Once upon a time the word “sheeple” was a clever little riposte reflecting the frustration of some parts of our culture with others who seemed to be thoughtless and easily led.
That time was around the time Hendrix got done playing the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock, and since then it’s usually more a like a trite contrived attempt at in-group signalling because it generally comes from a fairly well-defined range of the ideological spectrum.
This is a snarky li’l rant about how lame it is to be saying it fifty years after the last time it meant anything and thinking you’ve just won the game.
I created a bunch of videos and other digital between 2009 and 2015 or so about a variety of topics, sort of the first version of my official career as a media critic and political analyst and all-around demagogue. Much of it was just free-form ranting on whatever subject I might find at hand, as is this video from 2010, the first zombie content I’m digging up and gathering together under the heading of “JH Classic.”
In this video, we discuss the similarities between how right-wing media builds a disinformation narrative using the same tools employed by professional wrestlers and promoters back in the days when “exhibition wrestling” was a carnival sideshow and often involved conning local men into the ring for fights, which the promoter and his assistants would take bets (“make book”) on from the crowd while suckering their hometown boy into a fight against someone who had already lost a couple of matches and clearly couldn’t fight, but then magically became a martial arts master when Local Boy gets in the ring with him…after all Local Boy’s friends have made bets on him to win.
The scheme varied, and continues doing so to this day, but that was the core scam, the main “work” of the spectacle. In this video I discuss how the same basic psychology is used to befuddle and mesmerize consumers of mass media – and make no mistake, although my focus here was on Fox News and the right, the rest of the spectrum is not walking the moral high ground on this either. You may be able to rationalize some of it by noting it’s not as extreme or as misleading, or even fall into the “ends justify the means” thinking by noting that even if it’s the same tactics, the goal of the strategy is more ethically supportable from the left.
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It really isn’t; the goal is profit, not ideology, and neither your heroes nor mine are any less susceptible to its allure than those we disagree with ideologically.
I’m not going to re-litigate the video here. I chose this particular video because it’s one of several I filmed while staying with my friends Vince and Kym in Royal Oak, Mi. during the spring and summer of 2010. It was they who suggested I go to college, which I did shortly thereafter. I’ve often discussed how I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to self-educate in terms of nomenclature and terminology and tools to present and defend my positions in the “big leagues,” e.g. in a context where that level of academic knowledge is expected as a sign of competence like public speaking, or being an effective activist. Plus it gave me source content to use for playing around with filters and effects in Adobe Premiere. So this video is kind of a snapshot of that moment, basically.
It’s well worth noting how well this strategy has played out and how much more pervasive it’s become in the last decade; we’ve elected Donald Trump, a guy who has literally been an entertainer in the professional wrestling business, to the United States Presidency. Maybe if his fans understood some of this stuff – or if his opponents in the “independent liberal” Facebook Page-o-Sphere understood why they shouldn’t have embraced these tactics in spite of their equal utility as clickbait to generate ad revenue – we wouldn’t have that problem.
Enjoy, and please remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel, there’s a bunch of old content that will be visible there over the coming weeks, plus I’ll be creating and publishing new stuff there as well!
Examining media framing and how information is reported and tilted in ways that are destructive to useful discourse, and other failures of journalism in the context of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. More of a rant by the end. Interesting to note it was right around this time – and I mean it literally may have been the day I filmed this – that I made the decision to go back to college and elevate my own skills. Also, I used to make a lot more puns and little in-jokes and things in my titles, I wonder when I stopped doing that. Probably because it’s crap for SEO.
This is what my media criticism looked like *before* I was objectively qualified to do it at a professional level.
Original description: JH uses an unjustifiably cheery headline as a starting point for discussing the ethical obligations of media.
Back in 2009, there was this weird rash of situation where noted and thankfully now deceased right-wing propagandist-agitator and all-around anthropomorphic feminine hygiene product Rush Limbaugh would say something ridiculous and obnoxious, then a right-wing politician would call him out on it, then a week or two later that same politician would reverse course and apologize to Mr. Limbaugh.
As additional background context, back in the day on usenet’s alt.usenet.kooks group and other places, there was this fella – if I remember correctly it was the now departed Jamie Eckles – who used to write the most hilarious and deeply sarcastic “apologies” to the kooks he was trolling, like being sorry their home team big sports franchise can’t play worth a damn, that kind of thing.
