Saturday, October 23, 2021

Truth Is An Absolute Defense

The wind-up.

The pitch:
And the hits just keep on coming: The end is always near. And it’s not just right-wing cranks and TeeVee preachers making that pitch. It’s not only as American as apple pie, it’s as ubiquitously employed. Ah, dem was de days!

3 comments:

  1. It reminds me of the scene in the Clifford Simak novel All Flesh is Grass when the narrator goes to another planet by mistake and finds a group of friendly alien terror tourists who go to different places in the universe to experience past catastrophes and horrors. Never been big on horror, myself. Who needs it when reality has enough of that?

    The left does the same thing only not as well funded and not always as dangerously loony.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I remember the fear of cults, satanic worship, and child care. Easily as absurd as cellars under pizza parlors or anything Q-Anon came up with. The difference is people actually went to jail for using child care to cover up satanic rituals that never happened.

      I can't really match that up to anything anyone has done in the name of Q-Anon. The capitol riot was a criminal act (a bunch of them), but it didn't result in prosecutions based on equally loony conspiracy theories.

      We've been here before (and many times since Salem. People forget Miller wrote "The Crucible," which revived interest in the witch trials, as a commentary of McCarthyism, another serious abuse of government, not private, power). We just wake up in a brand new world every ten years or so, and reset the outrage machine as if the past were an unbroken glory and the present is beset by monsters who are always...not us!

      It's tiresome.

      Delete
    2. I got some pretty angry denunciation when I pointed out Miller had to invent his hero having an affair with a 9 or 10 year old girl to come up with the plot to that play. College-credentialed PhDs were enraged when I told them that the play wasn't real history. I can credit going online and interacting with more of my fellow credentialed with opening my eyes to the danger of using real characters in show-biz because even those would-be sophisticates are no more likely to separate that from reality than the dolts who believed Trump was the savvy all powerful wiseguy he played on The Apprentice. Show biz is the most inefficient educational medium there is if you want to use one story to tell a far different story. Jesus was a lot better at doing that but he used parables instead of Broadway plays and movies and he knew how to do it, though some of it taken out of the milieu of those he told them to requires some work now.

      Delete