Classic Gambit: 'When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden'
- wadE
With no time today for original thought, here is a classic Gambit from January 30th, 2003. Enjoy!
Let me first say, I'm a fan of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect...well, at least the one that was on Comedy Central.
Once he moved to ABC, the show went in the toilet. My main complaint is that just as soon as a good convesation
started between people and ideas were thrown back and forth and people started to think...Bill had to jump in and say,
"Excuse me...but we need to take a break."
Absolutely ruined the show...at least Comedy Central (and HBO, who produced the show) understood the ebb and flow
of the show and put in breaks appropriately.
Also being on after Nightline (or even later in some markets) didn't help. After awhile the quality guests stopped
coming on...and then after 9/11 Maher made some remarks to the effect of (and I'm paraphrasing here),
"They blow themselves up in order to get at us and we launch 3 million dollar missiles off of giant floating
iron islands 2000 miles away, who are the real cowards? "
He didn't say they weren't evil, he didn't say that the events weren't horrific. Not the smartest comment he ever
made, but I understand the point he's trying to make.
ABC says those comments had nothing to do with him being fired. At any rate, I'm glad the show got cancelled.
Network TV isn't the place for a show like that, and I hope his new show on HBO gets back to where he used to be.
In the meantime he has written a book which I think everyone should read...although waiting for the paperback version
to come out so you don't have to pay 30 bucks for the book is acceptabe.
I haven't read it yet, but I've heard quite a bit about it, and plan to read it. Below is a review of the book from
startribune.com's Eric Hanson.
Food for thought...
It isn't as if the cancellation of Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" left a rent in American society. As it turned out, the nation did somehow manage to hold itself together without hearing Kathy Ireland's thoughts on abortion, or Lisa Kudrow opining about the Bible.
But with the publication of "When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden," we now know what Maher has been doing (besides visiting the Playboy Mansion) since the demise of his TV show. He's still obssessed with Sept. 11.
Some of Maher's most interesting material came after the Sept. 11 attacks. That day restored the venom and vigor in Maher, who had by then become repetitive and tiresome. It transformed his priorities seemingly overnight, from how best to legalize drugs to how best to deal with this new threat. Suddenly, the gulf between the libertarian lounge lizard and some of his far-right guests narrowed to a sliver -- at least on U.S. military actions.
The book's title is based on a World War II-era propaganda poster that urged Americans to carpool: "When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler!" Using that poster's style as the inspiration for a new series of agit-prop, Maher has enlisted his sarcasm in the war on terror.
Don't you just love government propaganda?
Maher's salvos are powerful, and most of them are aimed directly back at us.
In the brilliant "Why They Hate Us" series, Maher addresses the contempt that many countries hold for the United States. One poster shows impoverished South American farmers standing in a barren field while a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration plane trails a column of poisonous defoliant above them. "We love coke, so you get Agent-Oranged -- sound fair?" writes Maher.
"U.S. planes have thus far showered defoliant on more than 200,000 acres, killing not just coca plants but entire ecosystems: damaging legitimate crops, poisoning water supplies, killing fish and livestock, uprooting entire villages, and causing people to suffer fevers, diarrhea, allergies and rashes. And that's why they hate us: because, to keep drugs out of Bobby Brown's glove box, we kill peasants in Putumayo. If we did this kind of thing to the Arabs, they'd actually have the kind of beef with us that they think they do."
Another poster illustrates a scene from "Apocalypse Now," with a G.I. water skiing past two Southeast Asian boaters, nearly toppling them. "They Hate Us Because We Don't Even Know Why They Hate Us," reads the tagline at the bottom.
" 'They' hate us because they feel -- and 'they' are not wrong -- that it is within our power to do so much more, and that we practice a kind of passive-aggressive violence on the Third World. . . . We do, upon reaching a very high comfort level, mostly choose to go from ten to eleven instead of helping another guy far away go from zero to one."
When it comes to excising self-righteousness and hypocrisy from Americans, Maher is an expert surgeon. "Put a Flag on Your Car . . . It's Literally the Least You Can Do," mocks one poster that shows two flags festooning a gas-guzzling truck.
"I like the flag plenty, but I never forget it's only a symbol, a reminder of what we stand for, not a replacement for actually standing for it," writes Maher. "True patriotism is doing something for your country. If our car flags had to be earned with real contributions -- purchased with deeds, not dollars -- if each one we saw meant someone had given blood or volunteered their time or donated money or written their congressman or saved a gallon of gas, perhaps then we'd really be bucked up at the sight of them."
And if Maher had more often cut through the braying nonsense of "Politically Incorrect" with this kind of trenchant, well-reasoned observation, maybe he'd still be on network TV. Then again, considering the Nielsen ratings of ABC's "The Bachelorette" relative to PBS' "The Charlie Rose Show," probably not.
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HUMOR
When You Ride ALONE You Ride With Bin Laden
By: Bill Maher.
Publisher: New Millennium Press, 132 pages, $27.95.
Review: Maher, former host of the irreverent "Politically Incorrect" TV show, tells it like it is about the War on Terrorism in a useful and humorous guide for those of us who want to do more here at home to help the war effort, but are at a loss as to what to do.
What do you think? Drop us a line at webmaster@simpleprop.com and give us some
feedback. Maybe we'll even run your letters in future Gambits. 'The Daily Gambit' is updated every weekday.
