Hate Male

Who’s Edward R. Murrow ? Expiring minds want to know. Murrow is hardly known these days except, perhaps, in some history books or journalism classes. 

Murrow was a hero of the ‘Greatest Generation’, who reported the news with an integrity and honesty that placed him in the pantheon of all time great journalists----a reporter’s reporter. In those long ago days, journalists considered being ‘personalities’ as a slight, entertainment and news were two completely different spheres, and most singularly----truth was the essence of reporting based on sound facts. Sounds quaint these days----truth, integrity, and honesty being the foundation of journalism----particularly in Cabletopia. But for the rise of MSMBC the landscape is rather bleak. Most of us get information from the internet and often in great detail before it ever hits the boob tube.

I mean, real news is buried beneath layers of fluff like Paris Hilton’s coolest choice of club thongs, Priscilla Presley's latest face catastrophe, or Brittany's crack o‘ dawn. The American attention span demands lots of pictures, T & A, smut, gory violence and entertaining disasters. Particularly attractive to the voyeur’s appetite are heaping piles of violence spiced with hate.

What happened? Well, for one that generation died off, or like Murrow, were pushed out when truth became inconvenient. When two of my personal favorites, Ed Bradley and Molly Ivins, passed on, it was definitely the end of an era. Now-a-days it often seems as if their kind of reporter is mostly gone for good. Thank heavens that Bill Moyer came back to PBS! Mild replacements, such as Gwen Iffel or Katie Couric are professional against all odds certainly, but as dull as watching paint dry.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, the Doberman Olbermann, is the hope of the future as are others of that 'tell it like it is' station. For years I watched CNN. It was once the fiesty alternative of Ted Turner's middle finger to the established order of things. Now it's so scleoritic that watching requires discipline and asprin. 'Personalities' occupying the 'Situation Room' are enough to inspire migrains, particularly Rick Sanchez, whose enthusasiasms could turn dirt to gold. 

The 'Spin' is but a symptom and a perfect metaphor of the  mindset which has infected American life on every conceivable level, and is no less the reflection of one man who has recreated America in his own tawdry image. That wizard is Rupert Murdock, brilliant genius of sleaze whose command of the American Spectacle revels in the lowest of the low, and exalts to the highest level the most base instincts of human nature with dazzling manipulation and illusion.

Rupert Murdock is, arguably, the most vile human being in the world. Murdock has reduced American sensibilities to fun emotional tragedy and food fights on the Maury Povich Show; illegitimate babies, tit flashing and fist fights on a Jerry Springer Show complete with amusing disabled dwarfs and fake drunken preachers. At the very bottom of the barrel, are racist oriented ‘neo-cooning’ reality farces, staring the likes of ‘Flavor-Flav’ or the greasy Tiffany Pollard in 'I Love New York,’ a stunningly vapid, eye rolling street trash version of ‘Aunt Jemima‘.

Even more pathetic is the pathological ex-cop, Steve Wilkos, who specializes in the badgering verbal abuse of battered, drug addicted bad mothers on a level of sadistic voyeurism that makes the mob feel superior. Wilkos’s holier-than-thou abuse of the obvious is typical of bullies who become cops to exercise perverse vigilante justice sanctioned by the protection of the badge.

Murdock has a genius for churning sleaze, tragedy entertainment and tabloid journalism into a multi-billion dollar enterprise. His FOX News is just lipstick on the hyena . American corporate profit couldn’t agree more. There hasn’t been the likes of him since Randolph Hearst----that creator of profitable wars based on the frenzies of yellow journalism. With truth out of fashion, dinosaurs like Edward R. Murrow can can be seen as historic on the old TV channels.  We now have cable free of the restrictions of ‘highbrow’ reporting. Cable is like civil law to criminal law----a lessening of accountability, standards of proof, and is ultimately justice based strictly on the success of its commodity value.

The Judge Judy Show, and others like it, is a Jungian projection of that decline and makes an entertaining mockery of justice, paying its show ‘judges’ to disrespect claimants selected for their racial stereotypes, low station, or obvious lack of intelligence. As a result, it’s hard to tell these days whether a courtroom exists for justice or entertainment. When justice is reduced to commodity and entertainment value , truth is reduced to a quaint incidental artifact of discovery.

It’ is only when comparing American cable news to the rare European news show that the absurdity can be experienced in stark relief. Even the BBC, which has declined and become a bit of a joke at times, stills reports real news. Nothing like that exists in America anymore, except for that dreary little cable news show , Democracy Now, where Susan What’s-Her-Name reads a prompter and drones relentlessly on in a Burkenstock blandness that is so irritating, one forgets that she’s telling the truth. However, we deeply appreciate her efforts, even if we do feel like Albanians in the old days listening to Radio Free Europe.

