Friday links! Ascending order of weirdness edition

Google image search: "weird sausage." Nice to see Marilyn Manson is almost done with his studio art MFA.

American culture is such a particolored cavalcade of weird shit right now that it’s sometimes hard to believe in the standards of realism. Consider, for a moment, that the most vibrant movement currently afoot in our national politics believes that the first black president is a second Hitler, and that Hitler himself was a socialist. Or ponder the knowledge that, having failed to block health care reform with misinformation and threats of filibuster, Republican congressmen have begun to attack financial reform with misinformation and threats of filibuster. It’s as if a promising but unpracticed undergraduate creative writing student were currently writing the narrative of American politics, with all the characters acting too closely to type and an increasing number of surreal flourishes to distract us as the plot fails to cohere. In other words, it all seems kind of made up. In preparation for a weekend that will doubtless conform to natural realism more faithfully than we’d like, this Friday’s link roundup is devoted to stories that our too good to be true, arranged in order of decreasing plausibility. That their truth seems to diminish in as their goodness mounts is surely commentary on something, but it’s probably better if we don’t think about what. Let’s just sit back and enjoy the descent into an entirely fictionalized culture, built for our amusement with the lineaments of the real.

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The unspoken racism of the Obama/Hitler comparison

On an artistic level, I think this is the best one of the lot. Bonus points for racism: notice the hair does not quite lie down.

On an artistic level, I think this is the best one of the lot. Bonus points for racism: notice the hair does not quite lie down.

Anyone with access to the internet knows that the similarities between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler are numerous and eerie. Both were heads of state. Both were closely involved with their nations’ auto industries. Both were talented orators, and both presided over the systematic extermination of six million Jews. When you get right down to it, our sitting President and Adolf Hilter are pretty much the same person, except Obama hasn’t suspended democratic elections, implemented a policy of cultural nationalism, embarked on a massive expansion of the armed forces, created a class system based on ethnicity, assumed control of the national media, staged an attack on the legislative branch, implemented a eugenics policy or invaded a sovereign nation.

He is black, though. If you hate Barack Obama’s politics and you’re also a racist, the election of our first black President is doubly galling. You know what else is galling? The fact that Adolf Hitler—generally agreed to be the worst human being of the modern era—was a racist, too. That was, like, his thing. Which makes it hard, when you’re vigorously arguing that black people have an extra muscle in their calf that makes them especially good at pro basketball, not to think of yourself as maybe kind of an asshole.

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