Looking at conspiracy cinema

This may be a belated start to a new year of blogging, but I am just able to put a new link in to the amazon.com page for my forthcoming book, CONSPIRACY FILMS.

Due this June 30th from McFarland publishers, the book will be one of the most comprehensive histories of conspiracy theory films ever written. Tracing a decade-by-decade chronicle of some of the most pervasive conspiracy theories in modern American culture, the book will then look at the films they helped inspire.

From JFK to Roswell, alien abductions, men in black, secret societies like the Masons and the Illuminati, I document our culture's most colorful fears and the movies they turn up in.

Interview with my favorite person...

I'm quite grateful for the very cool Nigel P. Bird for giving me the opportunity to join some fantastic talent on his blog and talk about my writing an upcoming book about conspiracy theory films.

Nigel let me and some great writers, like former Culture Wars guests Joelle Charbonneau, Hilary Davidson, Angela Choi, and Steve Weddle, talk about our work in a format where we pretend to interview ourselves.

Check it out right here.

www.nigelpbird.blogspot.com

Skating Around the Law

With the return of a new season of my radio show, Culture Wars, I am pledging regular updates of this blog as well. Following a summer that has been a bit too eventful, brilliant opinions and commentary will be returning to this blog!

The most important opinion for this week, however, is the need to check out our first author interview on Culture Wars. On September 23, 12:00 pm Eastern Time, we are talking live to Joelle Charbonneau about her debut mystery novel, Skating Around the Law. Joelle will discuss how she brings a humorous edge to the cozy mystery, shaking up some of the staid conventions of the genre.

Published by St. Martin's Press, Joelle's book will be available in all bookstores on September 28. In the meantime, check out her web page right here, and read an excerpt of Skating Around the Law.

Culture Wars, of course, will be once again live every Thursday and available on podcasts at http://www.culturewars.libsyn.com/

Yes!!!!!!!!!!! Sanity in broadcast regulation!!!!

And let me say it again, "Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!" Broadcast regulation seems to have taken a small step into the 21st century at last with an appeals court striking down the FCC's indecency regulations as being unconstitutional. Outstanding!! Check out the story right here.

For anyone with a high enough IQ and enough of an attention span to read a simple sentence in the First Amendment, the idea that the FCC censoring the broadcast airwaves was unconstitutional should have been obvious. Of course, IQ requirements would exclude people like the general membership of groups like the Parents Television Council or Focus on the Family any such fundamentalist, ultra-right wing nutbags. So much fun can probably be had today and over the next few days visiting and reading their web pages and blogs and seeing them make even bigger fools of themselves than usual as they claim that "families are under attack."

The only people who have been under attack until now were Americans who knew how to raise their kids and how to manage their families, families that believed in the fundamental values of freedom of speech and expression and the arts, people besieged by gangs of Puritanical crazies who like to force their values on others.

Just like Barry Goldwater so brilliantly said, "You can't legislate morality," you can't legislate taste either, and you have no constitutional right to censor curse words or sex or violence in broadcasting either. Thank God the courts are showing some sanity at last with decisions like this.

What mental illness is Brent Bozell suffering from?

In light of the most recent rampage of the psycho FCC - prompted by the Parents Television Council's complaints about Fox's American Dad cartoon - I somehow got in the mood to read some more idiocy. Thus, for the first time in a while, I checked out some of the recent essays by PTC and Media Research Center head honcho, Brent Bozell.

Now, you see, the thing about Brent Bozell columns is that they're kind of like daytime soap operas. You can miss a number of them and not really miss anything new. They're all essentially the same, especially when he's complaining that somehow society's mores seem to change over time. At one point Bozell woke up and noticed that we weren't living in the 1950s anymore. So, of course, he complains about this a lot and throws around a lot of childish insult words like "smut," "trash," "sleaze," indecent," and "vile."

But the most recent little hissy fit by Bozell is about the musical TV comedy "Glee." You can check it out here, on the web page of the Media Research Center.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the screen and you'll see his piece, titled "The Glee Agenda." It's a play on the right wing paranoid phrase "gay agenda." Get it? Gay agenda? Glee agenda? If you look at the other Bozell columns, you'll see more of examples of his impish wit.

But reading this piece made me wonder what a mental health professional would make of the twisted mind that wrote the article. Bozell apparently feels like the producers of Glee are a bunch of left wing bullies who unfairly like to beat up on social conservatives. These social conservatives, you see, are really nice and decent folks...aside from the fact that they would like to force certain Americans into second-class-citizen status simply for what they do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Thus, the article goes on and lists all the examples of Glee's meanness and rudeness and all the examples of their persecution of the Christian right. I was certain that at one point reference to the Christian diet of Roman lions would come up.

Just how exactly does Bozell find the audacity to complain about the mean satire of Glee after the sort of prolific name-calling he's been busy with in his editorial pieces? Just look around on the very same page and see Bozell referring to CBS as a "toilet network," to FOX as "television's dung pile," to the old FX show "Nip/Tuck" as "vile," and just browse the rest of his postings for all his sophomoric insults. But his work, of course, is nothing as terrible and intolerant as Glee making a joke about Sarah Palin, is it?

If Brent Bozell truly can't understand what prompts certain TV producers to take shots at social conservatives - especially in light of the censorship campaigns the PTC has been engaged in recently - PTC members should take some of those funds their donors lavish on them and help pay for Bozell's psychiatric care.

By the way, it's disappointing that the Media Research Center page no longer gives the readers of Bozell's columns the opportunity to offer feedback. I wonder why he would not be interested in getting some commentary. But since the PTC loves to mail complaints so much, here are a couple of e-mail addresses at the MRC people can send their own complaints to:

contact.cmi@mediaresearch.org

dgainor@mediaresearch.org

mphilbin@mediaresearch.org

craezler@mediaresearch.org

How long will FCC keep caving in to home-grown terror?

Having neglected the blog for a little while now, I must get back into the swing of things here with commentary on yet another reason why the FCC needs to be, once and for all, declared as an unconstitutional entity. Or, at the very least, the specific powers of the FCC to regulate expression in the broadcast media must go.

The FCC has gotten around to fining the FOX network for a January 13th episode of their successful cartoon series American Dad where a series of jokes were made that could be interpreted as a man masturbating a horse. Again, folks, this was an episode where double entendres suggested sexual activity between a man and a horse.

Of course, the people who got outraged over this was America's own home grown cultural terror network, the Parents Television Council. They bombarded the FCC with their complaint letters again, and once again the commission rolls over for this group of thugs and takes censorious action against broadcasting.

What I would love to hear the PTC explain, however, is what sort of a heinous effect they see coming as a result of this episode. Will we now have an epidemic of impressionable children going out and masturbating horses? Media effects are usually the PTC's dread fears. They are usually harping about the horrific EFFECTS of video games and violent movies and TV shows - with a shocking lack of understanding of the concepts of causality and basic social science research, as this blog had repeatedly demonstrated. So is this what the PTC seriously believes?

I would love to see them proven right!!

I am so eager to see the next epidemic of children masturbating horses.

For any members of the PTC reading this, this is an open invitation to prove me wrong!!

True Crime on Culture Wars

The latest episode of Culture Wars - originally broadcast on April 22 on WSPC radio - is now available for podcast download right here.

Our special guest was WRAL reporter and true crime author Amanda Lamb. Her latest book, The Evil Next Door: The Untold Story of a Killer Undone by DNA, has just been released. If you are interested in high tech detective work and the hunt for an elusive serial killer, be sure and check this one out.

And, of course, check out the next episode of Culture Wars live this Thursday from noon until 1:00, EST!