In the Friday Wisconsin speech, we were reminded again of how central the Trig pregnancy remains to the Palin phenomenon. McCain, in the three minutes he spent thinking about it, saw Palin as some kind of "reformer". In fact, she was carefully marketing herself in 2008 as the uber-Christianist, and her carrying to term a Down Syndrome baby was the single most important fact about her for the base (and still is). This is what Kristol saw in her: a walking embodiment of the pro-life movement, but also usable to launch further warfare in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan or wherever the next neoconservative adventure can be found.
So what did we learn on Friday? We learned for the first time that the Dish's appalling interest in her odd amniocentesis was onto something. In September 2008, I asked:
Why would a pro-life woman choose the procedure that could lead to the
death of her unborn child rather than the safe, less invasive
procedure? I don't know. It's one of many mystifying weirdnesses in
Palin's own account of her pregnancy.
You'd think I'd accused her of manslaughter. But it now turns out that Palin did have an early ultrasound before the amnio - at least according to her latest version of the one-month-long public pregnancy and miraculous airplane labor across several time zones and continents. And it was the ultrasound, and not the amniocentesis, that revealed the Down Syndrome:
Palin spoke movingly of her youngest son, Trig, who has
Down syndrome. She recalled that when she was pregnant, she underwent
an ultrasound and the technician told her, "I see boy parts."
Later, the technician told her that the baby's neck "is a little bit
thicker," an indication that there might be an extra chromosome. A few
days later, Down syndrome was confirmed.
Presumably, the confirmation came by amniocentesis, a procedure that posed a small but real threat to the baby's life. So the Dish wasn't crazy to ask this obvious question. Palin might have finessed this story last year because she didn't want to answer the question of why, as a pro-life woman, she would risk the life of her unborn child merely to confirm a diagnosis that had already been made. It could also be explained by a simple compression of the pregnancy story - but that's a little convenient given her acute control of the message at the time. There's one other aspect of her current story that's a bit strange as well.
You can forgive the pro-Catholic side for losing the debate in Britain on whether the Catholic church is a force for good in the world. Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan were up against Hitch and Fry. What you cannot forgive is the sheer intellectual shallowness of the defense. Just listen to the small speech above, I mean: really, this is the best we've got?
In Onaiyekan, you have a classic Benedict/JP II Archbishop: dumb as a post, sheltered from the actual debate in the West, incapable of argument, and pathetic as a spokesman. The problem with the theoconservative take-over in the Catholic priesthood is not so much its extremism as its mediocrity. And it is mediocre because it has been trained not to think, not to argue, and not to engage the modern world. It has been trained solely for obedience - blind, dumb, unquestioning, intellectually moribund obedience. Hitch's continued riposte is below. It was not a fair fight, and, for some reason, I still want my church to make a case that is actually intellectually and morally defensible. Under Benedict's weak, reactionary leadership, it is losing the battle of ideas in the West more swiftly than any of us could have predicted:
I've noticed a few right-of-center blogs complaining of double standards on the left, in the denunciations of extremist rhetoric and imagery of the Tea Party marches. Ed Driscoll has a good point. The extremes of the anti-war left before Iraq were every bit as inflammatory and loopy as the Tea Partiers today. Now, they were opposing a war that turned out to be a catastrophe for all involved, while the Tea Partiers are just opposing the working poor having a chance to buy health insurance. But if Godwin's Law is the point, many (but not all) on the left currently do not have a leg to stand on.
I get a lot of criticism for changing my mind on Iraq in the face of the evidence that there were no WMDs, that the war was conducted in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and the occupation was insufficiently planned, under-resourced, etc. But my position on the anti-war marches then was the same as mine on the Tea Party excesses today. From the Dish in March 2003:
As someone with a Christianist upbringing, I agree completely with your reader's take on marriage being about sex. (My husband and I, happily married -- really -- for 40 years, married at 21 because of it.)
That, combined with the Christianist belief that homosexuality is a choice because the God they believe in could not possibly create a homosexual, makes it unacceptable at its core and in the extreme.
