A viewer writes to comment on UnCommon Sense TV’s take on George Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address (see the USTV List of Programs for more details).

Is this just some bizarre attempt to grasp at the success MST3K had — but with political footage? I’m not altogether amused, but then again.. I detest politics.

Give me little robots and B-movies anyday.

Dear Viewer,

Gotta love those geeky robots! The point here was to use the MST3K format to comment on the 2005 “State of the Union” speech by George W. Bush. This was not a completely stand-alone production, but a special created by the producers of the UnCommon Sense TV show, which airs on public access in the Dayton, Ohio region on Sundays at 6pm. Our usual format is more conventional: We sit at a desk and talk about issues with some additional sound and images to reinforce the points we are making.

I also hate politics, (and would rather spend my time listening to DEVO, Sufjan Stevens, Theivery Corporation, and the Dresden Dolls or reading Robert Anton Wilson novels) but experience has taught me that I cannot run from politics. NEVER FORGET: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. If you don’t use your rights, someone else will be happy to use them for you.

Culture, music, food, business, media, entertainment, sports, education, and money in this country are all intertwined with politics. For instance, the channel where you saw Uncommon Sense TV exists because in 1976 the FCC required that cable television companies provide public, educational, and government (PEG) access broadcasting services to the communities where they do business.

Also, programming like the SciFi Channel, MTV, Food Network, ESPN, CNN, and all the other special interest channels exist because of ‘bundling’ of cable packages provided through the cable distributor. It used to be that most of what cable services provided were local channels from other cities. All the Turner channels and CNN grew out of this background. The original appeal of cable was to provide TV to communities that only had zero to two channels. Cable was discouraged from even operating in the big urban markets. So if you care about what you have the chance to see on TV, hear on the radio, or access on the internet, pay attention to politics. They regulate the media, and often they do it in ways that help their friends make money, NOT in ways that make it better for you.

Are you going to college or planning to? If you are intending to get student loans, know that they only exist because of politics. Do you like safe tap water? Know that it only exists because of politics. Do you like getting breaks at work? Know that employers are only required to give them to you because of politics. I could go on, but you get the point. You SO need to pay attention to politics.

Ed Lacy
USTV Media

PS: Speaking of Science fiction, did you see Dark City?

A note sent in regarding our program “America: A Christian Nation?” (see our program list for more information) which posed some of the following thoughts and questions.

i just wanted to write you and tell you that i think your show, which i only caught part of, was way off the mark. it was on america being a christian nation. the founding fathers were correct, i believe, in seperating church from state. they did a good job leaving christian symbols out of buildings and some tombstones and the like, but what about our money, oaths taken for office, and swearing in at trials and hearings?and that really isn’t the question about whether “america” is a christian nation. regardless of what some of the fathers wrote or said, the “people” of this country were christian and built many buildings such as churches, schools and hospitals. a poll, done by cnn i think, in 2004 said that 80% plus people regarded themselves as being christian or “tied” to christianity. i personally would never try to shove my beliefs onto someone else, and i realize that some christians want to “seize” our government, but don’t christians have a “right” to elect the people they believe will best serve their interests? the term “christian nation” only really started to appear in my newspaper and tv after bush was elected like it was wrong for “those people” to elect someone they wanted. it would seem to me to be more appropriate next time to use the term “christian government” insread of christian nation to make your point.

The term Christian nation denotes much more than a majority sentiment or belief. It refers to the political structure of a country. For instance, the United Kingdom is a Christian nation, because it has an established church that is officially recognized and supported by the government. Many other countries such as Sweden, Peru, and The Netherlands have similar arrangements. Our constitution expressly FORBIDS the official establishment of religion by our government, so the United States is, by definition, a secular republic, where the religious or non religious inclinations of all citizens must be given equal protection under the law.

QUESTION: Don’t christians have a “right” to elect the people they believe will best serve their interests?

ANSWER: The majority can elect who it chooses, and recently it seems that you don’t even need to be a plurality, much less a majority, to elect someone. However, regardless of who is elected, their JOB is to serve the public interest as defined by the Constitution. If they deviate from the Constitution on behalf of a zealous majority or minority, they are violating their oath of office and should be removed.

