Highway 99
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Hmmm. It appears that when Dan Rather submitted this autobiographical sketch to a speaker's bureau, he accidentally omitted at least one significant episode in his career. Can you figure out which one it is?
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
A notable inclusion. The blogosphere noticed when Tony Blair, listing countries affected by terrorism, failed to include Israel:
David Cameron, in the running to replace Michael Howard as leader of Britain's Conservative Party, is undoubtedly too obscure for most of the blogosphere to take note, but he did something courageous the other day that deserves to be mentioned. He had the guts to include Israel high on the list when he named victims of Islamofascism:"There is no justification for suicide bombing whether in Palestine, Iraq, in Egypt, in Turkey, anywhere."
It is, of course, a damn shame that any special courage is required to name Israel as a victim of the Muslim serial killers; but that's not Cameron's fault, and he seems to be doing what he can to correct the situation. I don't know what his views are on a lot of issues, but if he is as sensible in general as his support for the War on Terror indicates, then I wish him good luck in the leadership contest.On 7th July Britain joined "the long list of nations to be directly targeted by extremist Islamist terror," he said:
"Indonesia, India, Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Russia, Kenya, Tanzania and the United States of America."
He then provided a considered analysis of the fundamentalist Islamicism behind today's terrorist threat and how it has grown. He compared it to Naziism and Communism in its offer of "redemption through violence" [. . .]
When Glenn Reynolds sent people over to Crooks and Liars to view video of unscripted humor on a Shepard Smith report, I doubt he read the comments left behind by Crooks and Liars' readers. Quite a few comments consist of gloating over the upcoming deaths of large numbers of Red State residents in Hurricane Katrina.
See, that's why people love liberals. They're so humane and compassionate. To know them is indeed to love them.
Must explain why they've been winning so many elections lately.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
As I've mentioned before, there was a time when I was a great admirer of the BBC. One of the holdovers from that era is that I still get a kick out of several of their sitcoms, even as my ability to stomach their news service has steadily deteriorated. This weekend, however, I saw a sitcom episode that was an uncomfortable reminder of the BBC news division's bias.
The series in question was Are You Being Served? -- about as innocuous a comedy as has ever appeared on TV. This particular episode was one I hadn't seen in years. It introduced the character of Mr. Goldberg, who plays a newly hired sales clerk in the men's clothing department. His way of talking and gesturing are stereotypically Jewish. Goldberg initially seems like a nice guy -- nice to the point of unctuousness, in fact -- but as the episode continues and we find out more about him, that initial appearance turns out to be deceiving. And so does Mr. Goldberg.
Goldberg tells the staff his tailoring business was extremely successful and that he's only looking for a job in the store because his business was located above a restaurant and was lost when the restaurant caught fire. We later find out Mr. Goldberg arranged to have his own business burned down, for reasons which are never stated but which presumably have to do with insurance fraud.
Goldberg asks how everyone gets paid -- are the profits divided among the staff? -- and is told that pay is a commission on sales made, and that as a new hire he is last in line to serve customers. He asks whether he gets to serve any customers who come in and ask for him specifically, and is told yes, anyone who actually asks for him is his customer, but since he's new he won't develop such a clientele for some time. The next day at opening time the store is suddenly overrun with customers clamoring for Goldberg. As we watch and listen to them interact with the staff, we become aware that they are all blatantly Jewish and all apparently tailors: friends of Goldberg's whom he has corralled into helping him put on an act. The Grace Brothers staff, being taken in by this act, figure that if Goldberg already has so many people asking for him, he'll be making a ton in commissions, and they want in on the proceeds. They arrange to have the staff paid from now on by dividing the commissions instead of taking them individually with preference by seniority. Of course, the number of customers asking for Goldberg is not going to continue; it was only for show, for this one morning. Goldberg has managed to con his way into getting what is presented as an unfair share of the loot on a permanent basis.
Based on his astounding performance on his first morning, Mr. Goldberg now sends a request up the chain of command for an unreasonably large base salary. The executives of the department store don't think he's worth it. But Goldberg wangles a permanent position at the high salary anyway -- by blackmailing Captain Peacock, the character who supervises the others out on the sales floor and who can give the recommendation to the higher-ups as to whether Mr. Goldberg is worth keeping.
