They
Who are "They?" They are the "other," the "not-like-us," the "aliens." In TV and movies, they are represented literally as aliens often, just to get the point across.
Except in news channels, and specifically Fox News's Glenn Beck show.
I've gotta love Glenn Beck. He's a convert to my religion, and he came by it the hard way, so I hear. He's got cool hair, for a blowhard. Much better than Rush's or Bill O' Reilly's. He managed to go from CNN to Fox News without changing his schtick: and that's an acheivement. And it's important to point out that his on-air personality HAS to be different from his real-life self, just like all of the talking heads.
But I do wonder if, at some point, that real-life self looks at the caricature on the screen and listens to the vitriolic hate-speech and shudders to think of the world if they were taken seriously.
To take them seriously, we would literally have to kill them. Why? Because they are "They," the very "They" that they rage about. And no, this isn't a mind game--these talking heads are the aliens, the people who just don't get what it means to be human. They ("They!") try to break it down to polar opposites: black vs. white ("Race!"), liberal vs. conservative, early-risers vs. late-sleepers. Everything, to these talking heads, can be reduced to a patently absurd polar decision: you are either with us or you're with them, and, in true xenophobic majesty, they say that we must destroy them before they destroy us.
But life isn't a true or false test. It's full of difficult, open-ended questions. It's full of multiple choice questions, with a bubble titled "Something else" and a line after it says, "If something else, what?" Life refuses to be compartmentalized, so all of their attempts to pigeon-hole someone or something always ends up being incomplete and unsatisfying. Reducing reality to absurd proportions of polarity only points out that the absurdity is them, the talking heads, the pundits and wonks who truly know nothing about anything and everything about nothing. And when they say that we must do something about them, they are dooming themselves.
Note to talking heads: you're not "us" to us. You're "them," the "They" you inveigh against.
They think hypocrisy smells like napalm. I think it smells like pink slips.
Except in news channels, and specifically Fox News's Glenn Beck show.
I've gotta love Glenn Beck. He's a convert to my religion, and he came by it the hard way, so I hear. He's got cool hair, for a blowhard. Much better than Rush's or Bill O' Reilly's. He managed to go from CNN to Fox News without changing his schtick: and that's an acheivement. And it's important to point out that his on-air personality HAS to be different from his real-life self, just like all of the talking heads.
But I do wonder if, at some point, that real-life self looks at the caricature on the screen and listens to the vitriolic hate-speech and shudders to think of the world if they were taken seriously.
To take them seriously, we would literally have to kill them. Why? Because they are "They," the very "They" that they rage about. And no, this isn't a mind game--these talking heads are the aliens, the people who just don't get what it means to be human. They ("They!") try to break it down to polar opposites: black vs. white ("Race!"), liberal vs. conservative, early-risers vs. late-sleepers. Everything, to these talking heads, can be reduced to a patently absurd polar decision: you are either with us or you're with them, and, in true xenophobic majesty, they say that we must destroy them before they destroy us.
But life isn't a true or false test. It's full of difficult, open-ended questions. It's full of multiple choice questions, with a bubble titled "Something else" and a line after it says, "If something else, what?" Life refuses to be compartmentalized, so all of their attempts to pigeon-hole someone or something always ends up being incomplete and unsatisfying. Reducing reality to absurd proportions of polarity only points out that the absurdity is them, the talking heads, the pundits and wonks who truly know nothing about anything and everything about nothing. And when they say that we must do something about them, they are dooming themselves.
Note to talking heads: you're not "us" to us. You're "them," the "They" you inveigh against.
They think hypocrisy smells like napalm. I think it smells like pink slips.