Monday, June 06, 2005

The Most Shocking Image of 2005

I was innocently watching the Discovery Channel over the weekend, one of my 4 or 5 favorite Basic Cable channels, not thinking that after about 5 minutes of viewing I was about to be shocked and appalled to the point of nearly losing continence. A commercial came on advertising a show they were putting on call The Greatest Americans - standard fare during Basic Cable sweeps month. Again, I'm not thinking about having a seizure in about 20 seconds. They're flashing pictures and the voice over is saying things like, "Who's inspired us, who's made discoveries,..." Picture of Walt Disney (T-minus 3 seconds to heart attack). Picture of Neil Arstrong (2 seconds and counting). Picture of George Washington (1 more to blast of). Picture of VILLAGE IDIOT PRESIDENT GEORGE W. FRIGGIN' BUSH!!!!! I have about .5 seconds of shock before I erupt during whcih time I witness Abe Lincoln's picture flash on the screen immediately after the esteemed Village Idiot. I go Ballistic. Jenn has the where-with-all (after an initial screech of her own) to jump on my lap and immediately try to calm me down. It took a minute before I was able to utter a sound that resembled a word and a good 5 minutes before those words could be strung together in a coherent sentence. That sentence:

WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!?!?!

My first thought was that I needed to write the Discovery Channel a protest letter. An exept I had in my head was going to go something like this: "Why not include the images of Al Capone, Edward McArthy and Richard Nixon? Individuals who are equally adept at ruling by fear, using fear to acheive and sustain ill-gotten political power and manipulating the office of the President into a guilt-free get-out-of-jail-free pass to push forward one's own personal and political intiatives at an incalcuable cost (respectively). Each of these individual's acheivements were no less great."

I was also going to demand that they owe an apology to the families of the 1,700+ dead servicemen that lost their lives in Iraq, the thousands more that have been wounded and perminantly disabled, the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed, wounded or homeless now, and the Florida voters who failed to have their votes counted in 2000.

This was stuff I was GOING to say. So I went to the web site to figure out where to send this rant. It so happened that there was a link the the show The Greatest Americans. And so I went there just to see what it was all about. They listed their "100 Greatest Americans" as well as the final cut to the "25 Greatest Americans". Welp, I looked at the list of 100 and I instantly realized that sending a letter to these people was useless and the country is SO ignorant that the battle is not worth fighting when the opponent is the Discovery Channel (whose motto is Entertain your Brain but hence forth will be Entertain the Mindless Masses). Not only was George Bush, Village Idiot on the list of 100, but BOTH his mom AND dad were. Not only was George Bush, Village Idiot on the elite list of 25. But RICHARD "I AM NOT A CROOK" NIXON WAS ON THE LIST OF 100!!!! He shouldn't be on a list of the Greatest 10,000 Americans. Hell, if I could list 1,000,000 Americans, just random folks I know on top of the famous ones that other people may have heard of, he'd not be on the list either. And if I included Fictional Characters on the list, and made it the list of 10,000,000 Americans, I'd verture to say he'd fall somewhere between Marmaduke and John Holmes.

Maybe the e-mail would ahve been worth while if Blair were around and we could have come up with a list of 100 famous Americans that more than 10% of the population would have heard of that were truly greater than the Bush clan. Coming up with the list against Nixon I could do in an instant. Woodward, Robert Redford, Berstein, Dustin Hoffman, Deep Throat and Hal Holbrook. There's 6 that weren't on Discovery Channel's list right off the top of my head without even trying. Obviously, they'd be on the Bush Clan list, too, but I'd want that list to be really impressive.

Oh God, Condaleeza Rice is on the 100 list, too.

Anyway, you can see, the list is far too ridiculous to even argue against with a simple diatribe. I'd need my own list. And that's a slightly more daunting task to take on alone without the help of a history guy like Blair. I can think up Louis Arstrong, Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale,

Jesus Christ! RUSH FUCKING LIMBAUGH IS ON THE LIST!!!

I'm getting more and more pissed off as I try to write a rationale blog about this. Why do I bother?!?! If Rush Limbaugh is on the list and Howard Stern is not, then we are lost as a country. It's sad to say but I really have lost a little hope for our future today. Because THIS is the list that We, The People, are presented with. And most of the Peolpe aren't going to realize that Limbaugh and Dr. Phil (I shit you not) being on the list and Edward R. Murrow not is a crime and a rotting of our freedom to think and our free press.

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