While Fox News has been designed to promote debased primetime ’reality’ formats as ’talk’ news, it is as far from objective news as is gossip from truth. As if giving life to George Orwell’s ‘1984  New-Speak’ , Fox’s programs such as the O’Reilly Factor actually have that special Joseph Goebbels’ audacity to declare that the “Spin Stops Here”. It is so laughable, that we tremble because Orwell was right: history does not repeat itself. It is conveniently rewritten to suit the moment’s ideological convenience.

We are convinced what Fox really means by ‘spin’ is “Sit and Spin”----the name of our local laundromat. It can be said with complete assurance that Fox launders news the way criminals launder money. By the time the white wash disguises the filth and magic is done, the source is unrecognizable. Even more annoying is watching macho-merchant O’Reilly sell ‘Spin’ coffee mugs and T-shirts like ’The Factor’ was QVC. And of course, prime talk news is always using millions of dollars worth of free minutes promoting rubbish publications by its perverse savants. The line between Edward R. Murrow’s objective news reporting and talk’s ‘news-fo-tainment’ is erased for good. Fox News is not even remotely capable of fair and unbiased reporting, and Bill O’Rielly is not Edward R. Murrow. Headline News, CNN’s trashy affiliate version of Fox News, provides an antidote to the pompous screeching of Lou Dobbs and the annoyingly dry Wolf Blitzer. Its ‘Factor’ version of O’Reilly is the snarky ‘Man-Boi‘, Glenn Beck.

Watching these pathetic capons fluff up and walk the hate is reminiscent of those documentaries on high school ‘mean gurrls‘. It frequently surpasses offensive and often descends into comedy parodying the old ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Last week, O’Reilly was shaking his loofah at Arianna Huffington, a woman of intellect and opinion who scares Billy Goat to death. Bill, an equal opportunity hater high in testosterone and low in actual non-imaginary courage, usually likes to attack women, seeing in them his fantasy projections of dominance. Only his target class of victims tends to be higher on the economic food chain than bad-cop Wilkos’ battered-for-money and fifteen minutes of fame wretched under-class victims. Watching O’Reilly belittle his Barbie anchors is like sport hunting with Dick Cheney.

We wonder what Billdo was like as a boy. We imagine him a little Irish Catholic scrapper who worshiped Mr. Potato-Head, liked dressing up in lace as an altar boy (but denied it) and compensated by playing football, where he could hurt people and be acclaimed for it. Why he disrespects women is a puzzle. After all, he was raised in a Marist environment, a rigid Catholic sect devoted to magic virgins. Maybe he has vagina-envy. Maybe that’s why Ann Coulter, who regularly babbles her tripe on his show, is the only womb-man he respects. Who knows, but everybody cares. It does make sense, however, that he would have the spin-on for Ms. Huffington, who decidedly has more balls than he. 

The most recent contretemps with Huff-Po was a claim by O’Reilly that Ariana said someone should kill Nancy Reagan, and that Tony Snow should die a terrible death by cancer. And, of course, everyone knows,  except those that watch The Jerry Springer Show or ‘The Factor’, that is not true. Some droll trolls regularly leave droppings like that in the comments section:

We all get our share and never publish them---even from those superior libertarians who regularly troll overhead like sea gulls screeching and squawking before dropping a load in the comments section. Huff-Po erases them, but not fast enough for the Fox Snooze. Contradictorily, O’Reilly’s own blog has a policy of non-censorship, so that if one said the same about, say Hillary, it would remain posted. There is very little too terrible enough said about the Reagan's, but to call the old girl a ‘bitch’ is a little unseemly,  if not mundane,  and should be considered, according to quotes from her daughters, a family matter. Poor Nancy deserves more respect than that, if only for getting Ronnie through the last Alzheimer's years of his presidency and saving America from disaster.

There is something unpleasant about the likes of O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and others like them that produces an almost visceral disgust. It is probably the lack of manliness and gossip-girl bully affect that is so off-putting. In Hannity’s case, it is ties to neo-Nazi Hal Turner, or anti-Semite Pat Buchanan. 

What is it about someone who looks you straight in the eye, thinks fascism is democracy; thinks diversity is white folks in charge; waves a flag; wears an America pin; touts a direct line to God, and loves the excitement of war but decidedly avoided serving in the armed forces? Bush is also one of those vomit makers. Why is that? Is it because these hyper-patriotic, militaristic misogynists seem like strap-on wanna-be men? For all the beef jerky posturing, insecure little men like O’Reilly, Hannity, and Beck really are ’mean gurrls’ inside, with the thinnest veneer of macho covering the rotten delights of vicious gossip.

O’Reilly is an alpha nasty, who, while picking on women, also derides men his superior, but from a distance so he can run into the shelter of that pathological ideology he considers neo-con patriotism. In that, he resembles another ‘talk weirdo---- Glenn Beck, a sparkle-eyed non-entity so ’just fabulous’ in his own estimation, that he claims to have no expertise in any area except his history of alcoholism and drug use. There is something about Beck that reminds one of a cartoon beaver. However, his inner mean ‘gurrl’ is no less toxic than O’Reilly’s.

