FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2021
Same old story, we're told: For some reason, the rant on this morning's Morning Joe made us think of Camus' The Stranger.
More specifically, it made us think of the way the classic text begins:
Mother died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
Camus' narrator was already deeply estranged and alienated right there at the start of the book.
For whatever reason, that famous passage came to mind when Joe began yelling today. He got very red in the face, and he ended up yelling real loud.
For her part, Mika threw in the occasional chirp.
Joe was yelling at the Trump supporters who persist in believing that last year's election was stolen. By the end of his four-minute, 27-second tirade, the angry host was shouting thusly:
SCARBOROUGH (5/21/21): This is not about Joe Biden, this stopped being about Joe Biden a long time ago. This is about you. This is about you playing into what every one of our enemies wants you to play into, that American democracy is not worth being trusted, that American democracy is no different than Russia.
If you believe that, I will say to you what many of you said in the 1960s: America—love it or leave it!
If you don't have respect in American democracy any more, if you don't respect Madisonian checks and balances if your guy doesn't win, if that's the new rules of engagement for this great republic, then just leave our country, because you're unworthy of it, and there are millions of immigrants who will come here and raise their right hand and buy into the creed and believe that we are exceptional, that believe American democracy is the greatest government on the face of the earth, and they will do it proudly, they will salute the flag proudly, and most importantly, they will fight for what that flag represents, while you shame yourself, while you disgrace yourself, while you disgrace our country in the eyes of the world. Yes, this is all on you.
Get the facts, live in the light, follow the truth and love this country, and stop this—or leave! Or leave, If you're going to believe a reality TV show host's lies about the American republic, his desecration of American exceptionalism, then just get the hell out, we don't want you here. That's all I've got to say.
MIKA: You couldn't have said it better.
JOE: Why, thank you.
MIKA: No, I really appreciate that.
The Others no longer respect Madisonian checks and balances! It's no wonder Joe was so mad!
Just for the record, many of the people in question weren't even alive in the 1960s! At any rate, "Just get the hell out, we don't want you here. Love it or leave it," Joe said.
You can watch the full tirade at Mediaite. "Joe Scarborough channeled the rant of fictional Network anchor Howard Beale Friday morning," the site's Colby Hall opined.
Again for the record, when we say that Joe was yelling and shouting, Joe was really yelling and shouting. Experts tell us this:
It's entirely possible that the die has already been cast. The spread of The Crazy is very frustrating, but on the bright side, it does provide a startling anthropology lesson. The spread of The Crazy can be hard to take, but there's no clear way out at this point.
Concerning the way Joe screamed and yelled, our experts told us this:
This is part of the way our human arrangements typically move toward an end. Our brains are hard-wired for this sort of reaction. When things are substantially falling apart, they may tend to just spiral down.
"Camus' narrator was already deeply estranged and alienated right there at the start of the book.
ReplyDeleteFor whatever reason, that famous passage came to mind when Joe began yelling today. He got very red in the face, and he ended up yelling real loud.
For her part, Mika threw in the occasional chirp. "
1. There is no reason why this paragraph from Camus should come to mind when watching a yelling Joe Scarborough, because yelling is not alienated and estranged people behave.
2. Referring to Mika's speech as "chirping" is sexist and derogatory. But what else is new?
3. Name-cropping Camus into an essay where it has no relevance whatsoever is typical of Somerby. It is unclear whether he hopes to appear erudite or wants to buy validation from Camus, a leftist existentialist writer now 70 years in the past, but his misuse of various authors this way stinks.
Scarborough was expressing an opinion -- one I do not agree with. But his point about Republicans abandoning democratic principles remains important and deserves discussion. Somerby has never talked about it here. Instead, he focuses on the fact that Scarborough was yelling! Yelling!
At least Scarborough was emotional in his defense of democracy. Somerby appears to be the estranged and alienated one here, as he forces conservative memes on his readers, clumsily disguised as liberal musing or media analysis. Somerby is the one who doesn't care about Biden's efforts to undo Trump's damage. Somerby doesn't care about the scandals of Trump's minions (except to attack Maddow). Somerby is the disaffected one, the one who might, like Camus, take up residence in a foreign country and write about plagues.
name-cropping = name-dropping
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"Our brains are hard-wired for this sort of reaction. When things are substantially falling apart, they may tend to just spiral down."
ReplyDeleteIf this were true, we wouldn't have survived as a species. Of course this is not what people do.
What does Somerby gain by saying shit like this?
Here is a discussion of three persistent myths about how people behave during an emergency. Somerby seems to be infected with disinformation and needs to read this:
Deletehttps://www.draeger.com/Library/Content/myths-emergency-lt-6340-en.pdf
How do people behave during an emergency? Are they only out for themselves?
