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| Lileks vs. Olbermann |
| 2006-09-20 |
| Today's "Bleat" We arrive an hour early for choir, because Tuesday’s pizza night in the tertiary adjunct church basement annex. (It’s a big place.) The kids all watched TV and ate horrible pizza; the moms chatted, the toddlers waddled. Sometimes I chat with the moms, but there wasn’t a seat at the table, and I didn’t want to make everyone move six hundred pounds of coats and purses, so I went up to the library and got the Klemperer diary. (I hadn’t finished it, and when I’m at church with time to spare I pick it up.) I’ve mentioned this before – it’s a meticulous account of life in Dresden during the Nazi regime, written by a Jewish academic whose “Aryan” wife kept him from the chimney. The diaries start in the early years of Hitler’s rule, and it’s unutterably depressing; in 1937 the diarist is insisting that the government cannot last, and all the decent people believe it will fall soon. (He survived the war, incidentally; the diaries go to the end.) I was reading the 1941 passages today. Klemperer had his house confiscated by the state, although he was still obliged to pay for a new roof. He was put in a Jewish Home with his wife. Every month, the noose tightens, and not just for him; shortages are rife, and the planes begin to drone overhead. . . . An angry man on the radio yesterday insisted that talk radio was part of the “fascist control” of the media. He was, of course, a barking lunatic, as nuts as the people who were certain Clinton would use Y2K to appoint himself Bubba the First and suspend the Constitution. But if you dial down the rhetoric a little, you find the same overheated sentiments in more mainstream quarters. It reminded me of Keith Olbermann, who, by his own words, is the first person to criticize the current Administration, all other voices of dissent having willingly stifled themselves in accordance with Archie Bunker Act of 2002. The other day he birthed this rich observation: . . .That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think. Thus the lightning flash reveals not merely a President we have already seen, the one who believes he has a monopoly on current truth. It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights. Yes, indeed. Well, having just read what actual altering and reshaping rights looks like, I am disinclined to panic over the thing made out in the distant horizon via lightning, even if it reveals “a world” – presumably Manhattan, below 150th street – in which “authority” – presumably Drinky W. Flyboy, the Resident-in-Chief – actually suggests that thinking is unacceptable, and we must hereby rely on our autonomous nervous system. Hear ye: if ever I announce that the lightning is sending me messages about how the government seeks to control what I think, please have me commited for paranoid schizophrenia. Then again, it’s no ordinary lightning flash. It simultaneously “reveals not merely a President we have already seen,” but one who is preparing to revoke Keith Olbermann’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a job on a network a lot of people actually watch. Fine; it’s good red meat, and there’s always a market for that. (Insert obligatory Ann Coulter denunciation!) Mr. O has his furrow, and he will spend the next two years shoving the blade in the dirt. He will have fans and nice write-ups and profiles and the rest of the perks that follow when you stake out a particular niche. Just like Art Bell. And just like Art Bell, he will instantly become a footnote the moment something horrible and significant happens, and his nonsense is swamped by things that actually happen, instead of things he believes are actually suggested. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 "Lileks vs. Olbermann" Cage match! Olbermann's gonna lose that one. :-D |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2006-09-20 15:41 |
| #2 Dan Patrick was the talented one of the pair. |
| Posted by: Eric Jablow 2006-09-20 13:12 |
| #1 But thereÂ’s a certain dark jot of damp trouser-front to OlbermannÂ’s rhetoric as well, no? I thought it was because Oberman drools a lot, but it may be that he wets himself too. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-09-20 10:20 |