Riffing on Rush
Here's my solicited take on Rush Limbaugh as published in the Sunday Los Angeles Times. The Times screwed up the URL si I had to use Google cache and therefore please excuse the color-strewn highlighting.
Yes, I listen to Rush -- the same way an alocholic drinks. Sometimes you need to stare eye to eye with the green-eyed gargoyle at the foot of your bed.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Marc: I don’t find Limbaugh even remotely entertaining.
Evidence that liberals lack a sense of humor…. It’s one big parody of liberal craziness.
But, you’re not part of Limbaugh’s target audience. You wouldn’t get any more out of his show than attending a religious revival.
How is Rush different than John Stewart? They’re both entertainers with political slants. You’re taking him too seriously, and assume that conservatives do, too.
- – -
Marc: He’s a completely reliable inspiration and reinforcement for those who are embittered…
Obama: …they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion….
It’s bad enough for a journalist not to understand middle America, but he’s taking his talking points from a President who doesn’t.
- – -
Marc: For Limbaugh’s audience is not a happy lot.
You don’t get it, Marc. We’re laughing at liberals…those who take politics so seriously as to dwell on it constantly and have miserable lives in the muck blaming others for their plight. We’re happy with freedom and respect for the individual rather than worrying about how we can grow government to take money from others to make up for pathetic existences.
- – -
Sorry, Marc. Some good points, but I have have to give you a C-. Take it home, work on it, add a couple of pictures, and I might raise it to a B.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:17 am
BTW, I know it’s not as important as Rush Limbaugh, but did anyone notice that North Korea launched its ICBM? More warnings from the U.N. and Obama will scare Kim Jong-il as much as they did Saddam Hussein. But, let’s divert attention from that and onto Rush Limbaugh, since he represents a greater threat to the security of socialist America.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Another perspective….
Hate Speech Resides on the Left
by Brian Jennings
Really, Marc and others, the vitriol from the left is no where matched by the ridicule of you from the right. Of course, you can refute that in your style by calling me names and cursing me.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Woody
I have never called u a name and never will. I will use a descriptor however. It is ASININE for either liberals or conservatives to assert that one side or the other has any monopoly on dishonesty and vitriol. Absolutely ridiculous. There are a lot of a-holes who are liberals. And a lot of conservatives too. Rush happens to be a Big One.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:16 am
Marc, I should have been more specific on the name calling, as you aren’t one. Certainly, however, you recognize that many of your commenters do that. We know those whom I meant.
It does seem apparent to me and other reasonable people, though, that the viciousness from the left is much greater than that from the right, as the left is typically like spoiled kids who scream until they get their ways, while the conservatives shrug and go on with life.
I feel comfortable, however, in saying that you overrate Limbaugh on hate and underrate him as an entertainer and humorist.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Off topic, but I wonder how Obama would react if this was GM rather than the NYT.
“The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut the Boston Globe unless the newspaper’s unions swiftly agree to $20 million in concessions, union leaders said.”
We may have to wait until Monday to see what Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Boortz, and other objective commentators have to say on this.
Meanwhile, Leftwing Bloggers (and other nuts) Blame Glenn Beck for Pittsburgh Cop Killings
April 5th, 2009 at 11:29 am
(Isn’t Bush really to blame – still?)
April 5th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Pittsburgh_shooter_was_fan_of_rightwing_0405.html
Link to Fox News pushing some of this typical deranged toxic crap, much of which is also a staple of our very own racist troll:
http://tinyurl.com/c8mlqo
(I know this response is a thread killer, but it looks like its already been steered into the gutter by the usual suspect.)
Also, Brian Jennings quoted above appears to be one of the stupidest men alive. A bigger idiot than even Oxycontin Rush or Klever Klavan with his lips pressed against that obese butt.
April 5th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Wow, Woody, you make it sound like conservatives live in such a happy sun-shiny world — full of hate and disdain for humanity.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I enjoy reading Marc Cooper, but the resident stalkers on the comments side are getting really dull. For somebody who claims to be a happy conservative who lives life freely, Woody is incredibly quick to comment on every thread, as if he structures his life around reading Marc Cooper. The subject of the article is liberals responding to Rush Limbaugh. I’m perfectly aware that Limbaugh says outrageous things and used to say funny things; I don’t know if he still says funny things, but I know that he wields a great deal of political power and should be treated as a politician by the press. Instead, the mainstream press either ignores him or leaves him alone.
I can remember telling two successive editors of the Los Angeles Times that they should cover Limbaugh as an important ongoing story (Zocalo has had lots of them as guests). Each gave me a silly excuse for an answer. In retrospect, I suspect that even the lordly (well, at that time) Los Angeles Times was afraid to take on Rush, and if it wasn’t fear then it was a policy coming from the ownership.
The guy is a politician with the ability to force Republican heretics to kowtow before him, and the newspapers, television, and radio networks avoid this topic. In this sense, the internet blogs are a lot better sources than the holy mainstream media.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Sorry, Bob G.. Please feel free to skip my comments and move on to the interesting ones of the left. I simply try to provide a balance as only one of three conservatives who regularly comment here against a couple dozen of you guys. But, why learn if you already know everything?
You guys just can’t understand conservatives, because you don’t realize that we think as individuals rather than copy your herd mentality. You try to apply your mindset to our actions, and you only come out being wrong and confused.
Calling Rush “a politician” only shows your herd mentality, by following the White House ridiculous and coordinated attempts to have him labeled as the voice of the Republican Party.
Why can’t you guys think for yourselves rather than check in on what lefty leadership says before you turn on your mouths and keyboards?
You guys are so miserable.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Hey, reg, as a concerned friend, have you been checked for tonsil cancer? LINK
April 5th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Oh, yeah, reg, do you think that this cop killer and his supporters were Glen Beck listeners?
Were you marching with them? Did you hear Rush Limbaugh encouraging this cop killer, who did one better than the nut in Pittsburgh? At least conservatives didn’t support him, but liberals marched against the police in Oakland and other liberals, like you, were silent if not encouraging.
“Law and order” is just another racist term in your book.
Okay, I’ll give it a rest.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
You’re a sick little man…and dumb as they come.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Incidentally, moron, the group that marched in Oakland hates liberals as much as you do…and is just as crazy.
You’re an idiot.
April 5th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Woody,
It’s not that people here call you names because the content of your ideas are weak, but because you never advance ideas, and don’t honestly try to engage in any kind of serious debate.
When you’re not just outright trying to bait people here, you’re calling a trimple amputee names, making wild sweeping generalizations, like, “we think as individuals rather than copy your herd mentality,” and conflating the moronic antics of a few dozen people in Oakland with all of liberalism.