It was in this spirit the original was written, and having come across it recently (2021) while trying to curate archives and realizing that both the subject of the piece and the friend who inspired it are now gone, decided to make it part of the public archive as a tribute to Mr. Eckles…and a constant reminder that Rush Limbaugh was an ignorant pig of a man that far too many people took seriously.
This piece has been edited from the original; a phrase used to refer to homophobes that was acceptable language when this was written no longer is, in my opinion, and a more suitable word that doesn’t itself invoke a slur has been substituted. In making this change I intend not to hide my error in judgement and my poor display of allyship, but to acknowledge and correct it. In recognition of shifting interpretations of things, I’d also like to point out that there’s a ton of sarcasm in this so when you’re seeing things that don’t sound like they’d be coming from me, like misogynist and islamophobic stuff? Yeah, that’s sarcasm. Kinda sucks I feel like I have to say that out loud now, but here we are.
-jh July 6, 2021
I’m Sorry, Rush
In stark defiance of common sense and good taste, it seems that Rush Limbaugh, the Pundit of Palm Beach, has some how ascended from his rightful place as a fringe agitator shilling radio commercials to a legitimized conservative “leader” and, some are suggesting, potential candidate for President in 2012.
Rush Limbaugh’s booking photo from his arrest in 2006. These charges were eventually dropped by the local prosecutor. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Over the last few months, we’ve seen his lapdogs in the Republican party make the mistake of speaking their minds, only to recant time and time again when called out by this odious oxycontin overdoser. Say something bad about Rush one day…and apologize the next.
In keeping with this new tradition of reconciliation and regret, I too wish to make a public apology to Rush Limbaugh.
*ahem*
Dear Mr. Limbaugh:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry that you had such a bitter, miserable childhood, growing up in a home where your parents could afford to send you to broadcast school instead of making you actually work for a living. In a nation where so many of our children and young adults are lucky to find work at all, indeed in a nation where so many of our children have to work to survive, I understand the incredible burden of guilt that your short-cut to a lifetime of sitting on your ass for money must put on you. I’m sorry for not recognizing the depth of intestinal fortitude necessary to bear this onerous burden.
They Were All Against You From The Start
I’m sorry that you have been so viciously used and abused by not one, not two, but three different wives. Your multiple divorces are a stark testament to your unflagging respect for the institution of marriage. Obviously, the evil feminazis you unceremoniously dumped were merely ringers for the vast left-wing conspiracy, trying to bring you down and ruin your reputation by attempting to actually give a damn about you. You poor thing.
I’m sorry you spent so many years in the Boy Scouts without ever once earning a single merit badge. Obviously, the liberal thugs who lead the BSA recognized your sheer genius at an early age, and took every possible step to stop you from succeeding in life. But you got the last laugh, as you earned the most important merit badge of all: the praise and adulation of bootlicking Republican sellouts and their hate-filled, bigoted sycophants all across this great nation.
I’m sorry that the Ivy League curriculum of Southern Missouri State University was so liberal and so beyond your own intellectual scope that you were compelled to drop out after a year. Obviously the hidden cadre of brain surgeons, rocket scientists, political leaders, and multi-billionaires who have sprung from this pinnacle of advanced learning were against you from the start; threatened by your obviously superior intellect, they simply had to sabotage you. Kudos to you for rising above and refusing to let the MAN keep you down.
I’m sorry that your corporate lapdogs at Clear Channel and Premiere Radio saw fit to award you a $400 million contract last year. With your well-known back troubles, it’s unconscionable of them to expect you to carry that weight. Fortunately for you, in Palm Beach there’s a sizable population of illegal immigrants who will happily assist you for 20% of minimum wage or less, even while you agitate your ignorant, bigoted fan base to violence against them!
Betrayal and Impoverishment
I’m sorry that your hero, Ronald Reagan, has been revealed over time for the homophobic elitist economic fumble-thumb that he was. It must truly break your heart every time evil liberal reminds us that the unquestionably failed and destructive policy of “trickle-down” economics is called “Reaganomics” for a reason.
I’m sorry that you make more in a year for sitting on your hate-filled keister for an hour a day than many families in the US will make in a lifetime. Knowing that your personal income tax burden is going to increase – potentially causing you the loss of untold necessities like your five Palm Beach homes or your half-dozen cars that cost a cool half-million or so each – for the sake of allowing yet another drug-addicted, poverty-stricken, malingering minority welfare queen to feed her family for another month must really hurt.
