Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
As Lorne Greene might’ve said, “that’s a-hundred-and-five to you or me.” And there he sits, somewhere in the space around Queen Anne Hill and Lake Union, piling thousands upon thousands of items into the two columns, the left and the right.
He’s in that paper-thin upper crust of bloggers…and of course, although few will aspire to point it out, we all know what that means. It means he possesses the testicular fortitude to notice things. I first noticed Gerard Van der Leun noticing things some four years ago, shortly after Rush Limbaugh noticed him noticing his things. You’ll recall a certain young maggot, kind of a freckle-faced evil Jimmy Olsen, had opined in a newspaper column “I don’t support the troops.” Hugh Hewitt subsequently interviewed the maggot on a radio program, and listeners tuned in to find out if this was the work of a brave conscientious objector speaking truth to power, or…a maggot.
The sound clip is no longer available. But the verdict was clear. Maggot, maggot. Supermaggot. I made earlier reference to testicular fortitude — this poor maggot had been robbed of his, by a post-modern culture a little bit too eager to apologize for a patriarchal supremacy that it never really had.
Of the tinny anti-masculine undertones, Gerard had this to say:
You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.
The voice whisps across your ears as if the speaker is in a state of perpetual uncertainty with every utterance. It is as if, male or female, there is no foundation or soul within the speaker on which the voice can rest and rise. As a result, it has a misty quality to it that denies it any unique character at all.
:
Above all, it is a sexless voice. Not, I hasten to add, a “gay” voice. Not that at all. It is neither that gentle nor that musical. Nor is it that old shabby lisping stereotype best consigned to the dustbin of popular culture. No, this is a new old voice of a generation of ostensible men and women who have been educated and acculturated out of, or say rather, to the far side of any gender at all. It is, as I have indicated above, the voice of the neutered. And in this I mean that of the transitive verb: To castrate or spay. The voice and the kids that carry it is the triumphant achievement of our halls of secondary and higher education. These children did not speak this way naturally, they were taught. And like good children seeking only to please their teachers and then their employers, they learned.
It now seems prescient. This was the topsoil from which the weed that is the Obama administration eventually sprang forth. The American Castrati, each individual deciding for himself how he would speak his truth to power, what jokes to recycle, where to insert the word “basically” into his next quasi-question…but…as far as what to think, deciding without benefit of mental testicles. Going with the herd. Or the swarm. Floating up his audible trial balloons, with the “slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences.”
And somewhere in the nest, at the nucleus of the swarm, someone makes the call about which trial balloons will be given an atta-boy and which will be smacked down. From that binary enforcement, the message radiates outward and the hive is kept in sync. It opposes war, and troops. Champions increased minimum wage. Rolls back the Bush tax cuts. It seems to think the ultimate solution to the oil spill is to tax and fine BP out of existence. It loves the ObamaCare law, no matter what it says.
It knows of few constants in the universe. Other than whatever is white must be bad, whatever is male and straight must be bad, anything gay is golden, and one of the best ways to make a given commodity more affordable is to make it much more expensive for companies to bring it to market.
Gerard noticed the urban, neutralized, gelded oration from those in what we call Generation X. He noticed this because he has the balls they lack. He’s a registered democrat (or was), brought into the real world, the world of cause-and-effect in which true things remain true regardless of who agrees — by, among other things, that awful Tuesday morning in 2001.
Some of the most fascinating and foresighted bloggers I know are in that camp. They were on the left side until eight years and nine months ago.
Here’s to ya Gerard. Many more.
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Thank you, Morgan. Thank you very much.
- vanderleun | 06/17/2010 @ 19:30