Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This late-1940s public service announcement broadcast on the DuMont Television Network is, to me, a heartwarming artifact of an era in media history when at least some people may have been in the business for a constructive social purpose. Its target audience was kids, Video Rangers in particular---fans of Captain Video (such as Ed Norton). The PSA is earnest yet sincere, and the lesson is unassailable: fight discrimination by making friends. Prejudice gets in the way of making friends, and everyone wants lots of friends. Plus, prejudice is... un-American, of all things! Imagine someone saying that on TV today.



In fact, I cannot imagine a PSA of this caliber being created or broadcast in the current era. Even in the best case, I can hear in my mind's ear the condescension oozing through the glottis of some "cool" B-list celebrity paying lip service to some shallow feel-good message, as a vehicle for promoting someone's "brand." (Also: visibility and tax write-off!) The very idea of such a PSA would be considered "controversial," I'm sure, and thus focus-grouped to death before the project was orphaned to PBS where the message could be articulated by red, green, and blue Muppets.

Captain Video Anti-Discrimination PSA (late 1940s, DuMont Television Network), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Special bonus for all you Video Rangers:

I, Edward Norton, Ranger Third Class in the Captain Video Ranger Academy, do solemnly pledge to obey my mommy and daddy, to be kind to dumb animals and old ladies in and out of space, not to tease my little brothers and sisters and to brush my teeth twice a day and drink milk after every meal. 

Games Joe McCarthy played

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There are so many disgusting aspects of this story (more here) that I must struggle to avoid tangents. I'm sure most people have heard some incomplete version of it: a right-wing provocateur posted to his website a videotape that was deliberately edited to create a defamatory context for remarks made by a USDA appointee in a March 2010 speech she gave to a Georgia chapter of the NAACP. The deceptively edited video was rapidly propagated by FOX as "news," with all the dignity that usually accompanies baseless accusations of black racism by white racists. And then, before you could say "Tom Vilsack is a craven asshole," the minor official, Shirley Sherrod, was bullied out of her job by her chain of command. Only the impression given by the video, as I say, has been demonstrated to be false and defamatory.


Vilsack: way to create a possible tort for wrongful dismissal, dicknose. Washington Post: learn how to check facts, especially when your errors reflect poorly on the wrongly accused person... motherfuckers. NAACP: yes, you sure were "snookered," but I'll spare you an obscenity since you've sort of done penance and claim to have learned something from it... but your fuck-up shows how weak your organization really is these days. And Barack Hussein Obama? Waiting....