Joost Hilterman in the NY Review of Books thinks 2010 could be a very bad year:
[J]ust as Odierno will be pulling out his first combat brigades,
starting in March, Iraq will be entering into a period of fractious wrangling
over the formation of a new government. If Iraqi national forces fail to impose
their control, an absence of political leadership could thus coincide with a
collapse in security; if politicians and their allied militias resort to
violence, the state, including its intelligence apparatus so critical for
maintaining internal stability, could fracture along political, ethnic, and
sectarian lines.
It's coming: the final proof that the surge failed. (And yes, the Iraqi parliament still hasn't come up with an election law because of sectarian divisions).
I don't know why the bone deep and deliberate ignorance of some people
still shocks me, but it does.
I've been to Dachau. I have walked through the gates with the words
"Arbeit Macht Frei" and looked at the showers and the cramped bunks and
the ovens. I have seen the dusty yard where prisoners mustered every
morning. I now know that a place can retain horror and despair in
its soil. You can feel the evil in the air even fifty years later. I
have no idea how anyone survived with their sanity.
There are things for which there are no comparison, things like
the Holocaust, rape, the death of one's child, and yet they are used
with frightening regularity. 'This is like the holocaust'. 'He is like
a Nazi'. 'This is akin to rape'. No. No. And no. There is no like or
akin to these things and using them as political hyperbole shows a
breathtaking lack of humanity. Not to mention an inability or
disinclination to formulate a reasonable argument.
So the Dems' health insurance reform plan is equivalent to the poor,
tortured souls who lost their lives in Dachau and the survivor who
protests the comparison is the "Newest, most current tool of the sick,
perverted, racist, anti-semetic Democrap party".
There are no words.
Indeed there aren't. And the GOP leadership, with the sole exception of Eric Cantor, says nothing.
"This is a montage of footage a few friends and I shot for a Documentary during the summer/fall of 2009. The documentary was shot entirely on the canon 5D MKll in and around Cairo and Beirut."
In principle, there are three ways of limiting human environmental
impacts: through population policy, technology and governance. The
first of those does not offer much scope. Population growth is already
slowing almost as fast as it naturally could. Easier access to family
planning, especially in Africa, could probably lower its expected peak
from around 9 billion to perhaps 8.5 billion. Only Chinese-style
coercion would bring it down much below that; and forcing poor people
to have fewer children than they want because the rich consume too many
of the world’s resources would be immoral.
If this is really the best that Kathryn-Jean Lopez can offer in defense of the Catholic hierarchy's subjugation of women and treatment of nuns, it's pretty sad. She has no arguments. She just has the reflexive defensiveness of the dumb and the orthodox. Every now and again, you get a glimpse into the intellectual quality of the forces of reaction in the church. It is largely execrable - as anyone who has to listen to the Benebots being churned out in today's seminaries will testify.
And then you realize that this is National Review, a place where intellectual Catholicism once had a home, where Buckley and Muggeridge wrote, where Wills got his start ... and now we're left with a person with the intellectual heft of a college sophomore, defending orthodoxy because, well, any critique amounts to "anything goes." Really - pathetic.
Remember going to birthday parties or the carnival as a child and
getting your face painted? Face painting is fun and magical, and it
lets us temporarily transform ourselves. You can be just about
anything, from a fierce animal to a dainty fairy to a weird celebrity
look-alike. Unfortunately, most of us stop getting our faces painting
when we become adults. James Kuhn, however, picked up the habit as an adult – and ran with it...The artist, who lives in Michigan, describes himself as a face paint
illusionist, drag queen, performance artist, and full-time Christian.
Because of my horror at the inhumanity of, the Gaza assault, my support for a two-state solution soon enough to rescue Israel from becoming South Africa, and my desire to see the US-Israel alliance become less suffocatingly one-sided, I am deemed an anti-Semite. This is the fate of most goyim who question the Israeli government on any grounds in Washington, so I cannot complain (at least I am not called a self-hating Jew as most Jewish American critics of Israel's government are).
But when real anti-Semitism emerges, it is hard not to miss it. And if American Jews do not see it in the current Populist right, a faction that loves Israel primarily to bring about the Apocalypse, they need to open their eyes. From the comments section on Ben Smith's story on Elie Wiesel's concern about Dachau being a salient image for universal health insurance:
Rothschilds nothing! Everyone knows that Obama is George
Soros sock puppet. Wasn't Soros Jewish once upon a time? May the
Schwartz be with you.