I can’t recall any time that you’ve been critical of anything a conservative has done, except in the most pro forma cursory sort of way, so you can claim that you “think as individuals,” while you happily parrot the “teleprompter” blatherings right out of the right-winger’s play book.
Not only are you never critical of any conservative, but you twist yourself up into all sorts of contortions to defend, for example, torture with fantasies of ticking time bombs and other contrivances that show a complete lack of principle and loyalty only to party.
You are, without exception, the most hypocritical commmentator around here. At least Roper had the evenhandedness to engage and advance ideas part of the time.
My consolation in actually reading your comments is knowing that you are to be taken no more seriously than Rush, that you are unintentionally ironic all the time, and that you could beat a parrot in a predictability contest, which is a form of amusement I suppose.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Hmmm. Anyone want to rethink my more perspicuous and succinct description of Woody as a prick mouthed cracker?
April 5th, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Your take on Limbaugh, Marc, hit the mark AND was entertaining.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Anna,
No, because I don’t want to bring the discourse down to his level.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Curious how the resident troll (who seems to spend most of his waking hours reading this board) managed to look into my eyes via the internet and find the content of my soul. What’s so ironic in a trivial sort of way is that this thread is supposed to be about liberals and conservatives listening to each other, or at the least listening to each others’ propaganda. Perhaps if Woody had read my couple of hundred columns on various internet sites, he would understand that my politics doesn’t fit so easily into his little pigeon holes.
One of those pigeon holes is to misinterpret my comment that Rush Limbaugh is a politician and has a lot of influence. I have been pointing this out since the early 1990s and tried to convince the California Democratic Party of this fact as early as 1992. Many of us attribute at least some of the Republican gains of 1994 to Rush and his following; at the very least, the consolidation of the Republican Party under the Gingrich style of behavior (attack, never surrender, never apologize, and never ever give your opponents a complement) owes a strong debt to Limbaugh.
I was simply giving him credit for his accomplishments back then and over the intervening years, even as I loath his positions, views, use of racial baiting, and penchant for siccing his listeners on any politician who dares to question his positions.
I think our troll is being entirely disingenuous when he claims that conservatives don’t take Rush seriously. It is clear that he has a following who treat his words as nearly sacred, and take action, some of it quite nasty, when he puts them up to it. The southern California version of the aroused listener prodders are John and Ken on KFI. They broadcast the telephone numbers of elected officials over the air and later brag about how the numbers had to be disconnected.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Randy, every time you guys respond to him you are bringing the discourse down to his level. I just respond to him for what he is: a vicious pathological heap of shit. What you do not take seriously is how he will not engage and keeps pathologically repeating the same things over and over. And posting ( I have only ever looked ONCE because that was enough) the most adolescent racist tat. He is, at least in his 60′s. What kind of man posts that kind garbage–in between well articulated, tho stupid–right wing fundamentalist rants?
You guys fail to think of him as anything more than a one dimensional cartoon. You forget he has a life away from this blog and you need to imagine what else he is doing and has done that further expresses his ideological quirks.
Somehow, you all think this blog is his little steam valve and that he is harmless.
He is not harmless.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
You forget he has a life away from this blog and you need to imagine what else he is doing and has done that further expresses his ideological quirks.
Somehow, you all think this blog is his little steam valve and that he is harmless.
He is not harmless.
Anna, sometimes a troll is just a troll. Obviously you give Woody a lot of thought. I don’t. I urge you to consider doing the same.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Anna, I’m not in the habit of quoting scripture, but here’s a proverb worth considering:
Your calling Woody names is one of his goals. You’re playing right into his hands.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Randy, you are playing at being a very naive liberal. I am not the one who satisfies his unquenchable thirsts. Its all of your taking him seriously enough to “rationally’ try to pick apart his “reasoning”.
He loves the attention. I piss him off. He snarls like a trapped animal.
He actually responds to what I say because I catch him out. Telling me that I wish I were white! C’mon, Randy. This is a guy who posts racist tat and then out of the other corner of his twisted mouth–straight faced in ONLY the way a complete sociopath can do–brags about having befriended the father of one of the Birmingham bombing victims.
He is a monster.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Randy, you are playing at being a very naive liberal.
Don’t patronize me. Also, don’t flatter yourself; i hardly enhances your credibility.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Randy, I am not the one who consistently writes long windy rejoinders to Woody. I don’t need to give him a lot of thought because I know intuitively, instinctively–and based on the empirical evidence provided by his posts–exactly who and what he is.
It is YOU who needs to give him and your perspective about him–and others like him– some conscious thought.
April 5th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
I am not patronizing you, Randy. Just trying to wake you up.
April 5th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Sometimes it is OK (ie: useful, worthwhile, illuminating) to respond to a troll post, but usually for some reason other than to confront the troll. Sometimes the topic is of interest, and others have joined the discussion. Sometimes, I suspect, it is useful for one or more of us to write a reasoned response to the troll post because we may, in so doing, provide other decent people with an argument for when their neighbors and colleagues at work and fellow church goers pull out the same line.
One example: The right wing got terribly obsessed with Obama’s use of a teleprompter recently; I think it may be useful simply to point out the racist assumptions underlying the snark, and thereby to invite people to consider how they are presenting themselves in making such arguments. Obviously we won’t be converting people by the millions to the beauties of liberalism by doing so, but I feel that it is better to confront racism directly than to ignore it in the social setting. The bad guys get away with radiating their ugly attitudes in public when the rest of us avoid confrontation.
April 6th, 2009 at 4:49 am
I am not patronizing you, Randy. Just trying to wake you up.
I certainly don’t need your advice. I grew up surrounded by people like Woody. Again, don’t flatter yourself.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:39 am
You guys are nuts.
My first comment was directely on topic and the next two were related to the post, yet you chose to overlook those rather than appreciate and discuss a perspective opposite of yours by someone in the very group that you thought you could analyze.
You assume that a conservative doesn’t know his own beliefs and motivations and can’t communicate them correctly if they go in the face of your biases. How stupid and arrogant can you get?
Maybe you need to get out of your liberal enclaves sometimes and see the rest of our country and show more understanding about what the other half of our population thinks. Or, is it easier for you to attack me rather than consider my thoughts, which are not unreasonable?
If there are trolls, it’s many of you guys who respond with attacks rather than reasonable discussion.
It’s just so much nicer for you if you can sit around smoking on your pipes in your “intellectual” groups looking pensively at the ceiling while spouting only those things for which everyone else in your group will nod approvingly in agreement and reaffirm your own self-bloated images of yourselves.
When you can’t debate, which you can’t, you personally attack and drive people with other views to leave.
