Nine years ago I made my first mention of enlightened incarceration of dumbfuck rural righties via green re-education camps. I said I was half-kidding, of course, but you knew I was half-serious. A year later I said I was “perfectly serious” about rounding them up in trucks, etc. Five years later, in late 2015, Bill Maher joked that this idea made sense. Kidding but half-serious. And now Doonesbury‘s Garry Trudeau is saying the same thing, calling it a desperate liberal daydream but at the same implying there are crazier ideas out there.
In other words, a fair way to describe Hollywood Elsewhere is “the column that spoke too soon.” You may find certain HE ideas or notions appealing, but for your own political protection it’s better to wait for other opinion-shapers to echo them first. For I am Hawkeye or Chingachgook, a finder of new paths and new realms. If you’re smart you won’t immediately repeat or advocate what you read in Hollywood Elsewhere…instead you should wait five years, or better yet ten.
“Exterminate, forbid or significantly reduce selfishness in our society and we’re obviously looking at a better world. Therefore the extermination of the right would theoretically be a reasonably good thing. Not that this is possible. I understand that. But if I ran things they would all be rounded up and sent to green internment camps for reeducation. All right, I’m kidding.” — from an 8.5.09 post titled “Argument Over Beers.”
A year later, on 9.17.10, I wrote that “I want these people rounded up in trucks and incarcerated in green reeducation camps. I’m perfectly serious.”
“The more pernicious and threatening the climate-change situation gets, the less radical my green reeducation camps idea will seem. If you don’t want any kind of future for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, fine…let’s just cruise along and do nothing. But there’s really no way to argue against the notion that rural yokels and their Congressional reps are, no exaggeration, the most malicious villains of our time…public enemies in every conceivable sense of that term.” — From “While Rome Burns“, posted on 5.8.14.
