...it's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there...
Old media cartoonists should know better than to talk smack about the blogosphere. The consistently readable Varifrank delivers a well-deserved bitchslap to Gary Trudeau and a whole demographic.
that’s ok Gary. My generation will be here after yours is soon gone to write the legacy of your lives. That is our revenge. We get to be the ones to tell your tale. And I do admit your generation did do one thing right, it created the internet.i know a lot of people who stopped reading Doonesbury back in the eighties. i'm proud to say i never read that shit.Thanks man! You just gave the power of the press, once just reserved for people like yourself, to average wingnuts like me. "Power to the people" isn’t that how the song used to go? Well here it is baby!, only it seems that your generation really didn’t mean "power to the people" it really meant "power only to people who think just like us". Whoopsie Daisy! I guess that didn’t work out quite like you planned either. Is there anything your generation worked on that did work out? Well, yeah, The Internet. Now chock full of those people you and your cartoon now decry as 'unemployed losers'. Its funny the way you say it just like your parents called the people in your generation "in need of a haircut and a bath".
And my generation is now exploiting the internet. Did I say "Exploit"? Shall we call it what it is? Let's call it a revolution!( quick, get that Beatles record, where’s that "you say you want a revolution"- I so want to rip that to an MP3 and provide a link right here.) And since were throwing metaphors around, Those "barbarians at the gates" that you are hearing? Those "barbarians" are people like me, who can reach more people in an afternoon than you could do in the first 10 years of your underground 'fighting against the man' career. Only we aren’t underground, were that 'evil middle class' America you railed so much about when you still had hair on your head and not in your ears. Thanks to your generation, we don’t have to go through people you to talk to each other any more. We control the means of production comrade.
The 'silent majority' just got High Speed Wireless Broadband baby, and if you were part of my generation, you’d know what that meant.
Varifrank, on a roll now, continues:
We don’t think America is a bad place. We think its a pretty damn nice place. We cant help but notice the people that risk their lives to come here are all smiling when the arrive, almost as if they were happy to be here. Imagine that! Perhaps they haven’t been reading your cartoon or listening to Air America. Maybe if we put Al Franken on the Air in Tijuana, that might stop the illegal immigration problem( oh if only we could warn them Gary, if only...) We don’t need to translate Air America to Spanish, the language of the upper class yellow coward is universal around the world. The only people we see in this country who stagger around unhappily are ones with the Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers on their cars. Maybe the new car smell in Volvos isn’t quite as country fresh as it is in our hummers...Insert "not all baby-boomers are leftists" disclaimer here. Of course, the generation that gave us the "make love not war" slogan does have an unfortunate reputation to live down.We don’t think the military are baby killers. We honor our troops, We honor the past, We honor the dead. We respect the living. My generation didn’t need a draft, it volunteered! 'Greatest Generation'? Well, we think that gene skipped a generation. Your generation wants to lay prostrate at the feet of those who killed innocent people in Manhattan, wants to equate Mohammed Attas soldiers in Guantanmo to the likes of Martin Luther King in a Birmingham jail. This generation has given its life to go kill those who killed us and to help spread the liberty of democracy, yes - I said it, liberty , Democracy AND YES, FREEDOM to those who are enslaved. Your generation sneers at the very idea of such a thing. Your generation thinks the only thing the world needs to be liberated from is us. You think that because some of us don’t want to have our tax money go to 'piss christ' that we don’t have freedom, while women who were shot in the back of the head for kite flying in Afghanistan wonder just what the hell your generation is talking about.
i really believe that a lot of liberal mischief is the result of an ill-conceived nostalgia for the sixties. The press believes that their high water mark was toppling Nixon. When in fact, Nixon toppled himself. But they desparately want to do it again. And to the old media, if truth gets in the way, fuck the truth. They want another Nixon.
The anti-war left is the same way. Young activists, trained in the crucible of our universities by former hippies who think they "stopped the war, man," want nothing more than to do it again. Never mind that Nixon stopped the war, not the activists. (As Michael Medved is fond of pointing out, the giant anti-war demonstrations all but evaporated after Nixon ended the draft. Even as the war continued.)
