As IF Times

link Critics Choice Movies :: Movie News Headlines :: Just another WordPress site » Blog Archive » ‘Sesame Street’ Reponds To Bert & Ernie Marriage Petition.

This undoubtedly will affect how all men interact as we go forward.  It’s unclear to me the genesis of how Bert and Ernie became to be universally acknowledged as closet living roommates, all the while operating under the cover of teaching  ABC’s to kids.  It’s as if you owned a drinking establishment, when all of a sudden, it came to be frequented by gay males and voila, it’s now a gay bar.

Male-male bonds have been around for thousands of years before now coming under the revisionist scrutiny of our modern sensibilities.  Now, all of sudden we have to look more closely at some of these classic partnerships to see what subtle undertones we’ve been missing all these years.

What about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Butch? Sundance? Riding around on bicycles? Hmm.  What about Felix and Oscar, probably the model for the Bert and Ernie relationship.  One guy was very neat.  Starsky and Hutch?  Didn’t one of them always wear very tight pants?

This scrutiny will extend to the sporting world as well.  Do football players really have to huddle together before every play?  Has anyone noticed where the quarterback’s hands are on the scrimmage line? Even some of the expressions attached to the game are possibly racy in this new light.  Do the uniforms have to be so snug?  Why are there tight ends?  Wide receivers? Why are some players slow to get up from big dog piles after a tackle?  It’s like a light has been turned on!

Hockey doesn’t escape without some questionable images either.  The standard mobbing  and fondling of a player after a goal is scored.  He shoots, he scores?  This has been under our noses for generations and we’re just catching on to it now!  In professional golf, player/caddie teams are legendary including up until recently, Woods/Williams.  Caddies are known for carrying around the players’ bags and of course holding their putters.  At the amateur level, golfers are known to hang out regularly with their usual foursome,  previously considered male bonding.  Hmm.

Seen through the new enlightened  prism of modern culture, very few sports activities escape the vast net of possible gay undertones.  Let’s not even talk about wrestling.

link What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – NYTimes.com.

Even after 3 years and ample evidence from which to draw some rational conclusions, people like Drew Westen are still delusional.  If you read through Westen’s opinions, the answer to the query posed in his headline is embedded within, but despite this, he is unable to make the connection with reality.  It’s as if he knows it, but can’t admit it due to ideological hard wiring.

While he may ask “what happened to Obama’s passion?”, the realists who were not drawn into Obama’s soaring rhetoric already know what happened to it.  It never existed.  It existed only in the minds of the people who,  as Weston describes it, would rather hear stirring stories than face harsh facts.  Westen acknowledges that the vast populace can be taken in by soothing rhetoric and statements that have no basis in reality.  It’s not Obama that has lost his passion.  It’s that reality has set upon the vast populace who naively bought the Pied Piper-like messages offered by his campaign.  As a politician, he has been as masterful as anyone has  ever been in American history,  aided by a complicit and adoring media.

History tells us that we should be skeptical of all politicians, whatever their affiliation. When a nation adopts a Messianic figure like Obama without paying any regard to his complete lack of accomplishments but solely on his ability to read speeches, it is not the fault of the candidate, it is the fault of the naive public.  And of course  the media which allowed this to happen.   Certainly there’s nothing wrong with invoking touchy-feely rhetoric about world peace and equality.  But if that was the only prerequisite for leading a nation, any of the last dozen or so Miss Americas could have been  just as eligible.

Although Westen claims to be an educated professional, he adamantly clings to the cliche notions that it is the usual villains of Wall Street, big business and of course the Republicans that are to blame for all malaise that affects the nation.  Now, with the brunt of reality facing them, delusionals like Westen blame Obama for changing when in fact it has been their own fairyland worldviews that are flawed.

As long as we have enlightened people like Westen avoiding reality, what chance is there that the plain folk will be able to make sense of what to do?  My hope is, plenty.  I’d be willing to bet that the drape of mass delusion that has shrouded a huge contingent of American voters has lifted.  My bet is that the preposterous statements that emanate out of the White House which are completely incongruent with reality, will start to fall on skeptical ears.  A few articles back, I made mention of the similarity of what’s happening in US politics now with the premise of  the old 1962 movie, The Music Man, which depicts a town of rubes taken in by the optimistic promises of  a hustling salesman.  The moral from the movie is the same as the moral we can apply to real life:  The only real changes come from within, not through someone else.  Westen should absorb that instead of the fairy tales he’s used to.  Enough of the storytelling already.