"Where else would you go when you have an ax to grind?"

Monday, September 25, 2006

Stick a yellow ribbon on your SUV



The Asylum Street Spankers are to a certain extent an attempt by Austin, Texas to compensate the rest of the world for George W. Bush.
I just spent a week or so hanging out with these guys at the end of their Japan tour. See them, buy their album. Trust me, its fun for the whole family.

Update: The first time I trotted this out a week ago, it got a few hundred hits. This week I mentioned it on a few blogs and it got posted on Democratic Underground among other places and word on the video seem to have gotten out. I've had 1,200 hits in the last 24 hours - which is a lot compared to my usual 20 hits a day and the YouTube version is up over 100,000 viewings after only a few days. The band asks that you check out the video on YouTube so as to get the numbers up. While you're at it, go visit the Spankers site (see other links to your right) and BUY STUFF! Lots of stuff! Get their new album -"Mommy Says No!"- the review is further down the blog. You'll thank me later.

Update to the Update: Thanks to everyone who emailed this link around, I've had about 12,000 hits in the last few weeks. So as an added bonus here is more of God's Favorite Band: The Asylum Street Spankers

15 comments:

Aloysius said...

Is it so wrong that I can't stop watching this?

ellroon said...

This is delicious. I've linked to your site. Thanks!

leftdog said...

BRILLIANT!!!

Anonymous said...

Awesome!!! LMAO!!! I'm linking to this, okay?

Eft said...

Funny, clever, bitter, cool.

barbara said...

love it. thanks

Alison said...

Have been here every day for a week to listen to this.
Thanks, Rev.

oddcatout said...

Excellent! LMTO!

Carol Novack said...

Brilliant! The video's now linkable via my blog (http://carolnovack.blogspot.com), but it's on my magazine site: http://www.madhattersreview.com/mini-movies.shtml. Now maybe the troupe would like a spot in NYC. Hell, they should contact me! I'll see what I can do....

Rev.Paperboy said...

As the band has pointed out, since the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth have become one big contiguous city, the government has decided to merge them.

What will the new city be called?



Worthllas

Madeleine said...

kelvar

progressivegrannie said...

Love it and can't stop watching!

Rev.Paperboy said...

Madeleine, I think you mean kevlar, the stuff they make body armor out of.

http://www.personalprotection.dupont.com/

BG said...

GREAT VIDEO

We believe that the yellow ribbon is a symbol of the political impotency of the American public.

In the early to mid 2000s the American people accepted the yellow ribbon because they literally had no other way to "support" our soldiers. We tried to "support" our soldiers by preventing their deaths, but hey, what can you do? Despite the fact that the vast majority of the American population did not support a war in Iraq, our elected officials completely ignored us and started one anyway. And since the average person couldn't "support" our soldiers by preventing them from going to war and being killed (as they tried to do), they did the only thing they could…and stuck a magnet on their car.

We created the Anti-Ribbon to express our opinion that the yellow ribbon and "Support Our Troops" slogan is a form of propaganda, and pro-war propaganda at that. We believe that whether they know it or not, people who put yellow ribbons on their car are telling the rest of the world that war in Iraq is okay, and that war, in general, is an acceptable, viable solution to our problems.

We read a Noam Chomsky quote dealing with yellow ribbons as propaganda a long time ago that became one of the inspirations for the Anti-Ribbon:

"Americanism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian Gulf War, "Support our troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything that's totally vacuous. In fact, what does it mean if someone asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes, I support them, or No, I don't support them? It doesn't mean anything. That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like 'Support our troops' is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about the issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. It's crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."

Noam Chomsky

From "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", edited by Mark Achbar, p. 79

Anonymous said...

Good Job! :)