Have fun in your make-believe world.
April 6th, 2009 at 5:52 am
From the sidelines, Anna, what Randy said. I experience your comments as its own form of trollish behavior. If you would consider the observations of an outsider as having legitimacy, Woody “plays” you nicely. There is an old aphorism; the person who drives you to distraction ought to tell you more about you, than it tells you about the other person. I can attest that the skill of scrolling right by Woody’s comments is not difficult to acquire. GM Roper said it an age ago; Woody doesn’t believe half of what he writes. I think Roper was correct. So, if Woody doesn’t believe what he says, why do you? You become the troll by responding to one.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:21 am
“The right wing got terribly obsessed with Obama’s use of a teleprompter recently; I think it may be useful simply to point out the racist assumptions…”
Now that statement is just dumb Bob, and you don’t write like you’re dumb. I believe the right is pointing out President Obama’s obsession with the teleprompter.
Quite frankly, I think it has more to do with the ‘Chicago Machine’s’ obsession with the teleprompter. The President does quite well without it, but not ‘perfectly’, and that’s a problem as the well oiled ‘Political Machine’ see’s it.
It is actually just the reverse. Occasional mistakes keeps a leader human in the eyes of other ‘humans’. I think the President is getting it, ignoring dumb advice.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:24 am
Meanwhile, back to intelligent reality.
Palin can now see North Korea from Alaska.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:52 am
Marc -
That piece hit the nail on the head, although I think you underestimate the power he’s wielded. With the economic crisis and the re-emergence of an old-time cross-of-gold sort of populism, his hale-fellow well-fed Ayn Randism could begin to lose its luster. Glen Beck’s more aimless paranoia may be a better fit for these dark times, which call out for the salvific madness of a ‘rodeo clown’. In the end, he may be more frightening than Rush.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Listener: I am not the one being driven to distraction by Woody– only by those who insist on being played by him with their long windy rejoinders. I am addressing those that like Charlie Brown when Lucy swears she’ll hold the football…
Its really fascinating how my just kicking Woody up the ass now again translates as ME responding to him, but the Reg’s, Bob G’s etc etc etc who write the same vain attempts to cure Woody of his misquided thinking is interpreted as some sort of normal, constructive response!
You guys are a hoot. A whole virtual pysch lab. I could gather enough data from this comments section to do a doctoral dissertation on group dynamics/conformity and the liberal mindset.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:52 am
On a more cheery note: Amazon emails me that Lonely Are The Brave is now available on DVD.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:55 am
…a nice relief from the current headlines proving Lawrence’s “proverb” (for Randy) that America has the peculiar talent of producing “cold isolate killers”. Everyone here now seems to find great solace in getting in touch with their inner assault rifle.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:12 am
Woody was correct about one (1) thing in his first comment. Marc is not the target audience for Limbaugh. Marc isn’t a ignoramus.
April 6th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Trolls are pervasive in internet forums. Woody is a troll. He doesn’t bring anything true, or thoughtful, to the threads here. On balance, you’d be better off passing over Woody’s posts, because reading them causes a net positive brain damage.
OTOH, Reg is not a troll, because he does bring facts and thoughtfulness to the discussions. However, Reg does enable the troll.
Personally, I stopped commenting on Woody’s stuff some months ago. Alas, here I go again. As this illustrates, it’s a vain wish to hope that “extinction” (no response to bad behavior) will stop the trolling. That might help, but some other technical intervention is needed. (Not necessarily banning — something like moderation based on ratings.)
I believe, in fact, that as responses die off, Woody has ratcheted up the obnoxiousness to the point where he will get a taker. Usually a borderline racist post will do it. If not, then an out-and-out racist post will. I’m not speculating that this is, or is not, a conscious decision, just that it seems to happen.
As the Paul Graham link above says,
April 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
I’ve never been accused of being nice to Obamanoids. All I have to say is one thing politically incorrect, which is hard to resist, and I find out a lot from them about my mother and where I can put what.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Lonely Are The Brave is one of my favorite movies ever. Kirk Douglas and Dalton Trumbo united in what is their true masterpiece of moviemaking (much as I love Spartacus.) Thanks AC…I’m gonna order it immediately. I’ve kept an AMC broadcast on Tivo but it’s full of commercials.
Another great Douglas film released on DVD fairly recently, written and directed by Billy Wilder, is Ace In the Hole (which all of Marc’s Annenberg students should see before they see Front Page or All The President’s Men.) That one might be Douglas’ greatest performance and a definitive, utterly prescient (circa 1951) look at the direction our media culture was headed.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Back to the topic of King Troll: Rush Limbaugh.
One could argue that the real conundrum is why is there no counterpart to him?
Olbermann? Hmmm. Sorta. Maddow? She tries, but often huffs and puffs too much and misses opportunities.
HL Mencken, if he were alive, might be a good antidote. The diff between Maddow/Olbermann and the satirists–which is really what a Limbaugh is–is that they are constantly trying to do damage control and reacting rather than being pro active and having a laugh at the stupidity. Much more powerful.
“Our” side used to use satire. Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Swift, Mort Sahl. Unfortunately, when it comes to air time they are censored. Its ok to lie and skewer the truth. TELLING the truth is what is dangerous.
Charlie Rose gets everyone in the world to come on his show. But only to have them squirm and try to answer his inane set of questions because he refuses to allow any real dialogue to flourish.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
…’Obama: …they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion’….
Lets see how many headlines in the past week/year are about someone becoming “bitter” and clinging to their assault rifle?
Not too many registered Democrats or card carrying commie/socialists order assault rifles over the internet and then go on a rampage maiming and killing people they don’t know over some grievance for which they refuse to try and uncover the cause– and then maybe do something constructive about it.
Thats the difference between Woody’s harping on the left wanting to spend money redressing social ills rather than the right’s method of resorting to random and wanton killing sprees to solve a problem.
I guess the lone isolate killer syndrome could be construed as “rugged individualism”.
April 6th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
PG also thinks Lisp is the killer language…maybe he can’t be trusted on trolls
April 6th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
“One could argue that the real conundrum is why is there no counterpart to him?”
Ed Schultz is the closest in some ways, though he’s pretty stolid compared to Limbaugh.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Who’s Ed Schultz., Evets?
April 6th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Would like to return to argument over my being…lets see what was it…some sort of flat earth trollop for agreeing with Laing about the need for anecdotal evidence and the short comings of relying solely on the “scientific method’.
The Abruzzo region quake in Italy the other day:
The area around L’Aquila has been the scene of intense earthquake activity since October.
There was another smaller tremor around midnight which measured 4.6 on the Richter scale.
