A blog by Dan Brooks
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvjGIkl2yDY&feature=player_embedded
Combat! blog is traveling today, so that we may celebrate Christmas at our ancestral homeland. If you’re like me, air travel makes you want to Kill All, combining as it does the worst elements of a movie theater, a roller coaster and a locker room. It’s at such stressful times that we would do well to remember the reason for the season: the image of Jesus in a piece of raisin toast. Enjoy.
I'm not saying his parents would have preferred another girl, but he did get stuck with the Kalashnikov.
It’s been approximately four years since Fox News declared that the media and our socio-political overlords had declared War on Christmas, and I’m frankly a little frustrated with progress on the ground. The end of December is still the most expensive time of year to fly anywhere, and the mall is even more choked with wandering zombies dripping Cinnabon on their velour sweatsuits than usual. It’s starting to look like we’ve made no progress against Christmas at all—and at the expense of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Okay, maybe not thousands, but even one more life lost in this war of choice is too many, and frankly kind of embarrassing. We’re America, dammit. We beat the Nazis in four years, and if we can’t do away with one more cultural product of German barbarians in that time, well, maybe we need to reconsider our own preeminence. Perhaps we should withdraw from the War on Christmas entirely and leave it to the Chinese.
Another year is slowly—dare I say tediously?—drawing to a close, and the air here in the Combat! blog offices has taken on a philosophical tang. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the Christmas season. Maybe it’s the end of an undeniably weird decade. Maybe it’s that we’re 32 years old and spend almost every night alone reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in our house in the mountains. Probably it’s something you did. The point is, time moves forward with the inexorable confidence of like a time train or something, and we mortals can only note its passage. Change wins the day with the coming of every night, and the only certain thing in our lives is that each of us will eventually die. In the meantime, we have trend pieces. Won’t you join me in the news of the day? Who knows—it could be your last. Merry Christmas, everybody!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Highway to Health – Last Tea Party Protest of the Year | ||||
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The video above is from last night’s Daily Show, in which John Stewart assesses the final Tea Party protest of the year. First of all, I think it’s high time we acknowledged that the Daily Show pretty much performs all the functions of Combat! blog, plus a bunch of other stuff, and does all of it better. They are the Facebook to my Twitter. Second of all, after months and thousands upon thousands of words speculating on just what it is that the various Tea Party protestors have in common, John Steward has pinned down the species in one four-minute video segment. In so doing, he also assembles a pretty good list of differences between them and an actual political party. To wit:
1) They confuse goals with policy. At the 2:01 mark, Rick Scott says “we” don’t want more government or increased spending; we just want lower health care costs and more coverage. I agree that it’s a terrific idea, but I’m interested to see letter B in his outline. The chant “kill the bill” is a comical instance of how not just policy-free but anti-policy the Tea Party movement is. The Tea Partiers don’t have their own bill or even a vague plan for how to address health care reform, but dammit, they’re against everything that has been done so far. When they’re not out in force specifically to fight health care reform, the most common complaint of Tea Party activists is that taxes and spending are both too high. But what specific spending do the Tea Partiers suggest we cut? By now, we’ve all seen the video where the fat lady thinks for a few seconds before saying, “All of it.” Low taxes, a strong economy, unshakeable national security and an unobtrusive government aren’t positions; they’re values. That they’re values we all share makes passing them off as an agenda even more insipid.
2) They’re outraged at stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Since Barack Obama took office and the Tea Party movement miraculously coalesced out of nowhere/Fox News studios, no changes have been made to federal gun laws, tax structures or abortion statutes. Yet the Tea Party is animated by a sense of urgent panic over these issues. Granted, President Obama probably will raise the marginal tax rate and re-ban private ownership of assault weapons, but he hasn’t yet, just like he hasn’t converted the country to socialism or changed one whit of the landscape that Tea Partiers suddenly find so terrifying after the Bush administration. When Laura Ingraham says “First they came for the rich…” she’s either lying or describing her sophomore year in college.
3) They have no sense of historical perspective. And about Laura Ingraham’s little homily: it’s a good thing Eli Wiesel wasn’t at that anti-health care reform rally. For all their fixation on history, the Tea Party seems to have very little sense of how the lives of a bunch of mallwalkers in middle America might differ from those of colonists in eighteenth-century Boston, or Jews in 1930s Germany, or political dissidents in Maoist China. Now matter how much Congress jacks up the marginal tax rate, no one is going to be sent to a forced labor camp. The inability to distinguish between real tyranny and not getting your way is a hallmark of childhood, not of representative democracy in a post-industrial superpower.
4) They’re fundamentally anti-intellectual. “We cannot let the pen be mightier than the sword.” I’m sure that was taken out of context, but I would like to take this opportunity to personally offer to meet with this fat man and explain to him the benefits of a discourse based on rhetoric rather than capacity for extended physical violence. Does the Tea Party really believe that we as a nation should think less and act more? Probably, which is why they give me the fuckin’ creeps.
Besides wearing that one kind of hat that girls who are definitely not fat wear, I mean.
Remember the good old days, when Combat! blog was primarily about me getting angry at Victoria Floethe and other children of privilege masquerading as writers, politicians and intellectuals? That sort of masquerade is for children of the middle class, bitches, and don’t you ever forget it, but I digress. My point is, in our haste to actually address elements of contemporary American society that will be of interest to more than one obsessive man in his eerily unfurnished apartment, we at Combat! blog have forgotten our roots. Those roots are regularly dyed, and they totally look amazing and not trashy at all. They belong to Meghan McCain, the daughter of longtime senator and former candidate for President John McCain, and she is still working away at her weekly column in the Daily Beast, which has nothing to do with her being John McCain’s daughter but was instead awarded to her out of respect for her astute political analysis and talent as a writer, as demonstrated by her bestselling book, My Dad, John McCain. Seriously, that’s the title of her book. According to the New York Observer, she’s also got another book in the works for Hyperion, which contract she secured with the help of “the literary agent she shares with her father, Sterling Lord Literistic president Flip Brophy.” Every time I try to understand that clause, my brain slips out of the socket. If you’re like me, you can’t wait six months for Meghan McCain to write a whole damn book, even if it does cover “topics ranging from what the party needs to do to attract others like her, to the importance of technology in reaching out to younger voters, to what needs to be done to keep young people passionate and involved in politics in the future.” I’m assuming the word “Twitter” appears in this book several hundred times, but until I find out I will have to content myself with her Daily Beast columns, which finally brings us to the topic of today’s blog: Meghan McCain is a rich little fascist who can’t think and would right now be gradually developing a cocaine problem in the the stock room of some ASU college bar had her dad not run for President. Ours is a broken meritocracy. Won’t you join me for lunch at Schadenfreude’s?