And all the while, as he schemes and lies and cheats his way into unfair gain, Goldberg presents himself as a victim. His whole obsequious persona is designed to elicit sympathy, and sympathy is what he gets from the other characters (except Captain Peacock, the blackmail victim).
Years ago, I was not bothered by this episode. One important reason was that a lot of the character's Jewishness went right over my head. It took several viewings of the episode before I even figured out all the con games he was running; and even as I caught on to those, it never occurred to me to connect them to his ethnic background.
The other important reason was that, to the slight degree I was aware of certain gestures and expressions that were designed to seem Jewish, I tended to be less surprised to find ethnic humor in British sitcoms than in American ones. Because Monty Python's Flying Circus was the first British comedy I ever watched on a regular basis, it remained in the back of my mind as the archetypal British comedy, influencing the way I viewed all the others, even a show as far removed from Python as Are You Being Served? And since Python was the ultimate equal-opportunity offender, slamming anyone and everyone with egalitarian glee, I half-consciously dismissed ethnic touches in Britcoms that I might have found startling in American sitcoms. I just figured British TV as a whole was more willing to offend than American TV, but that as long as they hit everyone equally (as it appeared to me at the time), there was no unfairness involved. So I ignored it.
As time went on, however, patterns in British writing that I had once been oblivious to began to surface, and I started to become uncomfortably aware that even in British comedy, some of us are more equal than others. It was a foreshadowing of the rapid and painful realization I've had since 9/11 of the vicious bias in the BBC's various news services.
Watching this episode again for the first time in years, I saw the character of Mr. Goldberg with new eyes.
As the episode ended, just as Mr. Goldberg's threat of blackmail was evidently on the verge of succeeding, and at the end of the closing credits there appeared the logo of "Lionheart Television: The BBC in America," it was impossible not to make the connection between the seemingly harmless stereotyped character on the extremely silly old sitcom and the worldview that motivates the largest news organization in the world.
Mr. Goldberg, a smarmy, brown-nosing, constantly lying connoisseur of sharp practice; a whining, sniveling con artist who takes advantage of his new friends even as he wins their sympathy; the victimizer who presents himself as a victim -- Mr. Goldberg is what the BBC sees when it looks at Israel. This attitude extends to many related entities as well, of course; it's similar to the way the BBC sees the West, sees America, sees Britain in relation to the Third World, sees the military (especially the American and British militaries), and so on. But Mr. Goldberg as a microcosm of Israel in the BBC's presentation of reality is what really stands out.
And on a related note, here's an odd coincidence:
The most recent BBC comedies I've seen date from the early to mid-90s. I don't recall picking up on any Jewish characters in those, so I don't know how the BBC is presenting fictional Jews for laughs these days.Are You Being Served? was the brainchild of Jeremy Lloyd, who - upon his return to the UK after a stint working in the USA on Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In- was having difficulty finding work. He dreamed up this department-store idea and sent it off to both the BBC and ITV. BBC producer David Croft took an interest, suggested himself as co-writer and producer and made a pilot. This was quietly awaiting a broadcast slot, almost certainly in the next series of Comedy Playhouse, when tragedy struck at the Munich Olympics with the murder of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. This resulted in major scheduling problems for the BBC, which found itself with slots to fill and no sport taking place. Thus they reached for the shelf and rushed out a couple of Comedy Playhouse pilots, Are You Being Served? being one of them. Despite being unadvertised the pilot was well received and the powers that be ordered a series.
The Goldberg episode isn't actually all that old; it was produced in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became prime minister.
I'm afraid it's one I won't find funny any more.
Saturday, August 27, 2005
TV Guide listed a movie on Cinemax this morning titled Resident Evil: Apocalypse. It indicated that the movie was "German-French-British." The first thing that occurred to me was: Ought to be a movie about Iran.
Friday, August 26, 2005
When I read this post at LGF, I found a name that rang a bell, but in an unexpected context:
From one of the internet’s darkest holes, neo-Nazis are coming to Crawford, Texas, to show their appreciation and support for Cindy Sheehan: Stormfronters Rally In Crawford, TX On Sat. & Sun. Aug. 27-28. (Hat tip: Morgan.)
I’m driving out to Crawford, Texas tomorrow, Friday August 26th to help put up a White Nationalist voice in the protest against Bush’s War for Israel that was started by Cindy Sheehan.
