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As a red blooded American man who has a handful of remote controls at his immediate disposal for the very purpose of rifling a wide variety of sounds and images through the glowing box at the end of the cable TV wire, I make no bones about the fact that I’ve engaged my properly opposed thumbs on said devices in order to satiate the intermittent attention deficit disorder which tends to salt and pepper my down time. The particular viewing package in which I subscribe to affords me what seems like a million channels to watch, most of which are local sports networks for parts of the country which I can’t even muster the smallest inkling of a desire to know what’s going on in that neck of the woods. For those of you Ohio residents who are fans of your local sports, I offer my apologies. Why those particular networks appear on my TV in south central Texas is beyond me. Such presence of these out of market networks on my system makes me favor a cafeteria style plan when it comes to filling my head with the mindless dribble which television has to offer.
In recent months of perpetual channel surfing, I’ve encountered the last 30 minutes or so of a Jim Carrey movie called “The Majestic”. In all of the times I’ve run across this movie, I’ve never been able to catch the beginning of it to figure out exactly what was going on. After several games of hit and miss, I finally gave up and set the DVR to record it sometime last week. It wasn’t until last night that I finally watched the film in its entirety.
The story is set in McCarthy’s America where our government blatantly pushed into our private lives and subjected us to interrogation about our constitutionally protected practices of holding whatever ideology we want to. Carrey plays a Hollywood screenwriter without any real convictions who has recently found himself to have been blacklisted. He goes for a drunken drive up the coast one night, has an accident which gives him amnesia, and subsequently gets mistaken for a small town’s favorite son who had been reported missing in action during the war some ten years prior. In the end, Carrey finds his convictions and tells various members of Congress to go get bent with their baseless and unjustified accusations.
Frankly, I’m not the biggest fan of Hollywood and what it has to offer. Even more irritating is when members of the gene pool within the entertainment industry use their status as a celebrity to push their political agendas on their fans. It’s a sad state of affairs that these people who have fans who hang on every word and action in which the celebrity partakes. Sheryl Crow suggested we limit our use of toilet paper to one square per visit. Shortly after Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Barbara Streisand answered questions in a press conference where the culmination of her answers to the problems in this country would be solved by more government intervention. Ted Danson told us about 20 years ago that the human race only had 10 years left on this planet if we didn’t stop our off shore oil drilling. Johnny Depp has been known to go overseas and open his piehole in criticism of his own country, instead of doing it here at home. A few years ago, Linda Ronstadt hijacked her own concert performance to extol the virtues she perceived in Michael Moore for his work on the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. Oprah Winfrey stumped for Obama and even refused to have Sarah Palin on her show until long after the election. In a pledge video released earlier this year, Sean Combs says he’s going to turn the lights out, Jason Bateman promises to flush only after evacuating solid waste, and Demi Moore commits her servitude to Barack Obama. There are plenty of other examples of solid waste which needs to be evacuated and disposed in that video as well. The faces are familiar; however I tend to get a case of anal glaucoma when it comes to exerting the effort to identify all of them. I just can’t see my ass doing that.
Just to offer a little fair time, there have also been a number of conservative celebrities who used their status to push their views as well. Charlton Heston spent his time with the National Rifle Association. In addition, he also spoke out against Time Warner for releasing the song “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T. Chuck Norris stumped for Mike Huckabee in 2008. Even Ronald Reagan was speaking out against socialized medicine before moving into politics.
Not so strange is the fact that we tend to hear more from the liberal minded celebrities pushing their politics over the conservative ones.
Regardless of whether I agree with the paradigms in which the aforementioned celebrities operate, I honor the fact that here in America, those people along with the rest of us have the freedom to say and believe whatever they want, provided that the exercise of those beliefs does not infringe on the rights of others. That’s not the case in other countries. Case in point, consider the Nazi’s. In America, Nazis have the right to assemble, perform their salute, and display the swastika. Such action in Germany is an offense which can land someone in prison.
Having arrived in the late 60’s, I have never known of a time where the U.S. government has run amok over the rights of the American citizens like it was known to do back then.
That is, until now.
Nowadays, the government has identified a new menace which is more evil than the red one they were chasing in the 1950’s. Actually, that’s not all together accurate. Under the guise a new menace has been identified, the truth is that those who want to change our way of life have manufactured a collection of crisis’s to sell the electorate on the need for change. As much as they tout the need for change to be in the spirit of making our lives better, their real goals are to put legislation in place to perpetuate their control on the way things are run.
Today’s new menace is the premise that we have too much freedom and not enough regulation. We have the option to purchase health insurance privately in order to avoid financial devastation in the event of a cataclysmic disease, injury, or other life threatening malady. If we opt out of purchasing such coverage, there are no legal consequences. If something comes up and we aren’t covered, we still have access to the necessary healthcare to treat our condition. There are a wide variety of privately funded options to resolve the costs of treatment. Needless to say, we can’t be fined or imprisoned for not purchasing health insurance coverage. The U.S. Constitution does not spell out the ability for any of the three branches of our government to compel us (the people) to buy anything. Rightfully so, as it was a government’s practice of forcing it’s goods on the colonists which led to the Boston Tea Party on this day in 1773. One would tend to think that our Founding Fathers had that little tidbit in their recent memory when they set out to define what the United States of America would be about.
What a difference 236 years makes. One can only wonder if the anniversary of such a pivotal moment in our nation’s history will be celebrated with the proper level of respect it deserves. Will Harry Reid suspend the conspiratorial construction of a universal healthcare bill for a few hours that day in order to pass a resolution acknowledging and applauding the efforts of the colonists on that December evening so long ago? Given the propensity for the A –List players in Reid’s party to exercise hypocrisy at the highest of levels imaginable, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if such a resolution was passed unanimously. Naturally, one can only expect that the Senate would get back to the extended discussion on just how much prison time will be handed down to those who willfully refuse to purchase some sort of government mandated health insurance policy. After all, it’s important that our publically elected officials spend the bulk of their time addressing the business of the people.
To consider things from the big picture point of view, it’s really quite ironic to consider the activities of our government throughout the McCarthy era versus what it’s doing today in the Obama/Reid/Pelosi era. One of the biggest fears Uncle Sam had back then was whether all of his nieces and nephews had communistic machinations. Nearly 60 years later, his paradigm for legislation is based specifically on that premise.