The jews need to clam up and accept the fact that they are in a Chritian country.
This hollowcost thing is totally overblown by the jewish.
Eli Wiesel should just go back to Indonesia. I don't see him condemnig the terrorist shooter at Fort Hood.
Elie is a whiner. She should stop her whining. You didn't not complane when the libs were calling Bush Hitler.
You
know what? The fact is that at a time in history, The Rosthchild family
controlled practically everything. This is a fact. Not anti semitic. I
resent the Jewish outrage at everything. I am a tea partier. obama is a
Marxist and takes his orders from George Soros... it is similar and
these people need to get a life., Why any Jew would support the Obama
administation is a mystery anyway. He is a Muslim sympathizer and the
greatest threat to Israel ever to sit in the White House. Wake up
Jewish community. Take off the blinders.
A tragic but heartwarming tale about a little girl named Elena:
“They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live,” Keith Desserich said. Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her
cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The
tumor slowly took away her ability to talk. But Elena was still able to write. “That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK,” Brooke Desserich said.
After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter
had left a message behind for them — a lot of messages, actually. “We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said. Then the couple started finding them everywhere. “We started to collect them and they would all say ‘I love you Mom,
Dad and Grace.’ We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep
finding them,” Keith Desserich said. “Literally, there are hundreds of
notes that we found.
The notes were made into a book for cancer research.
The party-buckers on the 220-215 vote on Saturday night included 39
Democrats who voted against the bill. Of them, 31 represent districts
that voted for John McCain over Barack Obama. Republicans are targeting
many of them for defeat in the 2010 election. Of the other eight, three
are serving their first terms in districts in which they defeated or
succeeded Republicans in the 2008 election.
“I read the versions of the House [health reform] bill. I listened to the countless stories of Orleans and Jefferson Parish citizens whose health care costs are exploding – if they are able to obtain health care at all. Louisianans needs real options for primary care, for mental health care, and for expanded health care for seniors and children," - Republican congressman Anh Cao of Louisiana, who voted for health insurance reform last night.
Nick Bilton is one voice in an exchange about digital information over at Edge:
I feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores
rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while
the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the
neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show ... Every moment of our day revolves around the idea of telling stories. So
why should a select group of people in the world be the only ones with
a soapbox or the keys to the printing press to tell their stories? Let
everyone share their information, build their communities, and
contribute to the conversation.
Nick Carr highlights other aspects of the debate. Personally, I love both ways of understanding the changing world. I still read my NYT on dead-tree every morning, with coffee and ginger snaps, and then plunge into the bloggy chaos. Why do we always have to choose between them? Why not both?
Razib Khan dusts off some religious history books:
I agree with Winnifred Sullivan’s argument in The Impossibility of Religious Freedom that one of the ways in which the American religious injunction toward neutrality was made practicable was that religion qua
religion was fundamentally shaped by a belief-centric (orthodoxy)
Protestant model. Why did Roman Catholicism and Judaism not change that
model? Because both of these religions in the United States were
heavily “Protestantized.”
The vast majority of American Jews do not
adhere to the orthopraxy, a system of behaviors and actions, which
defined Judaism for nearly 1,500 years. Rather, their Judaism is
defined by an unadorned monotheism, a small set of rituals, holidays
and taboos, and a “culture.” Similarly, American Catholics are very
hard to differentiate from mainline Protestants in their beliefs &
practices; the Americanist
won over the long haul. In fact, they would no doubt be shocked at how
Protestant American Catholics had become in their outlook.
A new paper demonstrates, once again, that the human brain is the
ultimate category buster, blurring the lines of good and bad, black and
white, until everything is gray. The reason is that our behavior is
deeply contextual, profoundly influenced by our surroundings and
immediate situations. Whether or not we're able to resist sin, then,
might depend more on the details of the sin - and whether or not it
triggers our automatic urges - then on the strength of our moral fiber.
