Remedial Class Warfare

I stole this from Leaving Alex Jonestown.  Go read her Christmas countdown series , it's scary and hilarious!

I don't think I could work for Fox News.  It's not just because I'm not blonde a pretty enough either.  Having to constantly act outraged at the most trivial bullshit imaginable would just take too much of a toll on my general wellbeing, I don't think I could handle that.  If I had to spend my days acting like a new type of lightbulb is the worst thing in the history of anything I would have to fucking kill myself before the inevitable aneurysm puts me into a permanently vegetative state.  I don't know which is worse either, having to constantly pretend that the most trivial nonsense is worse than Hitler or having to ignore the genuinely terrible things out there because you're paid to pretend it's the best thing since the discovery of cheese.

In a season where many in the media are even more nonsensically outraged than usual, Fox has once again managed to distinguish itself from the rest of the pack with its current outrage at The Muppet Movie:



That's right, the fact that the bad guy in the movie is a rich oil tycoon means that the Muppets are teaching class warfare to kids.  Fox totally calls it like it is there, liberal Hollywood is  totally demonizing the rich!  It started way back when with classic movies like It's a wonderful life.  Basically every Bond movie ever along with all Superman movies that featured Lex Luthor had evil rich villains.  Of course there are also horror movies like Hostel where evil rich people pay to torture and kill young people and sci-fi movies like The Phantom Menace where the Trade Federation (a group of interplanetary job creators simply protesting a tax hike) are portrayed as the bad guys.  Also, when the A-Team got hired it was usually because some rich guy was trying to muscle out a smaller competitor.  In pretty much any period piece or Western I can think of the bad guy is almost always the rich landowner/tycoon trying to destroy the hard working poor.  Actually, come to think of it most villains tend to be rich and powerful people oppressing the poor and disenfranchised. It makes sense though, having the protagonist be richer and more powerful than the antagonist just wouldn't be good storytelling, why would anyone root for someone like that after all?  This is another reason I can't work for Fox, I don't think I can pretend that I think Ebenezer Scrooge should have been the hero while holding a straight face.

Of course while Fox I knows all about the infamous liberal bias of Hollywood, they may not realize that this evil liberal bias against the rich is everywhere.  Not just in movies and the media but also in books!  And not just in radical fringe works like The Communist Manifesto either, I'm talking about the world's favourite all time best seller - The Bible.

The Bible is just class warfare from cover to cover*.  Well by Fox standards anyway.  You have Jesus commanding a job creator to redistribute his wealth to the welfare cases.  There is the socialist setup of the original church which is portrayed in a positive light.  Jesus even told this one parable in which a rich man goes to hell because he was rich and a poor man goes to heaven because he was poor - not because of their creeds, dogma or belief systems, riches and poverty are the only things mentioned in the parable.  Also that whole thing about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven didn't seem very pro-capitalism at all!  It wasn't just Jesus being all hippie either.  As The Slacktivist pointed out recently, the prophet Nathan once used a story about an evil rich man who took from a man who had very little to illustrate to King David just how evil his actions have been.  In fact, demonizing the rich seems to be a running theme with the prophets.  The Bible has lots to say about money but it rarely has a good word for those who have a lot of it.  It has plenty of really bad things to say for those who make their money by exploiting others, those who don't pay their workers fair wages (promptly) and especially those who foreclose on widows (See Deut 24:15; Isa 58;  Mark 12:40 for but a few examples)

Clearly the Bible is one long piece of anti-capitalist propaganda and I bet Fox would be outraged that it is taught to children.  Of course they can't be outraged by it since they've clearly never read it.


*To be fair, Fox is also wall to wall class warfare but unlike the Bible, they side with wealthy.