AndrewX, commenting on this Ed Driscoll post [h/t Instapundit] about the runaway emotional rage of the left, characterizes the contemporary left as:
Hawkeye Pierce became Frank Burns, and the stick up his hindquarters seems even bigger then it was back in the day.
That just nails it. Today’s left are have all of Frank Burns’s attributes: they are arrogant moral scolds and hypocrites of the highest order.
Just remember, lefties: political and cultural suicide is painless.
Hawkeye Pierce was no prize himself. Frank Burns was a Bible-thumping adulterer, but Hawkeye was the shortest-tempered pacifist to ever come out of Hollywood until Sean Penn. And is there any question which hypocrisy is worse? Adultery really is wrong. Opposing totalitarianism isn’t.
I wonder if anybody involved with that show ever has second thoughts about spending a decade arguing it was a mistake for America to stand between South Korea, which has developed into a prosperous, relatively decent society, and North Korea, which is the world’s largest hostage crisis.
How facile. To simply declare so many people to be misfits while ignoring, say, the deranged members of the Tea Party, screaming to take back their country but from whom and for what and from where, being matters not to be thought about.
Clearly, anon, the post is about lefties, not for lefties. Otherwise there would have been lots pictures and fewer polysyllabic words.
** I blush! **
I’ve actually posted this line a couple times around the ‘sphere, ’cause I did have a sense that its pithiness would stick. Glad to see a little movement that way :-)
Now, Bgates, just to clarify, the thing to note about MASH, which I loved in the day and can barely stand now, is just how much Hawkeye moved towards becomeing Frank while the show was still on!!!. BJ Hunnicutt, the quintisential fuzzy lefty, didn’t help. (While Wayne Rogers is now a business analyst on FOX, heh.) So MASH in a strange way really chronicled the morphing of the left from the Merry Pranksters, that Hawkeye and Trapper were, to the insufferably caring-and-make-a-better-world, aren’t-we-just-the-same-as-the-genocidal-North-Koreans Hawkeye and BJ.
So when I say that line, I sort of refer to early, Trapper-era Hawkeye. (But even then, you sorta have a point.)
By all means, do spread the meme!
MASH was a Vietnam allegory. A tremendously popular show but its themes of moral equivalence rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t think many people took it seriously, or not for long, any more than the lampooning of conservatives in “All in the Family” had much lasting effect.
Anon,
To simply declare so many people to be misfits…
I didn’t declare them misfits, I declared them hypocritical moral scolds. Free spirits have evolved into authoritarians. I guess they were always authoritarians (except in matters related to sex) but at least they had a sense of humor and some new ideas. Now all they can do is cry racism and they haven’t had a new idea since the first season of MASH.
Andrew X,
You should sell T-Shirts. I think everyone would get the joke.
Jonathan,
I loved MASH when I was a teenager. In my first year in college I think I watched it three times a day. Then my daughter started watching it in syndication about 10 years ago and tried to watch it with her but I just couldn’t. It was just to childish. I guess I loved it as child because its simplistic and childish world view fitted my own simplistic childhood world view
For example, the show had only a handful of depiction of the nature of the Communist enemy and for every one of those, there were dozens of depictions of bad behavior from South Koreans. Even when they did show the Communist as bad, the characters never seemed to draw a sane lesson. In one episode, a female North Korean “Guerilla” (who attacked in civilian clothing by the way) is protected by Hawkeye from the evil South Korean officers. The North Korean crawls out of her sick bed and attempts to murder a comatose American. Hawkeye is horrified at the incident and gets an I-told-you-so from the South Korean officer but the lesson he draws is “We have to stop this horrible war” and not Communism is insane and evil and has to be fought.”
In retrospect, the show continuously vilified the people whose efforts eventually led to a peaceful, prosperous and democratic South Korea while pretty much giving Kim-il Sun and his get a complete pass. That kind of wraps up modern leftism in a nutshell.
You do know what a straw man is I hope. It is your usual argument and it is regarded as stupid and facile where IQs are above normal.
Oh sorry, how elitist of me.
Pengun, how can your post be elitist when your post makes little sense? If you seem to imply that you or moral relativist leftists have a higher IQ, you didn’t back up your assertion with, well, anything. Basically, the Frank Burns reference got to you (perhaps due to its accuracy) and you felt the urge to reply but you had nothing. Perhaps if you thought a while before you posted your reply, you may have had something.
Oh well, there’s always next time.
Y’know, as the absolute global authority on this particular quote, I would just wrap this thread up by thanking Shannon for noticing it, and pointing that whether it is “facile” or “a straw man” is pretty inherently absurd. It is a humorous observation, of the kind that humorists the world over make every day, that John Stewart or Bill Maher are happy to make 12 times an hour about their targets of choice.
It is noticeable that it pushed some buttons. The fact is, you can call the Left many names, and they will shrug it off: Unpatriotic, anti-democratic, tyrannical…… whether such charges would be “true” or not, the reaction is “Meh… whatever.” But call them the worst of all possible things…. call them “unhip”…… and watch them recoil in absolute horror. This is why they are so categorically unable to acknowledge the inner Frank Burns in themselves, the guy who reacts in outrage if you poke his delicate sensibilities, step on his lifetime treasured and nurtured beliefs, or, God forbid, use mocking humor against him to actually come off as more hip, cutting edge, and willing to step out of bounds and confront the current version of ‘The Man’ than he is. Horrors!
News flash: Hawkeye Peirce has become Frank Burns. He has also become John Lithgow in ‘Footloose’. Just as rigid, prissy, self-righteous, and tightly wrapped in their own little boundries that they insist on inflicting on the rest of us as those characters ever were.
That’s the deal, there’s no escaping it and we all see it…. glaringly.
Tout fini.
PenGun,
Simply calling someone stupid is only a valid argument from someone who thinks of themselves as an elite. I’m supposed to be cowered by being sneered at by my “better”. Unfortunately, you do not come off as impressive as you think you do.
Try an articulate counter argument instead. For starters, try looking up the definition of a “strawman argument.”
Shannon: exactly.