Some think of faith as a simple matter - you have it or
you don't. For these people, further inquiry is unnecessary. Faith is
not accessible to reason. Kierkegaard agrees, a little bit. He never
thought that faith could be understood through logic or rational
thought. Faith, for him, had to have an element of the absurd or it
wouldn't be something special, something outside the normal rules. But
he did not think of faith as simple. He saw it as the hardest thing,
the greatest challenge, the center of the grand torture we call life.
He once said, "If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not
believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe."
Why are you still a Roman Catholic? Why have you not started attending an Episcopal church? Familiar liturgy, similar theology, radically different morality. The US Episcopal church has committed itself to being a community where all people are members, where all people can be married and blessed and become priests and bishops. We in the US are paying a high price for our commitment to equality--a schism in the worldwide Anglican communion--but we are standing firm. We've got Anglican African bishops and Pope Benedict himself trying to poach Episcopal parishes. We're tiny, we're beleaguered, and we are standing up to the entire world and the entire Christian community to do the right thing.
I know that an Englishman named Sullivan is genetically indisposed to ever imagine attending a branch of the Church of England, but, man, we could use your help. This is where you belong.
Another writes:
As a former Catholic, I read "As The Onslaught Continues" and feel
really bad for you. On the one hand, I appreciate that you do not
abandon your faith. But on the other hand, I look at my own situation
and have hope that one day you will truly send the right message and
stop supporting a faith that does not support you.
So here's the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy of Earth's known history, there's
only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about
0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth's history we couldn't even breathe the air.
And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely
fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any
meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly
die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time — assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we're down to about 2% survivability.
The mainstream media and the blogosphere are alike in misunderstanding the Church’s teaching and the nuance taken by Benedict XVI as chief teacher. Please note that you, like the rest who report the stories about Church teaching and gay Catholics, leave out three big pieces of the puzzle.
Three generations of my family have endured a family member going to war. As a Marine, I've left my family to go to war (Afghanistan, Iraq). It was the toughest thing I've ever done. And when my Dad went to war (Desert Storm) it was tough on me (probably tougher on him). Both my Mom and Dad remembered vividly their fathers leaving during WWII, even though they were both only six.
This video, and the young girl's reaction, captures all of the extreme emotions a family endures in such circumstances.
I can see my parents as young children in her. That memory never leaves you.
But now it is worse, when the deployments repeat over and over again, and weigh so heavily on one small part of our population, it is traumatizing beyond description. It makes it worse that the rest of the country goes on as if nothing is happening.
The price of war can be seen all over that young girl's face. Can you imagine if she were finding out not that her father had come home early, but that he would never come home again?
A leopard gecko is displayed in an aquarium tank during the annual
Taiwan International Aquarium Expo at the World Trade Center in Taipei
on November 7, 2009. More then one hundred tanks of fishes from nine
asian countries can be seen during the exhibition. By Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images.
You ask, what it is about sunlight and open debate that Palin is afraid of.
My guess is that it isn't fear. (Though she knows on some level that
she's not capable of debate with her dismal language skills.) I think
that it's because the debate isn't the point. Because she doesn't want
debate. Her sole objective, and that of the neocons who back her, is to
continue consolidating a rabid right wing base, to reinforce the views
they already have and then send them out to keep their fellow members
of the base in line.
"Maddie knows if this bill passes, she knows her mom’s health care will go away and won’t be around for five years. If the bill passes, then no more health care for her mom, because it has to change," - moronic John Shadegg, holding up a baby, fanning unsubstantiated fears and engaging in ideological abstractions.
Republicans are the party of the South these days, and sure, the GOP
will regain power eventually. But will they be able to do it if they
remain a party dominated by the culture of Dixie? Demographics suggest
pretty strongly that they can't, which means that eventually the South
will have to come to grips with the fact that they no longer hold the
whip hand in American politics and probably never will again. This
means acknowledging that they're just another region, one with
influence that waxes and wanes but basically corresponds to their
population. I wonder how long it will take for them to do that?
I just watched the video of the young girl who is surprised when her
father is home from the war. Watching the expressions on her face, I knew instantly what she
felt. I've been in her shoes. My father spent time in the Middle East
during the first Gulf war. I didn't see him for six months. I was about
the same age as this girl is now.