L’Aquila is a picturesque medieval town and has been hit by severe tremors twice before in 1461 and 1703 and both times the city was virtually destroyed.
An Italian scientist claims he predicted a major quake near the town weeks ago but was reported to authorities for spreading panic.
Vans with loudspeakers drove around the town a month ago telling locals to evacuate their home after seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani made his prediction.
He was reported to police for “spreading alarm” and forced to remove his findings from the internet.
——————————————————–
Refresher of Laing’s point:
” Science as it is practised today, has no way of
dealing with consciousness, or with experience, values
ethics or anything referring to quality. This
situation derives from something that happened in
European consciousness at the time of Galileo and
Giordano Bruno. These two men epitomise two
paradigms–Bruno who was tortured and burned for
saying there were infinite worlds (and theoretical
physics has now come to the same conclusion); and
Galileo who said that the scientific method was to
study this world as if there were no consciousness and
no living creatures it it. Galileo made the statement
that only quantifiable phenomena were admitted to the
domain of science–he said whatever cannot be measured
and quantified is not scientific and in post Galilean
science this came to mean whatever cannot be
quantified is not real.This has been the most profound
corruption from the Greek view of nature as physics;
which is alive, always in transformation and not
divorced from us. Galileo’s program offers us a dead
world: out go sight, sound, taste, touch and smell,
along with them have since gone aesthetic and ethical
sensibility, values, quality, soul, consciousness,
spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of
scientific discourse.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Ed Schultz is about to get a show on MSNBC. he’s been an AirAmefrica radio host. He used to be a talk show host and college football announcer in N Dakota (I think). He was a conservative republican then, but had an epiphany about a dozen years ago and became a kind of union-supporting populist. He’s a big guy like Rush, with a similar voice.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
“blaming others for their plight”
You project so well you could have been a movie theater.
April 6th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Reg: don’t forget Lonely is an Edward Abbey story!
April 6th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I dont think I have seen Ace. Thanks. Will Netflix it or something.
Come to think of it don’t think I have noticed it rifling round the vid store bins when I had access to absolute cookie jar of a tiny indie rental shop in SF.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
“maybe you need to get out of your liberal enclaves sometimes and see the rest of our country ”
(when you click on Woody’s “rest of the country” you get a US map with lots of red a little blue. This is Woody’s idea of “seeing” his country)
My parent’s idea of “getting out of their liberal enclave” was, in 1951, to buy a 30 foot trailer, attach it to the Chevy station wagon, rent out the house in North Hollywood, apply for a year’s sabbatical, put a 4, 9 and 14 year old in the car and hit the road.
We covered 38 states and Canada and Mexico.
This was all being done while Woody’s family was dressing up in white sheets and pointy hats. Their idea of showing Woody what its like outside a ‘liberal enclave” was to take him to a cross burning.
April 6th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
By the way, Woody, were you in that crowd that turned ugly when as a 4 year old on the road in the deep South I drank out of the “colored” fountain?
April 6th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Anna
I’m sure this is entirely pointless, but the earthquake warnings are in no way at all a validation of your belief that anecdotal evidence should triumph over more rigorous scientific evidence. The warning was based on scientific observations about radon gas accumulation.
This would appear to be well established science:
1) http://www.medicaljournal-ias.org/3_3/Khan1.pdf
2) http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2002AM/finalprogram/abstract_42775.htm
That took me about 45 seconds to find.
The story only further undermines your claim, but you fail to notice… In fact, you should be deeply embarrassed by this, but you won’t be.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Anna -
Just caught the last few minutes of the 1st ‘Ed’ show on MSNBC. He seemed more subdued, less Rushian, than he does on radio.
April 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Dan O. The scientist was using what is considered in scientific circles as anecdotal evidence much as the accumulation of evidence that supported the theory of global warming 20- 30 years ago.
you are misunderstanding my use of ancedotal evidence in these contexts.
A lot of good scientific gestalt is based on being able to connect the dots. Intuition married to observable and experiential data doesnt always satisfy the quantifiable and qualifiable mafia.
That is why the scientist was ignored. As was Bruno who was burned at the stake for suggesting there were infinite worlds–as theoretical physics has now come to the conclusion is so.
The annals of scientific discovery and genius are filled with just such stories.
There are a host of observable anomalies around quakes and the run up to a big one. But left to your scientific method this type of anecdotal material is not considered enough to base a warning on.
Laing’s point is that common sense needs to enter into the equation.
Let me ask you this: if you were an Abruzzi resident would you have said yourself…holy moly maybe time to do a bunk. I live in a seismic hot spot, this exact region gets a corker every so many hundred years, the architecture is the worst for a quake, the ground has been shaking now for a month, the dog is going mad, there is this guy says radon levels are spiking, but wait…the government says there is no scientific evidence that suggests I should be alarmed.
Nu, Dan O?
April 6th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Cooper scrapes up against but misses the center of Rush’s appeal; Woody gives us a clue with his feigned shock at Obama’s famous non-insult to middle americans. Rush’s appeal is grounded as much in Norman Vincent Peale as the Gipper; his core audience are people like Woody: “glad sacks” Garry Wills called them. And in the early days, it should be noted, the guy was, on occasion, funny.
Read Roger L Simon’s strange but worthwhile “Blacklisting Myself.” It is a work of harrowing self-pity. For a conservative to be hand wringing, in genuine PAIN, out of the treatment poor George Bush took at the hands of cruel liberals (some of them movie producers who wouldn’t hire Simon) given the Clinton years; well, we have some truly dysfunctional people. Or look at the Woodman’s rewriting of the golden rule: Denigrate, jeer, and defame others as you would have them grovel and celebrate you.” Come on darkie, it doesn’t hurt that much when I whip ya’ll.
In ALL the talk of late on Limbaugh, it has gone not too strangely unmentioned that the fruitcake accused Bill Clinton of murdering Vince Foster on his show virtually every day for years. Sure, it’s not the kind of dubious behavior likely to upset Marc Cooper, but it helped right wing standards slide into the sewer they may never crawl out of.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
I liek Lonely Are the Brave,but Abbey himself was a racist.
Some quotes:
“I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, Mexicans, and Orientals. Look at Africa, Mexico, and Asia.”