Delete"On the contrary: Especially during extreme situations humans manifest themselves as fundamentally social beings. People who have experienced emergencies or catastrophes all report
overwhelming solidarity, readiness to help and generosity between those affected.
Practical observations and scientific studies also confirm that positive social behavior dominates in collectively experienced danger situations. This applies even more if other affected persons are not strangers but familiar people, such as
colleagues. "
"Joe was yelling at the Trump supporters who persist in believing that last year's election was stolen."
ReplyDeleteDembots do protest too much wethinks.
If they really do want us to buy the absurd proposition that the last presidential election was clean, they'd do better by keeping their holes shut.
You're a goddamn liar, and everybody who reads this blog goddamn well knows it.
Delete'The spread of The Crazy can be hard to take, but there's no clear way out at this point.'
ReplyDeleteCertainly for Crazy Trumptards like Somerby there is no clear way out. All Somerby can do is spend the rest of his miserable existence worshipping Donald Trump and defending Roy Moore, Ron Johnson, Devin Nunes and Matt Gaetz
“Concerning the way Joe screamed and yelled, our experts told us this:
ReplyDeleteThis is part of the way our human arrangements typically move toward an end.”
I am angry at the Republicans too.
Sometimes, anger is justified. It is a way to explode people’s complacency. (What’s that complacency called? Oh, yeah: “sleeping in the woods”.)
The “love ethic” preached by Somerby can actually perpetuate injustice. The Republicans tried to refuse to certify Biden’s election? They want to pass laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote? They want to pass laws allowing legislatures to overturn the votes of the people? Saying “I love you, Republicans” isn’t going to stop them. Saying “I hate you” won’t stop them either, but anger is a good motivation to get people off their asses. A persistent problem for Democrats has been the relative lackluster turnout in non-presidential elections.
And anger at least shows you have some interest in the situation, as opposed to Somerby’s faux-“anthropological” detachment. (That is, except when he discusses Maddow. Then his anger is proudly visible.)
And then again, there are the Stacy Abrams’s of the world, who fight as hard as they can and don’t give in to the bullshit despair of “professional” bloggers.
I hope Ms Abrams never reads Somerby. I doubt they would have much in common anyway.
Thus angerly spoke the people who bought into the great Russian hoax. How self-righteous of them.
ReplyDeleteOh, poor baby. Still looking for some vaseline along with Hugo Chavez ?
DeleteWell, great Russian hoax was NOT a hoax. https://tinyurl.com/2sbbtjvz. Remember Mr. Trump was raised by Roy Cohn, who denied every true thing that was ever said. Roy, the gay lawyer, was obsessed with running every gay man or woman out of the U.S. It, along with other things got him disbarred. Just like Michael Cohen. I'm assuming that Trump's next attorney, Giuliani, will be next to be disbarred. I'm not sure that any other person has managed to have two lawyers, let alone three, disbarred.
DeleteAnd I was very much alive during the "America, love it or leave it." This was the Nixon era. Nixon looks like a fine president in comparison to Mr. Trump. At least Nixon had the good grace to walk away from the mess he had made.
No wonder we lose in the media wars, amiright? Reminds me of Hillary and "deplorables" dig. So it goes.
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Hillary? She;s the one they couldn't find any corruption to pin on, correct?
DeleteSo what, Bob? Rush Limbaugh was spewed red-faced anger at liberals over the airwaves for 30 years and was rewarded with $600,000,000 in wealth from our society's billionaire owners.
ReplyDelete"things are substantially falling apart"
ReplyDeleteReally, Bob? Were things falling apart when Limbaugh hit the airwaves in the late 80s? Reaganite Republicans ruled the planet, so what was there to be angry about? The mere existence of liberals was enough to provoke 30 years of red-faced anger.
The show has a pattern of staging outraged soliloquies from Joe down to the couple’s wardrobes and the amount of eyeliner that Mika wears.
ReplyDeleteHe pretends to be outraged over something that's been going on for thirty years. He's been studying the mass-media for 20 years and he still doesn't seem to know that the cable channels adopted the model of talk-radio rage since before he started his blog. That's what Bill-O did for two decades.
ReplyDeleteSomerby doesn’t get inured to such things.
ReplyDeleteIn 2019, Joe and cohost had on degenerate religious nitwit Ken Starr. Joe and his wing man slobbered over Starr like he was a God, doing similar wailing over how unfair Bill Clinton had been to him(!). The next week, Starr was out vouching for Bill Barr who Joe was (rightfully) damning as a corrupt pawn for a degenerate White House. And Starr would now go unmentioned on MJ. Too bad, Bob didn’t notice.
ReplyDeleteBob doesn’t like the tone Scarborough took on his telecast. He invokes an irrelevant quote from Albert Camus. This quote serves notice that Bob is an intellectual. Since Bob is an intellectual, he can justifiably prattle on about the style of Sarborough’s rant. It’s a lofty perch.
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