Say nothing.
Sara reminded me of rickrolling, and got me to read the Wikipedia article, and—well, there’s just something about the po-faced seriousness of Wikipedia’s house style, you know?
In the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video, directed by Simon West, a smiling Astley sings and dances to the song in various outfits and venues, sometimes accompanied by backup dancers. A bartender has a notable presence in the video, as his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves. The athletic exertion of many of the other dancers also becomes more intense over the course of Astley’s performance.
You’ve got to say something, but you can’t say something, or you’ll risk unleashing controversy—we assume, for the moment, that your goal isn’t to launch a flame war—and so you bend over backwards to say something about the thing in question without saying anything until that last sentence topples down a Zen navel of staggering uselessness, utterly indistinguishable from its hypothetical Onion parody.
I’d just gotten out of the shower, trying to sluice off the Bakersfield dust, and I stood there before the hotel TV set with the remote in my hand, gawping as the talking head said something like how unfair it was, how he couldn’t get over how unfair it was, that a white politician couldn’t survive something like this. This being Obama’s relationship with the storied Reverend Wright, his unfair survival of which has been only by dint of writing and delivering one of the most powerful speeches in the last, what, 40 years of American rhetoric? Can we make that call yet?
Thing being that it seems the talking head is blithely unaware of white politician John McCain’s relationships with snarlingly vicious anti-American Christianists such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley, that he’s managed to survive by dint of inviting the press corps to a barbecue at his wife’s summer house.
So I yelled at the TV and changed the channel. Alton Brown was showing us how to cook an omelette. —It was only later that it occurred to me: maybe when I was walking through the lobby and saw a giant TV screen full of TV screens full of pictures of Wolf Blitzer standing there, mildly puzzled, before a rank of giant TV screens in his glossy, empty Situation Room; or maybe it was while I was sitting in the Salt Lake City airport and some white-toothed boytoy surrounded by bobbing glossy headshots boasted about sending his Entertainment Tonight Truth Squad out on the thankless task of determining whether Will Smith was really a Scientologist now or what—the talking head had time to fill. He had to say something about the thing in question, but he couldn’t risk saying anything, and so.
…his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves.
It’ll help, I think, keeping this in mind. Whenever they say something stupid (which is, um), they’re just doing their job, which is to say something about the athletic exertions of the background dancers without saying anything at all.
—I’ll smile more, anyway, and yell less, which is as good as it gets these days.
Nope, they are just plain evil racist fucks, doing the work of their corporate masters. There are a million things they could talk about to fill the time (Hell, they could talk about McCain and Hagee and play some Hagee tapes in an endless loop talking about the Whore of Babylon and then play McCain saying that _if_ Hagee had said something anti-Catholic, of course that was not something McCain agreed with, and then they could talk about how “If” didn’t cut it, was McCain saying he didn’t agree that calling the Catholic church the Whore of Babylon was saying something anti-Catholic).
Plenty of shit to fill the time besides repeating the same ridiculous lies about Obama and Wright again and again. Bullets for all of them (this is the US, so there are plenty of bullets to spare).
Now, Charles, you’re spoiling my happy empty smiling moment. Please don’t spoil my happy empty smiling moment.
Maybe McCain could have his “Obama moment” with the Catholic church. “See, my friends, this guy who isn’t my pastor and didn’t baptize my children nor marry my wife and me, he’s still a crazy uncle in the attic, and because he motivates a whole army of such crazy uncles, I gotta blow him and pretend to like it if I wanna be president. I could no more renounce him than I could renounce this corporate lobbyist money.”
I don’t like Obama, so I hate God. I am an anti-God bigot.
A bona fide New York Xtian Democrat told me so, so it must be true.