“It might be wise for us, as American citizens, to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically, impoverished people…Why not [support immigration]? Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful–yes beautiful!–society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see.”[
April 6th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
To Jim R:
I tend to disagree with your take on the recent right wing obsession about the teleprompter. I reached my conclusion after reading posts on the dealmac forum (used to be one of the best, but has fallen on hard times); it was obvious that the argument being tossed around there was that Obama is a hollow man who can’t make an intelligent argument or give a decent speech unless it is pre-canned. Admittedly I am responding in part to the context and to a particular set of contributors. Considering that particular cast of characters to which I refer, I find it hard to believe that any of them would be typing about the teleprompter unless (a) it was in the attempt to tear Obama down and (b) they got the idea from some talk radio jerk. The inference that the argument is racist is based on the fact that the president, a man of considerable accomplishment and obvious intelligence, is being presented by those particular trolls as unable to be those very things. The denial is so strong that I attribute it to racism.
Loved your line about Palin now being able to see North Korea.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:16 pm
That’s ironic, because – probably due to Trumbo’s adaptation of the Abbey novel – “Lonely” is one of the most immigrant-friendly, “anti-borders” films not just of its era but ever. The “Brave Cowboy” novel was written before Abbey was 30, and the more well-known and “quotable” he became, the more he became notoriously misanthropic and cranky, even toward other environmentalists.
April 6th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
That was a response to RP’s comment on Edward Abbey’s racism.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
O/T for anyone who cares.
The New York Review of Books has just released the full ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody. Mark Danner has a lengthy introduction and synopsis in the piece he wrote at which the ICRC report is linked. His analysis of the implications going forward are, IMHO, profoundly important.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Randy, very aware of Abbey’s incendiary remarks and a lot of them were made to inflame and be ironic. If you read about him and what he says himself of his background he is rather different. His father used to quote Whitman’s maxim: Stand up for the stupid.
Nuff said.
And he, like some of the best American commentators are complex people. Mencken who made some of the most prescient observations about Americans revealed himself to be as unthinking in some of his remarks as those he castigated. Hunter Thompson, who is unparalleled in his ability to both write and raises social criticism to poetry was a racist and thats also in black and white and reported by childhood friends. That is a fact. So do we disregard his work?
Eliot and Pound were rabid anti semites. And Eliot a shit to boot. And after first glance his poetry doesnt hold up either.
Henry Miller’s early attempt at a novel while still living in Yorkville (German area on upper east side) was an anti semitic rant. But he shed that cultural skin when he got out of the ol hood.
Dunno, man. Gotta be very careful when you get on your high horse with those kinds of remarks– when dealing with artists who have produced a whole body of work. The whole deal with art is someone is in the process of transforming themselves as well as interpreting the world. They are not static— like a Woody.
April 7th, 2009 at 8:48 am
But he shed that cultural skin when he got out of the ol hood.
And Abbey became a bigot as hegot older.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:46 am
A lot of people get cranky; a lot of people are always cranky or always assholes and always bigots.
But few people wrote Desert Solitaire or the inspiration for a film like Lonely Are the Brave.
I don’t care if he was the anti-christ. He was not dishonest and I think his remark on immigration was right up there with Swift in its irony.
If you read down the Wiki list of his other quotable remarks one sees a pattern. (kinda like the radon spiking before a big seismic event)
When I called the Wa Po City Desk last fall to ask why they didn’t have the guts to put that incredible shot of the anti Wall Street bail out protester’s placard on the front page (‘Jump You Fuckers’, it said) as the Sydney Morning Herald had– he whined: most people here don’t get irony.
I rest my case, Randy.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:48 am
And, I repeat, Abbey’s father taught him to “stand up for the stupid”
Reminding myself of that I almost thought to swear off poking a stick at Woody. But I’m not that enlightened yet.
April 7th, 2009 at 11:00 am
A man whose father raised him on this— is not a bigot:
“This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.
You can see how just that directive informed a great deal of Abbey’s work.
He adopted the persona of a misanthropic curmudgeon.
Here is a bit of bio on him:
Abbey was born near Home, Pa., in 1927. His father, Paul Revere Abbey, was a small farmer, magazine salesman and school bus driver with strong opinions. He was against organized religion, held Marxist views and quoted Whitman by heart, adopting the poet’s maxim, ”resist much, obey little,” as his personal mantra. Abbey’s mother, Mildred, was a schoolteacher who communicated her love of music to her son, putting her children to bed with Chopin and hymns played on the living-room piano. When Abbey was 17, in the summer between his junior and senior years in high school, he hitchhiked across country and got his first taste of the West with which he would be identified for the better part of his life.
After high school, he joined the Army, where he was posted to Italy as an M.P., and then in 1948 he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend the University of New Mexico. There he studied English and philosophy, married and separated, edited the student literary magazine (and was relieved of his duties after emblazoning the cover of one issue with the slogan ”Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” while the university was host to a religious conference), worked on the rough draft of his first novel, ”Jonathan Troy,” did an 80-page treatise on anarchism as his master’s thesis and won a Fulbright scholarship for postgraduate work at the University of Edinburgh.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Anyone can learn to be a bigot. Abbey did.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
better get out the torch then…time for a book burnin’
April 7th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
People are complicated, Randy. (Unless you are Woody)
You can find blatant racist pronouncements in some of Hunter Thompson’s stuff. He was also a close friend of Ed Bradley.
My take on Abbey is that he was more the trickster than the bigot.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
Now you’re just rationalizing. What you wouldn’t accept in some, you accept in others.
April 7th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
As for book burning, spare me the sanctimony. I enjoyed reading Desert Solitaire, too. I just find Abbey to be a reprehensible person for his racist views.
“Orientals?” You find that acceptable.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Randy, I stand by my view that he was yanking people’s chain with those remarks.
Look at the whole package– his background, his points of reference, his philosophical bents, his upbringing and then Ed, himself.
Do you remember in Desert Solitaire when he gratuitously kills..was it a rabbit? I remember throwing the book down. He likes to pull people up by the short hairs and shove them out of their sentimentality. I don’t think he really did the act–I remember something about it in the memoir written about him or him commenting later.
What I did find interesting about him was that he did have that white boy macho thing of rather than man in harmony with nature it was more the European white man having to conquer it. That is one of the things that did jump out. But that may also be part of his age and the pervasive sensibilities that he was channeling.
He certainly, if I recall, didn’t get tangled in any Native American stuff. That didn’t seem to touch him, nor did he seem to seek it out and he was right there in Indian country.
So that, to me, does support your feeling that he had a ‘white man complex.’ But I don’t think that is what fueled what he wrote or behaved…or how he treated people.
Again, Hunter Thompson very much cut from same cloth.
If you look at his outrage against the transgressions against the wilderness–which can serve as a metaphor for just about everything wrong with what goes on in America–and then read that passage again where he rants about immigrants it all comes off very tongue in cheek. Turn what he is saying on its head. Culturally Asia, Mexico etc make America look like the beer can tossing on the ugly hiway down the middle of the desert country that it is. He’s the one who chucked beer cans out the car window cause he said the hi way itself was what defiled the landscape.
