Tom Goulter - "Actor" - Christchurch
Saturday, November 20, 2004
In Which I Heartily Endorse The Efforts Of Right-Wing Crazies
There's this cat named Daryl Mason. He does not, it's fair to say, like Skinny Puppy much. In fact, he dislikes Skinny Puppy so much, does Daryl, that he has made it his mission to eradicate them from the airwaves. (Daryl's task is made all the more herculean by the fact that Messrs. Puppy aren't really played by real radio stations, per se, and as such their airwave prescence is limited to the insidiously untrackable breeding ground for militants, revolutionaries and stoners that is college radio. DAN-dun-duuhhhh).
Mason, however, isn't alone. Oh no. Mason, as his form letter (readable on most of the links above) would remind us, is part of a majority. He's the status quo, motherfucker. And he has the MANDATE (oh God, that felt good) of PABAAH[1]!
PABAAH - Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood, for those who find it hard to take that acronym seriously - is the harelipped, eleven-fingered baby of Jon Alvarez, who sounds to me like he's just jumped the border to take jobs off decent Americans like Colin Powell, but I'm not here to judge.
PABAAH, however, most definitely are! The folks at Sorry Everybody are branded "Sick, disgusting, dangerous, and irresponsible... traitors", whereas advocating public lynchings and photoshopping your mysogynist fantasies is a Good Idea. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The problem with PABAAH - well, obviously, there are plenty of problems with PABAAH, such as they're crazy and they want to repeal the 22nd Amendment and they're totally crazy - but the main problem, as I can see it, with PABAAH, is that they're nowhere near complete in their list of dangerous counterculture insurgents whose work must be ignored at all costs.
(It's at this point in the writing of this article that I tried to become a member of PABAAH, so as to explore their fine gallery of hatred further, but they started sending me here wherever I clicked, so I don't know, they must be psychic or have magical computer-seeing powers or something).
Nowhere on PABAAH (before it branded me a liberal moron, that is) could I find a single reference, for instance, to Halo 2. Nor on Boycott Hollywood, of whose misguidedly amateurish [2] design I have fond memories as something of a proto-PABAAH. (And don't go telling me that Boycott Hollywood's function is to highlight artists whose public comments are at odds with the webmaster's opinions, because I'd be interested to see what movies have given Ben And Jerry's icecream above-title billing). Indeed, googling any and all right-wing boycott groups and crossreferencing them with references to Halo 2, you'll find nothing[3].
Which is simply ludicrous. After all, we're talking about - I'm quoting official Xbox sales personnel here - we're talking about "The Biggest Retail Release Ever" here. We're also talking about a game whose writer, Joe Staten, was quoted desribing his work as "a damning condemnation of the Bush administration". Staten later clarified that, actually, a "damning condemnation" was exactly what he wouldn't call his game; but that's exactly what these money-grubbing champagne Liberals would say, isn't it? Bungie? Bunjew, more like. (Just to be sure, Republican Radio put out Staten's response way under their original "damning condemnation" headline and story. It's good to see someone's remaining creative with their slander).
Boycott Hollywood list includes George Clooney ("Now THIS one is a heartbreaker - - he's just so darned cute, isn't he?"), but not David O. Russell, who directed Clooney in the incendiarily subversive Three Kings. Thanks to neglect on the part of Boycott Hollywood, David O'Russell is able to keep on spewing his virulent anti-American propaganda unchecked!!1!!! They also neglect to call for any sort of action against Ed Kowalcyk, who as we speak is making dozens of dollars with his new cd, Awake: The Best Of Live. Live. A band who once fearlessly sang something about "blood and oil on a bayonet" in a song called What Are We Fighting For?
SERIOUSLY, Boycott Hollywood! Your fellow grassroots-nutcases are calling for a boycott of The World's Most Hated Insidious LifeStyle Conglomerate, Starbuck's, because they play Sheryl Crow sometimes in their stores and Sheryl Crow said something sometime about not liking war, and you can't even connect a few fucking dots and not buy Awake: The Best Of Live? Really! Seriously!
Probush.com do a little better: their list is longer, and it's less organised, so you have to read all of it, and they really grab for that brass ring by calling for a boycott of the work of Viggo Mortensen. Oh shit: There goes New Line Cinema, Cause Stone Cold Probush Dot Com Said So.
