Dick Cavett: Real Americans, Please Stand Up

[Hissyspit]

This is from a couple of days ago, but I don't think it got posted here and it is so well-thought out and written, that I wanted everyone to see it.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/real-americans-please-stand-up

August 20, 2010, 9:00 PM
Real Americans, Please Stand Up
By DICK CAVETT

All this talk about the mosque reminds me of two things I heard growing up in Nebraska.

I had a 6th grade teacher who referred to American Indians as “sneaky redskins” and our enemies in the Pacific as “dirty Japs.” This abated somewhat after I asked one day in class, “Mrs. G., do you think our parents would like to know that you teach race prejudice?” She faded three shades. The rest of that year was difficult.

- snip -

I like to think I’m not easily shocked, but here I am, seeing the emotions of the masses running like a freight train over the right to freedom of religion — never mind the right of eminent domain and private property.

A heyday is being had by a posse of the cheesiest Republican politicos (Lazio, Palin, quick-change artist John McCain and, of course, the self-anointed St. Joan of 9/11, R. Giuliani). Balanced, of course by plenty of cheesy Democrats. And of course Rush L. dependably pollutes the atmosphere with his particular brand of airborne sludge.

- snip -

I remain amazed and really, sincerely, want to understand this. What can it be that is faulty in so many people’s thought processes, their ethics, their education, their experience of life, their understanding of their country, their what-have-you that blinds them to the fact that you can’t simultaneously maintain that you have nothing against members of any religion but are willing to penalize members of this one? Can you help me with this?

Set aside for the moment that we are handing such a lethal propaganda grenade to our detractors around the world.

You can’t eat this particular cake and have it, too. The true calamity, of course, is that behavior of this kind allows the enemy to win.

MORE

[RandomThoughts]

1. that enemy did not take my beer away.

Although there religion is against beer, it was something else that did that.


If they were to win or lose, they are not the ones that smeared and took my social and economic situation.

They might be bad also, but if they are not against you, they are for you.



And those that have kept what I should have away, know who they are, and will pay, it has been proven.

[AlbertCat]

42. there religion

Well, what about here religion? Or over there religion? :eyes:

[gratuitous]

2. We are indeed

Handing a lethal propaganda grenade to our detractors around the world. Our standard is supposed to be better than the nitwit fanatics in other countries. Instead, we insist that everything bad they have to say about us has some basis in fact. Oh well, nothing bad can come from this, right? What are they gonna do to the mighty U. S. and A.?

[BrklynLiberal]

39. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in

New York?
Frank Rich 8/22/10

He also gives voice to many of the same thoughts expressed on this thread, and by Mr. Cavett.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html?ref=frankrich

[bleever]

3. The "new" freedom of religion:

A woman tells the news guy on the street, “I have absolutely no prejudice against the Muslim people. My cousin is married to one. I just don’t see why they have to be here.”

:eyes:

[Angry Dragon]

4. Sanity speaks and no one hears

Drowned out by the closed minds and hearts of bigots and hate mongers

[howmad1]

29. What would you expect:;

when we live in the dumbest country on the planet?

[elleng]

5. Posted here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x554863

[Hissyspit]

8. Ah...

Editorials and Other Articles. The place where good articles go to die. :)

Sorry about dupe. Don't know why that didn't show up in my search.

[laughingliberal]

6. K & R nt

[suffragette]

7. Still a class act after all these years

Very well said.

:applause:

[LiberalAndProud]

9. This should go viral.

Mr. Cavett nailed this one.

[pinboy3niner]

10. Cavett's still great

He said of Palin during the campaign, "She doesn't seem to have a first language."

On Palin's selection as VP nominee, he said that McCain "aimed low and missed." :)

[BumRushDaShow]

13. Bwaaahaa!

:rofl:

Perfect!

[xxqqqzme]

41. Have always loved his dry wit.

'aimed low and missed' love it!

[PSzymeczek]

45. That is

utterly fabulous!

[tkmorris]

11. A kick for Dick

Once upon a time he had the most intelligent talk show on television. It wasn't even close. I'd give a lot to see him back on.

[Smarmie Doofus]

14. Every time I try and fail to last ten minutes thru....

...Charlie Rose's nightly drudge- athon, I think exactly the same thing.

