Kerry's Ilk Threw Eggs,Tomatoes at Wounded Vets - Wo'C Exclusive!Let me now turn the monitor over to the esteemed Glenstonecottage, who has consented to share with us a true-life story about his recent dealings with a cousin who sounds kind of like the guy who called Rush Limbaugh for advice on how to deal with his wacky liberal relatives. I think you will be edified by it. And a little troubled. And greatly amused. ******* Cousin Mary's Houston Airport Story Mary L------- is my second cousin, a lawyer in her 50's who lives in a major city in Texas and works for the DA's office there. I don't remember that I've ever met Mary, but if I did, it was back in the fifties when my family lived in Texas. My dad, who has just turned eighty, enjoys keeping in touch with a large network of family and friends via e-mail, regularly passing along jokes and voicing liberal political opinions. From my dad's mailouts, Cousin Mary has learned that that my dad, and indeed our whole family, are the kind of earnest liberals with weird, mockable left-wing opinions on issues such as the death penalty, homosexuality, the Iraq war, etc. and that we can usually be suckered into endless, pointless arguments about these issues. So Mary occasionally enjoys e-mailing us to stir the pot a bit and start an argument. The latest exchange occured when Mary sent an e-mail to my dad a few days after Nov. 2, gloating about the election results. Now, my dad wasn't in the best of moods last month, due to a combination of Bush-induced depression, turning eighty, and some painful bouts of sciatica. And so, physically unable to spend much time in a sitting position in front of his computer, he forwarded Mary's message along to his four children and invited us to respond to her. The basic theme of Cousin Mary's epistle could be summarized as: "John Kerry: America's number one traitor"... Mary simply had to vote against a man of Kerry's despicable character, yadda yadda, despite the fact that Mary is NOT a Republican, but prides herself on being a "GDI" ("god damned independent") Personally, I thought Mary probably was a Republican, at least her message was full of crapola about Kerry of the type spread about by the Shitboat Veterans, Freepers, etc. Anyway, one detail of Mary's message that quickly caught my attention was her claim that John Kerry reminded her of a shocking incident which she had personally witnessed at the Houston airport during the Vietnam era:
I knew I wasn't going to win an argument on any of Mary's other idiotic ideas, such as her insistence that John Kerry's war wounds were bogus. So I decided to press her a bit more on her airport story. It struck me as patently false for so many reasons. First of all, to my knowledge the Houston area was never exactly a hotbed of anti-Vietnam activism. And any protesters down there who'd actually dared to pelt a planeful of returning Vietnam veterans with raw eggs and tomatoes would have survived roughly two and a half seconds. Then there was the fact that I'd never heard of harassing servicemen upon the completion of their tour of duty- what would even be the point of that? I do remember news reports of demonstrators attempting to prevent recruits from boarding the bus to basic training camp, but that was a totally different thing. And one thing you'd know about 1960's peace demonstrations in the US, if you had attended a few, was that there were usually plenty of angry servicemen hanging around them trying to start a fight. And we few lonely peace demonstrators were more interested in trying to avoid these fights than seeking them out! So I asked Mary to please provide more information about her airport story, like what was the month and year that it happened? How many demonstrators took part? etc. She responded as follows. (BTW, all the messages that follow were cc'd amongst family members.)
Mary's story still smelled pretty bogus. I was determined to get to the bottom of it, so I tried to e-mail Molly Ivins, one of my favorite columnists and a long-time Texan... but unfortunately, the Creator's Syndicate website said they couldn't contact Molly Ivins. Then I got the brainstorm of e-mailing one of my favourite bloggers, David Neiwert, whose weblog Orcinus is a sort of national right-wing watch. David turned out to be a motherlode of information. He alerted me to the fact that Cousin Mary's airport story was actually a variation of an urban legend which had been sweeping the US for years. Better still, he put me on to a Holy Cross sociologist and Vietnam veteran named Dr. Jerry Lembcke, whose 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam described Lembcke's long but fruitless attempts to find a factual basis for this urban legend airport story, popularized in the 1980's Sylvester Stallone movie Rambo, which I had never seen. Armed with this delightful information, I decided to do some "torquing" of my wingnut cousin. My first e-mail was cc'd to Mary, but addressed to Dr. Lembcke:
I waited a few days. No response from Mary. I began to worry that perhaps I'd teased Cousin Mary beyond the bounds of family propriety. I phoned my dad at his Ohio home to find out if he was upset by my latest broadside. My dad can be a bit testy at times, so I was relieved to hear him boom over the phone, "Hell, no! Don't stop! You're doing a great job!" This inspired me to further flights of fancy, so I waited a few more days and wrote to Mary and Dr. Lembcke again:
Soon after this, I considered writing a whole bogus Houston airport screenplay to send to Mary, but since I am a teacher and report cards were beckoning at that point, I had to give that idea up. But an even better idea intervened in the form of a second second cousin in Texas, Denise G, whom I'd been cc'ing my Cousin Mary stories just for a laugh. Denise has never met Mary, although previously unbeknownst to either of them, they live in the same city. Denise was not thrilled when I enlightened her to the fact that my second cousin Mary was also hersecond cousin Mary. Denise in turn enlightened me of the fact that stories like this one are common as dirt down in Texas! Denise is a real computer nerd and it took her only a little bit of Googling to find out the real truth about Cousin Mary's airport story. Namely, that it was a thinly plagiarized version of a September 1, 2004 GOP-USA column entitled "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold" by a writer named Barbara Stock BTW, the strong of stomach can read Stock's "Revenge" article for themselves here. Naturally, I had to e-mail a copy of the Barbara Stock column to Cousin Mary for her comments. But surprisingly, Mary had no comments. At some point in my correspondence with cousin Mary, I had started cc'ing blogger "s.z." whose humorous weblog, "World O'Crap" is devoted to lampooning the lunacies and lies of rightwing columnists. Since Barbara Stock had long been one of s.z.'s favorite wingnuts, she was delighted to learn of the Stock-Cousin Mary connection, and suggested that I share the entire story with her thousands of worldwide "World O'Crap" fans. [Ed. note: I did not pay Mr. Cottage for his testimonial.] Now, s.z., I know this story is a bit long, though I've done my best to compress it. But I hope you will allow me the luxury of finishing with a quote from one of my heroes, progressive economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote back in the 1930's about "the Power of Ideas":
Unfortunately, it seems that things in the USA have degenerated to the point where the "voices in the air" echoed by many of our countrymen--- people like Cousin Mary, a lawyer, university graduate and presumably an intelligent person--- originated not with arcane rightwing academics, but with out and out liars who are paid to whip up the rubes with "boogeyman" stories...("Bill Clinton is a cocaine dealer and murderer! Hillary Clinton is a lesbian! Liberals are all traitors!") From my reading of history, similar hysterical delusions swept over Germany in the twenties and thirties, with results which didn't take long to become terrible. So, family etiquette notwithstanding, I think it's incumbent upon everyone who has a Cousin Mary in their family--- and alas, most Americans nowadays probably do-- to gently shine the light of reality on some of their increasingly bizarro "boogeyman" hallucinations. I'm sure that one day when they wake up, they will thank us... right, Cousin Mary? 4:10:13 AM  |
Who Said It?(Dr. Mike Adams Scandal Edition)As Chris V. stated, our first Mystery Guest from yesterday was Midge Decter's son, John Podhoretz. We want to thank Clif for reminding us that the righteous Podhoretz said he didn't need any lessons from crack addict Aaron Sorkin -- you know, until Pod got that job at "The West Wing." I don't know if he's still advising the show this year (I don't watch "The West Wing" because, frankly, I have enough problems running the country via this blog and can't carry the TV version too), but if he is, then I think he should suggest a story line that involves President Sheen announcing that he's no longer the President of the people who didn't vote for him, and so he will totally ignore them and try not to do anything to benefit them as long as he's in power. And as D. Sidhe indicated, our second Mystery Guest was Ditto Head Jerry Falwell. We have to thank Media Matters for the quote, because we also don't watch Jerry's televised sermons. Chris V. also correctly identified our third Mystery Guest, the prolific Mike Adams, who, as you will recall, wrote that lovely column in which he said that Senator Julia Boseman and her lesbian partner were raising a child sired by her brother (and implied that some sort of hillbilly incest was involved). Mike, as you also may recall, came to public attention after a student threatened to sue him for libel for using the university's computer system to send her an abusive email after she sent him one claiming that US actions played a part in causing 9/11. She also claimed that he forwarded her email to some students, two of whom then sent her threatening emails. She reported the students (but not Mike) to the university police, who didn't deem the emails to be threats. Mike, who was worried about being sued, whined to the "Foundation for Individual Rights in Education," which told the Moonie Times how the liberal university P.C. forces were repressing him ("Help! Help! I'm being repressed!") for making a student feel "uncomfortable" -- and Mike became a conservative martyr to the issue of free speech, and got a Townhall gig out of it. In the spirit of free speech, let's revisit some of that story. Here's part of the student, Rosa Fuller's, complaint:
Here's more, from Rosa's father :
Should professors be allowed to call students names, and disparage them to other students? Well, while it's probably not illegal, it sure doesn't sound like the kind of behavior universities should be encouraging. But here, let's read Mike's Townhall bio:
"Wife Krysten." Hmm. But maybe she's not the former Krysten Scott. Surely all those emails that Professor Mike sent to this young, female student (and the Secretary of the campus branch of the College Republicans) were purely professional (in that they were about disparaging Rosa Fuller). Right? From the Wilmington Star -- 01/19/03
So, less than 18 months after Krysten sent Rosa an email telling her that she deserved to be dragged through the street by her hair for not keeping her liberal mouth shut, Krysten and Dr. Mike were engaged. What a touching story. If I were like Mike, I would imply that all kinds of nasty and inappropriate things were going on between Dr. Mike, an Associate Professor, and Krysten an impressionable student under his guidance (and a College Republican, a member of a group for which he is the faculty advisor). But I will just stick with the facts. But on to other things. Who said this?
1:19:11 AM |
No comments:
Post a Comment