Media Curmudgeon

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May 7, 2008

I Know You

Guest blogger Paul Talbot writes:

"I’ve found you, you pathetic fool. You are the whisperer. You’re the one with a lot to say but you don’t have the guts to come out and say it. You are doing everything you can to disrupt, derail and deride Barack Obama. But you just don’t have the guts to admit that you are afraid of him because he is black.

I’ve got your number and I’ve got your picture.

That’s you, isn’t it, 42 years ago, holding a copy of “Meet the Beatles,” beaming for the Memphis newspaper photographer, getting ready to sidearm the album onto the preacher’s bonfire.

That’s you, isn’t it, indignant because John Lennon compared his band’s popularity to that of your main apostolic man.

That wasn’t even your album. You stole it from your older sister because she told your parents she caught you whacking off in her closet.

And the only reason you showed up for the Beatles burning at that evangelical church was because you thought Linda Sue Morris would be there.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t. Linda Sue and two of her girlfriends told their parents they were going to a horse show. But they actually went to see Otis Redding.

That sad, intolerant church. It’s sure come a long way, hasn’t it? You’ve got that big video screen now and a sprawling parking lot just like the one at the Winn Dixie.

No, you back off, because I’m allowed to mock your so-called church. I’ve got the right. I was an Episcopal choirboy at St. Gabriel’s in Marion, Massachusetts, where, as part of our indoctrination to capitalism, we were paid to both rehearse and perform at services.

And had we known at the time, we wouldn’t have cared too much about our negro Senator banging Barbara Walters.

So, after you burned that Beatles album, after your stint with Nixon’s Young Republican goons trolling the hotel lobbies at the Miami convention for hot babes and getting nowhere, you sank into the kind of moral swamp your heroes Erlichman and Haldeman would have been proud of.

And today, you’re skulking out of your swamp to badmouth Barack. I’ve heard you and you’re not bad, you’re just credible enough to be dangerous.

But the caper’s up when you tell us we need to be drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to keep America strong and help our working families.

Ironclad, irrefutable proof that you just don’t get it. You don’t see that oil is soon to be yesterday’s news. Hay, oats.

And you don’t even see that the news, yesterday’s, today’s, whatever, well, that’s sort of yesterday’s news also. The news is something else now, and I’m not quite sure what kind of a label to slap on it.

But I know what kind of label to slap on you, you tawdry, shopworn, backwater cracker, yearning for some kind of approval, some kind of belonging, some kind of redemption.

Imagine.

If Otis Redding had performed on a different date, if you had a shot at Linda Sue Morris the night your church burned those Beatles records, there’s no telling how your politics may have turned out."

Posted by Charles Warner at May 7, 2008 10:55 AM

Comments

Steve Touhill at May 7, 2008 10:39 PM writes:

Media Curmudgeon at May 7, 2008 1:57 PM writes:

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