April 7th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
What I meant to say is I think he was an early performance artist- but he managed his installations through the written word. Pretty cool.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
The good news about Rush is that his schtick is now hurting, rather than helping, the conservative cause.
Prior to Bush screwing the pooch on Iraq and the economy, there was significant value to conservatives of Rush’s talking points forcing their way into the mediocre media. To an extent, he was also helpful in drawing moderate conservatives into more hard-core positions.
But conservative America now faces a very different challenge. Rather than preserving its position of power and vast ideological privilege, it must win back basic credibility for both its economics and geopolitics. Swing voters are well onto the conservatives’ game, and people like Rush just serve as a constant drip feed reminder that nothing has changed — the core of the GOP is run by immensely self-regarding, arrogant paranoids who have, at heart, disdain for their own followers.
April 7th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Sorry, Anna I don’t buy it. A lot of Abbey was raging id, the side that shows no restraint and unltimately reveals what he really thinks.
He was a bigot by his statements. If anyone else made these comments, they would also be bigoted. His writing doesn’t excuse his bigotry.
April 8th, 2009 at 7:16 am
‘no restraint’? can you give an example, please?
‘raging id’? Thats what made him a great writer whose passion for the wild was able to be evoked by harnessing that ‘raging id’ of his.
Sorry, mate. But I don’t want to live in a world of neutered men. Or rather I do: these are men who are so detached from nature they invent every fucking bit of gimcrackery so people can be buffered from reality.
Go back and read what he wrote as he took a last trip down the Green River before it was dammed and Glen Canyon flooded.
That is what a ‘raging id’ does when harnessed.
Give me ‘raging id’ any day to the robotic, bland, pathological pieces of shit parading as human beings and species of businessmen that allow themselves to make the decisions that allow a Glen Canyon to be flooded so a few entrepreneurs can make money off of ass holes who want a big dumb motor boat to take their dumb families for a ride in a reservoir.
You are throwing out the baby with the bath water.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:01 am
And you’re rationalizing racist behavior. Obviously we have to agree to disagree.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Look at his legacy:
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. Abbey’s account of his work as road inspector for the Forest Service and as a ranger for the National Parks Service has been cited as a key source of inspiration for the modern environmentalist movement and by critic Grace Lichtenstein as “among the towering works of American nature writing.”
1975 The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey’s novel about the misadventures of a group of ecoterrorists becomes an underground classic, selling half a million copies. It is believed that the book inspired the formation of the underground environmentalist group Earth First! Fool’s Progress (1981) would continue the adventures of the Monkey Wrench Gang.
——————————————————–
Wish I could get hold of this paper:
A Harsh and Hostile Land: Seeking Edward Abbey’s Aesthetics …
Luke, T. W. “A Harsh and Hostile Land: Seeking Edward Abbey’s Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics in the Desert” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the …
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p152594_index.html – Similar pages
April 8th, 2009 at 8:46 am
“We are living … among punishments and ruins. For those who knows this, Edward Abbey’s books remain an indispensable solace. His essays, and his novels, too, are ‘antidotes to despair’ — Wendell Berry
“Abbey is a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion, the most effective publicist of the West’s curious desire to rape itself since Bernard DeVito” — Wallace Stegner
“Edward Abbey is arrogant, self-centered and bigoted, which often shows through in his pull-no-punches writing. He also happens to be one of the most sensitive writers around, and one of the few able to portray the wilderness and the importance of wilderness in the human psyche” — John Harlin, Outside
April 8th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Berry and Stegner nail it.
April 8th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Anna,
You can try to defend Abbey and say his racist statements were ironic or whatever, but it’s disingenuous. The man was a racist. Say what you will about his environmentalism; personally, as an environmental historian, I think he was incredibly damaging to the environmental movement. He basically hated people–immigrants most of all. He was also a misogynist. Arguing that he was a good environmental writer is sort of beside the point. Who cares for our purposes–he was an unrepentant racist.
Except that it does matter. His antihumanistic environmentalism helped turn the movement away from the problems of humans (pollution for instance) and toward focusing on wilderness. This made a lot of people that environmentalism wasn’t about their lives, undermining it as a political movement. His dislike of immigrants and people of color was part of a larger problem he had in not liking people. And how one can build a better society or a better human relationship with nature without sympathy toward human beings is beyond me.
And to reiterate, what Randy said is absolutely right. Anna, you are rationalizing racism because you like Ed Abbey.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Erik, there was no environmental movement to speak of at the time Abbey was working out his rage against the despoiling or it–through his art. Saying this ONE man was “incredibly damaging” is just a jaw dropper.
No. All the transgressions done from the time the white man landed on the continent up until this very moment as mountain tops are being blown up in Appalachia are what are incredibly damaging–that and the AMerican mindset that cheerily went along with the whole car culture that has nearly destroyed this country–amongst a million other travesties to the environment.
Lets keep a little perspective, Sparky.
“His antihumanistic environmentalism helped turn the movement away from the problems of humans (pollution for instance) and toward focusing on wilderness. This made a lot of people that environmentalism wasn’t about their lives, undermining it as a political movement.”
Eh? Eh? Eh? Are you nuts? Are you a total philistine that you don’t know a ;howl of pain when you hear it?
Every word in that last snippet of yours is completely insane.
‘ he MADE people think that environmentalism wasnt about their lives–undermining it as a political movement?”
Just for starters, what the fuck do you think his Monkey Wrench Gang romps were about?
But never mind those. If you got all that tripe from Desert Solitaire and Down the River then you need a soul transplant.
You are making the most whining retro statements I have ever heard. He never intended to start any movement. He was writing about what he was passionate about and that was the wild and his hatred of the very forces that the entire environmental movement has come to fight against.
Your mad statements assigning him all the blame and responsibility for people who way after he wrote his very personal elegies somehow couldn’t work things out for themselves and so he is the culprit. The man didnt give a rats ass about “movements”. He lived his commitment. He was a one man show whose example was a catalyst for others. Unintentionally.
I am not rationalizing his racism. Are you basing all your comments on a few quotes? So now you think he is the anti christ?
He did’nt set himself up to be an icon for the environmental movement.
What the hell is an ‘environmental historian’? You rummage round the writings of the Browers or Stegner? I don’t get how you can actually make such daft statements blaming Abbey for the failures of something he was never a part of!
And by the way: what you call misanthropic is to fail to understand the difference between a true misanthrope and one who feels constant rage at the stupidity of humans. Its pretty much the fuel that drives all artists, Sparky.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
“And how one can build a better society or a better human relationship with nature without sympathy toward human beings is beyond me.”
