Here’s the text:
Remember when watching an unpredictable womanizer in a toupée rant about someone named Khan was how we took our minds off the real world?
GOOD TIMES.
I wish I could say that this clever observation was mine, but all credit goes to Yossie Bloch, who came up with the quip, Skye Gray, who added Captain Smirk to the mix, and Jeannie Cool, who let me know that this thing existed.
“Farewell, left versus right,” reads the subtitle in this Economist article. “The contest that matters now is open against closed.”
I agree with the Economist’s stance, which is made clear in this excerpt:
Start by remembering what is at stake. The multilateral system of institutions, rules and alliances, led by America, has underpinned global prosperity for seven decades. It enabled the rebuilding of post-war Europe, saw off the closed world of Soviet communism and, by connecting China to the global economy, brought about the greatest poverty reduction in history.
A world of wall-builders would be poorer and more dangerous. If Europe splits into squabbling pieces and America retreats into an isolationist crouch, less benign powers will fill the vacuum. Mr Trump’s revelation that he might not defend America’s Baltic allies if they are menaced by Russia was unfathomably irresponsible (see article). America has sworn to treat an attack on any member of the NATO alliance as an attack on all. If Mr Trump can blithely dishonour a treaty, why would any ally trust America again? Without even being elected, he has emboldened the world’s troublemakers. Small wonder Vladimir Putin backs him. Even so, for Mr Trump to urge Russia to keep hacking Democrats’ e-mails is outrageous.
South Park poked fun at liberal smugness ten years ago in their episode, Smug Alert:
…and Vox’s Emmet Rensin writes that the wages of all this smugness is Donald Trump. You see it in articles like Gawker’s Dumb Hicks are America’s Greatest Threat, the clever mockery of the right that the Daily Show and The Onion produce, and the question we ask over and over again: Why are these people voting against their own self-interest?
The Smug Style of American Liberalism will be a challenging article for some people to read, but it’s an important one. It’s not a call to compromise values or back down on issues for the sake of going along to get along, but for empathy. Rensin hits the nail on the head when he writes:
It is impossible, in the long run, to cleave the desire to help people from the duty to respect them.
It’s too easy to live in our own bubbles and associate with people who are pretty much just like us, and that makes it easy to forget that everyone thinks they’re the good guy:
One thing you’ll learn in this article is the value of writing to your audience:
The first time I bid on a freelance job to ghostwrite a doomsday survival guide, I was only asked one question: Did I have experience writing for middle-aged Republican men?
And of course, there’s a Florida angle:
I didn’t know anything about the client, let’s call him Dimitri, other than that he lived in Florida, and that he had about $600 for me if I could pump out 100 pages on how to survive the end of the world. The only way to make a living on writing projects at these prices is to do them quickly. In some cases, freelancers are asked to “spin” extant books—that is, to essentially copy the structure and content of those books but to make them new enough to reasonably (and legally) market them as new products.
Here’s a screen capture from Ici Radio-Canada Télé, the French version of CBC Television, the big public TV broadcaster in Canada. The title in the “lower third”, Améliorer le sommeil, means “Improving sleep”.
Here’s a newly-painted “SCOHOL” crossing in Deltona, Florida. I was always under the impression that those crossings were painted using a single stencil containing the complete word, but it would appear that they’re done by laying out single-letter stencils side by side. Still, it’s nice to see that they lined up the letters properly.
Photo via The Smoking Gun. Click to see the source.
On July 26, 1991, Paul Reubens — better known to the world as Pee-Wee Herman, and at the time, host of a popular (and surreal) Saturday morning children’s show — was arrested for partaking in a form of onanism in a pornographic cinema in Sarasota County, Florida, a 90-minute drive south of my place.
For you younger readers: in the days before home internet, never mind home broadband internet and wifi, there were generally two ways to watch porn in 1991:
That’s right, kids, once upon a time, the only way you could watch porn — and perform any ancillary activity — was in a public place. This started to change in the 1980s with the rise of video playback devices (first VCRs, then DVD players) and speciality cable TV channels, but even in 1991, XXX theatres were still a viable option for porn consumption.
The incident provided comedians of all stripes with lots of material. David Letterman remarked “Hey, Pee-Wee, have you never heard of a VCR?” and I remember the alt-rock station in Toronto dedicated this song to Pee-Wee every time they played it:
I also remember his appearance on the 1991 MTV video music awards after the incident, where he asked a very forgiving audience “Heard any good jokes lately?”
The Smoking Gun has commemorated this event today. In an age when all the porn you can eat is available on a device that fits in your free hand, the Pee-Wee Herman incident wouldn’t even have happened, and my 2016 sensibility is leading me to wonder why the cops would even bother looking for a non-crime like masturbating in an adults-only legal business that showed films specifically made for that sort of thing.