Guest guest Posted July 12, 2006 Report Share Posted July 12, 2006 http://newsforreal.com/ by Raconteur at Large Stephen P. Pizzo Selected Responses to Calling All Suckers Post Steve, you wrote: " The other way - the better way -- is for liberials to free themselves from the lodestone of political correctness -- to stop pretending the Wal-Mart-er demographic is worthy of an iota of respect. Instead of trying to humor them, confront their lazy ignorance and their knee-jerk jingoism. " I have been doing this for awhile. The problem is that they are everywhere. Family, friends co-workers. I swear to God, the best analogy I can think of is the movie " Invasion of the Body Snatchers. " Remember at the end, when the girl comes out of the bushes and taps Donald Sutherland on the back? He turns and looks at her with those blank eyes and screams the alien scream. He has become one of them. So, if you do this, prepare to live your life being told by these mouth breathers that you are just jealous, or that you are too stupid to understand whats really happening in the world. It is just a cycle. It is all gonna turn around. Gas will go down, the ice sheets will be back in a year or two, and interest rates are gonna fall. These people are not sane in the way that we used to think of it. Honestly I believe that it is from 30 years of TV, talk radio, video games and mental sloth. I don't even bother to come in here and read much anymore. Even on the Internet the pettiness and attention to worthless stories as you describe is rampant. Check out Salon and Huffpost. In order to get readers they pander to these retards. Honestly, I feel like finding a nice little cave somewhere to hide out and just " come and get me when its all over " . At present, my family is no longer speaking to me. I mean total extended family. I made a crack at a dinner after listening to these whiners complain about everything under the sun. My crack mainly was this: We are a people that has everything. TV, computer, 2 or 3 SUV's in the driveway, nice homes, nice clothes, eat 3 squares a day, and all we do is bitch and lust after things that will make the neighbors envious. Nothing is good enuff. Bring up Iraq, oh god no! In addition to being a negative downer Laura, you are also depressing. Lets get back to the real stuff like the houses up on the hill that we can buy on our blue collar wages -- if they just get rid of the principal portion of our monthly payment. Then we can flip it in 5 years and get a better house, or get that Hummer. The young couple is building a house in a project where the density is like rats. They are coughing up 300,000 build this house from scratch on this ant hill because they " will never get just the right floor plan if they buy a 10 year old house. " This couple has been married for 2 years and has brand new twin boys. No one talks about saving for their future, college education or even retirement planning. Nope, its all about impressing everyone else. No one has any hobbies. No one wants any hobbies. No one can talk about anything except themselves. No one reads books. It is just pure greed and misery because it is never enough. Never. One thing I do know. We do not want these people voting. Ever. So, I just press on with my home remodel, do my artwork, garden and work in the yard and stay the hell away from the world. It is so depressing. Thanks for showing up once in a while to give me a little hope that I am not a psycho. Laura (AKA, AppleAnne) Mr. Pizzo, My wife recommended that I read your " Calling All Suckers " piece. I didn't want to, but I did. I knew it would hurt. Everytime I read one of your opinion pieces, I have to put a tin hat on because I KNOW that you're reading my mind. And when I point out your blog to coworkers, they all have to wear tin hats, too. We're not sure if you have secret journalistic prism powers or if our heads are bugged. You are articulating our doubts, our fears, our social fatigue, and our impotent rage at 'leaders' who confuse (mis)information with knowledge, force with power, religion with faith, and viciousness with honesty. PLEASE STOP! Don't you understand? There's enough of us wearing these hats that we're visible from the space shuttle. It's a hell of a thing when you fear the attention of your government. On the other hand, maybe you're right to continue. It helps to have the reasoned, well-sourced material you give us when we're pulled into those conversations that start with the media's or administration's latest attempt at misdirection " We gotta do something about this gay marriage thing? ...Can you believe that Barbara fired Star? " Yeah, keep going. I look forward to coming home after an exciting day in IT and reading your blog. Somehow it leave me feeling less isolated, and relieves me of that doubt of my own judgment. Those bastards reall ARE trying to kill us. Yossarian was right. Thank you for your efforts. They aren't wasted. Corially, Tom P. July 10, 2006 Calling All Suckers To proceed from one truth to another, and connect distant propositions by regular consequences, is the great prerogative of man. — Samuel Johnson: Rambler #158 Oh man, am I going to get in trouble for this post. But, damn it, someone needs come right out and just say it. So here goes. We liberals are often accused of being elitists, that we look down on fellow Americans, those red-state folk who consider Wal-Mart the best thing to happen to America since Hostess Cup Cakes. Well, it's time to come clearn. We do. We've tried not to, but they make it really hard. So it's time to come out of the closet. We do look down on them. But not for the reasons they think we look down