Okay so I know I need to get over the election and I hated the idiots who were trying to get a different vote in Ohio.
However how dumbass can you be? I as a white upper middle class American will do very well, and I guess I should say thank you for working to make me richer while you suffer through yet more years of unemployment and a government you doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
I don’t want to be sanctimonious, and I certainly don’t want to hear about all the great people in middle America, but just who hell is so outraged with the NBC for showing an pre-game “vinette” with a white woman attracted to a black male athlete and dropping her towl. Somehow the add depicting identical twins in a sexual overtone we are cool with, but that little show was offensive? Oh and we are cool with nearly any amount of violence and beer drinking being depicted during the superbowl, but then we see Ms. Jackson in a pasty and we freak.
Just how dumb can we be? How much outrage over stupid dumbass stuff can we have, while we ignore basic issues like health care and our kids not being able to go to school safe. How about we address the fact the only jobs becoming available are service jobs for Walmart? I am just tired of the complaints about the wrong things.
What makes you think that your examples are representative of “middle America” (whatever that vague phrase means) and are not simply examples of shrill minorities of certain groups with the will to make their outrage public–while you choose to rant on a fairly niche-driven message board?
Have you fired off angry messages to the various media owners showing support for the scenes that others deplored? Have you encouraged others to follow that example and make their views public?
I suspect that a lot of things that “people” or “some people” or “those people” do are done by much smaller, more organized groups than you might believe (or that they want known).
A few things that suck about this particular pitting:
The flow of your argument was not clear or effective.
You should probably pit one particular advocacy group, as I remember reading something like 99% of all decency complaints received by the FCC come from them (this includes the Janet Jackson and TO ones.)
You didn’t really hit much at anything that can be spread on middle American in it’s entirety.
Of course the problem is you start off by mentioning how middle America is obviously buying into a kleptocrat, then you just drop that argument and go into some unrelated tangent about recent FCC fines.
Dear God. It is like being caught in a sudden hailstorm of extreme leftist vomit. If you don’t want to be upper middle class and you can’t stop wringing your hands over healthcare, give all your property over to a charity hospital.
In the 1930s, Europe looked down their collective noses at middle America. Uneducated, uninterested in Europe, provincial, old-fashioned unsophisticated and somehow embarrassing.
America produced Thorton Wilder, Our Town, Oklahoma!, The Grapes of Wrath, and modern cinema. Europe produced Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler.
Maybe you are right this time, but perhaps not. I for one will not bet against the good sense of modern middle America when it is judged by History in another fifty years.
Paul, I have great respect for your posting but playing the ‘selective listing game’ in this way is as large and silly a generalisation as the OP was.
One could equally say that, in that time, the US helped produce Duvalier, Pinochet, Suharto, Trujillo, Batista and Noriega. And Hiroshima.
In that time Europe produced Émile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss. And all the rest. Etc…etc…
It really isn’t very helpful to play the “who’s done what?” * game.
Apologises if this is actually the point which you are making with your chosen lists.
I wasn’t bragging, I was just throwing together a quick list of some famous dudes to make a rather banal and pointless point.
He did dirink a mean cup of coffee though, I’m told. And kept a decent cookbook diary too.
longat24, the actions of the people you described are not ‘middle America’. These kinds of people are naive shallow, and spineless. They come from all walks of life.
The OP may be painting with too broad a brush, but I do feel his pain–and I live in middle America (but a blue state, thank God).
I think (don’t know for sure) that what he is trying to get at is the black and white thinking and the hypocrisy displayed by American values vs American behaviors. It’s a valid question. And a valid reason for anger. IMO he needs to focus is a bit better.
Right. Because people who engage in black and white thinking are hypocritical morons who deserve every ounce of the scorn and hatred we enlightened people feel for them.
If only those fucking idiots would have some compassion and empathy and understanding for their fellow human beings like we do.
You made me laugh!
I see no problem with the OP venting frustrations about the current state of things. I also see no hypocrisy in venting.
Fankly, turning the other cheek and taking the high road don’t seem to be working for the more liberal folks today. I’m not going so far as to say if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em–but a few rants here and there are not amiss.
The irony is not lost on me–I just think the guy was venting. I say all manner of sweeping statements when irked. Don’t you?
