Soylent Granny Icefloe Bars, part 1
A stock photo of an ice cream sandwich, NOT a tasty Soylent Green frozen treat.
"Soylent Granny" coinage courtesy of dmsmilev.
I know a lot of people in Center-Left Blogistan have been baffled by the speed with which the "ZOMG! Obama's gonna kill your grandparents!" meme has been spread, and consider this to be a sign of something new in US politics, or at least something that only dates back to the Clenis Frenzy era - but "not so, but far otherwise," as I can well attest. Rupert Murdoch didn't create it, at all.
It goes back at least to the mid-Seventies, and is possibly older than that, though I don't know as I wasn't around then and haven't run across any examples of it from the Sixties or Fifties. It was part of the whole meme-package that was being peddled by the Old Guard, the Wanderer and the National Catholic Register and New Oxford Review and all those other conservative rags I've talked about before, some of which have folded or been recreated as other publications since - and those were the more mainstream, the least flaky then as now, make no mistake: we in our little anarcho-syndicalist (ie proto-Crunchy-Con) part of the rightwing pond thought that the Sedevacantists and the Bar Code Tattoo crazies (implanted chips, like Black Helicopters, were a later development) and the Birchers with their fluoride-in-the-water phobias were whackjobs, or at least most of us did at least publicly.
I didn't even know that anti-fluoridation panic in the US of A wasn't something that Stanley Kubrick made up as the most far-fetched example of unreasoning panic-mongering conceivable until I was in my mid-twenties, when I read a letter in the paper from someone who was still het up about it.
In the latter Nineties.
So, you see, by real hardcore Traditional American conservative-paranoia standards, we were brainwashed European-influenced liberals who thought that fluoridation was a good thing, like organic farming or recycling, though all we ever did was bitch'n'moan that nobody was putting in a recycling program in our town - we couldn't be arsed to actually work for one, that was for liberally liberals who didn't have anything important to do like pray five decades of the rosary every day to End Communism/Abortion/Democracyts In America or spending hours in Perpetual Adoration...or reading right-wing propaganda zines by the cubic foot every month.
But nevertheless, we were all caught up on the Dystopia that would result if The Left ever got their way: in addition to becoming a Dying Generation as we followed Godless Contracepting Old Yurp into the hedonists' grave they were hedonistically digging for themselves (and being replacd by ZOMG!Turks!&Algerians!&Indians!) we would also - whether before or after the mandatory gay-commie-neopagan-atheist re-education-&-sterilization camps for Christians - be subjected to mandatory euthanasia as well.
This would either be to kill off the aged and infirm in the name of "compassion" as understood by the deluded bleeding-hearts, or because all those environmentalists secretly wanted to eradicate the human race and leave it to the more deserving beasts of the field, or because the Godless Commies who were giving The Left its marching orders wanted only the strongest and healthiest workers to do their bidding in the future. Or all of the above.
Who was going to be doing this? The Liberals, of course! "Aged Hippies" - R.A. Lafferty wrote a story which - given this was R.A. Lafferty - was either a serious sketching of what our collective fantasies might play out like, or a masterfully-satirical illustration of them taken as though seriously, called Ishmael into the Barrens, well worth reading either way. (I still get a kick out of scatter-print, after having seen what the "Grunge" fad did to typesetting.)
In it, Aged Hippies (Don't Trust Anyone Under Thirty!) mandate various forms of what would eventually be called political correctness and obligate fun & happiness (ie sex & drugs) enforced at gunpoint and people who want to live monogamously in traditional families are exiled or hunted down - and this all made perfect sense to us at the time, going along with other Catholic apocalyptic futurism like Robert Hugh Benson's 1908 Lord of the World - I gather that Evangelical Protestant apocalyptic paranoia at the time had different but basically similar forms, was worked out in more detail and had movies to go along with it.
By comparison, my Scholastic-reader-inspired terrors of army ants, killer bees, tidal waves (in the heart of the Southwest, over a day's hard driving from any coast!) and unsuspected volcanoes erupting in the backyard were infinitely more reasonable ones than my elders'. No, I honestly can't sort out how much of it was "real" fear on their part, and how much of it was kids telling each other that ghosts would get in their mouths if they didn't hold their breaths while passing a graveyard, the perverse "fun" of scaring yourself shitless with stories about Hookhand on a camping trip - but it doesn't matter, when people are falling over with self-inflicted asphyxia rather than letting themselves be possessed, or organizing manhunts for Hookhand and shooting unfortunate amputees in their panic.
Another ex-Theocon talks about the "Euthanasia" meme as well as the Abortionists = Nazis=people-it's-okay-to-kill-in-self-defense and how this propaganda was manufactured and spread lang syne.
(Claiming that folks like O'Reilly and Beck are not really calling for violence, hey they even say "Nobody do anything stupid!" - is disingenuous to the extreme: "But all I SAID was 'will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest'--! I didn't say 'will someone kill him,' I didn't TELL anyone to kill him, I just asked a QUESTION!" Yo, it's freaking NAZIS, we can do ANYTHING to freakin' NAZIS, amirite?)
A number of years after, when my convictions had become weakened in part due to bad company (mainstream Catholics! gay guys! apolitical sorts!) and unsupervised reading (dangerous places, libraries--) and mostly due to the fact that I could see an awful lot of hypocrisy and deception up close and personal in our own midst, I noticed as I worked unsupervised in the library that this "Logan's Run" theme was moderately common in SF of the 1970s, of which our small-town library had a fair amount and of which selection I read as much as I could manage on my breaks or during slow times behind the desk. I can't remember the authors or titles now, there wasn't much memorable about them beyond the fact that this kept coming up, making me think "huh, something in the water back then" (ironically, as I didn't realize yet that people in our era really did attribute beliefs superstitiously to chemicals in the water...)
--Yes, there were people in the 1970s in the ecology movement on the Left who were talking wild talk about how humanity was bad for the earth and Voluntary Extinction was the way to go. I've read a few rants by them. They were never more than a tiny fraction of the whole and they had no political power - they were not the ones setting policy of any sort, Democratic or not, in the Seventies.
More later - Karen Ann Quinlan, the anti-Organ-Donation movement of the 1970s, and Holland as the Embodiment of Evil, plus why the Right was at a loss when the Cold War melted away and why Y2K was the biggest morale booster while it lasted, how The Island was tailor-made for the same crowd who ate it all up in 1976 and how this meme-clusterfuck imo mostly comes from Suburban Boredom-Fueled-Angst, at least on the side of the Tools* who are PWN3D by a gang of racist plutocrats, aka the Hegemony in my own jargon. Also Harry Truman. RL shit to deal with, now.
* They really would be [ie we would have been] so much better off being honest LARPers.