Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Breath of Fresh Maher
I recently saw comedian Bill Maher interviewed on CNN's Larry King Show. After watching this segment, I realized that I agreed with everything that he said. From his assertion that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice for VP to his compassion and advocacy for animals to his exhortation to true believers of various diverse viewpoints regarding God to just "man up and admit that you don't know", Mr. Maher may very well be someone intellectually honest enough to lay it out on the line. I don't get HBO, which carries Maher's own show, and his subdued, charming persona displayed with Larry King may not carry over into his other performances. But I'm going to have to keep my eyes and ears open for this "breath of fresh air" in the midst of the pervadingly stagnant, stinking, and polluted media cesspool.
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Ah, yes... I've been watching Bill Maher for a few years, and I have a standing search for him set on my TiVo. (I don't have HBO either.) There are things about him I don't like or agree with (how on Earth could he have dated Ann Coulter?), but in many ways it seems that he and I were twins separated at birth.
ReplyDeleteMaher on why he won't run for office:
«Nobody would vote for me. I think religion is bad, marijuana is good, and babies are disgusting.»
I remember watching Inherit the Wind back in our high school English class (I think it was Belzowski's 10th grade class). And I marveled at the idea that some people, even as late as the 1920s, still believed that evolution was a hoax and the universe was six thousand years old. Now in 2008, when I would have predicted Mars settlements to be going on, instead we seem to be crawling back into caves.
ReplyDeleteWhat's scary about hearing Bill Maher's opinions is that, 35-40 years ago, they would have largely been mainstream. It's our society that's changed, and in a regressive direction that makes Maher now stand out, sounding like some kind of defiant rebel.
The thing we often forget is that those who don't want evolution taught in school have never gone away — remember that John Scopes lost and was fined (albeit minimally) — but merely drifted into the background as we worried about other things (the Great Depression, World War II, Communism, the civil rights movement, ...). It strikes me that the re-emergence of right-wing religious fundamentalism began during the Reagan administration and has continued and strengthened since.
ReplyDeleteYes, when we were in school, people mostly let their private religious beliefs be private. And the political slant of the country was generally moving to the left. Our society has definitely changed.
It's sobering to think that today, Richard Nixon would probably be considered too liberal to be elected by the Republican mainstream (and Eisenhower certainly would be).