the particulars than I....
Fascinating that Democratic Pols
never made an issue of foreign interference and collusion in the 1968 and 1980 presidential elections. Evidence exists for '68 and the circumstantial evidence for 1980 is very strong. As if they preferred to blame the "dirty rotten hippies" for 1968, but Carter wasn't their guy anyway; so, they weren't too exercised about that loss. Few seem to doubt that Carter would have won had he managed to get the hostages released before the election, but it would likely have been close because he'd angered many people by his other poor decisions. The one that didn't hurt him was deregulation which was viewed as a good thing at the time.
Important to note
that the public wasn't aware of either the Nixon sabotage of the 1968 election nor the Reagan sabotage of the 1980 election prior to election day. In both cases the info came out only later. But important too to note that Dems did have the goods on Nixon prior to the 68 election, but LBJ decided not to make it public. I've forgotten what bs excuse he gave that was reported later. Probably something about the country couldn't handle it.
But if you want to trace back the origins of the Dem tendency to wimp out on calling out the Rs for election theft, it starts with LBJ.
In the 1980 "October Surprise" case, iirc while people suspected something might have happened given the curious precise timing of the hostage release and the Reagan inauguration, enough facts about that election skullduggery didn't come out until later in the 80s and then the Gary Sick book a little later. Recall though that a congressional subcommittee was set up to investigate (hehe) led by Rep Lee Hamilton (D-IN) who arranged to ignore and bury any inculpating information. Hamilton was always good at covering for Repub crimes. New president Bill Clinton didn't press the matter, even when presented with further info from reliable Russian intel, iirc.
Dems have gotten very good at ignoring these R crimes against democracy. They just want to be nice and build bridges with the opposition. Which is probably why these crimes keep happening.
LBJ didn't publicly disclose Nixon's treason
because he couldn't do so without revealing how he'd come by the information. His credibility was too low for him get away with a 'trust me' on this. Still begs the question of why he didn't leak it to a friendly reporter. Perhaps he hoped that Dirkson would be outraged enough to leak it.
Dunno, seems like there
would easily have been ways to put that info out there directly or thru friendly media outlets, or enough info w/o having to go into details about how it was obtained. He could always have pulled out the national security excuse as a reason for not fully disclosing the methods used. And public attention, the headlines, would have been all about the allegations against Nixon lodged by a sitting president, not how they were obtained.
He did refer to Nixon's actions as "treason". Then proceeded to sit on the information, let it all happen, and enabled Nixon's election. And by his silence, he undoubtedly gave the Reagan/Poppy ticket encouragement in 1980 and the October Surprise affair. I understand Nixon himself was in contact with that campaign about the Iran situation. If true, I doubt if Tricky was advising them to be careful not to tread on any negotiations Carter might be undertaking because That Would Be Wrong and you might get caught.
I sense that LBJ wanted to avoid a direct confrontation and major controversy. Perhaps he was worried that the other side had info on his own, uh, prior misdeeds. Apart from that, I don't have a good read on his odd thinking. After all, this is the master manipulator who excelled at playing political hardball. And suddenly he goes weak and lets Nixon manipulate him. Very curious.
Nah, that was Jimmy's
famous "Malaise" speech from July 15, 1979. Given at a time when his popularity was well down and in the midst of an OPEC oil shutdown that caused massive lines at the gas pumps in the US.
It was his most famous speech and was very well received..
Fomally
"Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence" speech.
Yes, afterwards it became
commonly known as the Malaise Speech but he never used that word.
Interesting that it was well received, given that he was really telling Americans they were too focused on the Self and material goodies and were neglecting the more important things, like religious faith, spiritual well being and national unity.
It was well received by the public but
the msm was happy to portray it as overly pessimistic and, eventually, to tout the empty-headed cheer leading of Reagan.
Not sure on the sequence,
but I think the speech was initially reported favorably by the media. Then Carter stepped on that positive momentum by firing his cabinet, or most of it, which sent up a red flag in the MSM that this guy was losing his nerve. It was after Carter's weirdness with his cabinet that the meme started in the media about the "malaise" speech.
Carter was a bit of a victim of the then new conservative trend in the media, where Rs had greater influence and as the regular media post-Watergate wanted to show they weren't really the "liberal" media that conservatives had long complained about.
I recall Carter beginning to get semi-consistently bad or highly skeptical media coverage starting with the wildly overblown barely scandal of Bert Lance, Carter's OMB director, who was accused of mismanagement of a small GA bank. Oh dear. The Lance Scandal was headline news for weeks in 1977.
