From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Sat Jan 29 2005 - 03:50:02 GMT
Hi Ant and Platt and all,
Re: Bill Moyers, whose retirement represents a further degeneration
of Quality within the mass media.
ant said:
I also viewed a video on the MRC website of what is apparently
advertised as a Jonah Goldberg speech and as I watched it I thought
initially “Oh, no – not another flag waver”. However, the speech, by
the end, began to make a lot of sense and I was thinking maybe Platt
wasn’t completely mistaken about Goldberg and the MRC.
I thought Goldberg had stated the following:
“I decided to put on my flag pin tonight - first time. Until now I
haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of
patriotism for everyone to see.... I put it on to take it back. The
flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo – the trademark of a
monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows official
chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval and during the State of the Union did you notice
Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s
patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows
no immunity from error.”
“When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time
in China when I saw Mao’s Little Red Book on every official’s desk,
omnipresent and unread. But more galling than anything are all those
moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels
while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines
attacking dissenters as un-American.... I put it on to remind myself
that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad
what bin Laden did to us.”
I thought fair enough. Though Goldberg’s a conservative, he still
wants to emphasise that his views aren’t that extreme and that not
all conservatives are ranting flag wearers with a distorted sense of
patriotism. Then I realised – due to the poor navigation on the MRC
site - that I’d actually been watching a Bill Moyers speech (you have
to remember that being British, I am unfamiliar with what many of
these people look like!) and the reason it was featured on the MRC
website was because this clip had actually won the “Roasting the Most
Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2003” – “I Hate You #!*#!
Conservatives Category”.
It was quite disturbing that such a level-headed clip could be
considered in such an extreme way. If I had been originally directed
to this “media watchdog” page as a parody of conservative ideology
(say by Mark H) I would have easily believed it!
msh says:
Yes, and how strange that the #!*#! conservatives see in this
beautiful speech an equation of conservatism with communism. Their
paranoia makes them impervious to the truth in Moyers' elegant
expressions.
Moyers is not claiming some bizarre "moral equivalency" between Mao
and Bush, whatever that's supposed to mean. The paragraph that
begins "When I see flags sprouting..." draws a parallel between the
unthinking ideologues who worshipped Mao and the unthinking
ideologues who worship GWB and blind uncritical patriotism: the
little red book everywhere but unread; the flag pins everywhere, but
the notion of patriotism completely distorted and misunderstood.
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
--
InfoPro Consulting - The Professional Information Processors
Custom Software Solutions for Windows, PDAs, and the Web Since 1983
Web Site: http://www.infoproconsulting.com
"The shadows that a swinging lamp will throw,
We come from nowhere and to nothing go."
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jan 29 2005 - 05:29:14 GMT