>>>>>Once upon a time he had the most intelligent talk show on television. It wasn't even close. I'd give a lot to see him back on.>>>>>>>

[Bluenorthwest]

20. A Cavette quote that explains that situation...

"As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it."

[defendandprotect]

37. Right -- turn off the TVs ... put them in the closet - !!

Not only do we have immense pandering to the basest instincts of human beings

via TV --

There has for decades been a huge interest on the part of elites/corporations to

introduce via our "free press" immense violence -- suggesting we should fear one

another for endless reasons -- and probably arm ourselves!!

Turns out those very same elites were the ones harboring violent concepts of

TORTURE, RAPE, SEXUAL EXPLOITTION, REVENGE, AND GENERAL VIOLENCE which have all been

tossed at the public for decades. Including to young children!

Why? Because the right wing can only rise and succeed via violence -- there is no

other way. That's why we can look back at 50 years and more of overt right wing

political violence which were actually right wing coups on our people's government.

Stole elections/computers another part of this --


And, coming back to the issue of the Muslims and the hatred the right wing has put

in play against them, we might recall those very violent Islamic textbooks used

to teach some Muslim children which the TVs were showing Americans while expressing

their shock! Sadly, those textbooks were created, written, printed and shipped to

the Middle East by our own government ... !!!


Here's the story of how American sought to create and further violent Islamic ideas

and ship them into the Middle East --

The US spent $100's of millions shooting down Soviet helicopters yet didn't spend a penny helping Afghanis rebuild their infrastructure and institutions.

They also spent millions producing jihad preaching, fundamentalist textbooks and shipping them off to Afghanistan. These were the same text books the Western media discussed in shocked tones and told their audiences were used by fundamentalist teachers to brainwash their charges and to inculcate in young Afghanis a jihad mindset, hatred of foreigners and non-Muslims etc.


Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal?

Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to happen?"

Because it has been almost unreported in the Western media that the US government shipped, and continues to ship, millions of Islamist textbooks into Afghanistan.

Only one English-speaking newspaper we could find has investigated this issue: the Washington Post. The story appeared March 23rd.

Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.

"The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books..." -- Washington Post, 23 March 2002 (1)

According to the Post the U.S. is now "...wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism."

So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks "steeped a generation in violence."

How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?

Nobody with normal intelligence could expect to distribute millions of violent Islamist schoolbooks without influencing school children towards violent Islamism. Therefore one would assume that the unnamed US officials who, we are told, are distressed at these "unintended consequences" must previously have been unaware of the Islamist content of the schoolbooks.

But surely someone was aware. The US government can't write, edit, print and ship millions of violent, Muslim fundamentalist primers into Afghanistan without high officials in the US government approving those primers.

http://www.tenc.net/articles/jared/jihad.h ...

[PSzymeczek]

46. In the words of John Prine...

Blow up your TV throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try an find Jesus on your own

http://www.jpshrine.org/lyrics/index.html

[Douglas Carpenter]

12. Dick Cavett brings back warm memories and he still stands against racism and bigotry

[eShirl]

15. "after the worst had poured out their passionate intensity"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

-snip-

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

[ooglymoogly]

31. Excellent

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity".

A perfect meaning for this moment in time.

[malaise]

16. An intelligent man speaks

:applause:

[lame54]

17. Thanks for posting - great read

[deacon]

18. k + r n/t

[The_Commonist]

19. Great quote:

"Our goal in at least one of our Middle East wars is to rebuild a government in our own image — with democracy for all. Instead, we are rebuilding ourselves in the image of those who detest us..."

[wookie72]

21. Wise words from the man who taught me..

that Spiro Agnew was an anagram for "grow a penis."

[MsPithy]

26. Words fail

to express how sublime this is!

[MsPithy]

27. So sublime,

I am beginning to think maybe there is a "God."

[saltpoint]

22. 'Have appreciated Cavett since the very early times when

he took Norman Mailer down several notches on a program.

Recommended.

[DirkGently]

23. Great words from Cavett

[me b zola]

24. K&R!

:applause:

[me b zola]

25. K&R!

:applause:

[Butch350]

28. Well Hissyspit...

I guess some people are just blinded by their over exaggerated patriotism. Is the mosque some kind of threat?

