04.02.10
April Fool’s Everyday for Angry Americans
American extremism is impossible to satirize. It’s a reality cartoon from which there is no escape. And one standard example is rocker Ted Nugent.
The zinc-plated proof of it is that he was too-too-too-much for even his conservative hometown newspaper, the Waco Tribune, which 86’d him as a columnist last year.
“No more namecalling,” said the newspaper.
Asking Ted Nugent to not namecall is like telling Fido that from now on he will have to defecate in the toilet like the rest of the family.
Anyhoo, for yesterday, colleague Chuck was commissioned to do a short piece for the Rhapsody on-line music site. It was an April Fool’s announcement that Nugent had just announced a run for the presidency:
Angry times call for angry measures, so rock ‘n’ roll’s Angriest Old White Man of all — Ted Nugent — is the first candidate to officially declare presidential ambitions for 2012. “The Nuge,” as his bow-hunting buddies call him, will run on a hybrid True Republican/Tea Party/Michigan Militia ticket, he announced Thursday morning at O-Dark-Thirty while clad in full camouflage gear and straddling a great white buffalo on his homestead not far from the ATF-seized former Branch Dividian compound in Waco, Tex . . . With the Atrocious Theodocious at the helm, the G.O.P. arsenal can now train its full stormtroopin’ firepower on Obamacare Maoists, animal-rights numbnuts, states’ rights deniers, illegal invaders, global-warming charlatans, paycheck-blowtorching Fedzillas, bailout-happy congressional cockroaches overloading America’s credit cards like drunken sailors in a Planet of the Apes whorehouse, sperm-whale-shaped children fed on junk food, smokers who expect the healthy to fix their self-poisoned lungs, human leeches claiming poverty [etc] …
He even got the foaming, shouted into a tape recorder run-on style of Nugent’s columns at Human Events pretty close.
Of course, if you watch Glenn Beck for even fifteen minutes you know everyday is an April Fool. You can’t make up more ridiculous stuff and pass it than he does on a daily basis. And since his large audience believes every word, one sees the problem. There’s no longer any real distinction between telling them a story on April Fool’s day as opposed to any other day of the year.
All these people can’t be nuts. But there is something else that has taken root in them over the last decade of polarization and however one tries to describe it — it points only to an increasingly bleak future. (See Digby today.)
So DD thought it unsurprising when the majority of Rhapsody readers who chose to comment did not actually get the Ted Nugent thing was part of the April Fool’s party. Even when other commenters tried to tell them so. They believed it because they wanted to, it seemed entirely consistent with news they get from their regular sources.
Be sure to read the entire thing here. I’ve posted only two of its ‘better,’ or more discouraging — if you will, bits:
You go for it Ted, We as True-Blooded Americans need someone like you as a FrontMan to start kicking some A– so we and the younger generations to come can enjoy a lifestyle as the Constitution was written. I have no doubt the end is near if we don’t remove these “Fedzillas”. I will support you 100% in any way I can.
I’m 100% disabled, but I make my own way; I don’t give em nuthin and I don’t want nuthin! I’m with ya all the way “Lock n Load”
Woodman
I had planned on voting for Palin, but If Ted runs, he’s got my vote! I’ve never been a big fan of his music, but I agree with his line of thinking!
I’ve got a strange hunch that Obama will not complete his 4 years in office as president.
From the end of 2008 here:
I used to catch my dad reading trash like Mandingo and “Masters of Falconhurst” in the early Seventies, books he’d hide away in a closet whenever the neighbors were about to come by. Although something like [Nugent’s political manifesto] “Ted, White and Blue” is non-fiction, it’s a book of quality in the same way that Fifties-made fiction for white men about sex between plantation owners and slaves, fisticuffs and torture made for books of quality.
Approximating $25/hardback, Regnery … made about $600,000 gross on “Ted, White & Blue.”
Sales of 24,000 would have merited Nugent being summarily dropped by a major label in the Seventies.
Another publication for right-wing nutjobs feigning sanity, the City Journal, featured an article by a conservative book reviewer who admitted to some heartburn over the success of “Ted, White and Blue.”
“William Regnery once told his publisher son, ‘If you ever begin to make any money in that business you are going into, you can be pretty sure that you are publishing the wrong kind of books,” writes the reviewer.
“Regnery is now highly profitable, and the elder Regnery’s words loom over such titles as Chuck Norris’s Black Belt Patriotism and Ted Nugent’s Ted, White, and Blue.”
Ted Nugent — from the archives.