There are many things that do not subscribe to common sense in the Phil
Robertson storm raging across the internet. The first that comes to
mind is why A&E, a cable channel that's quickly acquiring a
reputation for putting out some of the best shows on television, would
want to shovel boatloads of money at the boots of a man who'd already
made millions with his patented kazoo, a man who makes Jed Clampett look
like Cary Grant by conspicuous relief. Another is what A&E's
executives were thinking in putting a bunch of hillbillies on their
network when it was obvious that they'd eventually say something stupid
and embarrass the network. The only wonder is that it took four years
for this to happen.
Another question is why ignorant right wingers and fellow hillbillies
like Sarah Palin are screaming about the First Amendment as if that's
some guarantee of getting a reality show and how a Constitutional
amendment somehow applies to a network (i.e. part of the Free Market)
when all it does is safeguard individual rights from the overreach of
government.
Another is
why freedom of speech is so important in Phil Robertson's case and not
Phil Donahue's or Dan Rather's or the Dixie Chicks or Linda Ronstadt or
Martin Bashir or... Well, you get the idea.
Linda Ronstadt's career took a nosedive when she inveighed against
Bush during a show in Las Vegas when she lauded Michael Moore's new
movie
Fahrenheit 911, a movie that had set box office records for its genre. She was not only booed off the stage, she was
booted from the casino.
Ronstadt's only mistake was in overestimating the liberal sensibilities
of your typical nightclub audience, an entertainment demographic that's
notoriously conservative and completely out-of-touch. In fact, news
reports at the time said,
Ronstadt's comments drew loud boos and some of the
4,500 people in attendance stormed out of the theater. People also tore
down concert posters and tossed cocktails into the air.
Timmins, who is British and was watching the show, decided Ronstadt, who
was booked to play only one show at the venue, had to go -- for good.
Timmins said he didn't allow Ronstadt back in her luxury suite and she
was escorted off the property.
All for telling people to go see a movie.
The Dixie Chicks
can tell you all about the right wing's sanctity of free speech. Nearly
11 years ago, Natalie Maines also took a moment from their set list in
London, England to say, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with
y’all. We do not want
this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the
United States is from Texas.” Does that not qualify as an opinion as
much as Phil Robertson's ignorant dismissal of gayness and likening it
to bestiality?
The Dixie Chicks had to wait a decade for
their careers to recover and all over criticizing a war and a
"president" that hardly anyone who doesn't paint murals with their feces
still defends. CD's were burned and there many war-crazed Americans who
would've loved to have burned the women who made them and not in
effigy.
To cite a more recent example, there was the coerced "resignation" of
Martin Bashir,
who suggested someone should shit in Sarah Palin's mouth on account of
the woman's obvious idiocy. As with Phil Donahue a decade ago, the
"liberal" MSNBC flew into a corporate rage over his comments and, after a
meeting with the same Phil Griffin who'd
suspended Keith Olbermann three years ago for making two minor contributions to Democratic campaigns without disclosure, Bashir effectively "resigned."
Those Who Wear Camou Suits and Have Camou Wallpaper Should Stay Hidden
It goes without saying that Bashir, the Dixie Chicks, Dan Rather and
Phil Donahue have already been vindicated by history and posterity.
Sarah Palin is indisputably an idiot and a failure in every professional
aspect. The war in Iraq was unjust and we'd spent or will spend nearly
$4 trillion on a war that bought us nearly 4500 coffins and the
execution of a single tin pot dictator. George Bush did go AWOL from his
Texas Air National Guard champagne flight and wound up, for reasons
that haven't been fully explained to us, in Alabama, of all places. Phil
Donahue was also justly critical of the war in Iraq. These people told
the truth or expressed opinions that are no less valid, to say the very
least, than those made by an ignorant redneck likening homosexuality to
bestiality.
Now let's look beyond the irony of a hillbilly
like Phil Robertson appearing in a magazine named Gentleman's Quarterly
or of him inveighing against gay sex after making a fortune inventing
and patenting something for other men to put in their mouths and look to
the larger issue, one that's even larger than the rabid right wing's
breathtaking hypocrisy in apportioning First Amendment rights only for
those who echo their ignorant prejudices and biases.
It
wasn't too long ago that Lara Logan flushed down the toilet whatever
credibility she may've built up over the last decade as a war
correspondent by taking part in what cannot even be called bad reporting
but
an outright hoax in
60 Minutes'
take on the Benghazi attack. Essentially, Logan and the show's
producers had willingly Curveballed themselves out of relevance and
respectability by taking the word of a con artist who claimed to be
there at the Benghazi embassy and even conned his way into a book deal
that was later rescinded when the guy's story fell apart. Yet,
60 Minutes
is still on the air, Lara Logan still has her job and the Benghazi hoax
has been virtually forgotten despite it being one of the most
shamelessly incompetent pieces of journalism in the world this year.
Time after time, we liberals are comforted by one survey and poll after
another telling us that America is leaning more and more from the right
wing regressive side of the political spectrum and to the progressive
side. Yet our standards and tolerance for outright bullshit tells a
different tale as right wing talking points and outright fabrications
are troweled out on a daily basis virtually unchallenged (such as
ObamaCare's failure when it still hasn't been officially implemented and
Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi).
Those of us in the know knew
way back when when the purges began 10 or 11 years ago that Rather,
Donahue, the Dixie Chicks and Ronstadt were right. But the rest of us
were whipped into a pro-war hysteria that simply wouldn't tolerate a
dissenting opinion that's guaranteed to us in the same First Amendment
that's now being touted as an example of why we ought to allow Robertson
to spew what are obviously falsehoods. Again, A&E shouldn't be
shocked about Robertson's pronouncements. After all, he's the patriarch
of a family that looks like an inbred Appalachian cult and his
Bible-banging pretensions are pretty typical for the Bible Belt.
So we've become a nation where gun nuts congregate at Starbuck's with
our AR15's strapped to our backs, choke down Chik-Fil-A sandwiches and
Freedom Fries, do our Christmas shopping at Hobby Lobby and cook Barilla
pasta because the people who own and run these corporations echoed our
pet prejudices and artificially gave us consensus. It doesn't matter to
them that yesterday
Utah got same sex marriage and the day before
New Mexico
did, making 18 states with marriage equality. It doesn't matter to
these people that others who inveigh against the LGBT community aren't
merely un-PC but hateful and prejudiced. It doesn't matter to them that
just because Phil Robertson didn't see examples of racial prejudice in
the 60's that it didn't exist. And it doesn't matter to these
mouth-foamers that it's not free speech that's un-PC and no longer
tolerated but outright lies and bigotry.
Again, if Martin Bashir or
David Letterman
say something critical about one neolithically stupid woman, it's off
with their heads. But if Rush Limbaugh consistently makes
misogynistic and demeaning comments about all women, calling one "a slut", that's his right as a Republican white male.
As long as our worst fears and bigotries are amplified in an echo
chamber, there will always be a large segment of us who will insist on
freedom of speech while screaming their fool heads off to figuratively
or literally axe those who challenge those prejudices or speak
inconvenient truths. We need to be lied to because the reality of our
nation, that many of us still hate African Americans and gay people and
that the pre-Civil Rights America wasn't just hunky dory, is still too
horrible to confront.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I know it all seems so obvious, but I can't escape the nigh constant fantasy of tying a Sarah Palin fan to a chair and making them hear that post over and over and over.