Right, so the popular image of the American South in the fifties and sixties had been of rednecks, klansmen and big white cops beating up and shooting at peaceful Black civil rights activists. If you came from the south and were white, you were ignorant at best, stone cold racist at worst. Politically you had that old rotten to the core southern Democratic Party as the flag bearer of that image of the old south, corrupt, segregationist and resist to all change while the country was changed around it. In short, not a nice time to be white, from the south and not a stick in the mud bigot.
And then the seventies came and things changed. The south got less racist, you got a new generation less redneck, more hippie, less racist but not ashamed of being southern either. The south seemed to move away from its past, experience somewhat of a boom as cities like Atlanta attracted new businesses and inhabitants alike as the region got richer and less yokel. Meanwhile Nixon’s great southern strategy –as thought up by Lee Atwater[1]– by which he appealed to that core of racist old Democratic voters by well, stoking their racism, has started to work, which means that the Democratic party in turn can be cleansed of its racist past, become more like it is in the rest of the country.
And so you have this vision of a New South in the mid seventies: young, optimistic, integrated, liberal, proud of its heritage but no longer mired in its past. With the culmination of that vision being Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976. Here you have the first true southern president since the Civil War, somebody both a liberal and from what rightwingers like to believe is their heartland, a Southern Baptist even, but liberal, who had southern rock bands like the Allman Brothers Band campaigning for him.
Is it any wonder that Republicans hate Carter, even now hate him even more than they hate Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, two other Democrats who “stole” their presidency from them? He represented a vision of the south, of their American heartland in direct opposition to what they wanted it to be, a south in which racist dogwhistles would no longer get their core voters worked up. He was a direct threath to their power and they would go to any length to make him lose the election, even going so far as to make deals with what they themselves would call an evil country, Iran, to make sure that the release of American hostages would not take place before the election so that Carter couldn’t profit from it.
that’s Andrew Weiss’ judgement of the seventies and while he may be bitter, he is sadly more right than wrong. The seventies is when the Republicans got their pretty hate machine really going, first used it to kill off Carter and the New South, then just kept dragging the whole of America ever more rightward into the mire, in the process replacing the real south with their Disneyfied, Nashvilled simulacrum of what they wanted the south to be.
[1] Lee Atwater in 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*gger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
So last Summer, nine year old Caine was stuck at his dad’s used car parts shop and bored, so he started making classic arcade games out of cardboard boxes. He got a little bit obsessed with it to tell you the truth, in that way nine year old kids can get obsessed over their hobbies. There was just one little problem: he only had one customer and would’ve liked to see more people play his games. But luckily that solitary customer was geek/film maker Nirvan Mullick and he set out to give Caine the best day of his life.
They can be wearisome sometimes, self congratulatory and up themselves, but sometimes they show that things can get better with geeks. This was a brilliantly sweet thing to do for one lucky nine year old.
I used to love The Village People when I was a kid, but in a way that I suppose is fairly unusual, in that I took them entirely literally. Being only eight or so years old when they first appeared (and perhaps naive even for a kid of that age), I didn’t see the gay subtext (or in their case just plain text) at all. Which meant that I viewed them as a peculiarly big-hearted group who liked to write encouraging, optimistic songs about institutions that were normally overlooked by pop (homeless hostels, the U.S. Navy etc.) and to dress up in cool gear for the pleasure of us kids (because who else could they be dressing like that for?)
If you look at the video on its own it’s camp as hell of course and you wonder how the hell people in the seventies didn’t realise these guys might have ulterior motives to “hang out with all the boys”, but now look at them in their natural context, on Top of the Pops, along with all the Showaddywaddies:
And Real Things:
Really, were the Village People that different from their contemporaries? They fit right in that tradition of light entertainment and inoffensive mums & dads pop music: not too complicated, a catchy tune, lines you can easily sing along too and a wacky dance. In all, they’re not too different from these guys:
Another perspective, more optimistic, same message:
Last Summer’s riots were a warning, but nobody has learned anything from it yet. I don’t think I ever thought I could get less optimistic than I was in 2002-2003 when I saw the world slide into war against Iraq, but my fear is that the only lesson the politicians took out of that debacle is that you can ignore popular discontent as long as you got parliament and the Westminster press bubble on your side. They’re wrong, but a lot of people are going to suffer before these fsckers get their just desserts.
That whole Invisible Children/Kony 2012 campaign is the worst case of “what these people need is a honky” style of activism. It’s overtly simplistic, revolves more about the activists’ egos than about the supposed cause they’re supporting and it all looks a lot like a scam to get money out of idealistic but gullible people. That the director of the video is an Evangelical Christian fits with the m.o.; Evangelical Christians are masters of the fake charity.
It’s been a long time since I’ve been enjoying an old skool sketch show as much as I’ve been enjoying Watson & Oliver. I hadn’t heard of either Lorna Watson or Ingrid Oliver before, but they’ve obviously been around for some time, as they’re quite good and work well together.
A lot of their humour is observational and depending on repetition, as in both the sketch above and below. I’ve known co-workers/volunteers like her below, while the caf sketch is only mildly funny at first, but having been repeated in succesive shows has only become funnier.
They’re also good at getting in character, as seen here in the second of their Kate and Wills sketches.
All in all not a bad way of ending a Monday night.