on them. It's not because they prefer a night with Jerry Springer than live theater or because they can't tell the difference between Ripple and a good California Merlot or prefer a Big Mac with fries to a healthy salad. No. The reason we look down on them has nothing to do with any of that kind of trivial stuff. We look down on them because they are natural born suckers. And, as such have aided and abetted in the the closest thing that we've seen to a constitutional coup in American history. Oh, and because they don't seem to care, in fact, like it. We look down on them because, as a group, they know more about current NASCAR standings than they know -- or care to know -- about what's afoot within the top ranks of their own government. And, as we've learned at each election since 1994 – they vote. These Wal-Mart-ers prefer their information on the light side, hold the nuance. As they flip their TV remotes through a couple hundred channels of brain Novocaine, they occasionally cross paths with the news. And the news wants those glazed eyeballs. FOX and CNN now compete for the Wal-Mart-er demographic. Both networks know that Wal-Mart-ers suffer from notoriously short attention spans and that they hate stories that take more than 30 seconds to explain. But that they are particularly partial to animal stories and any footage showing some poor guy getting slammed in the crotch by an object moving at high speed. CNN knows that if it's going reel in these mouth-breathers they must do so quickly, before they can relocate their remotes. Which explains why that, at a time when the seeds of civil war first sprouted in Iraq, and Iran began building nukes, and North Korea built more nukes, and 45 million American's, including many of these very viewers, could not afford health insurance, and the polar ice caps began to shrink, and genocide raged in Sudan, CNN served up near-nonstop coverage of ---- “BREAKING NEWS: The Run-a-Way Bride.†In a recent editorial, scholar Robert Rapaport put it this way: “Should we call it " The Cracker Factor? " Unless explained by CNN's presence in Atlanta, or the ghost of Scarlett O'Hara rampant, how do we account for this previous year's crop of overheated, overexposed, over-the-top stories about life-supported-spouses, kidnapped children, missing high-schoolers, run-amok lacrosse teams, and run-away brides, emanating from the American South? ... “ Wallowing in the coverage of this Confederate cornpone-ucopia has been enough of a slog. Worse, are the scoldings we Yankee/liberals seem destined to endure about our social, political, and moral shortcomings from such Southern scions as Senators Bill Frist and Saxby Chambliss, the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and former House Republican generalissimo's, Tom Delay and Newt Gingrich. It is enough to make an ex-New Englander conjure up the satanic despoiler himself; General William Tecumseh Sherman, for a second tromp through Georgia. (Full) Rapaport gets it just right. Look no further than CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who named his daily news show, “The Situation Room.†When you name a daily show, “The Situation Room,†there damn well better be a friggin “situation†every day. Lacking stories any real news person would consider a “situation,†CNN pumps up whatever is happening at the moment, no matter how trivial, declaring it “situation†de jur. All of which is perfectly fine as far as our Wal-Mart-er viewers are concerned. They prefer a trivial “situation,†to a news story that forces them to balance opposing views or challenges their low-brow opinion on how things oughta be. So it came to pass that a story about a goofy looking woman who deserted her boyfriend at the alter, became a ratings winner -- the nacho chip version of news. No upsetting pictures of starving childrent or global warming hand wringing. And definitely no booooooooorrrring footage of some Democrat alleging the President of the United States may be breaking the law or aiding and abetting in war crimes. (“In the old days, dang it, we knew what it meant for a President to break the law, like when Clinton lied about sex. Now that was something! Grunt, grunt.†) Yes, we liberals look down on them, the Wal-Mart-ers, those zombie suckers. Because they not only don't know much, but don't care to. They are the great un-curious mass that elected one of their own kind to run our country. They are universally un-curious. Science and supertition homogenize in their brains. Most march dutifully off to church each Sunday's clutching a King James version of the Bible, yet show no curiosity why the God they claim is Perfection, required a royal editor. Or that since their bible is a “version,†-- says so right inside the cover -- a version of what? If there are other versions, what's that all about? Never mind. These folks like their religion the same way they like their politics – straight up, unmixed, uncomplicated, like beer. Anything that challenges their religious or social beliefs are, at best, just noise, unworthy of consideration and, at worst, seditious. These people brush aside evidence that the neo-conservatives they elected to high office are less like their father's Republicans and a lot more a pack of neo-fascists. (And they definitely don't want to hear a history lecture on how ordinary Germans, working stiffs just like them, were suckered by Nazi Party seventy years ago. Because, the Wal-Mart-ers grunt, whatever the superficial similarities, it's not fascism when we do it.) The Wal-Mart-ers have been quiet since they returned George W. Bush, et al to office in 2004. But the neo-cons have begun stirring up their