72 Comments
May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

Yes, belief is weird -- powerful enough to deny the undeniable. It's like what separates us from the animals! Animals just know while we discount knowledge with reality-denying beliefs. Then again, so does the establishment media.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

(Nods) People used to keep their gullibility to themselves, or maybe a select few. Now they feel compelled to *share.*

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

Had a client who was gaga over Frank Sinatra long after his mafia ties and domestic violence had been revealed. I could never relate. My heroes were chosen for their feet of clay (Sam Clemens, John Lennon and, for a while, David Byrne). I admired their accomplishments but realized that as individuals they were all assholes. That kept the fanboy in me at bay. Well that, and meeting other fans (always a disturbing experience).

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I could be wrong about this, but I think you have to prime people to feel rage *first* before you introduce the conspiracy. Dorothy didn't have an interconnected media complex telling her to get the bastards who were maligning Liberace, because their plan was once they took down Liberace, they'd be coming for her next.

So people spend decades watching Fox News, then add in 10-15 years of rightwing websites, plus the emailed crank newsletters, plus especially the Facebook groups (and the worst thing many of us ever did was set up Facebook accounts for our parents/grandparents) that provide constant engagement and interaction. Constant fear mongering, constant outrage peddling. Once you’ve got people riled up, then you just point them toward the villain they should be mad at, the one(s) responsible for making them feel scared and angry.

And at this point so many of them are hard-wired with the rage impulse, and they only have to click on a website to get massive reinforcement that their rage is true and good. They really don’t need Fox or the websites or the newsletters anymore, they have become self-frothing, so something as asinine as a reporter removing a mask after a press conference becomes a huge affront and evidence of conspiracy.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I think more than a little of it has to do with the fact that most of the truthers know that their leader is an asshole and their movement is complete bullshit. Unable to cope with the actual truth, they come up with their own "real" truth, and the aggression is the same kind of aggression you see in cornered animals.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

Having read a comparison of Liberace to the touring pianists of the 19th century, like Beethoven and Liszt, I went to see him on his last tour in his home state. He was the finest showman I’d seen since Frank Zappa. He carried the crowd along for two hours, swinging between romantic classical piano solos and unison Gershwin sing-a-longs. I finally understood what my grandmother saw in his weekly TV show we were forced to watch if we wanted to then see “Dragnet.” (We didn’t have a TV and had to watch hers.) No doubt it was too much of a whiplash for Dorothy to associate Liberace’s unique welcoming warmth and talent with a “perversion” she’d been taught to hate. But I don’t see a similarity between that refusal to accept an unacceptable truth about a man who brought so much happiness to so many, and the reprogrammable meatbags (Driftglass tm) who can be wound up and turned against anything the Republicans have chosen as the hate target of the day.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I would venture to guess that Dorothy's denial stemmed less from a conspiracy mindset and more from being unable to reconcile a truth about a celebrity she loved with a sexuality I assume she thought deviant. There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong. For myself, I love James Brown's music, but I understand that he physically abused women and that that's horrific; I don't know what it says about me that I still listen. I gave up on Michael Jackson. Can't hear his music anymore.

Anyway, a big reason Americans are vulnerable to the conspiracy theory media apparatus is because a majority---perhaps a large majority---of this country is functionally illiterate. Yes, they can read and write in a broad sense, but they have no interpretative skills, no reading comprehension, no ability to break down duplicities no matter how obvious. Stubbornness can be a part of it, yes, but it's also just an inability to comprehend.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

“She was a little defensive looking, like life had done her a bad turn and she was on the lookout in case life tried the same shit again.” You’ll want to keep that sentence at hand for your work-in-progress. A little gem, it is.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I know very little about LIberace (my parents were not fans) but my impression has always been that the rumpus was solely about "was he a prevert or wasn't he", i.e., it was about *him*, not any unpleasantness that he inflicted on others. (Maybe he was a jerk to people he cared about, but I never sensed that this was the reason for the controversy constructed around him, at least while he was alive.) The people who liked him and enjoyed his performances really liked him and didn't like to hear bad things about him. Mean things. (Back then lots of older ladies had, for example, gay male hair stylists that they adored. I reckon that many of them just pretended that their favorite guy would never do icky stuff, like have the actual sex with other guys - or beat up their wives. He was *safe*.)