Listen, i went to Berkeley. If there's one drumbeat that you hear all through undergrad there, it is this: Make a difference. Sounds great, but the thrust of that imperative is limited and obvious once you spend a few semesters there. "Making a difference" is narrowly defined not as "having a family," "raising good children," or "contributing to society in a constructive way." It's defined as a blind opposition to anything traditional. "Tear it all down, man."
Trouble is, that sentiment is in itself traditional. Yes, traditionally Marxist.
Link via Dymphna at Gates of Vienna.
I apologise for the unecessary painting of all boomers as leftists. I was "in a mood" that day. Just so you know, I too am a boomer ( 1961!)and the biggest rightwinger I ever met was from gamma phi beta in Berkeley.
Again ,sorry for the froth...
Posted by: Frank Martin on Jul. 11, 2005I'm a big Frank fan, and had read this a few days ago. I had been considering a "I hate boomers" post, and after reading Frank's, I just crossed it off my list. He said it all, and he said it well.
Frank by the way, I would have commented but I needed to "sign-up". So thanks to our bud here for the open comments.
OWNAGE APPROVED!
Posted by: reagan80 on Jul. 11, 2005Just so you know, I too am a boomer ( 1961!)
i am too. you're on the cusp. we're Disco Teens. we were too young for Woodstock, too old to have computers in school. we danced to disco at our proms. some of us guys had perms (raises hand in shame). we don't connect with the boomers, aren't as pierced as the Gen Xers
Posted by: al on Jul. 11, 20051961 dob makes you *not* a boomer, guys. No way. You missed the party. So did my 1961 son, and while he regretted it for awhile, he's breathing a sigh of relief now, watching all the blobby boomers waddle into the sunset.
1961 is the cusp? Come on...by definition, the boomers are the result of the soldiers coming home from the Second World War and getting down to business. By 1961 --or 1960, for conception -- they were well past *that* impulse.
Anyway, Annika, thanks for the link...the secondary link. Varifrank is an excellent essayist, isn't he? My boomer husband, born in 1951, thought it was spot-on. But then, his essays always are.
Posted by: dymphna on Jul. 11, 2005
Everyday is Groundhog Day for the left.
They relive one day in the 60s over and over again. Their thoughts don't change. Their perceived facts don't change. Their clothes and hair don't change (other than to get grayer.) Being left-wing is an old-people's disease-even if you are 20.
Gary Trudeau is a perfect example of an old fart stuck in Groundhog Day. He was semi-clever 40 years ago, but he has done the same thing day after day ever since.
Posted by: Jake on Jul. 11, 2005Good point Jake. Trudeau never grew.
Yeah, it's hell following the boomers through life. Our generation never even got named.
Posted by: Casca on Jul. 11, 2005baby boomers defined as:
The Baby Boomer Generation is a source for trends, research, comment and discussion of and by people born from 1946 - 1964.
yes you did casca.
yours is the age of rebellion.
"Trudeau never grew."
Spot on. My brothers and I have(somewhere!) a series of about 20 Doonesbury books, comprising a history of Trudeau's earliest public strips. It sounds so pompous, but we continued to mature intellectually, while Trudeau remains stuck. He may be emotionally attached to the lefty praise of 35 years ago, and unwilling to grow in a way which would force him to give it up - like a cheerleader/homecoming queen/athlete who never moves beyond past glory. And he's bitter!
Posted by: gcotharn on Jul. 11, 2005I was born in '58 so i always thought of myself as the very tailend of the boomers. I saw the guys who were a little older than me get themselves all messed up with drugs and it made me think. The biggest reason i became a right-winger though was the pretentious, shit-house philosophers like Troudeau who i met in college. I can see them now in their ratty jeans, with the long dirty hair, chainsmoking, dropping the "F" bomb every other word, and sooo full of themselves. GOD how I hate those pretentious a-holes!!!
