Hint: It's a secret to everybody.

It’s the first Friday in September, and around here (zip code 20037) things are starting to look a lot like fall. The breeze is cooler, the last single cicadas are desperately chanting the bug version of “funny, loves wine, travel,” and all around us, nature prepares for the inevitable slide into death. Seasons change and leaves may wither, but the educated person comforts himself with the knowledge that truth is eternal. At least it was, until the invention of postmodernism, the internet, chain emails, multinational corporate ownership of all media, and Glenn Beck. Now the truth is as flexible as a mail-order bride, and just as likely to disappear with your checkbook. So pour a cup of strong coffee, settle into a comfy chair, and get ready to meet Oxana’s suspiciously handsome cousin, who lives in your house now, too. It’s the Combat! blog Friday link extravaganza, and it’s all* about grotesque parodies of the truth.

First, the good news. As Ashley pointed out in the comments section, those of you who would like your very own Smith-Cotton High School marching band Brass Evolutions t-shirt can email Main Street Logo of Sedalia, Missouri, at mainstreet@sedaliamissouri.com. You can also become their friend on Facebook, and I encourage you to do so, since they were so kind as to post a link to Combat! blog, and all. Judging by their Wall, things are a little busier than usual down at Main Street. Let that be a lesson to us all: if you’re going to become embroiled in a controversy, try to have it center on something that you can sell through the mail. Go get ’em, guys, and props to Jack for the link.

That’s the last paragraph of today’s Combat! blog that won’t make you want to buy a big sharp axe. Just when the groundswell of support for evolution-related band t-shirts in Sedalia, Missouri, had me thinking that the United States was populated by reasonable people, I ran across this article about a 65 year-old man who had his finger bitten off at a health care reform protest. Apparently a group of anti-health care reform protestors gathered to picket a pro-health care reform rally organized by Moveon.org (official motto: “Like your friend who always escalates shit with the bartender, only for politics,”) and in the general confusion that followed, people started punching each other. First of all, do you really need to bite off a finger in order to win a fight with a 65 year-old man? You can pretty much just hand him a jar of salsa and wait for him to break his wrist. Second of all, how close did this event—in which activists on two sides of one of this country’s most pressing issues planned to meet each other at a public location—come to being a grassroots forum? And yet, how far it remained. Just once, I would like to see a debate break out instead of an incompetently-executed shoving match. Failing that, could we at least fight more effectively? Not only do the American people seem incapable of reasoned argument, but they also can’t seem to sucker-punch one another without falling down.

Then again, “seem” is a loaded word. For every Kenneth Gladney video, there are a dozen calm discussions that go unreported. That’s the contention of E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post, who argues that the electronic media has vastly exaggerated the level of shouting and disruption at health care town halls. Dionne believes that the interest inherent in video footage of a Medicare recipient screaming at his senator about socialism and Hitler has led national news outlets to dramatically overreport opposition to health care reform, creating the false perception that the public is generally opposed to legislation. Far from displaying a liberal bias, the news media has focused on fringe right-wingers to such a degree that they are, as Representative Mary Jo Kilroy puts it, “allowing loud voices to distort the debate.”

Unlike the unreliable electronic media, respected print outlets would never report a broad cultural trend that simply didn’t exist. Writing in the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan reports that people are leaving Facebook en masse. Heffernan cites the social networking giant’s heavy-handed terms of service, the death of Scrabulous, and widespread exposure to stalkers as reasons why “the disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves.” Except it hasn’t. “The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers,” Heffernan writes in the first sentence of the second paragraph, immediately providing quantitative evidence that the premise of her entire story is made up. It turns out that you can know the exact number of Facebook members at any given time, and that number has steadily increased for the past five years. But to paraphrase Mencken, no New York Times trend reporter ever let the truth get in the way of a good story. Presumably Heffernan has an editor, and presumably that editor looked at her second paragraph, saw the sentence that concretely refutes the existence of the trend the story reports, and decided to run it anyway. In doing so, he or she continued the Times’s tradition of the trend piece as speculative fiction. Heffernan’s article reports not so much on a cultural phenomenon that is actually happening, but on one that might be interesting if it did.

You know what else would be totally messed up, though? If, like, socialism and fascism were not only totally taking over the United States right now, but also they already did. That, as near as I can piece it together, is the bizarre contention of Glenn Beck in this video, during which he constructs a totalizing theory of 20th-century American history based on some art he walked past in Rockefeller Center. It’s long, but it’s worth it:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szlLM5lCNJg

Let us briefly put aside Beck’s early assertion that “there was no real American architecture in New York City” in the 1930s and try to assemble his main argument. First, he seems to assert that John D. Rockefeller, the man who built Standard Oil and amassed one of the largest personal fortunes in history, was actually a communist. Not one to embrace an ideology without simultaneously believing in its polar opposite, Rockefeller was also a fascist, as evidenced by a bas relief of a dude driving a chariot on the side of one of his buildings. Finally, Rockefeller was a progressive, which is a statement that is actually sort of borne out by history. After offhandedly mentioning that the President will be performing a Mussolini-style “indoctrination” next week by telling the nation’s children to stay in school, Beck then identifies various public sculptures of swords being beaten into ploughshares, a fundamentally communist image that originally appeared in the Book of Isaiah. And who commissioned one such statue? The Soviet Union! And who else? John D. Rockefeller! It’s also in “The End of the Innocence,” but we already knew that Don Henley must be stopped. Anyway, the fascist/communist Rockefeller Art Axis clearly demonstrates that progressives are now, and have always been, agents of fascist/communist subversion. As Beck puts it, “Don’t let any of these people ever tell you anything other than the truth, and that is: early twentieth-century progressives, and the progressives of today [pause.] It makes sense!” You can actually hear the moment when he realizes that he is not saying anything, and the jarring act of psychological self-preservation that follows. “Progressives, fascists, communists,” Beck says. “Now what do they all have in common? That’s something you’re going to have to figure out.” The important thing is that they’re all the same, somehow, and the President of the United States is equivalent to Mussolini, a man whom my grandfather risked his life to remove from power.

Don’t let any of these people ever tell you anything other than the truth. If you’re like me, reading all this has made you angry, depressed and a little hungry. It’s times like this when we must turn to the only honest voice in contemporary discourse: Japanese cat celebrity Maru. In confusion, in darkness, in a big cardboard box, he will show us the way.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_AbfPXTKms

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