[bvar22]

30. Can you imagine if the 1963 Democratic Party had said,

Vivian Jones had every RIGHT to enroll at the University of Alabama,
but she should NEVER do so because it would offend the sensibilities of all the Alabama racists.



Sometimes, you just have to STAND UP for what is right.

[ooglymoogly]

35. Wow; That picture is a standard bearer, for the greatest

moments in our Democracy, based on the principles of its constitution;
Our Government forcefully standing tall for what is right;
Right down to its agents enforcing the rights of its people, who's government it is, down to a wo/man

The magnificent wisdom of our government at a flashbulb's moment in time and the wonder of what that moment and those policies have wrought.

That proud history looks like a parallel universe today, when rights now; No longer protected, are falling away like mercury on a rock bed.
Forcing us to wake up and realize how far we have carelessly let that wisdom and the government in which it thrived, disintegrate; How far the vast meaning of that picture has flown from us;

A constitution now upheld only in platitudes and poses;
A coy government, furtively and with the greatest, backroom stealth, searching for a way to move backwards; While pretending something entirely different.

[defendandprotect]

36. Great point . . . and makes obvious how poorly informed the public is these days...

compliments of a runaway corporate press serving only elite interests --

[coti]

32. The comments are excellent, too. A choice one:

Precisely, Mr. Cavett. But where do we start to search for those responsible? We all have had a hand in arriving at this state.

Over time, we have allowed our political dialog to be reduced to a combination of pandering and demagoguery. Yes, those strains have always been there, but reason had at least equal footing. Now reason has become "elitist rhetoric," as if somehow the tool that dispelled the dark ages and built the modern world is no more than a debating tactic and therefore has no standing. We have allowed comforting lies and flattery to push aside discomforting truths about ourselves and the world. We elect those who tell us the lies and flatter us with what we want to hear. Now we are complicit in those lies and are afraid to admit that responsibility. That fear is allowing the lies to build upon each other and we can't deny the edifice without denying the foundation. The more we choose to stray from reality, the harder it is to deny lies, and the easier it is to harbor profound hypocrisies.

What has this national denial bought us? On the national stage we are watching Yeats' statement, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" play out. Extreme Republicans will say anything they think will rile up their base. Moderate Republicans sit silent, hoping not to be paired with their wacko brothers, but hoping they can still ride what the tsunami to another term in office. Democrats, rather than fighting back, try to be menthol Republicans, praying they won't drown.

Right now, it feels like every one of them is afraid of the ravening mob, but no one will admit that there is a mob out there let alone that they are abjectly afraid of it. Why is there a mob? Because pandering to fear and vanity, strangely, has not brought peace and a return to prosperity. What does the mob demand? Sadly, more lies and more flattery.

You are absolutely right in calling for us to stand up and fight back. But we also need the fourth estate to do more than parrot preposterous palaver.

Right now, in the din, that's all that's being heard.

[spanone]

33. standing, mr. cavett

[defendandprotect]

34. Three sad truths - GOP has succeeded in branding all Muslims as "terrorists" ... and they did

it to create on the one hand a very distracting scapegoat to avoid legitimate questions

and challenges re 9/11 --

and on the other hand, to advance the concept of America as a "Christian" nation --

and the 9/11 wars as "god blessed and given" via W as "Crusades" -- !!


Another of the sad truths is that Americans are no long given a valid understanding

of their rights and the rights of others, neither in our public schools nor in

the support of those rights by our "free press."


Last of the sad truths is that we have a run-away corporate press which exists mainly

to confuse and disinform the public on every issue, in the interestes of their elite/

corporate owners.

[BrklynLiberal]

38. I have always thought Dick Cavett was an intelligent and gifted interviewer. Now I

see he is a great writer as well.
I wish we saw more of him around the media...

I happened to have just seen a really classic video of him interviewing Phil Silvers and Jack Benny.
It was priceless.

[ooglymoogly]

40. A man of wit

I miss his snark; His witty interviews and the depths he plumbed. Would like to see him back on the tube.

"I went to a German-Chinese restaurant last night; The problem is; A half hour after you've eaten, you are hungry for power".

or something to that effect.

Introducing Jane Mansfield he wrote for Johnny "here they are"

Imagine Johnny and Cavett, both young, hanging out together, both, as performing magicians.

[democrank]

43. Excellent as usual, Mr. Cavett

[Name removed]

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