We’ll be uploading digital photos, and maybe video, from Crawford so that Stormfront’s 58,000 Members (achieved today) and hundreds of thousands of Guests can follow the events in Crawford from a White patriot perspective.
If you live anywhere within a driving distance that won’t put you out too much, would you please join us on Saturday and Sunday? That’s August 27th and 28th.
The facilities at the Crawford Ranch Camp Casey are excellent: good food, shade, tents, water, toilets, parking, and all basic necessities are there in ample supply. Most supplies are free. All you need to bring is yourself, a good shade hat, and a long-sleeved shirt.
I’ll put up maps to Crawford and sign-making ideas in this thread. Please add your ideas.
Our purpose in journeying to the Crawford protest against Bush’s Neocon War for Israel is to:
Let The World Know That White Patriots
Were First & Loudest To Protest This War For Israel
We don’t want leftist Johnny-come-latelys who are misleadingly protesting this war as if the war is about oil (not true), or as if it’s right-wing patriots who launched this war (not true) to hijack the issue from us.
We want to challenge these leftists with the fact that their leftist leaders, like Hillary Clinton, are on the same War for Israel team as the cowardly Republicans who have been bought and paid for in the Senate, House, White House, and Media by the Jewish Neocon political machine.
Please PM me if you can come on Saturday or Sunday. Please phone me too: Jamie Kelso at 985 809-0424. I’ll be answering the phone around the clock, so call at any hour.
Emphasis added, because that's the part that jumped out at me. The name Jamie Kelso was one I'd first encountered more years ago than I care to remember, back in 1975 when the book What Really Happened to the Class of '65? appeared. I remembered that the Jamie Kelso in the book was a strange, hostile misfit and immediately wondered if, after the various extreme belief systems he'd adopted and discarded back in the day, he'd now signed up with the white supremacists. It seemed such a plausible development that I figured it had to be the same guy, but I thought I'd check, and . . .
yup, it's apparently the same guy. The ex-existentialist and ex-Scientologist and ex-God-knows-what-all is now a neo-Nazi:
(One slightly funny aside: On the Amazon page for the book, one reader/reviewer leaves the following sentence: "I haven't done a search of the name "Jamie Kelso" on this website, but I sense that I won't find much if I do. At least he participated in one terrific book.")''"Did you hear about Kelso?"' a classmate asked Wallechinsky.
''"Tom found out from Google," Wallechinsky replied. He said Kelso was the reunion no-show who surprised him most.
''Jamie Kelso's chapter, "The Idealist," began with Kelso's declaration:
''"I think probably a lot of people remember my lecture on Sartre in Advanced Placement English. Inside my own head, I was in a crisis. Existentialism is, of course, a fraud. Jean-Paul Sartre is an imbecile. I'm quite aware of that now. When I got up in front of the class I was so torn up inside that I couldn't see."
''During an Internet search, Betts came across several articles naming Kelso as a member of the National Alliance under former Klu Klux Klan leader David Duke.
''When Kelso was interviewed for the book, he was a member of The Church of Scientology and living south of Kansas City.
''"He was always a joiner," said Betts. "We were friends. But I've lost touch with him now. In fact, he's the reason I called Michael [Medved]. Michael said he was up-in-the-air about coming tonight."
As I've noted before, it's notoriously easy for an individual or a culture to go through repeated superficial changes while retaining the same basic structure just below the surface.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Under the radar? There was something interesting about Bush's signing of the transportation bill that I haven't seen anyone else highlight: the fact that he traveled all the way to an Illinois Caterpillar plant to do it.
Doubtless it has something to do with the idea that Caterpillar will benefit from the highway bill. And doubtless it doesn't hurt that the plant is located in Dennis Hastert's home district.
But there might be something more to it. I believe Bush is sending a signal to those in the know.
Caterpillar has been under siege in recent years because Israel uses Caterpillar bulldozers to demolish structures associated with Palestinian terrorists. The bulldozers' role in destruction of Palestinian terrorists' homes has gotten the most attention, but the single most famous incident, in which American terrorist sympathizer Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed, involved the destruction of tunnels used by terrorists to smuggle explosives into Israel. (For background, see here and here and here and here and here and here.)
The anti-Israel activists may be boycotting Caterpillar, but with his bold gesture of signing a huge piece of legislation in a Caterpillar plant, Bush is showing anyone who's interested that he sure as hell isn't boycotting it.
The media all missed this one. But those who care about this issue will not.