So these people weren't on his side despite him doing harm to others, or despite his criminality, they defended him because people were being mean to him and because they really liked him.

And it occurs to me that I'm just riffing off what DrBDH said an hour ago about the cruelty of the windup-able "reprogrammable meatbags". The Liberace folks weren't fans because they enjoyed pissing off critics; they just loved his "unique welcoming warmth and talent". As Dr.BDH says, it's a whole different thing than some endless two-minute hate squirmish.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

Roy, this is another great column that deserves to be made public.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I remember every Catholic-drilled sensibility in my head screaming at the top of it's perception when I first saw Freddy Mercury on TV singing "I want to break free", cross-dressed in an imitation leather mini-skirt, chintzy cotton singlet top replete with bra and stuffing, lipstick, bouffant wig and large pink plastic ear rings. This was long after I'd brushed Liberace as 'other', with his mincing around the stage in a giant fur, schmoozing the old ladies in the front row by showing off his jewelry.... "Want to see my ring?"

I just didn't want to know, no matter how talented they were.

"There are still people who deny Woody Allen did anything wrong."

Yeah. Sorry.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I know a kind-hearted, generous guy who insists the moon landing was staged.

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Well, jeez, it's my existential responsibility to link to this. It's by Gregory Fleeman, an old friend and one of the funniest people I know. He wrote, sings. Turns out both "Lee" and Elvis had dead twin brothers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8gYJLiIw7o

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

Betsy DeVos is going to fund my protests outside your house for slighting Hamilton

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Aren't there two aspects to any cult/crackpot belief? One, the thing you insist is true. The other, the malevolence/greed/evil/etc. of everyone and everything else (the media; the liberals; society) who insist you're wrong. Dorothy might have said about Liberace, "I just know it's not true." Her modern-day counterpart might say, "I know it's not true, and that Big Gay is advancing its vile agenda by trying to convince us otherwise."

The latter phenom therefore attracts both true believers and true haters, two different constituencies drawn to the same cause. The former have a priori romantic/religious/etc. needs. The latter get out of bed mad (for real reasons) and look for some kind of congenial outlet.

Also, Dorothy's dot matrix newsletter was barely a step up from the single-spaced mimeographed nutbar screeds taped to Greenwich Village light posts. Today everything looks legitimately published, produced, etc., and has that kind of McLuhanesque legitimacy.

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May 20, 2020Liked by Roy Edroso

I think people have a meanness that most civilized people suppress and control, but the obnoxious few find outlets - in the old days, it was something like lynching a black man or throwing rocks at homosexuals, but now it's berating reporters and carrying a rocket launcher into a Subway sandwich shop. Some of those folks were hurt in some way, whether some kind of abuse or maybe just the endless torment of life not turning out the way you want. Some of them are just assholes. Either way, the internet has allowed them to organize at a level we never could have appreciated even 20 years ago (when we also had the internet but social media wasn't really a thing).

Entirely unrelated, but I think it is unfair of you to take a shot at Hamilton. I have seen quite a few musicals over the past few years thanks to trying to attend more theater (or theatre) for the cultural experience, and my goodness, Hamilton is easily one of the top three musicals I've seen. The worst? Cats. I know it's trite to make fun of Cats thanks to the recent film, but it is truly a horrendous mess. I'm not here to make the case for or against T. S. Eliot, but the man's work deserved better. Between Cats and Starlight Express, I refuse to believe that Andrew Lloyd Webber wasn't more coked up than Rick James.

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