I don't think the Carter admin knew exactly what they were up against in this aggressive media atmosphere, and they didn't respond well usually. Jimmy had decided to bring mostly his loyal guys from parochial GA politics into the WH, and so didn't have a clear grasp of how nasty things could get in the Beltway press, Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters excepted.
He missed the year but close enough.
I introduced Jimmy into the essay because that was a sitting US president telling people that the road we were on 40 years ago was going to lead to the kind of disaster described in Taibi's article.
There is plenty of reason to fault Jimmy's presidency. I doubt anyone following Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, and the social upheaval of the '60s could have been successful. He's more than made up for those failures in the time since with tremendous work that has improved peoples' lives all over the world. More important, he's the only one who didn't use their time since leaving office to line their pockets.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Jimmy had plenty of goodwill
and political momentum entering office to have had a more successful presidency. Watergate, VN and the rest actually helped him get elected as he presented himself as not sullied by any hint of scandal. He just didn't always act wisely in important political ways that if managed better could have helped him earn a second term. Like failing to work in positive, respectful ways with Speaker Tip and Ted Kennedy. Instead, Carter came in with a chip on his shoulder and seemed to want to show the Dem establishment that he didn't need their advice as he hadn't needed their help winning the WH, insulting them on several occasions.
Carter often made such clumsy own goals. Like immediately squandering the public goodwill from his Malaise speech and promptly firing his cabinet, which made him look unstable, erratic. Or allowing himself to be persuaded that he should allow the Shah of Iran into this country for medical treatment, knowing that such a move might incite forces inside Iran and lead to an attack on our embassy in Tehran. It's said that Carter was a very decent guy who also had a vindictive, mean streak. And it could also be said that he was politically astute except for the times when he was politically stupid.
The FRightwingnut Powell Memo/Blueprint
came out 5 years before Carter was elected. The FRighties and their Religious Right allies were buying up and consolidating both radio and print MSM megaphones per the PM. So, here comes the Raygun Cartel, the only time I wept watching election returns in 1980. I must have been psychic. Rec’d!!
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Carter --not quite
Yeah right, American Native genocide, slaveholding, aggressive wars of choice, racism, xenophobia, exceptionalism - American values. If you believe that America was great and all we need to do is make her great again, then I have a tower in Manhattan to sell you. WTF, we have never gotten it right and never will until we come to the terms with who we are. The Oligarchs and the Neocons are laughing in their limos as we fetish on Political Correctness. My god, the problems are immense and we can't see the big picture, only a tiny part of it. Racism will never be solved if we don't focus on economic justice, social justice and peace. MLK understood this well. He was dangerous to the establishment, and we all should be too.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
No doubt, but
imagine if Carter had not only chastised Americans for their self-centeredness and materialism but also taken the opportunity to deliver a harsh rant listing all those crimes in American history you cite.
At the very least, he would have been pronounced a lame duck president, and 2/3 of embarrassed and outraged Dems would have called for him to step aside for the party's nomination in 1980. Presidents still aren't allowed to go all Howard Zinn on all the nation's deep sins, esp so 40 yrs ago. On this matter, Bill Clinton had it right in taking a piecemeal approach and selecting out certain past horrors for attention and public apology, but never all at once. That would have been too much for the political market to bear.
This trend goes right along with the left now
accepting people like Robert Mueller and making them modern day heroes just because they oppose Trump. For gawd’s sake they have even rehabilitated George F Bush!
This is high praise.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Dementia nation?
Frustrates the hell out of me that bad presidents, senators, governors, and high level public officials are later praised and honored by the opposition and their knee-jerk followers. As if everyone has forgotten how bad they were.
Bush got high kudos for saying something about
George Floyd. He’s being celebrated for having more empathy than Trump. The centrists elevate anyone that they used to despise as long as they aren’t Trump.
Have you heard about Ramp Gate? Trump walked down a ramp at the graduation ceremony and ran down the last few feet. You can see he was afraid of slipping and falling so he said he just got the last few feet done quickly. But now everyone is making fun of him. Just saw a clip of Obama walking up it and people on Twitter are building ramps and showing how to walk down them.
This is childish in my opinion as was the bunker gate story. Do people not know that decision was up to the secret service not Trump?They would have done that same thing with any president.
Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?
Give Democratic pols a dozen years after he
leaves office and they'll be speaking fondly of Trump. He'll be a member of The Club and like old school Senators, they will socialize.