Also, boycott Tom Morello?? Do these people not remember the crashing-and-burning of the alt.music boom in the late 1990's? Tom Morello was on, like, every fucking record! How the fuck are you going to boycott the missing link between Rage Against The Machine, Prodigy, Puff Daddy, Bone Thugz 'n' Harmony, Atari Teenage Riot, The Crystal Method, Henry Rollins, and - most crucially and - The Class Of 1999?? That's impossible!
Problem, basically, is that none of these people go far enough. Moby, Madonna and REM? Sure, fine, so to boycott all these artists and any use of their work would require you to scrupulously avoid a disgusting amount of fine media, and also The Bourne Supremacy. But what's needed is a grand overarching list of everyone who's spoken against the war or the President, and every piece of art - if you can call it that! - they've been associated with. And these brass-balls-having guardians of truth and justice and paranoid vitriolic raving insanity need to put their fucking money where their mouth is and avoid everything on the list.
And then those of us who are not crazy nutbars can go on enjoying whatever movies and music and artists we like. (In fact, we might do our best to adhere to artists on The List: after all, Carrot Top isn't on anyone's lists yet, and Britney won't be on it anytime soon - which I know will make a lot of you very happy indeed).
After all, as President Bush has noted, all who are not with him are against him.
(NOTE: This line was previously used by Lawrence Fishburne, who is on The List; and also by Jesus Christ, who advocated Loving Thine Enemy, so He's on The List; also, He was in the Bible, which had that whole swords-into-ploughshares thing, which is so anti-war, so it's totally on The List).
[1] If you can read that link, we here at Fightingtalk aren't doing our job very well. Even Livejournal manages to make PABAAH's list of undesirable source links: if you try to access www.pabaah.com from LJ, you get the following message:
Your[sic] coming from a site that we don't like. So why dont[sic] we send you back! [sic]
powered whit Protector System[sic] - perhaps they meant to say "Powered White Protector System", I don't fucking know.
Policing the parts of the Internet from which people can access your site has always seemed to me like one of the lamest, most insecure things you could ever do. But that's just me.
[2] You can't call for a boycott of the work of Lawrence Fishburne and simultaneously take design cues from his biggest movie. It doesn't work that way.
[3] We who aren't in the journalism business call this "the poor man's Nexus-Lexus".
There's this cat named Daryl Mason. He does not, it's fair to say, like Skinny Puppy much. In fact, he dislikes Skinny Puppy so much, does Daryl, that he has made it his mission to eradicate them from the airwaves. (Daryl's task is made all the more herculean by the fact that Messrs. Puppy aren't really played by real radio stations, per se, and as such their airwave prescence is limited to the insidiously untrackable breeding ground for militants, revolutionaries and stoners that is college radio. DAN-dun-duuhhhh).
Mason, however, isn't alone. Oh no. Mason, as his form letter (readable on most of the links above) would remind us, is part of a majority. He's the status quo, motherfucker. And he has the MANDATE (oh God, that felt good) of PABAAH[1]!
PABAAH - Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood, for those who find it hard to take that acronym seriously - is the harelipped, eleven-fingered baby of Jon Alvarez, who sounds to me like he's just jumped the border to take jobs off decent Americans like Colin Powell, but I'm not here to judge.
PABAAH, however, most definitely are! The folks at Sorry Everybody are branded "Sick, disgusting, dangerous, and irresponsible... traitors", whereas advocating public lynchings and photoshopping your mysogynist fantasies is a Good Idea. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
The problem with PABAAH - well, obviously, there are plenty of problems with PABAAH, such as they're crazy and they want to repeal the 22nd Amendment and they're totally crazy - but the main problem, as I can see it, with PABAAH, is that they're nowhere near complete in their list of dangerous counterculture insurgents whose work must be ignored at all costs.
(It's at this point in the writing of this article that I tried to become a member of PABAAH, so as to explore their fine gallery of hatred further, but they started sending me here wherever I clicked, so I don't know, they must be psychic or have magical computer-seeing powers or something).
Nowhere on PABAAH (before it branded me a liberal moron, that is) could I find a single reference, for instance, to Halo 2. Nor on Boycott Hollywood, of whose misguidedly amateurish [2] design I have fond memories as something of a proto-PABAAH. (And don't go telling me that Boycott Hollywood's function is to highlight artists whose public comments are at odds with the webmaster's opinions, because I'd be interested to see what movies have given Ben And Jerry's icecream above-title billing). Indeed, googling any and all right-wing boycott groups and crossreferencing them with references to Halo 2, you'll find nothing[3].
