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Republican Moral Values Revealed: Sexual Insecurity and Quick Impalement
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Republican Moral Values Revealed: You can learn quite a bit about the character of political web sites by examining the advertisements that are placed alongside their main content. Here at Irregular Times, for instance, one of the things that you'll notice very quickly is that we don't have any paid advertisements. We never have, because we don't want content to be influenced or overshadowed by the interests of advertising businesses. Our first priority is not making money. Our first priority is free and independent expression of our ideals. In an age in which most information is tightly intertwined with paid advertising, we recognize that our advertisement-free format is highly irregular, and we're proud of that.
Most political web sites do mix paid advertisements with their content in one way or another, of course. Some manage to do so without a strong impact on their political message - by accepting only those advertisements that fit their general political positions. These sites sacrifice their independence, and get a cluttered look, but remain mostly true to their political purpose. The political and moral values of the people who run these sites are positively demonstrated through these advertisements.
Other political web sites are less focused with their selection of advertisers, and seem to allow anyone who pays money to put a commercial graphic on their pages. A simple argument might claim that these web sites are being crass, and that the advertisements displayed on their pages are a merely random representation of what's out there on the web. However, even if the political web sites are allowing random advertisements, online advertisers do not randomly select where they place their ads. Instead, ads are strategically placed only on web sites that advertisers believe will meet their advertisements' target audience. So, even if a political web site does not select all of its ads, the advertisements on that site have a great deal to say about the values of the people that web site claims as its audience.
A good example of this category of political web sites that accept advertising is NewsMax, a right wing site that consistently advocates for the same old agenda that the far right has been pushing for ages, no matter how the available facts change. I wouldn't ordinarily visit a place like NewsMax, but recently, one of their articles was so out of hand that I couldn't help myself.
How We Found NewsMax: The Paranoid Political Correctness of Christmas
I've written before about the delusional right wing religious campaign to mount a defense against a supposed War Against Christmas. The Religious Right, claiming that phrases like "happy holidays" are offensive to Christian fundamentalists, has been trying to enforce a right wing code of politically correct speech in which workers at government agencies and private companies would be forced to say only "Merry Christmas", and not any other traditional greeting of the winter holiday season.
Right wing activist groups have even pushed through a congressional resolution - h. res. 579 declaring that Christmas needs special protection of a sort that no other holiday has ever received. Only 22 members of the House of Representatives had the guts to stand up to this frivolous legislative effort to pander to the paranoid fantasies of fundamentalist Christians who imagine that Christmas is under siege by secretive satanic socialist conspiracies. Right wing hacks have been busy trying to punish these representatives for failing to conform to the right wing religious agenda, with attack sites like NewsMax writing that these 22 members of Congress "Hate Christmas".
Understanding The NewsMax Ads
In the lefthand column next to the article in which NewsMax joins the bandwagon of right wing activists pretending that Christmas is on the verge of being destroyed, I found the three advertisements you see here on the left. It's a weird juxtaposition, seeing these messages mixed right into the same page as an article claiming to defend Christmas from its imaginary attackers - a juxtaposition that reveals the dark moral weakness of America's right wing political movement.
First, there's the advertisement for the Tom DeLay Legal Defense Trust. It's beyond comprehension to me that the same Texas Congressman who has gotten himself mixed up in a combination of bribery schemes and plots to twist the political system in order to benefit the wealthy and powerful is now asking ordinary citizens to pay the bills for his expensive lawyers as he's put on trial for corruption. But there the ad is - and the NewsMax right wingers gladly accept the money from Tom DeLay's legal defense team.
Right Wing Moral Value #1: Take from the weak to defend the strong.
Next, hop to the advertisement on the bottom. This one is an animated graphic, so you're seeing just one of its several panels here. Yet, its message is pretty clear: The advertisers expect that NewsMax readers are likely to be sexually frustrated men who are frequently rejected by women.
Just wait until you hear what comes after the initial message appealing to men who hate rejection by women. The advertisement quickly flashes to another panel, which advises NewsMax readers that they can "discover forbidden attraction secrets the liberal media does not want you to know". No kidding. Not only are the advertisers on NewsMax betting that a lot of right wing activists are sexually incompetent, they're also pushing the claim that there is a secret sexual conspiracy by the liberal media elite to keep right wing men from learning the secrets of being sexually attractive to women. I don't have to make it up, because NewsMax broadcasts this sad truth straight its readers: Many right wing males really believe that the only reason that they aren't having as much sex as they want is that the liberal media elites are keeping the art of picking up women a secret.
Stop and think about that for a second. According to this advertisement accepted by NewsMax, if it weren't for the liberal media, right wingers all across America would be going out and having lots of promiscuous sex. Therefore, according to this strange conspiracy theory, the liberal media is all that stands between America and a right wing free love movement. To fix the problem, NewsMax is endorsing a campaign to spread the word about how have all the sex you want. If it feels good, do it, right?
Right Wing Moral Value #2: Promoting promiscuous sex is a good idea, so long as Hollywood isn't doing it.
Now, let's get to the last and most bizarre NewsMax advertisement of them all: The advertisement for quick impalement techniques.
What's that? You don't know what quick impalement is? Hey, you're not alone. Before I saw this advertisement and visited the web site that it links to, I had no idea that there was a market for impaling people without any inconvenient delays.
When I first saw this advertisement flashing its quick impalement promise at me, I thought that I must be misunderstanding its message. Perhaps, I thought, it was referring to some kind of medical procedure I had never heard about, something akin to diabetics lancing their fingertips to take blood samples for insulin tests. Then I looked at the site: FightFast.com, and saw that there was no mistake: This web site offers to teach people how to quickly impale other people.
Bob Pierce, the president of the site's parent company, TRS Direct 2004, offers the following opening offer: "You can learn these "unbeatable" skills in an afternoon... and use them to be LETHAL with a knife.". Mr. Pierce continues, explaining that if you purchase their set of two DVDs entitled "Dead Eye Power Throwing" (that's a trademarked term, because so many companies out there are eager to use the phrase), you'll get "easy tips (they'll take just a couple seconds) to a turn a ball point pens, pencils, even paper clips, into deadly missiles... How specific weapons dictate which target you'll fire at... Just how "deep" certain thrown weapons will penetrate through clothing and flesh... which weapons will shock him, and which ones will kill him... exactly how to deliver devastating facial shots... and a lot more."
Yes, this web site that NewsMax is helping to promote is offering to send people a DVD that instructs viewers in methods on how to kill people. Murder 101, you might call it.
Right Wing Moral Value #3: Teaching people how to murder is a good idea.
Now, to wrap it up, let's consider the right wing moral values revealed by these advertisements in context. According to what we can see on this page from NewsMax, bribery, corruption, sexual promiscuity, and killing people by impaling them with household objects are morally acceptable things to do, so long as you don't say "Happy Holidays" while you're doing them.
And they say that liberals like me have trouble talking about moral values?
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