I am on the floor. You don’t get out much, do you? Or rather have any points of reference for how those that actually CARE are driven to turn their rage and frustration at the human condition into art–so that lesser mortals are actually moved to act.
You come along, AFTER the fact, after the blood is spilled and Google the soul leavings of those who actually did something and then call yourself an historian? You make reductive, smug assertions about people and ideas you have absolutely no feeling for. You understand nothing.
What you write makes me think you are under 30? Maybe 30 ish at most?
You are way out of your “comfort zone” here, Sparky.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I am not rationalizing his racism.
Of course you are.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I’m not overly inclined to get into a spitting match with a crazy person. Nonetheless, I will respond one time at least.
I hate pulling out credentials, but in this case I guess it’s necessary.
You say I know nothing of what I speak.
I am an environmental historian, with a PhD in history, who is a professor at a college in Texas. I teach environmental history. I am writing a book on loggers and nature in the 19th and early 20th century Northwest. I have several articles about to come out. I have presented at conferences in three nations on two continents. I have read Edward Abbey. I have taught Edward Abbey. I have lectured about Edward Abbey. I have read about Edward Abbey. I’ve talked to people who personally knew Edward Abbey.
So don’t give me a bunch of crap about not knowing what I am talking about.
As for your ideas, such as they are, if you are interested in a civil debate discussing these things, great, I’d have that. But I’m not going to engage a person who clearly has no interest except accepting Abbey as a hero immune to any criticism.
One point though–if Dick Cheney said the same things Edward Abbey said, you’d be outraged. What’s the difference? You’d slam Cheney
for being a racist. Should we not hold all people to the same standard? Plus, whatever Abbey personally believed, it’s his public statements that matter. That’s like arguing that because George Wallace was in some ways progressive on race for a southern man of his era in hiring practices that his public race baiting for political gain didn’t make him a horrible person.
You can still like Abbey and admit that he’s a racist. So what’s the big deal? Do you have to accept the man as a hero? Does that satisfy as psychological need for you?
Now, not everything you say is useless. Did he live his commitment? Sure. But was that a good thing? Like most things, it was mixed? Did he alert people to the beauty of the desert? Sure. Did he damage the desert at the same time by turning Moab into a hellish tourist town? Most definitely. Did he want to create a movement? Maybe, maybe not. Did he want to influence how people thought about nature? Most definitely. Was that a good thing and were ideas productive? I would argue no. Others could legitimately argue yes. Me, I think the only successful environmentalism is one that centers humans within nature, not nature something outside of humans. But that’s my opinion.
However, I’m not going to go down the road of insults. If you want to hold onto your unchallenged assumptions about humans and nature without any complexity, go for it.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Also, to answer your question, environmental history is the history of the interactions between humans and nature, understanding how humans shape nature for their own desires and how nature shapes humans. Complexity, you see. Perhaps a touch of that would do you good.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Erik, how was Abbey responsible for wrecking Moab? I am stunned at several of your remarks that assign him huge blame for things he had no part of.
Just because he was one of the first to write about an arcane place in a way that then moved others to try and seek ;the same inspirations and experience doesn’t put him at fault. I suppose then its Jesus’ fault for turning Jerusalem and Golgotha into a tacky pilgrim’s haunt–the actual rock now covered and rigged out with candles and lamps etc etc.
Now you blame him for wanting people to think about nature!
You are assigning him the powers of a god.
He is not my hero, by the way. And yes, I can admit that an artist I like is flawed. I said same of Hunter Thompson who IS a racist.
I also was disturbed by some of Abbey’s stuff when I initially read him many years ago–but in this context where a poster just dimisses someone–accuses them of being a racist–someone who is complex, passionate, and whose raison d’etre was not about his peculiar ideas towards various ethnic groups and who also said things to rile people up and who has a background in philosophy and clearly took his cues from certain other poet artists– you need then not to be so literal.
I am objecting to what sounds to me like a very childish, day late and dollar short assessment of someone whose contribution as a writer is important. Anyone who can make people feel nature the way he did is not someone you dismiss. So if you are claiming yourself to be some sort of maven about “the interactions between humans and nature”…you better go back to square one and learn how to think like a poet.
You make rash, daft statements Eric holding Abbey accountable as an environmentalist WHICH HE WAS NOT.
The man was a writer. An artist. His time was at the tipping point of when American culture was about to have that interaction with nature that was to cause all hell to break loose. Remember, Rachel Carson was publishing the real seminal works on environmentalism at the same time Abbey was finding his way working in the Forest Service.
Rachel Carson, is the MOTHER of mother’s, brother.
Abbey did not set out to be an environmentalist. His daemon exercised through his pitting himself AGAINST the wilderness. He was never a dewey eyed, New Age, pseudo Native American mimicking nit wit. For him going into the wilderness was a test. He expressed his masculinity by wrestling with the earth. Or maybe he was wrestling with the MOTHER. Who the fuck knows. It was very visceral, sensual and personal what happened for him. He also suffered from Satrian nausea– as anyone worth their salt who claims to care about the planet would. His love of the wild lead him to muse on the destruction of it by consumerism and the burgeoning, exploding love of crap and need to sell crap.
He came to his “environmentalism” organically and honestly.
In my opinion, Erik, I think your take on Abbey is all wrong. You are trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. You are treating him like he owes you something and assessing him as if he was a David Brower or someone who deliberately set out to organize around the idea of educating and influencing legislation etc etc.
If you are creating curriculum around Abbey as an environmentalist you should have your credentials stripped.
The only way you can look at Abbey is as an artist.
You are imposing a lot of earnest, after the fact criteria on a context that won’t support it.
And most of the other academic comments I have come across about Abbey–such as Wendell Barry and Stegner–would support my point of view –rather than yours. And they knew the man.
My beef with you is your earnestness…your lack of feeling for what it takes to write like an Abbey or even a Blake. You extrapolate and then literalize. And try to make something fit into your theory.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
The only way you can look at Abbey is as an artist.
The level of your narcissism is a thing of wonder.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Objectivity is the greatest threat to the United States today.
David Brower
(kinda what Laing was saying in the quote I have been dragging out recently– which keeps getting misunderstood because—well the same reason that forced Brower to make his conversation stopping statement)
This debate has caused me to rifle back through some late 80′s reading that I had forgotten. So glad for that.
This was a favourite:
Encounters with the Archdruid [Narratives about a Conservationist and Three of his Natural Enemies]
As well as Kenneth Brower’s Starship and the Canoe.