Such credentials remind us of commedian drug addict, Grandpa Limbaugh, who gets through the day on Oxycontin and a direct line to God. Now-a-days, he is channeling his inner Jerry Falwell, worships at the coffin of Ronald Reagan and got his fat ass in a wringer for convincing Republicans to vote for Hills in the primary and who now can't return to their elephant nests.

Naturally, in keeping with radical right wing reasoning, O’Reilly states emphatically he does not ‘censor’ his comments section because of free speech that guarantees his right to hate liberals. Because he has the decency of a piss ant, it would never occur to him that Ariana Huff-Po, who edits that part of the opinion and eliminates hate-speech trolls, might be granted the same privilege. In an irony lost on cretins like O’Reilly, hate speech is acceptable on right wing sites, but not progressive sites. Now is that democracy or what?

What would Glenn Beck say? Well, he keeps promising to ‘have blood shoot out of his eyes’ every time he has a hissy fit in the presence of contradictory opinion, let alone intelligent analysis. ‘Becky Boi‘ has a simulacra of intelligence and if he were really twelve years old, might perhaps be considered potentially interesting. But what is left of the gray matter after all those drugs and booze is devoted, one suspects, to research gleaned from Encyclopedia Britannica for Dummies or his ultimate source of inspiration----comic books? Doesn’t ‘blood shooting from his eyes’ sound a little comic book puerile and creepy?

We suspect Beck is not yet a realized  ‘alpha mean gurrl,’ but a second level apprentice and secretly admires Elizabeth Hasselbeck on The View, who Donald Trump once called the dumbest person on TV. Or, even Ann Coulter, she of posion for blood. Who would have thought that you would ever find agreement with the Donald on this site? The difference between Hasselbeck and Beck, however, is the vicious intent of the latter.

Recently commenting on the rise of families on food stamps Beck opined that it was "wrong to make the poor 'happy,'" because "pain would motivate them to improve their lives." Well, you go Marie Antoinette! Beck supposedly approves of the situtation in which millions of below-poverty level children go hungry everyday in the land of the free and are denied basic health care thanks to Bush's recent veto. And for all of it the 'Boi' gets paid some twenty million dollars.

Typical of Beck’s smallness is a little series he cobbled together proving that ‘liberation theology’ is Marxist, and worse---shooting blood out of his eyes---‘socialist!” OMG! Did you know that? The attack on ‘liberation theology’ is slanderous and just indecent. It’s the kind of attention getting stunt a kid would pull by dropping a turd in the swimming pool. 

True, it was Socialist. Socialist in the sense that unions and democracy are socialist----collectives of the common good that individuals from Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker Movement,  to the saintly Pope John XXIII saw as the desirable union of gospel and politics in democratic realization.

Thousands of dedicated people and community workers were murdered for that cause, and Beck’s facile misrepresentation defames their sacrifices, martyrdom, and human dignity. If Beck really wants ‘blood to shoot out of his eyes,’ I suggest he change places with one of those courageous individuals and get shot in the back by a right-wing goon squad while protecting innocent villagers, women, and children in a defenseless church sanctuary.

For me, the true irony of writing a critical satire in the style of ‘hate male’ is that it has disgusted its own author, and in that realization comes the uncomfortable experience that any brush with evil lingers like a stain. To what degree can we combat evil without being compromised and damaged by it? The discomfort walks a thin line between hate speech itself and the absolute necessity of conversation about it. In my mind, it is the constant war between advocate and activist; monk and warrior; between peace and war. It always comes down to the realization that when good people remain silent, evil thrives. It is perhaps my uncomfortable karma that agrees with Malcolm X: “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”  (*1)

The lost, marginalized, exploited, used and abused in the twilight democracy of America do not need to envy or kiss the boot that oppresses them; much less be entertained by sadistic schadenfreude . Ugly as it is, righteous vengeance is the first impulse of justice. A good beginning, as common sense dictates, is to switch the channel, then turn off the TV and throw it into the dumpster with the rest of the garbage. But denial will not stop the tsunami of degenerate spectacle which has become the American New World Order.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

- Orwell George

Orwell, of all people, was acutely aware of the blessings, as well as the dangers of democracy. He watched, as did all Europe, the swift rise of the Nazi Third Reich on the mesmerizing tide of fascist free speech, which washed away, in short order, the German Weimar Republic. His statement is as powerful as it is poignant.

Americans must ask themselves if O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and other icons of sewer journalism really represent the traditions of our democratic nation? If that is truly the common consensus, then we are doomed to a change that can only disgrace and betray the heritage of sacrifice that once defined us. One optimistic thought may save us:  the Nazis were brilliant and fiercely competent; Bush-Co is merely corrupt , colossally inept at governing and its propaganda puppets are a mediocre joke.   The Nazis were ultimately defeated and consumed by their own hell. We can wish the same for Republican Neo-con fascists. America must reclaim its heritage before change can occur. My intellect tells me the worst, while my heart sings to the tune of freedom.

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