Yes, bunker and ramp gate are childish, but they're also tasty snacks because Trump predictably responds childishly and defensively to any suggestion that he's not a "he-man." IOW, trolling Trump is child's play.
That's the point of Trump.
He's a credibility generator for anyone who chooses to oppose him. He has traits that make him useful for this purpose, but only really becomes such when the media, social and legacy, constantly uses and defines him this way. Which they do, constantly. Inundating people with such discursive habits 24/7 encourages them to adopt the same. Pretty soon they won't even know they're adopting any habits at all. It will just be the way things are. Then it won't even register as that.
Where would the Democrats be without him? They need a monster to stand next to. Without one, they'd be revealed as the vacuous career-driven nihilists that they are. And he's also profoundly useful in their quest to create one gigantic political mega-machine that combines neoliberals and neoconservatives into one big late capitalist blitzkrieg on the human race. And everything else.
You can't unite Clinton "liberals" and Bush "conservatives" into one political faction without repairing their reputations first.
What sickens me and leads me to despair is how quickly intelligent, loving people jumped on this bandwagon. It was very early in the game when a dear friend of mine, for whom I have the utmost respect, said "I never thought Dick Cheney would look good."
And yes, as Marie says, they could easily be doing the same thing for Donald Trump in 10 years that they are doing for Bush and Cheney now.
At this point, it's all about destroying people's moral standards, and, more importantly, their ability to even form such.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
DINOs/Centrists are
§GOPuke Lite. That assimilation into the Democratic Party went into warp drive in 1981.
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Well, you see,
Eastasia was always our ally.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
The awful and mediocre
presidents are later glorified and white-washed beyond all recognition to those who lived through their presidencies, in large part due to loyalists who engage in considerable rosy PR on behalf of their former bosses, and in part by the entertainment industry which gets into the act with their mythifying plays and movies.
I started seeing shelves of hagiographies about Reagan not long after he left office. Undoubtedly these boosters would argue he deserves a place on Mt Rushmore, trying to take him from middling mediocrity of little substance to Jeffersonian All Time Greatness.
Something similar with Truman, attempts to elevate him to greatness, mostly successful so far. This started either in the 60s or 70s with that wildly successful one-man play Give 'Em Hell by James Whitmore. Then the wildly successful best-selling valentine book from that PBS historian host guy.
The LBJ reclamation project has been underway for some time. He left behind a number of loyalists, among them the ex head of MPAA, a major newspaper publisher, and at least one famous author-liberal pundit, the young pious religious guy he brought from TX to be his house liberal.
The GWB rehab is quietly underway. Dems are assisting.
Even Bill Clinton was a player in the Nixon rehabilitation movement. Like a lot of things he did, that one too hasn't aged so well.
I can't think of a thing that others have done to rehab Jimmy Carter, and few read the insider memoirs from his aides Ham Jordan and Jody Powell. Their efforts, and another minor offering from historian Douglas Brinkley, didn't seem to move the needle. To some extent he's rehabbing himself with good deeds, but that only gets him points in the Best Ex-President category.
Back to the main topic,
Taibbi's op-ed that's worthy of discussion.
Can any other writer today construct this level of apt imagery?
Or this:
More seriously:
Wow -- I'm so old that "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was in my freshman English reader textbook.
Here I think Taibbi is somewhat off base:
May never have been a time when that didn't exist. Or the bounds for acceptable facts and alternative views were only somewhat wider than what is becoming singular today on certain topics. Can anything be more shameful than journalists conspiring to discredit and destroy Gary Webb and his solid reporting on CIA cocaine trafficking? That was long before Trump.
I didn't catch the story
about the UCLA prof quoting from MLK and getting in trouble. Sounds crazy. I did read of another UCLA prof, in the management school, who got suspended for not allowing black students, per their request, to postpone or easy-grade their exams bc of the recent turmoil in the streets. Sounds crazy too yet it happened.
As for this
I thought immediately of one recent story he doesn't cite there which seems pertinent, namely the way his podcast co-host seemed to act as advocate on the allegations of that now-discredited woman against Biden, charges not adequately vetted before airing. It was ok not to be too skeptical bc she was going after a disliked pol. Dunno if either he or his co-host have discussed it since the story was suddenly disappeared.
WOW. Matt Taibbi saying this....
Here's what I've never understood: Why does it seem we must choose between simpering ineffectual cowardice and brutal alt-fascist idiocy? Either way, Evil prevails.