At ten years old, you are old enough to understand that when your
father leaves for war, he is not leaving by choice. It is duty, honor,
and obligation. But abstract notions like war and duty are overshadowed
by the stark reality of one parent not being home. And so at times, you
get angry at your father for not being there, even knowing it's not his
choice. But even the anger comes and goes. The strongest part of the
complex emotional bundle is worry and fear; at ten years old, you are
old enough to understand that if your father is off to war, he might
not return.
So when you see him again, what you feel is complicated. First is
joy. Soon after the joy follows anger. But the tears come from relief.
I
remember the the moment when my mother brought my father home like it
was yesterday.
Carl Hulse has an interesting report on the Republican clusterfuck that led to their losing a safe seat in an off-year election. They were outmaneuvered by the Dems:
Democrats planned to make mischief in the district from the moment Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, approached John M. McHugh, who held the seat, about becoming Army secretary. Democrats smelled opportunity.
They put in place an extensive field operation that has become a hallmark of the House Democrats. Operatives say the party, which spent $1.1 million on the race, had workers knock on more than 101,000 district doors and make more than 108,000 phone calls. The White House dispatched Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to help in the campaign.
Jonathan Martin snuck into the Palinfest in Wisconsin and reports that the crowd was not so wowed:
While she drew applause during her remarks, Palin’s extemporaneous and frequently discursive style was such that she never truly roused a true-believing crowd as passionate about the issue at hand as she. Not once during her address did they rise to their feet.
In a closing exhortation, she urged the audience, “Don't ever let anyone to tell you to sit down and shut up.”
She then got a standing ovation from most of the crowd, but a few had begun to leave before she even finished and within seconds of her concluding, scores more got up and put on their jackets as they walked away.
But they were half a mile long in line to see the Immaculate Misconception beforehand. It seems to me like a Mass. Her very divine presence is all that matters; what she says is largely irrelevant. There's some small news in her re-telling of her fifth pregnancy story (more on the latest version tomorrow), but what strikes me from Jonathan's report is that she has been watching Glenn Beck closely. To wit:
No great comedian is ever amused by himself. Billy Connelly could have been a great comedian had he not taken to collapsing
hysterically during his own routines. The seal on David Brent's
prattishness was his laughing at his own jokes. Then it turned out that Ricky Gervais, who created him, laughs at his own jokes too. Self-satisfaction is an
unpardonable crime in a comedian because his role is to remind us that
nothing is satisfactory. Hence the necessity of keeping a straight
face. It affirms the seriousness of his calling. Which is to make
people laugh, not because life is funny but because it isn't.
Remember the good old days? The days when you could turn on prime-time
television at 9:00 or 10:00 PM and catch an arresting hour-long drama
mid-season and feel thoroughly entertained? Oh sure, maybe you didn't
know all the character's names on ER or what exactly was going on between Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey on LA LAW but, you could pretty much tune in any night and enjoy a well-constructed program. Other shows required even less dedication; The Twilight Zone, Quantum Leap or Law & Order
(in any of its many incarnations) could be watched in whatever sequence
one wished-you always knew Jerry Orbach's mordant one-liners would be
the same. The model made sense; after all, television viewing was a
casual activity - prone to whims of channel surfing and audience
distraction (not to mention toilet breaks). Dramas that forced a deep
commitment of time and mental energy on the viewer simply selected
themselves out of candidacy for Neilsen glory. Not any more.
The Atlantic's Ben Schwarz also explores the "megamovie" in his recent review of Mad Men:
In thinking through the rather good ads that eventually came out in Maine, many are arguing that future marriage campaigns need to go negative against the anti-gay forces. Steve Hildebrand tells Rex Wockner:
We are fools to have spent all this money and time and not have defined
the opponents. It's not enough to answer their charges. We need to hit
them back and not let up on it until voters don't buy their lies
anymore. Malpractice in my opinion.
We can, of course, do both. A campaign that in future took on the Catholic hierarchy for its tolerance of child abuse while denying grown people marriage rights would be a promising start. Ads reminding people of the Mormon church's long, long history of racism would also be salient. We're new to this, and we're learning.