I’m sorry that your 24,000 square foot main home was too small to make the life-size portrait of you that hangs in the front hall any larger…but then for you, life-size is already pretty large. If I get busted with a joint, I’ll eat government potatoes for 90 days and sleep on a concrete mattress. When you get busted with enough pharmaceutical opiates to put the entire Haight-Ashbury district to sleep for a month, you eat with Supreme Court justices and presidents, and sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom
I’m sorry that activist judges trying to write laws for themselves continue to sentence young people to years in overcrowded prisons for selling a little grass, but when it came time for you to pay the piper for your illegal Oxycontin and Viagra prescriptions, you were held to a different standard.
This is totally not fair to you, and it is unforgivable that these judges should put you in such a position.
It must prey terribly on your conscience to be the victim of such judicial disparity; you too deserve to be imprisoned just like a mortal man, and I can totally understand how hurt you must be that you were robbed of this opportunity to better understand that great underclass of self-defined losers in life who so courteously provide you a target for your hate.
Vacation, All I Ever Wanted
And speaking of drugs, I’m sorry that the half-dozen different doctors you went to in order to feed your Oxy addiction didn’t bother ahead of time to warn you that it would cause your reproductive organs to start malfunctioning, thus making it necessary to secure more illegal drugs in the form of Viagra when you take your trips to the Dominican Republic. Of course under ordinary circumstances I wouldn’t be able to imagine what relevance Viagra would have to a single, old, man vacationing in the Dominican Republic, but after years of listening to your show I don’t think it’s any secret that you like to screw young black people as hard and as often as possible.
I’m sorry that you had all that trouble with your ears a few years back. I’m also sorry that you were forced to be able to have a qualified medical professional attend to correcting that trouble when so many in the Welfare World get by just fine without so much as a decent set of teeth. Clearly this was just another liberal plot to cast you as weak and in need of the support of a doctor. I’m glad that you can hear again – but just in case, I’m publishing this in print so you can read it. I’m sorry to be so patronizing.
I’m sorry that Michael J. Fox fakes his Parkinson’s disease for the sake of pushing his evil baby-killing agenda. As you and I both know, all liberals are baby-killers who regularly conduct satanic rituals where they consume placentas and burn the corpses of dead babies to gain the favor of Evil. Clearly Fox is either not taking his medicine or, far more likely, he’s acting in order to gain sympathy from the ignorant so they will fall in to line and promote baby-killing, thus ensuring that Evil continues to be pleased. And you with nothing for protection but a microphone and 45% body fat. Poor fella.
I’m sorry that gay people think they should have the same rights to love and be loved as straight people. Obviously, as a man who has been married three times, you know better than most what constitutes a threat to the great institution of marriage.
I’m sorry that those evil feminazis refuse to admit that they want to be groped and manhandled by mouth-breathing, overweight old perverts. Especially the ones who buy Viagra and fly to the Dominican Republic. Obviously these women know in their hearts that it is their natural duty and obligation to not only tolerate but enjoy sexual harassment, and I’m sorry that we live in a world where it seems that only you and John Norman really understand the “natural order” of things.
I’m sorry that I didn’t take the bone out of my nose before I called your show that one time in Pittsburgh. I’m also sorry that the only reason people like Donovan McNabb is because he’s black. I’m also sorry that all composite police sketches of criminals look like Jesse Jackson…but hey, you know, they all look alike to us anyhow, right?
The Final Grievances Of Poor Rush
I’m sorry that the stupid American public was so outraged over that harmless little college prank at Abu Ghraib. Obviously since the babes were involved, this was all harmless fun. Besides, we all know that Muslims aren’t human anyway, so what’s the problem?
And finally, Rush, I’m sorry that you had to work so hard to hone and sharpen an entertainment persona deliberately calibrated to separate the most gullible marks from the biggest percentage of their dollars.
I’m sure that as you cash that $38 million/year paycheck and kick around your 24,000 square foot home, your heart is just breaking to think of all the senior citizens dying in their homes because they can’t afford heat.
I’m sure that your unbearable burden of guilt over the way these people throw their money at you can only be relieved by the liberal (if you’ll pardon the phrase) application of synthetic opiates and erectile dysfunction remedies.
I’m just so glad that, because of your position and political connections, you never need worry about criminal sanctions as a result of using these drugs illegally.
You bear your burdens with aplomb and courage, sir, and I’m sorry that more people don’t recognize your genius.
