Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number 20 Aug 6, 2004
Conventional Whizzdom: Fear
Itself
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
“Come on out of there, Uncle Frank! We know you’re in there!”
Muffled groans.
“Lemme alone.”
“You can’t hide any longer!”
“Go away. Just go away.”
“The terror alert’s off the charts!”
More groans.
“I gave at the office. Go ask the Girl Scouts.”
“You’ve been in hiding too long, Uncle Frank!”
Stumbling into the Light
Sometimes it’s hard for Uncle Frank to stand up and be counted.
Nevertheless, he hauls himself to his feet, lurches across the room,
opens the door, and stands leaning against the jamb, one hand over his
eyes. The room behind him is in disarray, the blinds closed, the
curtains drawn. A discarded pizza carton lies on the floor, next to a
half-consumed bottle of Rolling Rock. A television plays a test pattern.
“There’s too much light out here,” he says. “I was watching Fox, and
right about the time Bill O’Reilly started telling me the spin stops
here, something clicked off in my head. So I switched to CNN, but it was
the same thing there. Blondes with big lips and tanned thighs laughing
with the sports guy. Joking about Kerry. So I switched over to MSNBC,
and it was the same thing there, Chris Matthews hollering at someone. I
turned on the local radio, and Sean Hannity was complaining about how
the liberals run the media. I turned on C-SPAN, and sat there for half
an hour watching an empty table with a microphone on it.”
Uncle Frank took his hand away from his eyes and blinked.
“Then Brian Lamb came on and conducted an entire interview without
moving his mouth. It was weird. Too weird. I turned back to CNN, and
George W. was trying to talk. ‘Listen,’ he said, so I listened, but he
didn’t say anything except ‘gonna’ and ‘uh,’ so I went to bed and stayed
there. Jesus. I’d rather read Mallard Fillmore* than follow this
crap-ola.”
Conventional Spawn of Satan!
Who can blame Uncle Frank for hiding under the covers? He feels
dreadful about it, but he’s working hard to bring himself back to a
semblance of citizenship. To borrow from the Bushian lexicon of
lucidity, he’s, uh, listen, he’s gonna wok the vote.
That’s right: If you donno know how to do it, he’ll show you how to
wok the vote.
(That’s fer you old timers out there who remember Rufus Thomas.)
But after all this, nothing gets Uncle Frank up and at ‘em like a
purported insult from the ever-hilarious Ann Coulter. You’ve probably
seen the news of her brief, fleeting employment by USA Today.
USAT hired her to furnish her uniquely partial and imbalanced brand
of commentary on the Democratic convention. She wrote one column, and
got canned. How’s come? She opened her piece by referring to the
gathering in Boston as “the Spawn of Satan convention.” Really. Check it
out:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2004/072604p.htm
The USAT editors thought that was going a bit far, so they
dumped her. Awww, shucks. If Joe McCarthy could see her now.
Frankly, Uncle Frank, a liberal-progressive-godless-socialist
Democrat, is flattered to know that he stands lumped with the Spawn of
Satan, in AC’s purported worldview. He considers it a badge of honor.
But poor Ann: How can any thinking person take her seriously? Does
anyone believe that she believes what she says? Surely no woman in her
right mind could subscribe to the assertions Coulter utters. Assuming
that neither Fox News nor USA Today hires people not in their
right minds, then only one conclusion remains: Ann Coulter says what she
says for money. What a fresh concept! She knows the clientele, and bends
to meet their tastes, regardless of her own.
There’s a word for such behavior, but we won’t use it here.
A Little Trick with Old Nick
So dear Ann did not enjoy the Democratic convention all that much.
Too bad. Uncle Frank found it occasionally agreeable, Spawn o’ Satan
type that he is. He’s looking forward to the Republi-cant convention,
too, when—to follow through on Ann’s alliterative attack—the Bastards of
Beelzebub will bask in the bosom of fear in New York City.
How many times between now and the Repub-fest do you think the Bush
Gang will ramp up the terror alert level? (And, of course, Howard Dean
is taking heat for suggesting that just maybe the elevated alert has some
fuzzy link, maybe, to the Bush Gang’s ambition to deflect attention from
Kerry, and to stoke a gullible public’s anxiety about changing
commanders in the middle of a war.) Today the malefactors are targeting
financial centers; what will it be tomorrow? As one threat segues into
another, who will pay attention, even if, for a change, the fear-mongers
accidentally tell the truth?
Remember Attorney General Lord o’ the Flies Ashcroft’s excited
announcement a month or so ago that the authorities had tracked down a
terrorist plot to destroy a major shopping center? The “terrorist”
nabbed in this operation is apparently a delusional headcase, with
neither tools nor a plan to carry out his “attack.” Haven’t heard much
about this guy lately, have we? Or about what a breakthrough in the
famous War on Terror his indictment represents. “No specific mall was
targeted,” reported CBS News in the following June 16 story. “No
explosives were in hand. And it is unclear that the alleged terrorist
had the wherewithal to do it.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/14/terror/main622950.shtml
Who needs objective evidence when it’s so easy to wave the flag of
fear? George W: He da man. He’s out there trying to scare you out of
your vote, this clueless, lazy, dimwitted, tongue-tied tool of the
Cheney-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Perle neocon cabal, with nothing to sell but
fear itself.
Uncle Frank don’t buy it, pardner. Don’t you, either. It’s poison.
*Mallard Fillmore, by Bruce
Tinsley, conceivably the unfunniest comic strip in the history of the
universe, not excluding Nancy or Family Circus. Uncle
Frank reads it daily in hopes of discerning a subtle and revealing
intelligence within its ostensibly, and perhaps deliberately, cretinous
comedy. You think I’m
exaggerating? Look and see: http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/mallard/about.htm
|
P.O. Box 1580