Hope those are on our student’s reading lists as well as all of Emily Bronte –if you really want to understand about the “interaction between humans and nature” as you so clinically put it.
April 8th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
A final word–I’m not dismissing Abbey. He’s exceedingly important. I just think he was a bad person and a bad model for people to follow in thinking about nature.
April 8th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
“I just think he was a bad person and a bad model for people to follow in thinking about nature.”
Oh for heaven’s sake, Erik. That is the silliest comment I have ever read.
How can you take yourself seriously as an academic with those two statements?
“bad model”? I have turned several people on to Abbey over the years. You are nuts. His evocation of the looming destruction of Glen Canyon is one of the most visceral and heart breaking elegies EVER. If that doesnt move someone to feel the tragedy of loosing the privilege to be on a planet that offers such wonders and make one want to go to the wall…
And he never set himself up to be a model. He wrote what HE felt. It was others who decided his writing was so dynamic and potent a call to action that they –as critics do–decided to hail him as the lightning rod for action to save the environment.
And another thing, Erik the environmental movement has so long ago gone past thinking about nature or anyone else. Its all about how can everyone get rich making more crap that is “green”.
Most people still don’t get it. Unless their water is being poisoned from strip mining or some other horror they are so consumed by their fucking iphones and assorted other gadgets that the real world has no meaning.
We send soldiers to Iraq to die so assholes here can zoom around on a jet ski spewing diesel, stinking up the shore and crushing the skulls of manatees.
Greenpeace thinks its doing something now by getting people together on a beach for a feel good fest and forming a human something in the sand.
Clean coal is being sold like the Emperor’s new clothes and James Lovelock says wind power is inefficient and not worth what it does to the countryside. He also says we are all fucked.
I say if maybe more people had been inspired by Abbey and actually become eco warriors we might have made a dent in the problem.
“We are living … among punishments and ruins. For those who know this, Edward Abbey’s books remain an indispensable solace. His essays, and his novels, too, are ‘antidotes to despair’ — Wendell Berry
April 8th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
You think you know better than Berry…who is a deeply religious man, deeply humanist, deeply ecological?
April 9th, 2009 at 5:40 am
You are nuts.
No further proof of your narcissism than the fact that someone who diagrees with you is nuts.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:57 am
“Most people still don’t get it. Unless their water is being poisoned from strip mining or some other horror they are so consumed by their fucking iphones and assorted other gadgets that the real world has no meaning.
“We send soldiers to Iraq to die so assholes here can zoom around on a jet ski spewing diesel, stinking up the shore and crushing the skulls of manatees.
“Greenpeace thinks its doing something now by getting people together on a beach for a feel good fest and forming a human something in the sand.
“Clean coal is being sold like the Emperor’s new clothes and James Lovelock says wind power is inefficient and not worth what it does to the countryside. He also says we are all fucked. ”
…
“Edward Abbey’s books…are ‘antidotes to despair’”
How’s that working out for you ?
April 9th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Randy, please go back and actually read some of Erik’s wild remarks that declare Abbey responsible for somehow doing irreparable damage to the environmental movement. I mean remarks that are just…NUTS.
And I think I make a fair point in referencing highly regarded people who have devoted their lives to the very issues Erik feels Abbey has betrayed as acknowledging Abbey’s work to be important and profound– in contrast to young Erik’s irrational, dismissive assertions that he is somehow…all alone…the anti christ.
If that ain’t “nuts” I don’t know what is.
Reg: what is your point here? If you aren’t able to discern Marc’s despair through his words– and the raison d’etre of this blog then surely you could not be so thick souled as to not see Marc’s despair as displayed in the body language of his first video blog.
Honey, this whole blog is about despair.
April 9th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Back when Berry wrote that there might have been the illusion of hope.
Now we know better.
Years ago I canvassed briefly for Greenpeace. Training included watching a film that essentially was a cavalcade of environmental horrors. The then head of Greenpeace whoever he was commented that based on what he had seen around the world he knew that “it was too late”! All that was left to do was “bear witness”. And with that we were sent out to knock on doors and beg for money.
Between that and viewing On the Beach at age 12 its a wonder I get up at all in the morning.
But the cat needs food so I do.
April 9th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
If that ain’t “nuts” I don’t know what is.
Trust me on this: you don’t. it apepars that no one here can disagree with you without drawing insults.
April 9th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Let me clarify: It appears that no one can disagree with you without your hurling inuslts at them.
Erik is a reasonable and sensible person. He and I have disagreed on issues without the personal attacks.
April 10th, 2009 at 5:59 am
Randy, If you feel the sweeping, bizarre statements Erik makes about Abbey 1) responsible and 2) not nuts and 3) not insulting then I am wondering what your criteria for responsible commentary is.
I think that someone who sets himself up as a spokesperson for an idea and teaches and gives lectures has a responsibility not to say crazy things.
I am attacking his ethics and logic. I don’t see how you can call him “reasonable” with the daft statements he makes. I am not talking about Abbey’s controversial attitudes towards immigration etc. I am talking about his making the bizarre claim that somehow Abbey singlehandedly did some sort of irreparable damage to a movement that didnt even exist at the time the books he published that then became the lightning rods for those who were becoming desperate for a rallying point around the issue of preservation.
Erik makes accusations about Abbey that are NUTS. There is no other way to put it.
Talk me down, brother, if you can. But its right there in black and white.
Erik’s earnestness and lack of an ability to differentiate between the job of the artist to ignite the spark in others and those that then–often misguidedly and lacking in a friction surface take everything literally and may even form cults, organizations etc around images and ideas in a work of art. Uh Rimbaud comes to mind all the little twits who took–and still take–literally Rimbaud’s suggestion to get wasted in order to understand.
In Erik’s world Rimbaud would bear the blame for every idiot that went on a mind bending drug binge.
I think your refusing to address very valid points in my responses to Erik and Erik’s refusing to even respond to my challenging one of his madder statements that Abbey “destroyed Moab” shows you the two of you as waging a far more vicious attack on me than my passionate rejoinders that hurl such terrible insults as “nuts” to that which IS nuts!
April 10th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Anna,
As I don’t accept your premise in your first sentence, the rest of your comments really just a lot of bloviating. There is a strawman here and it is this:
I am talking about his making the bizarre claim that somehow Abbey singlehandedly did some sort of irreparable damage to a movement that didnt even exist at the time the books he published that then became the lightning rods for those who were becoming desperate for a rallying point around the issue of preservation.
He never said that.
A word to the wise: statements such as the following:
Arguments are not won by the amount of bombast one hurls. Arguments are not won by the intellectual equivalent of holding one’s breath.
I learned that when I was about fifteen. I remain hopeful that you will learn it some day.