Which is simply ludicrous. After all, we're talking about - I'm quoting official Xbox sales personnel here - we're talking about "The Biggest Retail Release Ever" here. We're also talking about a game whose writer, Joe Staten, was quoted desribing his work as "a damning condemnation of the Bush administration". Staten later clarified that, actually, a "damning condemnation" was exactly what he wouldn't call his game; but that's exactly what these money-grubbing champagne Liberals would say, isn't it? Bungie? Bunjew, more like. (Just to be sure, Republican Radio put out Staten's response way under their original "damning condemnation" headline and story. It's good to see someone's remaining creative with their slander).
Boycott Hollywood list includes George Clooney ("Now THIS one is a heartbreaker - - he's just so darned cute, isn't he?"), but not David O. Russell, who directed Clooney in the incendiarily subversive Three Kings. Thanks to neglect on the part of Boycott Hollywood, David O'Russell is able to keep on spewing his virulent anti-American propaganda unchecked!!1!!! They also neglect to call for any sort of action against Ed Kowalcyk, who as we speak is making dozens of dollars with his new cd, Awake: The Best Of Live. Live. A band who once fearlessly sang something about "blood and oil on a bayonet" in a song called What Are We Fighting For?
SERIOUSLY, Boycott Hollywood! Your fellow grassroots-nutcases are calling for a boycott of The World's Most Hated Insidious LifeStyle Conglomerate, Starbuck's, because they play Sheryl Crow sometimes in their stores and Sheryl Crow said something sometime about not liking war, and you can't even connect a few fucking dots and not buy Awake: The Best Of Live? Really! Seriously!
Probush.com do a little better: their list is longer, and it's less organised, so you have to read all of it, and they really grab for that brass ring by calling for a boycott of the work of Viggo Mortensen. Oh shit: There goes New Line Cinema, Cause Stone Cold Probush Dot Com Said So.
Also, boycott Tom Morello?? Do these people not remember the crashing-and-burning of the alt.music boom in the late 1990's? Tom Morello was on, like, every fucking record! How the fuck are you going to boycott the missing link between Rage Against The Machine, Prodigy, Puff Daddy, Bone Thugz 'n' Harmony, Atari Teenage Riot, The Crystal Method, Henry Rollins, and - most crucially and - The Class Of 1999?? That's impossible!
Problem, basically, is that none of these people go far enough. Moby, Madonna and REM? Sure, fine, so to boycott all these artists and any use of their work would require you to scrupulously avoid a disgusting amount of fine media, and also The Bourne Supremacy. But what's needed is a grand overarching list of everyone who's spoken against the war or the President, and every piece of art - if you can call it that! - they've been associated with. And these brass-balls-having guardians of truth and justice and paranoid vitriolic raving insanity need to put their fucking money where their mouth is and avoid everything on the list.
And then those of us who are not crazy nutbars can go on enjoying whatever movies and music and artists we like. (In fact, we might do our best to adhere to artists on The List: after all, Carrot Top isn't on anyone's lists yet, and Britney won't be on it anytime soon - which I know will make a lot of you very happy indeed).
After all, as President Bush has noted, all who are not with him are against him.
(NOTE: This line was previously used by Lawrence Fishburne, who is on The List; and also by Jesus Christ, who advocated Loving Thine Enemy, so He's on The List; also, He was in the Bible, which had that whole swords-into-ploughshares thing, which is so anti-war, so it's totally on The List).
[1] If you can read that link, we here at Fightingtalk aren't doing our job very well. Even Livejournal manages to make PABAAH's list of undesirable source links: if you try to access www.pabaah.com from LJ, you get the following message:
Your[sic] coming from a site that we don't like. So why dont[sic] we send you back! [sic]
powered whit Protector System[sic] - perhaps they meant to say "Powered White Protector System", I don't fucking know.
Policing the parts of the Internet from which people can access your site has always seemed to me like one of the lamest, most insecure things you could ever do. But that's just me.
[2] You can't call for a boycott of the work of Lawrence Fishburne and simultaneously take design cues from his biggest movie. It doesn't work that way.
[3] We who aren't in the journalism business call this "the poor man's Nexus-Lexus".