sucker-brigades in preparation for the November mid-term election. I know because I've begun getting hate-emails from these knuckle-draggers: Mr. Pizzo: Did you know the Swift Boat people are genuine heroes, not phonies like Kerry and Murtha. But then real heroes make Liberals feel guilty about enjoying the protection of real men. I do know you Liberals NEVER WANT TO TO READ THE OPPOSITE POINT ..... You're so full of shit. You should be considered anti-American. You, like Murtha are quick to present the negative and now you, your kind, including Murtha are shown to be liers and full of shit. (Most Wal-Mart-ers seem to suffer from a sticky ALL CAPS key. It's their way of grunting, virtually.) Anyway they are baaaacckkkk -- the Wal-Mart-er voters. They've put down their remotes, rallied by the call of the wild neo-con. Called back into action for November. From radio talk shows, to the floor of Congress, to the White House, the sucker bait has been put out: “The liberals are burning your flag! Are you gonna let them get away with it?†“Boys are marrying other boys! Girls are marrying other girls. Is your child next?†“Your President took the guy the runs Japan to Graceland today! Whata guy -- A real guy... not like those two fairies in that gay cowboy movie!†“Fur-in-ers – maybe carrying dirty bombs! -- are flooding across our borders and the liberals want to take your gun away.†“The liberal media is undermining the war and aiding the terrorists.†Sucker bait. And it's strong stuff apparently. Because it's able to make the Wal-Mart-ers vote against their own interests -- not once, but over and over again. Memo K. Rove Calling all suckers. We need you real Americans once again. Pay no attention to the fact that, since you put us in power, we've gutted the US industrial base, supplanted good paying skilled jobs with low-paying service jobs. Or that you, and everyone you know, are drowning in debt or that you may not be able to afford health insurance. Oh, and pay no mind to the pile of federal IOU's that has soared to stars over the past six years, it's not a problem. It's just paper. And even as record hurricanes, tornadoes and forest fires devastate whole regions, don't listen to those liberal global warming alarmists. They just want to raise your taxes. Pay no attention to any of that stuff. Because none of that is more important than making sure the godless liberals do not gain control of Congress this November. So drop that remote. Cancel that trip to Wal-Mart. America (and God!) needs you to vote Republican this Fall. It's us against the tax raising, flag-burning, gay-marriage loving, god-hating liberals -- and their friends in the terrorist-loving media. We know we can count on you. Karl Yeah, I know it's silly crap. But have no doubt about it -- it works -- every time. These suckers have the flattest learning curve in the history of mankind. If they were chickens they'd accept a dinner invitation from Col. Sanders. So there. I got it off my chest. Call me culture snob if you must. But that's how I feel. I am sick and tired of trying to pretend that those folks... the Wal-Mart-ers.. actually have something valuable to teach us. Or, that while I may disagree with them on some things, the ideas that motivate them hold any moral equivalence with the actual challenges facing America and the world. Because they don't. Not even close. The issues that motivate the Wal-Mart-ers are simplistic, divisive sucker bait, set out for suckers who, time and time again, gobble it all down, even though there own lives get worse each time. Only a moron would fall the same scam so many times. There's simply no other way to interpret such behavior. Still, as I said, there's a helluva lot of them out there, and Democrats have learned that these folks cannot be ignored. The GOP has perfected the care and feeding of this army of zombie suckers into an fine art. When summoned they march, stiff-legged, to Karl Rove's violin - every time. So, it's time to start dealing with them. But how? As I see it there's only two ways to deal with them this group. One way is to engage them, try to win them over to our side. That's what Hillary Clinton is trying to do with her silly-ass flag burning amendment. Instead of fighting the “vast rightwing conspiracy,†Hillary court it. Which is okay I guess if all you care about is getting caried into high office on the backs of morons. The other way – the better way -- is for liberials to free themselves from the lodestone of political correctness -- to stop pretending the Wal-Mart-er demographic is worthy of an iota of respect. Instead of trying to humor them, confront their lazy ignorance and their knee-jerk jingoism. Question their own patriotism when they try to insert religious dogma into the secular political process, or make excuses for unconstitutional misbehavior by the executive branch. Six years ago excuses could be made for them. But now the damage those they put into power is so evident no future excuses can be made for them. They're like parents who continued to send their kids to slumber parties with Michael Jackson. I'm tellin' ya, the time has come to crack heads, figuratively speaking, with these low-brow, ill-informed voters. Because democracy is not a state of nature but a state of mind. And as such, it requires just that – a mind – to be effective. It needs minds that think, question, examine and votes based on facts rather than mindless nonsense. It's time liberals get past their reluctance to call a spade a spade when it comes to the GOP's army of ignoramus suckers. Because, as the last six years have shown with brutal clarity, these sucker voters, even more so than terrorists -- represent nothing less than a clear and present danger to our own democracy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted July 13, 2006 Report Share Posted July 13, 2006 On 11 Jul 2006 at 21:21, dar wrote: > So, I just press on with my home remodel, do my > artwork, garden and work in the yard and stay the hell > away from the world. It is so depressing. Thanks for > showing up once in a while to give me a little > hope that I am not a psycho. > > Laura (AKA, AppleAnne) > Man -- not only are you not a psycho, but you are not alone! (And I thought I was!) ....geminiwalker Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted July 21, 2006 Report Share Posted July 21, 2006 I recall having the exact movie repeat itself in real life on many an occasion in the past few years.  