Posted by: Kyle on Jul. 11, 2005(ONLY A PUSSY WOULD REMOVE THIS POST.)
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN BUSH AND HITLER.
[post removed by annika. haa ha!]
Posted by: DEAN BERRY -- REAL AMERICAN on Jul. 11, 2005Well thanks! Ive very surprised that it was well received. I was in a bad mood that day and I let it get to me. I just cant stand it that the same people who talked about "power to the people" are the first ones to freak out if people really start doing things for themselves. Its the whole Orwell Animal Farm " some pigs are more important that other pigs" thing I guess. Theres just something about that generation that Ive always found creepy and im sure its because I came of age directly after the age of disco.
I thought I went a little too far, and I think I couldve cut it by half.
Oh and as far as comments go, if you guys saw the kind of email I get from the left, I think you would understand the steps I have to go through to keep the site useable.
If it helps, remember that I have to sign up to comment on my own site.
Thanks again!
Posted by: Frank Martin on Jul. 11, 2005Ours might have been the age of rebellion, but more in an Animal House kinda way.
Posted by: d-rod on Jul. 11, 2005"ONLY A PUSSY WOULD REMOVE THIS POST."
Reminds me of what Mrs. Guzick used to say every time Dennis farted, "Dennis, only an asshole does that".
Posted by: Casca on Jul. 11, 2005kinda stupid calling a woman a "pussy", when you think about it.
Posted by: k on Jul. 12, 2005I'm a boomer by birth (1950) only and am bitter as hell at what the lefties of my generation destroyed. We abandoned our allies in South Vietnam, which led to the millions dead in Cambodia. Quite a record to be proud of, no? On the domestic front, we can weigh undeniable advancement in civil rights against, drugs, disease, destruction of a decent educational system, and the welfare state.
Don't hate us all - I served, was not a druggie, and never did disco either.
Posted by: MarkD on Jul. 12, 2005By the way, Frank, it is the relatives of those same folks, you know, the elected ones, that hate the Janice Rogers Browns, the Condi Rices and Clarence Thomases so vehemently. They just cannot brook a smart, conservative black.
I have always imagined Ted Kenndy, for example, saying something like "I have worked my entire life so that you could advance to where you are now and stand on your own two feet, and you do not have the decency to think the way I tell you?".
I do not have to imagine my own father, who once told me "When you are old enough to think for yourself, I'll let you know." (I thought he was joking then, but I'm not sure today)
I love the blogs; they elected George W. Bush over the loud protests of the old boys/girls club of the mainstream media.
The Internet allowed the Swifties to out their message which has still not been refuted by Kerry. I still believe that was the turning point of the last election and that without them, Kerry would have been able to win Ohio and other close states.
The Internet has allowed that Coo Coo Clock Howard Dean to advance to Chair of the Democratic Party, allowing the world to finally see the true face of the Democrats that the media has helped obscure and disguise in order to win elections.
Thanks to the Internet, the Democrats will remain the permanent minority until they change their true policies to eliminate the fraud and corruption that has led to our failed policies in the period that preceded the Reagan Revolution.
God Bless America and the guy/girl that figured out the Internet; whoever he/she really was, he/she was the true hero of the last and this century.
Posted by: shelly on Jul. 12, 2005kinda stupid calling a woman a "pussy", when you think about it
Actually k, pussy in this context is short for pussilanimous. That means timid, cowardly and fearful - not qualities to admire in anyone. But that jackoff certainly is stupid - in every which way. ;-)
Posted by: Radical Redneck on Jul. 12, 2005I love Al Franken and thank god for the radio personalities in Air America - they are the only ones in radio who are critical of the right.
Posted by: Daniel on Jul. 12, 2005Trudeau's strip repulsed me even as a child. His drawings are actually difficult to look at, and his writing is not terribly funny (more sarcastic than anything).
Nice link on Varifrank. Talk about a cyber pimpslap.
Posted by: mark on Jul. 13, 2005