Woodstuck+Torture=Uproarious Laughter -- Or, the Passion of John McCain
John McCain's latest campaign has attracted a bit of attention recently. According to TPM, Fox News is singling McCain out for using footage of the Fox Republican Debate. I don't really care at all about the political machinations of Fox News, but I do think it's worth mentioning that John McCain's new ad is really weird. Let's watch and count the ways:
1. The Austin Powers-esque one million dollars for a Woodstock museum. Wow! As though nobody’s counting that one trillion dollars being spent on other kinds of shock and awe social experiments.
2. The standing ovation, raucous cheers, and merry laughter (particularly Giuliani’s) that follow the line “I wasn’t there…. I was tied up at the time” being tortured.
3. That anyone who would dare propose spending one million dollars to commemorate a “cultural and pharmaceutical event” that occurred while John McCain was being tortured (ha! ha!) should not be able to run for the office of President of the United States.
I myself think a Woodstock Concert Museum is a great idea, and I’m pleased to see that it’s going to happen with or without John McCain’s approval. Nevertheless, this is just a really stupid ad, focusing on a really small amount of money, which in addition in some weird way is trying to equate Woodstock with approval of torture. No politician would ever wittingly condone torture in this country for fear of being immediately voted out of office, so I’m particularly shocked that McCain himself hasn’t retracted this ad, and is instead waiting for the pious torture-haters at Fox News to do so.
1. The Austin Powers-esque one million dollars for a Woodstock museum. Wow! As though nobody’s counting that one trillion dollars being spent on other kinds of shock and awe social experiments.
2. The standing ovation, raucous cheers, and merry laughter (particularly Giuliani’s) that follow the line “I wasn’t there…. I was tied up at the time” being tortured.
3. That anyone who would dare propose spending one million dollars to commemorate a “cultural and pharmaceutical event” that occurred while John McCain was being tortured (ha! ha!) should not be able to run for the office of President of the United States.
I myself think a Woodstock Concert Museum is a great idea, and I’m pleased to see that it’s going to happen with or without John McCain’s approval. Nevertheless, this is just a really stupid ad, focusing on a really small amount of money, which in addition in some weird way is trying to equate Woodstock with approval of torture. No politician would ever wittingly condone torture in this country for fear of being immediately voted out of office, so I’m particularly shocked that McCain himself hasn’t retracted this ad, and is instead waiting for the pious torture-haters at Fox News to do so.
posted by Robot at 11:25 AM
12 Comments:
damn hippies
last night there was a party at the temple bar and david lynch's assistant was there. he said he was sorry david lynch could not make it. then he pulled out a tape recorder and it was david lynch saying "hey, now im here."
then everyone went wooooooahhhhh. and all the euro artists started talking about how cool it was that david lynch recorded himself an said "hey, now im here" i have a feeling his assistant just goes to all the parties in manhattan and pulls the recorder out in order to make his boss more popular
Or to make himself more popular.
Hey, John Liberty, you totally bogarted Josh the Hippie Killer's shtick.
Thanks for posting this. I knew McCain said it during the debate but I didn't think he'd be dim enough to run it as a campaign ad. Just look at the lineup here:
Woodstock: A beloved cultural event among the baby boomer population, who are more than ever a massive force to be reckoned with among the electorate. As you point out, what the hell is a mere 1 million for a museum (I will be interested to see the full operational capacities of such an enterprise) compared, for example, with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on worthless bridges in Alaska? A million bucks is chump change.
John McCain's detention and torture in Vietnam: A terrible situation which nevertheless has nothing to do with a bunch of hippies getting high and listening to Sha-Na-Na, no matter how hard McCain tries to finesse the causal connection. This might work with the Republican base, for whom any act of hippie decadence is automatically a slap in the face to our troops abroad, who are always inevitably fighting for "our freedom," but again, see the boomers above. They ain't gonna buy it.
John McCain: teh dumb.
I think McCain's next campaign ad should just be a tape loop of Rudy Giuliani laughing out loud played for about thirty seconds.
Martha Nussbaum & Cass Sunstein
“I’m angrier about political issues. Cass wants to be liked for what he says when he goes to Washington to talk to the Republicans. He wants them to be won over by his sweet reasonableness. I wouldn’t care what they thought.” —Martha Nussbaum, 02138 magazine
they;'re married
hey scantron you totally bogarted...every liberal armchair academic in the world
But my armchair is so comfy... and the world fits so nicely into my preconceived notions from this angle...
Nussbaum is a classics PhD, doncha know.
I second both Mr. Liberty's and Scantron's respective first comments.
McCain's use of "pharmaceutical" is interesting to me for philological reasons. In the course of recent study, I have been reminded that we indeed derive our words "pharmacy"/"pharmaceutical" from the Greek "to pharmakon" (neuter), drug or medicine. Yet there was also the term "pharmakos" (masculine), tied to the neuter term no doubt through a mutual aetiology of "ritual purification," which meant a "scapegoat," one who is ritually expelled from the community for purposes of purification and restoration of order. The modern "dirty hippie" is thus a surprising and ironic figure, in that he or she becomes a scapegoat ("pharmakos") for society's ills through the very act of consuming drugs ("pharmaka").
Interestingly, "pharmakoi" in the sense of scapegoats were often conceptualized as lame and ugly. Thus, the god Hephaistos, who was once expelled from heaven by Zeus and who also serves the function in Iliad 1 of restoring harmony among the gods at their banquet, and also Thersites, the ugly man of the demos in Iliad 2 who dared to talk back to the kings and is summarily beaten by Odysseus for it. This act restores ideological unity to the Greek army, which is roughly split between nobles and commons. There is also a persuasive argument that the poet Alcaeus describes his political opponent Pittacus as lame-legged in order to set him up rhetorically as a "pharmakos."
Perhaps, then, the punditocracy of our day is unwittingly drawing upon ancient precedent when they home in on Hillary Clinton's "big ankles." Her lameness (in more ways than one) and her association with pharmaceutical events thus makes her a prime candidate for a modern "pharmakos."
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