Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The sadly obligatory Peter Fonda has absolutely lost it post




So what's a former counter-culture icon to do when he wakes up to find much of the liberal orthodoxy for which he raged has gone establishment? Make not-so-veiled death threats against the President, that's what.

Lars von Trier, who was banned from Cannes for praising Hitler, was not the only one making unsavoury comments at the film festival.

Peter Fonda, the star of Easy Rider, suggested to Mandrake that he was encouraging his grandchildren to shoot President Barack Obama.

“I’m training my grandchildren to use long-range rifles,” said the actor, 71. “For what purpose? Well, I’m not going to say the words 'Barack Obama’, but …”

He added, enigmatically: “It’s more of a thought process than an actuality, but we are heading for a major conflict between the haves and the have nots. I came here many years ago with a biker movie and we stopped a war. Now, it’s about starting the world.

“I prefer to not to use the words, 'let’s stop something’. I prefer to say, 'let’s start something, let’s start the world’.
(italics, ours)

To paraphrase Jeff Foxorthy, he came there many years ago with a movie that red necks thought had a happy ending.



Pete... easy, dude. In a sense, your side won so why the anger?


Maybe it's the fact that in "winning", the counter-culture isn't so "counter" anymore and when your brand revolved around rebelling, what's so fun about that? You kinda felt it was coming, though, didn't you, when Nike started using The Beatles' "Revolution" to shill their sneakers back in the mid-late 80s.


Hippies once were the counterculture. Liberals were the nonconformist rebels, boldly wearing unwashed anarchy on tattered sleeve. They loudly and proudly raged against the establishment machine.

Today, they are the establishment machine.

All of our ruling-class institutions - academia, courts, government, media and entertainment industries - are teeming with closed-minded, hard-left ideologues who seek to “fundamentally transform America.”

But they already have transformed America, so what are they transforming against but themselves and their own ideology?

Still, liberals - or “progressives,” as they prefer to be called - persist in laboring under an embarrassing misconception: They honestly believe they remain the nonconformists. It’s precious.

In fact, today’s liberals are nothing of the sort. They compliantly conform - like little windup, patchouli-daubed lemmings - to a carnival-prize caricature of what they imagine nonconformity to look like. You know, the usual stuff: neo-Marxism, environmentalist activism, sexual relativism, big-government nanny statism, an actions-without-consequences rendering of reproductive rights, and other such populist nonsense. Simply put, today’s progressive nonconformist conforms.


This reminds us of the lunacy of that one union activist that was caught on tape a few months back advocating for the disruption of the capitalist system and "nuking" Wall Street with the hope of loosening Wall St.'s grip on power. Hilarious. Union power, particularly that of the public employee unions absolutely depends on the maintenance of the status quo. Those unions and their friends sitting at the levers of power in the government are the power structure. Those protests in Wisconsin back in March were protests for conformity, for the status quo.

We suppose, then that some people are just sore winners.

Sorry, Pete... not feelin' ya. Oh, and please stop with this talk about the President. That's not being a rebel, that's just being stupid. You're pissed off? Fine, but let's take care of business at the ballot box, shall we?


P.S. One of the hugest ironies of all-time in pop culture remains the punk rock scene. All that rebelling, all that raging, all that non-conformity and alleged individualism and for the most part the politics they embraced was command and control, collectivist, income-redistributing Socialism.

6 comments:

Harrison said...

This and Lars going off saying he thought he was a Jew but is a Nazi are two of the oddest things about Cannes. I haven't been following this Fonda thing too much but I have read a few stories about him going off. Why would he ask people to write Obama and use the same words he did? He has gone off the deep end of the tofu.

Anonymous said...

peter fonda is racist. there, i said it.

Anonymous said...

in re punk:
i think in the beginning of the movement it wasn't political. then the clash showed up.

not to take anything away from them-it wasn't their fault someone labled them in the genre.

Dean said...

Love The Clash... but, yeah, they were a bunch of leftists.

"Spanish Bombs", "Lost in the Supermarket", "Jimmy Jazz"... didn't get any better than that in the early 80s.

Dean said...

Harrison, just one big bad trip, man.

Harrison said...

You know... he said in making Rasy Rider he helped end Vietnam. He has gone off the deep end as Fondas are meant to do!