The pods must have been planted in most of Americas beds a while back. The reaction to my speaking of “how the King has no clothes†has gone from the initial glazed over look with the chant “I support the President, I am against terrorism†to blank stares of disbelief or even accusations of being “a domestic terrorist.†I personally became a bit paranoid about my exercise of Free Speech after watching C Span and the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings; then reading G Bush’s “Patriot†Act; and finally, listening to Arnold Gonzalez defend patently illegal and unconstitutional actions of the Executive Office. The revelations of Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, and of traveling or secret prisons, refusal (until forced by the Supreme Court less than a month ago) to abide by the Geneva Conventions, and other events have reinforced that I am not paranoid, but that there is indeed a great deal to be afraid of. I do not stay wake at night out of fear of terrorism. A guy with a bomb around his waist is no more threat than a kid with a 25 Auto: you only die once. We face that daily wherever we are. In a very real sense, acts of violence or terrifying events have always been part of the scenery for humans. If one lived alone there would be the possibility of volcanoes, earthquakes, firestorms, and more. Within cities acts of terrorism have been a historic part of American life- from Charlie Mansons crew to the Unibomber. Who could forget the Oklahoma City bomber. One is very likely to be carjacked or come close to it simply driving through town. Home invasions threaten folks in the quiet and safety of their homes, but are common. Malvo killed someone who was mowing their grass. We don’t like them, but humans are used to having bad things happen, and recognize that they cannot be completely avoided. The terrorists I fear are in what was once called public office. One hesitates to refer to “elected†officials as public servants, as clearly the path of non-representative government and government by the elite for the benefit of the elite has effectively replaced it- perhaps through a signing statement. These terrorists work will live long after them. They are eating away the Constitution that makes America worth living in; and while they are busily creating more power for their position, they are spending the people of this country into bankruptcy and beyond while creating enemies throughout the world- kind of like taking an overdose and then lying down in a fire ant bed while stirring the ants. What is most frightening, however, is that no one seems to be able to take note of anything that is happening around them. It is as if they were hypnotized, or drugged. I have been accused of being a “domestic terrorist†for questioning or criticizing. To even ask is to considered a terrorist suspect, or at best sympathetic to terrorism. I have tried to reason why some of us seem to have vision, and some do not. Put another way, I have tried to figure out how I have managed thus far to escape becoming like the rest of the folks about me. Curiously, when I was a student many years ago, I kept trying to figure out how Hitler had managed to mesmerize the German populace. One had to but view the film footage, any of it, to see the jubilation and elation that the very sight of him wrought. Hitler was quite able to accomplish that in them. Folks who lived short distances from concentration camps or crematoria were aware vaguely that things were going on, but were willing to trade off the rights of others for the security and social well being that Hitler brought Germany. Apparently the same sort of mass pod placement must have occoured. I still do not grasp how all those folks were so completely “taken in.†But they were. I still have not figured out the secret to escaping the pods or their influence on the mind either. Like the character in the movie version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I fell asleep briefly. However I snapped wide awake after studying the physics and logistics of the terrible events that happened in New York. I simply could not accept the version of this that was put forth, and with even less investigation or deliberation than that done after the Reichstag fire. The implications of that realization were stunning, eye opening, and productive of real fear of the real terrorists... A shriek is often heard if one dare speak of this however; and out of fear even I have tempered my speech. In that respect, the real terrorists have succeeded in destroying a big chunk of America, something no satchel carrying psychopath could ever do: they have destroyed the very Freedoms that made America a place apart in a world of tyranny and oppression. Michael    Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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