Important!
The “Socialist bandwagon” letter shared below was published in the Sentinel Record Monday 3/11/2019, one of two on this day about the terrors of voodoo, boogedy boogedy, baaad socialism. It triggered my alliteration addiction, inspiring this response which was subsequently edited and re-submitted a day later, on Thursday, 3/14/2019:
Dear editor:
Alas, one of our very own village people is beset with a worrisome weasel affectation affliction. Maladies like his once festered only along the squishy backwater fringes where free-range bigots roamed, and where Bible-thumping grifters peddled get-rich schemes and fevered fantasies about the end of the world.
Most of the rest of us were routinely inoculated against the contagion of obsessive weasel affectation affliction (OWAA, pronounced oh-wah-ah). It only took a few quaint progressive notions to keep the disease quarantined — education, science, reason, and an odd little commandment to love thy neighbor like thyself. But it was all bitter medicine for bitter regressives with deranged visions of socialists dancing in their heads.
And then, a clarion call to arms. A black man moved into the White House, and the cancer of OWAA suddenly metastasized into a white-hot plague of spittle-flying fury and name-calling.
Remember John Birchers? Bob Dylan sang their virtues in “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Seems these same John Birchers believed Eisenhower was a commie. Some still do. Ironic, n’est pas? that their tangerine President is probably a Russian asset.
Trump has reptilian instincts for fomenting OWAA. He divides our American house against itself, breeding fear and loathing against fast-changing cultural landscapes. A divided house cannot stand, but it can sure as hell pay for that big, beautiful wall Mexico was supposed to pay for.
Where else, but behind such impossible walls, can crouching racists dream of a white-power America from sea to shining sea?
America is getting poorer. America is getting sicker. America is getting left behind. How’s that unregulated capitalism thing working out for most of you? Want to make America great again? Maybe it’s time to try some good old-fashioned democratic socialism after all.
— Jacques d’Nalgar, Le mercredi 13 mars 2019 de l’ère commune
It was published Monday, March 18 2019 under the title “A worrisome weasel.” My poet-friend Stephen Manning (who died recently) once reminded me that in Saul Alinsky’s now-classic “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals” his favorite was rule number five: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.” I had never heard of Saul Alinsky until someone called me a “martini-sipping liberal” (I’ll cop to that one!) and Alinsky devotee. This one’s for you, Stephen (the emphases in the ridiculous letter that follows are mine), may you rest in perpetual light…
Socialist bandwagon
Dear editor:
Where is that little Hollywood elitist weasel Sean Penn? A few years ago he was making news palling around with his communist buddies in Cuba and Venezuela and now that millions have fled and millions are starving where is the little socialist communist weasel along with some of his other Hollywood elitist America hating friends like Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte?
This is what these elitist socialist weasels do best — they promote their extreme liberal agendas and all they cause is poverty and misery everywhere they go because that’s what socialism does whether here or some other country. Then, after they get some attention and it goes south, as in the case of Venezuela, they crawl back into the rat hole they came out of. Some of them might not have run down to Venezuela, but they’ll jump on Bernie’s socialist bandwagon or their newest socialist hero with her Bad Deal, AOC and the Hollywood elitist will be pouring money into their campaigns to, what, make us Venezuela?
Speaking of that socialist weasel Bernie Sanders, he owns three homes. He just built a multimillion dollar lake home in Vermont, hopefully, for his retirement and, like all of them including the Hollywood elitists, they fly around in their private jets. Their carbon footprints are 50 times most of ours and they then tell us to drive a Prius while their schemes lead to welfare and poverty. Anyone with half a brain should tell that socialist weasel and his other Democrat socialist friends to go to Vermont and jump in Bernie’s socialist lake.
They bring up this socialist nonsense even though we should know by now it doesn’t work. Here, it leads to pockets of poverty, and there it leads to starvation. They do this because there is always another generation that has to be indoctrinated with the so-called benefits of socialism. Millennials beware; it’s capitalism that brings prosperity, just like what has happened since Trump was elected. More jobs than people to fill them leads to a shortage of workers which leads to higher pay and benefits. Then allow just enough immigration to help fill those shortages. Don’t be fooled by liberal nonsense!
Larry Bauer
Hot Springs Village
Photograph of Bob Dylan during rehearsals for the Ed Sullivan show on May 12, 1963 (CBS Photo Archive / Getty Images). http://time.com/3847730/bob-dylan-ed-sullivan-john-birch/
Important!
When Bob Dylan Took a Stand Against Censorship
By Jennifer Latson, May 12, 2015
Performing on The Ed Sullivan Show might have helped launch the careers of Elvis Presley and the Beatles, but Bob Dylan took a different approach to fame: courting celebrity by not performing.
Dylan was slated to appear on the massively popular variety show on this day, May 12, in 1963 — a year before the Beatles. At the time, he was little known by mainstream audiences, although TIME had referred to him a year earlier as “a promising young hobo.”
“He dresses in sheepskin and a black corduroy Huck Finn cap, which covers only a small part of his long, tumbling hair,” TIME’s 1962 story attests. “[H]e delivers his songs in a studied nasal that has just the right clothespin-on-the-nose honesty to appeal to those who most deeply care.”
On Ed Sullivan, Dylan planned to put a spin on his clothespin-on-the-nose honesty with “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” a satirical song written from the perspective of a John Birch Society member who is so terrified of communist infiltration that he looks for Reds everywhere, including in his chimney, toilet and glove box.
Sullivan himself apparently had no problem with the song when Dylan auditioned it, but a CBS executive who heard it during dress rehearsal found it too controversial. Dylan was told he’d have to sing a different song or change the lyrics, which included, “Now Eisenhower, he’s a Russian spy/ Lincoln, Jefferson, and that Roosevelt guy/ To my knowledge there’s just one man/ That’s really a true American: George Lincoln Rockwell.” (Rockwell was the founder of the American Nazi Party.)
Dylan refused to change the song or pick another, and walked out instead.