Where is today's Napoleon, Lincoln, or FDR??? Who is willing to stand up for - not against - truth, reason, and Enlightenment values with force of arms?
Maybe I should take a step back. Let me see if I understand what I'm reading here: Am I right to be reminded of this?: https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-...
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Strong conclusions:
Not that I ever viewed post-modernists as any more on the left than Libertarians. Narcissism and authoritarianism are strong in both. The slow progress of modernism isn't due to undervaluing the individual lived experience but overvaluing it. Lived experiences are necessarily small, narrow, and limited. Education -- in the modern liberal tradition -- expands all those boundaries.
What do we do about them?
I hope it's just my OCD finding fresh fuel for ruining my life, but they seem to have taken over everything.
Where the hell did they come from, and why now??? They pretty much didn't exist in the '000s. It's like Rush Limbaugh's strawmen have, apropos of nothing, suddenly become real, just when it'd looked like we'd managed to shake them off. It's like they're the new Religious Right.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Do? Perhaps nothing.
As to where did they come from, hiding in plain sight all along. They could sort of speak/write the lingo of liberalism when the red team had all the power. When the blue team came into power, they revealed themselves. Psychologically, it's religion more than democratic self-government. The priest, pastor, mullah, etc. tells their adherents how it's gonna be and they follow and denigrate any dissenters from their orthodoxy which few actually understand. The WHY is never a topic of discussion; just jump on board with the blue team religion.
Liberalism is difficult for humans. Except in rare times, change is really slow, but most people don't want change for the benefit of all, only for themselves. Plus a driver in liberalism - the morality, ethics, egalitarian components - was religion that had shifted away from fundamentalism. Even science often found a acceptance in religion. Fundamentalists rail against liberalism, intellectualism, and science, and yet, are only too quick and happy to embrace the fruits of those efforts. They want their Social Security, Medicare, TVs, internet, etc. The form of religion, belief in a sky spook and heaven (the most irrational aspects of religion) have been retained while the substance, morality, etc., has withered.
There have been US leaders that didn't exhibit of show of the form but retained the substance. They didn't dare call themselves atheists because godless doesn't sell in this country. They just kept mum on this point and let what they did speak for themselves. So, how do we get to a godless society that's moral, ethical, etc?
There's only one place in the world today that is exhibiting that paradigm. Vietnam. It's a poor country but the people don't appear to be vulnerable to the god proselytizers and the sense of community appears strong. The coronavirus hit early in Vietnam and somehow with limited resources (they are very smart people) in a population of 97 million, the confirmed cases are only 334 and there have been zero deaths. (Overall, S. Korea has done much better than the west in controlling the virus, but has 12,000 cases and 277 deaths and continues to struggle with outbreaks/hotspots in christian religious communities.) This seems to say what I've been trying to get at:
I'm not sure I can afford to do nothing
This may be a corner-case concern (and isn't it remarkable how "the left" loves to holistically package every concern under the sun into every major movement, yet almost invariably winds up doing a WORSE job addressing any concern other than one, which it overcompensates with, like Stalin overproducing grain at the expense of all other food?), but I have seen them do far, far, FAR too much harm to the arts & entertainment scene, especially in certain sub-enclaves I happen to have long had a personal stake in; that matters, especially since I've always aspired to a career in those fields.
These shitstains have taken the things I pay attention to because I WANT to, and the things I pay attention to because I HAVE to, and they've made conditions in BOTH realms an order of magnitude worse than they already were. All this time I've been struggling like Sisyphus just to overcome the damage done to me during the Bush years, then they swoop in like dirty hockey players to break my back anew; someone once said never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, but stupidity is starting to become an inadequate explanation.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Artists -- or I should say more artists --
do better when most of the population does better economically. When their wages are sufficient to have something left over after covering their necessities (and what the average person considers a necessity today is much more than what it was in the past). Of course, not all or even most people will spend that extra discretionary income on art/artist produced entertainment. The market for low brow, or maybe I mean no brow, entertainment is large. (Do instagram stars/influencers view themselves as artists?) Beyond that I have no insight as to how artists can be helped by public/government policies.
Government policy actually isn't the issue, here
Heaven forbid it should be. It's more of a culture-war/neo-McCarthyism thing, except the only way GOP-base-types are involved is both sides are accusing the other of being like them (or worse).
I don't entirely understand it, myself, and I wish I didn't feel like I had to. People on DailyKos brought it up out of nowhere a few times to bully me, and struggling to understand WTH just happened sent me down the rabbit-hole.