Jim Windolf explores the science behind adorable animals:
“It’s part of our DNA to react to cute things,” says Meg Frost, who
founded Cute Overload in 2005. “What makes me post certain pictures is
if I have an audible reaction—a squeal—when I see the picture. I’m kind
of annoyed at myself for having no control over thinking these things
are so cute. [...]
Specifically, [biologist Melanie] Glocker’s series of experiments demonstrated that the act
of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain
called the nucleus accumbens. “It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent,
“which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward
processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a
variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli,
and drug stimuli.” Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting.
FU Penguin fights the urge to cuddle with the cute dog above:
Moshe Halbertal, a professor who helped craft the Israeli army’s ethics code, picks apart the Goldstone report and critiques its "overall biased tone." Nevertheless, he calls the siege of Gaza "morally problematic and strategically counterproductive." Money quote:
Radical groups such as
Hamas start their struggle with little support from their population,
which tends to be more moderate. They increase their base of support
cynically, by murdering Israeli civilians and thereby goading Israel
into an overreaction (this is not to deny, of course, that Israel can
choose not to overreact) in a way that ends up causing suffering to the
Palestinian civilians among whom the militants take shelter. The death
and the suffering of the civilian Palestinian population, in the short
run, is a part of the Hamas strategy, since it increases the sympathy
of the population with the movement’s aims. An Israeli overreaction
also leads to the shattering of Israel’s moral legitimacy in its own
struggle. In a democratic society with a citizen’s army, any erosion of
the ethical foundation of its soldiers and its citizens is of immense
political and strategic consequence.
I suspect in due course that Gaza will be understood as immoral, and counter-productive. It repelled me in a way that nothing Israel has done repelled me. It was an act of anger and vengeance and cruelty. And it will come back to haunt the Jewish state.
DiA notices that the leaders of both parties are no longer overwhelmingly southern:
Southerners haven't lost their country, but they have lost power—a
power they disproportionately enjoyed for nearly the entire
Clinton-Bush II era..."I want my country back," has become a conservative-populist rallying
cry. They have not truly lost their country, but have seen a wild swing
of power north and towards the coasts. It won't last, either. But it's
a painful reality right now for a region that once revelled in
separatism, then dominated the country as a whole for an oddly long
stretch.
But the South's control of the GOP has never been tighter.
The second thing Thatcher told Gorbachev, according to the transcript, was: “A destabilization of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests.” Why might she have said this? Why would not say instead, “We are fomenting the destruction of the Warsaw Pact in the hope of swiftly burying you?”
For the answer, recall that in September 1989, no one imagined that within two months, the Iron Curtain would dissolve without a drop of blood.
Much more easily envisioned was a Soviet crackdown and a brutal bloodletting, which had happened, within living memory, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and which the Chinese had just perpetrated months before in Tiananmen Square. Reasonable observers were worried that East German leader Erich Honecker was about to massacre thousands of people on the streets of Leipzig and Dresden—a step for which Honecker was preparing by stockpiling body bags. It was equally reasonable to fear that Gorbachev was on the verge of sending in Soviet troops.
The transcript suggests that Thatcher’s goal was to reassure.
A less convincing version of Fox News? Greenwald continues the scrutiny:
The Post today has two former Bush officials, one former Reagan official, two right-wing politicians, a Fox News neocon, the CEO of America's largest oil and gas producer, a defender of the right-wing Honduran military coup leaders, and one liberal columnist.
John Williams reviewsThe Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved:
Disclaimer: Like many people born in 1974, I’m incapable of writing a purely objective review of anything related to The Simpsons.
The 1990s may have been a decade of peace and prosperity in the U.S.,
but it left much to be desired on the pop-culture front. The 1960s had
the British Invasion, the 1970s had the golden age of American film,
the 1980s even had its goofy-but-inimitable mix of MTV, early
Letterman, and John Hughes movies. By comparison, Soundgarden and Singles seemed like a raw deal. But my generation in its youth had The Simpsons in its
youth, and more than just the best thing ever made for TV (Homer’s clan
was practically redeeming the existence of the entire medium when The Wire was but a twinkle in David Simon’s eye), the show’s glory days look more and more like the last gasp of eloquent mischief.
A few fascinating bits of Simpsons history after the jump:
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