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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Earl Butz Is Dead:
Long Live BULWORTH!
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 2/21/08

Earl Butz caused a peck of problems for incumbent candidate Gerald Ford, with his back-of-the-plane joke, told sub-rosa to journalists, whose number included John Dean, then credentialed as a ‘reporter’ with Rolling Stone after his prison sentence had ended. Dean did the deed, and done him in, by reporting the off-the-record joke in his story, which made it into the MSM – then not called the Mainstream Media, but just the ‘media’ in general.  It was the first of Dean’s deeds, to get past being a Nixonite and become a critic of all things remotely conservative.
 
Is it Fate’s fickle finger, giving the finger to B.O. and Hillary?  The irony of Butz dying this week as the two ‘affirmative action candidates’ vie for dominance among dems is: His joke said so much that was again said in a 1998 movie starring Warren Beatty, and has been scholastically legitimized by none other than that well-heralded Ph.D., William Cosby, and the lesser-known black economic genius, Thomas Sowell.  Butz asserted that blacks, meaning underclass blacks no doubt, would not improve their situation until their values improved beyond three dominant desires: loose shoes, tight [women] and a warm place to [defecate].  You can extract the actual victuals of volatile wording, reported explicitly by Dean.

 Butz brought shame to Ford, resigned as Agriculture Secretary, and will be forever remembered for his pre-Bulworth observations.  Then, the film “Bulworth” showed how Hollywood, and liberals generally, hold different rules for different fools, when desperate incumbent Bulworth confronts an agitated, confrontational black audience, noting their welded-at-the-hip bond with the democrat party.  The crowd grumbles in protest, and he declares a Butz Truth, in a scene oft-used in trailers on TV to promote the film’s release:
 
You can have a Billion Man March! If you don't put down that malt liquor and chicken wings, and get behind someone other than a running back who stabs his wife, you're NEVER gonna get rid of somebody like me!
 
From 1976 to 1998 – twenty two short years, and the truth shone again, in a popular little film.  Continues to this day, as B.O. avoids being seen as ‘too black’ but offers hope without specifics.  His sister Hillary similarly proffers nothing more than a promise to ‘start’ bringing troops home within sixty days of taking office.  And the elephant in this room?  Not the GOP symbol, but the one which no one wants to recognize – Bulworth and Butz still are right. Even as the data has gotten more depressing in the decade since Beatty’s beatitude.  But no one will say so.


Or if Dr. Cosby deigns to so utter, as once did Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Dogs of War on the left chew them to shreds.  Learned professors of the left condemn Cosby, even a full hardback book on the reasons why Cosby Is Wrong. And Moynihan learned early that the deepest credentials as a card-carrying, compassion-caring liberal operative of JFK strain don’t protect one from accusations of ‘racist’ when such Bulworth bona fides are put into the national ‘discussion on race’ by any public figure.

Yes, Butz is dead, as is Moynihan – two accused of racism, as Beatty lives in aged parenthood, amidst regal splendor, one of the unchallenged royalty of the left.  Butz said it, and was booed into isolation. Moynihan documented it in a famous government report, and was humbled into never mentioning it again, since he desired his ultimate future as a respected member of the Senate. Butz dying is not the death of the issue – whether we dub it race or class or stratification or other newly-minted terms, the battle is about VALUES.

B.O. claims a special claim to values, as does Hillary – one born of a worthless father who abandoned him to a single mother’s rearing, the other marrying a similarly rancid-reared spouse.  Dysfunction, and diss-function, dominating the left’s candidate pool.  Dubya comes from an intact family, as does John McCain – though McCain hasn’t kept h is own domestic tranquility intact after his POW circumstances worked its typical PTSD effect on that marriage. And McCain had a rather overpowering daddy, making him a rebel with a cause of considerable intensity.

But the values of Butz’ joke and Bulworth’s proclamation are still worthy of discussion – but don’t expect B.O. or HRC to bring them up more than in brief, hurried passing.  The problem of dysfunctionality is not limited to a particular race – witness Clinton’s adoptive daddy’s brutal behavior – but it does come to the forefront more often when presented as a ‘black problem’ and thus means that elephant is avoided at all cost.

The Bulworth/Butz dynamic won’t be an issue this campaign season – both sides want to avoid that one, for a first time in my political lifetime.  But Butz dying as B.O. and HRC continue to run neck-to-neck, cheek-to-jowl, rhetoric-to-rhetoric on a range of issues, is Fate Speaking With a Smirk.

Meanwhile, society’s political living room is piling up with ever-higher accumulations of elephant dung. At least the elephant has found a warm place to dump its diss-functionality on America.  

Bulworth, meet B.O. – a man who’s beyond the essence of those jokes, but will never confront a hostile crowd the way Bulworth did. But then, that was the movies, and this is reality.  Stay tuned for two more generations, before Bulworth and Moynihan are redeemed. And both Bulworth and Butz are reviewed with quizzical confusion, by generations who are truly ‘beyond race’ and just don’t get it, about the film clip or the Rolling Stone story.  As this rate, that setting is sometime around the year 2080. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

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