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
Won't be any comfort, but
belligerent, authoritarian censors have been present in all political sectors since at least 1968. They never seem to get it that promotion is inferior to attraction, and then act all confused because what seemed like fellow travelers drift away. (Within less than a year, I wasn't all that welcome at dKos, but I could write and post diaries and a few people appreciated them; so, I did my best to ignore the bullies. Only took them ten years to get me banned. None were smart, perceptive or political astute enough for me to miss that place.) On the political ends, internal discord has long led to fracturing and reduction to irrelevancy. It's not the such discord doesn't infect the Democratic and Republican parties; it's just that they have the institutional heft to ride it out until they don't have to say, "Where ya gonna go? We're as good as it gets for you."
Bizarrely, that worked less well for Republicans in 2016 than it did for Democrats. Yet, from all the post-election wailing, one would never know that a twice as many Republicans declined to vote for Trump than liberal declined to vote for Clinton.
Jimmy Carter.
I see I'm not the only one who remembers it. Always a good feeling, especially in these days.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Of course, I don't entirely agree with Carter's prescription
for fixing America, and I think he and I might disagree a bit on what were the signs and causes of the greed and selfishness--the cultural illness--he's talking about.
But I mostly agree with him in his diagnosis, and entirely agree with his prognosis.
Too bad most people chose "It's morning in America!" over what Carter was saying.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
"Morning in America" was Reagan's 1984 reelection
campaign. In what was, to my knowledge, Bruce Springsteen's first foray into explicit political commentary, he said, in a Rolling Stone interview:
The ad I remember from the 1980 campaign was the "Bear in the Woods" nonsense.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Dog whistling
Well, you have to give it them on creativity. I mean how many different ways can you say the same thing? Apparently a lot.
Love the Springsteen quote. Although I have actually have seen his house down by the Jersey Shore and it’s definitely not suffering from a bad moon rising there.
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
I had a well-educated
guest here a while back who revealed that the only time she voted R in recent times was in that election, and based on her perception that Reagan could be tougher with our enemies, like Russia, then Carter. Which was the point of that ad which kinda met the Cold War tenor of those times..
Otherwise she seemed entirely reasonable.
Sometimes all you need to do is offer something basic for people to hang their hats on or ponder. That was an effective R ad. So was the Morning in America one. In fact, most of the memorable ads of recent times have been from the R side. D ads have tended to be heavily detailed and issue-oriented, appealing to the intellect rather than a simple, pithy, catchy offering hitting voters at the emotional level, which good ads do.
Btw, I'm not an ad man. I did however watch Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.
The majority of Hillary Clinton's ads . . .
showed clips of Donald Trump on a TV making sexist and vulgar comments with children sitting in a living room. The adds concluded "They're watching."
Springsteen also raised his hackles over the
FRightwingnut Raygun yahoos co-opting his Born in the USA tune. Remember?
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Thanks for a good catch.
That's true about the slogan. But it's inescapable that Reagan ran--both times--on the idea that he and the right wing were the upbeat ones, not like the Negative Nancies on the left. The right was where visionary optimism and winning lived. If you want to be cheerful vote for us!
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Lo! and behold!
What Ronnie Raygun sowed is coming to maturity. But look at the explosion of billionaires and massive corporations who own everything. It's almost like that was the intent, no? No, not really. Ronnie wouldn't have had his pants zipped up most of the time if he didn't have smart handlers. The bullshit his administration sowed was just, "Hey! Look!!! Over there! It's a real unicorn!" People bought it and have been paying for it ever since. Millennials up through the kids entering the workforce today are simply on the bottom of the pyramid scheme buy in. Even those alive in the '80s aren't getting away scot free. They're looking at a retirement they'll never see. They've been the mark but haven't a clue.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
If by "those who lived in the 80s" you mean my generation
(GenX), we absolutely haven't gotten off scot free. In fact, the only reason the smack in the economic face we got is constantly ignored is that things are so much worse now, and apparently people have a really hard time grokking the nature of process.
In other words, everything is seen as discrete, with no historical (or any other) connection with anything else other than the comparative. Such a load of crap--and really handy for authoritarians. Martin Niemoller was right, and everybody quotes him, but nobody seems to be able to get that an acorn has a relationship to an oak. (Well, some people do; you do and I do, but a hell of a lot of people don't.)
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
I agree.
Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.
Related: other media censors
Narrative Control ... from Caitlyn Johnstone
Despite the frequency of those "reliable sources" posting corrections for the most egregiously unreliable reports.