Thursday, April 21, 2005

Culture Wars?

I was listening to Day To Day on NPR, and they had segment with Slate's Mickey Kaus who has a blog called kausfiles. The thing that struck me was that we are moving every closer to the point, where as a country, it would be hard to comeback for the totalitarian state we are moving towards. The Republican majority is forcing an ideolog on us that is fascist in nature. Kaus on his blog has brought up facts that I was unaware.
The Coming Culture War Over Gay TV: two facts together:

1) The FCC is coming under pressure to regulate cable TV for decency. President Bush at least temporarily seemed to endorse the idea and the new chairman of the FCC seems to be heading in that direction.

2) Viacom plans to launch Logo, a gay-oriented basic cable channel at the end of June

This combined with stories on the future of the Filibuster are showing these people, for what short sightedness we have in government today. These politicians wish to control large aspects of our life. From morality (the bible is now part of the curriculum in 300 school districts nationwide treated as literature), low paying jobs so that business gets cheap labor and large tax breaks, to our freedom of speech being taken away. These remind me of a quote from Cicero (c. 106-43 B.C.)
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

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