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Published Letters: 173
Editor's Choice: 6
"Everyone brags about their own ability to resist subliminal messages -- although this is quite liminal, but we assume the worst about our fellow citizens, and we assume that they can't handle the same complex images we can handle.")
Those of us who assume that our fellow Americans are too fucking stupid, to be blunt, to think for themselves are doing so as the result of concrete interaction with these braindead troglodytes, not some fabricated, ego-driven motivation. Anyone actually remember the 2004 election? Ask the average American about John Kerry today and you will still hear that he is a "flip-flopper" who wanted to surrrender to the terrorists.
Many of us have been attacked and ostracized for making the outrageous claim that Saddam had no WMDs or involvement in 9/11 by these same inbred idiots that we are now being asked to give the benefit of the doubt. Anyone remember "security moms"? Yes, take a minute to think about those women who were so concerned about their children's safety that they voted for the guy who let 9/11 happen and sat on his uncaring ass for 9 minutes when he told that it had happened. But we are supposed to accept that these people will get satire?
Idiots do not get satire. I spent my first year of college at a community college (having sex was more fun than filling out applications my senior year). In English 101, we read A Modest Proposal. The day after the reading assignment was made, I arrive for class to hear these Einsteins talking about how awful it was, how terrible Swift must have been to have considered such an idea a good thing. The teacher walked in the door and the first words out of her mouth were something to the effect of recognizing satire being the true test of intelligence. I barely contained my laugh.
These are the smarter of the people that we are supposed to give the benefit of the doubt. They at least tried college and some of them probably actually graduated. Assuming that unintelligent and uneducated people will understand satire is a fallacy.
The problem with the New Yorker image is that it is on the cover, where it will be seen by people who couldn't understand half of what they read in there if they did open the cover. The idiots will see it and what they will see is exactly what FOX"News" has been telling them is the truth. Check the cable news ratings. People are still watching FOX"News".
But don't you dare talk down to me for not trusting my fellow Americans to know their asses from holes in the ground. I have spent the last 12 years trying to point out the difference to no avail.
If such a dubious selection can make the list, I would have to put The Stupids starring Tom Arnold and Jessica Lundy on the list. It is overlooked and underrated.
As a bonus, it contains a song called "I am my own Grandpa." Any movie with such a song deserves at least one viewing.
And what is up with bashing The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas? Those are two of Disney's best modern movies. I said in '89 and I'll say it again. Mermaid and Do the Right Thing were the two best movies of that year. Yes, it changed the ending and thus the moral, but it still works as a classic fairy tale. It is hard to take a critic seriously who would bash a movie with the lyrics of the late, great Howard Ashman, whose death was the first step on the rather swift decline of the modern Disney animated film.
And, yes, Disney did transform the chubby 13 year old Native American into a marriage aged sexpot, but they also created a surprisingly well made film. It has a more adult tone than many modern Disney films, including an on-screen killing. And despite the subsequent marketing of Pocahontas as one of the Disney Princesses, the movie was not a fairy tale romance. It dealt with the issue of love in a way that was quite serious for animated fare. Love doesn't conquer all in Pocahontas. Pocahontas is faced with an adult choice and forgoes her happily ever after. Lastly, I would argue that Pocahontas is one of the better films to emerge from that time frame about Native Americans. It deftly avoids the overly PC traps that comprised the backbone of highly overrated films like Dances With Wolves. The Native Americans are not presented as this perfect civilization that was destroyed by the evil white man. The warlike, brutal side of Native American society is given more attention in this Disney cartoon than in most modern movies involving Native Americans. It has a balance that more adult films on the subject sorely lack.
So, while I agree with the need for a list of kids flicks that go beyond the standard Disney flicks, I strongly disagree with the choice of the two aforementioned films as examples of bad kid flicks. They seem to have been chosen randomly. With Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Cars, the grossly overrated (non-Disney) Shrek movies, and anything Disney has released direct-to-DVD out there, why pick two that arguably earn the header Disney Masterpiece�
Speaking of direct -to-video titles, Muppet Classic Theater is an hour of pure fun and I urge all parents to write Disney and get them to finally release this little gem on DVD, and not just because my daughter has just about worn out our VHS copy.