Boondocks Has The FINAL Word On The BasketBrawl In Detroit!

Huey Freeman and Michael Caesar make more sense in a New York minute than all of the talking heads on TV.
Copyright © 2004 Aaron McGruder [Click on image to enlarge.] 

Kill A Commie For Jesus!

The Reverend Mr. Billy James Hargis, 79, died earlier this week of complications associated Alzheimer's disease and a series of heart attacks at a nursing home in Tulsa, Okla., of unspecified causes. The 270-lb. Hargis was a televangelist who combined fundamentalism and anti-communism. I attended one of his rallies in Denver in the early 1960s. Hargis appeared with retired general Edwin Walker. Walker—commander of the troops sent to Little Rock during the school desegregation crisis in 1957—was newly retired and a convert to the bromide that racial integration was a communist plot. Walker and Hargis got a lot of standing ovations from the right-wing faithful that night. Walker ultimately faded into anonymity. Hargis was riding high until he was accused of sexually abusing at least one male and three female students at his American Christian College in Tulsa. Like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart who followed Hargis as prominent televangelists, Hargis faded into relative obscurity following the scandal by the late 1970s. Now, history professor Lori Bogle of the U. S. Naval Academy has established a linkage between the Pentagon and the anti-communist movement. If this is (fair & balanced) Cold War irony, so be it.

The Pentagon's Battle for the American Mind: The Early Cold War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).
by Lori Bogle

The U.S. military has historically believed itself to be the institution best suited to develop the character, spiritual values, and patriotism of American youth. Here, author Lori Bogle investigates how the armed forces assigned themselves this role and why they sought to create "ideologically sound Americans capable of defeating communism
and assuring the victory of democracy at home and abroad."

Bogle shows that this view of America's civil religion predated tension with the Soviet Union. She traces this trend from the Progressive Era though the early Cold War, when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations formulated plans that promised to prepare the American public morally and spiritually for confrontation with the evils of communism.

Bogle's analysis suggests that cooperation among the military, evangelical right wing groups, and government was considered both necessary and normal. The Boy Scouts pushed a narrow vision of American democracy, and Joe McCarthy's chauvinism was less an aberration than a noxious manifestation of a widespread attitude. To combat communism, America and its armed forces embraced a narrow moral education that attacked everyone and everything not consonant with their view of the world order. Exposure of this alliance ultimately dissolved it.

Lori Bogle, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy.

Copyright © 2004 Texas A&M University Press

Am I Cutting Edge Or, What?

I have maintained this blog since June 22, 2003. No one I knew at that time (in Amarillo) had ever heard of a blog. Now, I live in the Geezer Capital of Texas. The largest organization here is the Computer Club. To date, no one at the Computer Club has responded to me when I have suggested (more than once) that a class on blogging was long overdue. However, I have always been a prophet without honor in my own country. The irony here is that the Geezer Club that is supposedly most with it has never offered a blogging class to date. If this is (fair & balanced) ignorance, so be it.

[x Reuters]
"Blog" Tops U.S. Dictionary's Words of the Year
By Greg Frost

BOSTON (Reuters) - A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.

Merriam-Webster Inc. said on Tuesday that blog, defined as "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks," was one of the most looked-up words on its Internet sites this year.

Eight entries on the publisher's top-10 list related to major news events, from the presidential election -- represented by words such as incumbent and partisan -- to natural phenomena such as hurricane and cicada.

Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster compiles the list each year by taking the most researched words on its Web sites and then excluding perennials such as affect/effect and profanity.

The company said most online dictionary queries were for uncommon terms, but people also turned to its Web sites for words in news headlines.

"That is what occurred in this year's election cycle ... with voluminous hits for words like 'incumbent,' 'electoral,' 'partisan,' and, of course, our number one Word of the Year, 'blog,"' Merriam-Webster President and Publisher John Morse said in a statement.

Americans called up blogs in droves for information and laughs ahead of the Nov. 2 presidential election.

Freed from the constraints that govern traditional print and broadcast news organizations, blogs spread gossip while also serving as an outlet for people increasingly disenchanted with mainstream media.

BLOG CLOUT

It was mainly on blogs that readers first encountered speculation that President Bush wore a listening device during his first debate against Democrat John Kerry. The White House, forced to respond, called it a laughable, left-wing conspiracy theory.

Bloggers also were among the first to cast doubt on a CBS television news report that challenged Bush's military service.

CBS later admitted it had been duped into using questionable documents for the report. Last week CBS anchor Dan Rather said he would step down in March, although the network said the move was unconnected to the scandal.

A Merriam-Webster spokesman said it was not possible to say how many times blog had been looked up on its Web sites but that from July onward, the word received tens of thousands of hits per month.

Blog will be a new entry in the 2005 version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition. The complete list of words of the year is available at this link.

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© Reuters 2004