Ready to Receive
By Eastan McNeal on December 14, 2009 at 6:30 PM in Current Affairs
“.. It seems like we’re stepping on our dicks..”
If you want to blow up planes you should read the TSA airport security manual. If you lean politically left you should watch Fox News. If you are on the right go to the magazine rack and observe what, presumably liberal, young voters are skimming through. Learn your enemy. Open your mind. Either excuse is fine.
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Gentleman’s Quarterly used to be a dress fashion leader that urged men to get out of three-piece suits. But youth oriented mags and rags have to excite that market and kicking the crap out of the same power system that made their companies survive makes for great headlines. At first glance it seems that youth oriented publications are turning red and being read by millions of people who freely question authority without a thought given to the idea of questioning the writer or speaker suggesting the questioning. |
Have you become the person you were thinking about when the expression “don’t trust anyone over 30” sounded reasonable? Perhaps reading the self-loving intellectually agnostic bibles of the 21st century may help you decide the answer to that question. That is, if you are Ready to Receive.
Some of the loyal lemmings on the right may hope that the kids who scrape news from the bile-laden floors of these dead-end slop troughs don’t get out and vote in 2010 or 2012. They would also be satisfied if only educated voters, who can count backwards from one, motivate themselves to the polls.
They may ask: If left wing talking heads can get away with suggesting that people who watch Glen Beck become violent is it fair to suggest that the fire-breathing liberal writers are leading young idealists into Jihad camps in Pakistan? There have been discussions about a literary leadership crisis on the right and, the other day, we observed a developing identity crisis brewing on the left that has even penetrated the Rolling Stone readers’ circle. Let’s flip a few pages in a boys-to-men rag and see how their cumberbund is hanging today.
GQ Magazine. 2009 Men of the Year issue. Of course Leader was Will Smith?, or, you know, the short haired guy in the Whitehouse. To punctuate how serious this award is the magazine catalogues the article under “entertainment.” The best award was Icon. That title was given to Mr. Badass himself, Clint Eastwood. Before you continue you should consider that Morgan Freeman probably would not work with Eastwood if he thought he was a racist. But it is obvious that Clint is not smoking the same pony poop that many of his Hollywood cohorts carry in their Guccis.
On page 265 Eastwood explains that he does not much care for the far right or the far left. He says he won’t go on any news talk shows because, and this is the best line said in a minute,
“there’s so much transmission and very little reception.”
But the most daring lines come in the preceding paragraph on page 264.
GQ: Do you hope people will look at this movie (Invictus) and learn anything?
Eastwood: “.. It seems like we’re stepping on our dicks all the time. Jimmy Carter accusing people who disagree with the president of being a racist. The president sides with a black professor rather than the policeman.”
He goes on to explain that he thinks Carter has a plantation guilt thing going on:
“Carter is just kind of a senile old guy, I guess, and it’s something about being an old guilty southerner that makes you want to be perceived as doing penance for all the years you probably cast a lot of aspersions on black people when you were younger..”
That was the November issue. In the new December issue to hit the stands the editor of GQ – a guy who looks like an Obama speech writing kid, ready to fondle a standup poster – totally missed the best and controversial points of the Clint interview. He actually says this in his letter from the editor:
Perhaps you saw the episode of Glenn Beck in which he finally went fully insane… In our interview with Clint Eastwood, he rails against the cable networks and the nastiness of the moment. He wants a simpler time, too, but we believe that Clint himself may be the solution. Do you remember Dirty Harry? Do you remember those old movies?
We’ve asked Clint to do us a favor and go kick Glenn Beck’s ass.
Spreading it on, the editor added this about the original Bush:
Even the first President Bush has had enough of the nastiness and division. “I don’t like it,” he recently said, urging people to give President Obama some respect. (Zing!) “I think the cables have a lot to do with it. I’ll take you back to when I was president; we got tons of criticism, but it didn’t seem day in and day out quite as personal as some of these talk-show people. And it’s not just the right. There are plenty of people on the left.” Then he started calling MSNBC’s nightly anchors “a couple of sick puppies,” and our Brief Moment of National Unity ended before it began.
Brief Moment of National Unity? You, dear editor, are not promoting unity.
At best you are trying to keep your circulation up by promoting and inviting America’s youth into the Zombie Zone of cult and identity politics. You should want them to wake up before they go to the polls, as opposed to sleepwalking and voting in their dreams. You should RESPECT the power of the written words you publish and learn to receive as much as you transmit.
When I was a kid my mother was receptive to the idea of trying to understand me. She took an album, randomly, from my collection and two months later I found out that she played Pink Floyd’s Echos on her record player every day, because she thought it was beautiful music. She, in turn, loaned me her Jim Reeves Christmas album and I discovered an unforgettable voice. I am going to try regularly visiting the Bot Barristers. I doubt my experience will be as enjoyable as my mother’s and I doubt that I will soon see the loonies on the left nodding in agreement with people like Gretta Van Susteren.
But discovering and accepting the idea that one may have been wrong in the past is usually a good first step to future enlightenment, even if what is learned is still close to the original thought.
You may start transmitting and receiving now.
by Ronald Scott
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