Subscribe"It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he said. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"
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Of Course Your Vote Counts!
by Stephen Colbert
In every election, many people grapple with the nagging suspicion their vote doesn't count. As a citizen and someone who is always right, it is respectively my duty and my pleasure to tell them they are wrong. In fact, our democracy depends on every citizen recognizing the value of his or her vote.
And here is the value of that vote. In the 2000 presidential election 105,360,260 people cast ballots. That means each person's vote counted 0.000000949%. I defy you to find a mathematician who will tell you that number is less than or equal to zero. Okay, so we can agree, your vote counts. It counts 0.000000949%.
Swish that around in your mouth for a while. How does it taste?
Taste like freedom? 'Cause to me it tastes like jack-all squat.
This brings up a related, better question than "Does your vote count?" Namely, "Does your vote make a difference?" To answer that, perhaps a more visual comparison would be more illustrative. Imagine your vote as a deer tick. And the election as the continent of Asia.
Do you notice the relative size of these two things? See how the deer tick appears in comparison with the largest continent on earth? This gives you a rough idea of the difference your vote makes vis-à-vis the entire electorate.
But there is good news. Due to the rampant (and growing) cynicism of people who feel their vote doesn't make a difference, voter turnout is steadily decreasing. Where this cyciscm comes from escapes me, but it means that with each electoral cycle, the value of one vote increases. Now, it's difficult to imagine a day when the candidates running don't vote. So that's two votes right there. But, it is not difficult to imagine a day when only one other person bothers to vote. And oh, what a valuable vote that would be!
You're welcome.
By using the “urban” makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can’t openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and ’70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.[...]
Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus.[...]
Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life.
Indeed, as Stokes shows, The Birth of a Nation grew organically from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thomas Dixon, a lawyer, politician and Baptist minister born into a slave-holding family in the Confederate state of North Carolina three years into the Civil War, was enraged by the success of a stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His response was to write a quasi-autobiographical novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden (1902), which was both a sequel and a corrective to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story, extending it into the Reconstruction period. Among the characters who reappear in Dixon’s book is the sadistic slave-master Simon Legree, who opportunistically turns Republican, gets elected governor of North Carolina, steals a fortune and relocates to New York City.People rarely make overtly racist works of fiction by accident.
The Leopard’s Spots sold more than a million copies; Dixon’s subsequent Civil War-Reconstruction novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) was even more successful, and was turned into a hit play which toured for several years. Dixon even attempted to make his own movie version of it before joining forces with Griffith, who was another son of the South – indeed, the son of a Kentucky colonel. Griffith, who had been brought up on his father’s war stories and a belief in the nobility of the Confederacy’s lost civilisation, streamlined the melodrama by focusing on two families, the Stonemans of Pennsylvania and the Camerons of South Carolina, and simplified the narrative even as he expanded the story backwards to the eve of the war. He also invested Dixon’s material with his own family history, not to mention his fear, race hatred and sexual paranoia.
Among its other outrages, The Birth of a Nation presented itself as historically accurate. Stokes enumerates its most blatant distortions. Courts in South Carolina were never dominated by blacks, and ex-Confederates experienced only a partial and temporary disenfranchisement at the polls. Blacks held a majority of the seats in the state legislature but never controlled the state apparatus (and made no attempt to legislate on intermarriage). There was no period of corrupt black rule or black terror; the collapse of law and order had more to do with white attacks on blacks than vice versa. The Ku Klux Klan disbanded in 1869 and was moribund by 1871; it played no role in an anti-Reconstruction counter-revolution. The radical Republican senator Thaddeus Stevens, represented in the film as Austin Stoneman, died in 1868 and never visited South Carolina.
FAIL.
posted by dersins at 9:54 AM on August 18