Saturday, August 26, 2006

the new oxymoron

* rimone:
"reading is preznit’l-mental

from the Ministry of Truthiness: ‘look, ever’one! ah’m a-readin’! reel books, even! a heh, heh, heh!’

this week i discovered our preznit’s sudden love for reading actual books since Camus’s The Stranger obviously whet his appetite for more page-turnin’ book-larnin’. not. anyway, AFAIC, those of an intellectual bent in our country shook their collective heads in a mix of horror and disbelief. and i haven’t yet seen any journo asking for a damn book report — i want PROOF of his new-found love for books, goddammmit! anyway, after i finished laughing my ass off at this so obviously inane lit-offensive, i collected these, with which i heartily agree.
[]
preznit’l gravitas — the new oxymoron. :-)
go read and see the comments that Rimone has collected from around the place.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

do you remember the actual slogan they used in the States starting way back when? to get kids into books?

'reading is FUNdamental' which now has an entirely new meaning what w/the reality-challenged fundamentalists an' all.

i could puke. on the preznit, of course.

lukery said...

rimone - that's FUNny. stoopid fundies.

thanks o/s. good point - fp'd. maybe they're just throwin' everythin' at the walla and hoping that SOMETHING sticks.

Anonymous said...

From The Wanderer":

Hey - I can believe Bush read Camus' "The Stranger." Check out this description of the novel from Wikipedia - it could have been written about Dubya!

"At the start of the novel, Meursault (the protagonist) goes to his mother's funeral, where he does not express any emotions and is almost entirely unaffected by it. The novel continues to document the next few days of his life, through the first person point-of-view. In these days, he befriends one of his neighbors, Raymond Sintes, a notorious local pimp. He aids Raymond in dismissing one of his Arab mistresses. Later, the two confront the woman's brother ("the Arab") on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight. Meursault afterwards goes back to the beach and shoots the Arab once, in response to the glare of the sun. The Arab is killed, but Mersault fires four more times at the dead body.
At the trial, the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother's funeral, considered suspect by the authorities. The killing of the Arab apparently is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse. The argument follows that if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he should be considered a dangerous misanthrope and subsequently executed to prevent him from doing it again, and making him an example to those considering murder."

I mean, come on - the inability to feel remorse or cry at a funeral, befriending pimps, dismissive of women, killing an arab for no reason and then firing four more bullets into the corpse, and being seen as a dangerous misanthrope? That's our boy!

lukery said...

heh. thanks.

i bet Darth Cheney gave Bush the movie version as a present. or maybe they did some home theatre-ing.