04.23.10
Allentown Band’s PR Campaign On a Roll
Today Allentown hard rock band Poker Face’s campaign paid off big-time in an unexpected place — Springfield, Ohio.
In the Springfield News Sun, the opinion page of this Allentown Morning Call-sized newspaper, it was said:
The level of craziness that has been whipped up over the last year or so is now the dominant posture of America’s conservative wing.
Not that the left has always been sane — the 1960s are witness to that — but recently the right has hands-down cornered irrational exuberance.
A by-product is the rise of militias to fight off some danger perceived in the minds of talk radio personalities and handed off to their foot soldiers tramping about in the woods in their fatigues and guns.
Locally, there is a website for something called the Constitutional Militia of Clark County, which is a bit of a mystery. The site’s only point of contact with its creator is an e-mail address which doesn’t work.
The page does mention that the militia “is proud to announce the adoption of our new official anthem: ‘I’d Rather Die Than Be Your Slave’ by Pokerface, a political rock band from Allentown, PA.???
(Sample verse: It didn’t matter who shot first that day /
They killed my brothers, they laid dead by me — I’m covered in their blood /We hit them hard we made them pay that day / We hung the traitors from the highest trees — No mercy from me)
Leaving aside the questionable use of the word “laid,??? this song is clearly off the planet in terms of lyrics you’d like floating around in the head of someone with access to weapons.
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This week marks the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that took the lives of 168 people, a monument to the irrational mood that comes over our country sometimes.
Let’s turn down the volume.
This despite the quick removal of the ‘US Military Knows Israeli agents did 911’ thing from Poker Face’s website. (DD posted a snapshot of it here earlier this week.)
From the American kook far far right, conspiracy thinking produces a muddle of thought in which denial is the watermark for everything, from 9/11 ‘truth’ movement to the Holocaust and all points in between, no matter the cost to reputations.
In keeping with that, the Poker Face guy quickly followed up with a post today on 9/11 denial:
Sad thing about our accusers, is that they are all living in fantasy land, and dont want to wake up out of their soma coma. They love the entertainment to death drip going in their arms.
Thankfully, others are waking the F-up and have no problem telling the same TRUTHS we tell.
Go back to sleep clueless ones. you only get in the way.
This in a preamble to an article posted from the Holocaust denial publication, the American Free Press, addressing Jesse Ventura’s struggles to keep his cable series on conspiracy theory alive after he associated with 9/11 deniers.
The details of Ventura’s increasing kookiness were explained by Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune two years ago. I’ve excerpted some of the best bits from that column, which itself samples from a piece that ran in the Weekly Standard.
Recently, the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash was in town to report on something we hear little about in the local press: the comings and goings of a guy with “the demeanor of a deranged homeless man.??? Why was Labash interested in this man, when every other reporter in the universe was crammed into the Republican National Convention, which was going on across the river?
The guy in question was our former governor — Jesse Ventura. “The Body??? was back under the big lights, speaking to thousands at the Ron Paul convention at Target Center. Organizers billed the event as a return to Republicans roots. Apparently, they saw Ventura as worthy of star billing.
Labash didn’t pretend to journalistic objectivity. Here’s a sample of his report:
“Backstage I find Jesse Ventura holding court. In jeans and a Navy SEAL T-shirt under a sports jacket, his large shiny head ringed with long wisps of unkempt hair, he has, since leaving office and moving to Mexico, taken on the demeanor of a deranged homeless man.”
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The Ron Paul organizers worked hard to prevent fringe groups from hi-jacking their event, according to Labash. They were particularly concerned about “9/11 Truthers,??? who deny mainstream accounts of the World Trade Center’s destruction. The Paul folks saw Ventura as a serious risk in this regard, and convinced him not to broach the subject, says Labash.
But when he chatted with Ventura backstage, Labash says he learned that Jesse was going to break the taboo:
“I decide to bait Ventura, offering that some of the 9/11 Truthers in the crowd are disappointed their viewpoints aren’t being represented.
“‘They will when I get up there,’ he growls. He says he’s been studying the issue ‘for well over a year and a half,’ and he feels ‘very strongly that the truth has not been forthcoming.’
“When asked what the truth is and whether the government had something to do with it, he says, ‘I don’t know. But I know this, I do have somewhat of a demolition background, being a member of the Navy’s underwater demolition team, and I spoke to a few of my teammates a couple weeks ago. We’re all in agreement that buildings can’t fall at the rate of gravity without being assisted. And that’s called physics, that’s not an opinion.’”
Sure enough. Ventura’s speech threw 9/11 red meat to the boisterous crowd, according to Labash. Although he stopped short of accusing the U.S. government of complicity in the attacks, his speech was loaded with enough cryptic questions and innuendo to make clear where he stands on the issue, says Labash.
Elsewhere, Ventura has gone beyond questions and innuendo. Recently, he endorsed Kevin Barrett – who believes the U.S. government was behind the attacks — for a Wisconsin congressional seat, according to the Star Tribune.
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How did this man get involved with the fringe agenda of the 9/11 deniers?
“Oh God, kill me now,” wrote a waggish critic at TV.com.
“TruTV, which carries such enlightening fare as Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura and Rehab: Party at the Hard Rock Hotel, has okayed Wicked Summah, a reality show in the same vein as Jersey Shore but with “Massholes”—those white-hat, Tom-Brady-jersey-wearing, frat heads—instead of Guidos. Hopefully the house they film the show in will be right next door to the the house where they film I’m Going to Kill My Annoying Neighbors.”
“Hilarious … Oh wait, it’s not supposed to be. Never mind,” judged Newsday.
“Maybe you just want someone to validate a bunch of cockamamie garbage,” opined the Kansas City Star.
“So while it makes for some of the worst investigative television this side of Dateline, seeing a former United States governor sit down and attempt to have a serious discussion with a fat, bearded, middle-aged yokel wearing an undersized 50 Cent t-shirt is the kind of markedly hilarious scenario one could only find on Conspiracy Theory,” said another publication.
Perhaps too unappreciative of art, they are collected at Metacritic here.
The last time DD chatted about Ventura was in December in From Tough Guy to Kook.