BHASKAR SUNKARA

I honestly haven’t felt this weepy since I watched Steel Magnolias for the eighth first never time. You can tell that Glenn Beck took some drama classes in junior high. I wonder how that’ll go over with his viewing audience.  On a related note it is comforting to hear that my friends at Fox believe in America. I was in the midst of an existential crisis and I needed the reassurance.

The fact that the video appears to be directed by the talent behind your average softcore porn flick belies its content.

It’s an appeal for unity, an independent media and the Emancipation Proclamation against vile leftist forces that want to import class struggle from abroad, achieve hegemony in the media and the universities and apparently reinstate slavery.

It was very nice to see Oliver North in the video too.  Here’s a man who spent the best years of his life trying to civilize the yellow rabble in Vietnam and selling arms to the theocrats in Iran, but still had the keen eye to “find Jesus” and renew his commitment to the Catholic faith.  He proceeded to use this new found strength to arm right-wing death squads in Central America that actively targeted and murdered progressive Catholic clergy members. Ollie was also involved in organizing the transport of cocaine and marijuana from South and Central America to help fund the Contra “freedom fighters.” Somehow for these admirable services to his country some activist judge decided to throw him in jail for three-years and charge him 150,000 dollars in fines. (It was probably some racist Hispanic woman). Thankfully his convictions were vacated with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.  The ACLU took a brave stand for middle-aged, white, war-criminals everywhere, a vulnerable group that has historically bore the brunt of the American injustice system.  It’s not like their services could have been rendered elsewhere.

Ollie North then ran for Senate in Virginia and lost by a slim margin in 1994 (the good old days, back when it was the real Virginia before all the gays, yuppies and colored folks started pouring in).  Naturally being a celebrity reactionary-extraordinaire he took to the radio waves and now to television to spread his gospel.  “Fair and balanced” FOX will presumably follow War Stories with Oliver North with War Stories with Widowed Latin American, Vietnamese, Iraqi and Persian Women.

Ollie North gets to tell yarns from his life–well spent contributing to the death of 4 million Vietnamese, 2 million Laotians and Cambodians and 60,000 Americans in his mid-20s.  He followed it up by playing a role in a Middle-Eastern war that claimed a million lives.  He then funded by unscrupulous means a Contra force that some might describe as a CIA-sponsored death squad that raped and maimed civilians; then again Paul Berman convinced a few American liberals that the Contras were actually a grassroots peasant movement seeking to overthrow a brutal Leninist dictatorship in Nicaragua… tu’meytow, tu’maatow.

Ollie North actively supported and campaigned for McCain and other Republican candidates in 2008, but somehow it was a bigger story that Bill Ayers, someone who blew up a few empty buildings around the same time Ollie North was playing Rambo in Vietnam, was caught inhaling the same stuffy air as Obama at a charity conference.

Somehow after seeing Ollie North’s debonair mug in that video again I’m less weepy and more aroused enraged now.  I need to unwind and calm down a bit. I’m torn between rewatching The Notebook and popping in Sleepless in Seattle. (In case you philistines are wondering and I know you are, Dirty Dancing wears its free-spirited youthfulness on its sleeve a bit much for my taste.)