Spending taxpayer dollars, PUBLIC money, on programs such as Bush’s “faith based initiatives” is unconstitutional, and must end. If people want to involve their churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, covens, etc in charity work, they can fund it directly, instead of asking Americans whose faith differs from their own to offer money to be spent under their auspices. The founders and the authors of the Constitution were very clear about this. A key point of democracy, as opposed to mob rule, is that, while it reflects the will of the majority, it does not allow the majority to tyrannize the minority. Imposing subjective morals that should apply only to members of a religion in secular law is tyranny. Using government money, which is secular by Constitutional mandate, to implement programs that favor any religion is antidemocratic, and tyrannical. It is one step away from taxation without representation. Eliminating religious favoritism is one of the reasons we fought the American Revolution.

If one has any doubts that faith based initiatives can engender religious favoritism, take a look at who has received the money. A much higher percentage of evengelical Christian applicants have been successful in receiving awards of money than those from other denominations or religions who have applied for it. If a different political constituency had more power in a future administration the tables could be turned, Neither scenario is acceptable. Even if it were Constitutional, this is an inefficient use of tax money because, far from providing an advantage by eliminating public bureaucracy, it helps to fund duplicate private bureaucracies.

Furthermore, the poll cited here does not reveal anything about the public’s will in political decision making, since among the eighty percent of Americans who identify with Christianity in some way or another, there is a wide range of opinion about what, if anything, their Christian association means in terms of political action. Some of the most committed Christians in America are the Society of Friends (usually called Quakers). I greatly doubt that THEIR political agenda would be even remotely palatable to the Southern Baptists, but they make up part of that eighty percent you are citing, As do Russian Orthodox, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Mormons, Brethren, Rastafarians, liberation theologians, African Methodists, Coptics, Metropolitan Church members (gay Christians), and even some Unitarians. So the poll says little about the religious will of people who identify with Christianity, let alone non-Christian Americans. Even if there were a monolithic viewpoint being represented by that number, that constituency would have to amend the Constitution to force its will on the rest of us, and they would be sacrificing our democracy on that zealous fire.

Frankly, I find it hypocritical that neoconservatives want to invoke the Constitution to protect our gun rights (which I support by the way), but want to ignore it when it gets in the way of subsidizing religion, reusing old communist detention camps in eastern Europe, setting up a system of illegal eavesdropping, or sticking their noses in my library records. Americans need to step back from all of the shortsighted and disrespectful tinkering with Constitutional law that we have been indulging in since Bush took office.

In conclusion, I will ask that one ponders the following: Would you want a President Hillary Clinton or Edward Kennedy to award the monies and wield the powers that are currently being offered to George W. Bush?

Ed Lacy
UnCommon Sense TV

UnCommon Sense TV receives occasional feedback, some is praise, some is thoughtful criticism. The following email was in a different category, however. Here it is (sic), along with a reply:

You are obviouly desperate to get attention with silly attacks heres a fact ted kennedy got lots of press for mary joe, and he’s been fine ,,terri schiavo is dead did your view of the constituition defend her?

Dear viewer,

I really don’t think it is productive to respond to this, but I’m tempted because you are participating (I hope unwittingly) in milking the Schiavo tragedy to political advantage.

You obviously never had a relative wasting away in a medically irreparable state. I remember how hard it was for me to let go of my mom, but she had made her wishes very clear, she wanted to be classified as DNR, and not to have a feeding tube. When she was laying in bed dying, I would have done anything to have her live for one more month, week, even day. But it would have been so unfair to her, and even though she had no living will, she had let everyone in the family know her views on artificial life support- she only wanted it if it could lead to recovery and a return to normal living. I can imagine the heart wrenching misery of both Terri Schiavo’s husband and parents. I understand from my personal experience the desire of her parents to keep her alive regardless of the prison her body and brain had become, the frustration of her husband and the struggles they all must have gone through. What an awful situation, and then along comes the political agenda of people like Randall Terry– and Tom DeLay, who was obviously using his righteous posturing to avoid being scrutinized for some less-than-righteous behavior in another region of ethics, that of the public trust in elected officials.

Politics aside, my answer is YES, the Constitution did defend Terri Schiavo, and it has nothing to do with “my view” of the Constitution. The rights it provided come from the long tradition of English legal precedent that traces back to the Magna Carta, a tradition which the theocratic right is determined to replace with the “divinely inspired” judgment of a bevy of Ayatollahs like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Randall Terry, et al. If the parents had wanted to remove the tube and her husband did not, should the court have allowed them to intervene then? Do you see the inconsistency here? Judicial tradition respects the sanctity of marriage. I could be disingenuous (like a congressman on a talk show) and ask you if you would prefer that it didn’t protect the sanctity of marriage, but I sense that your opinion on this matter is not based on the consistency or Constitutionality of court decisions, but rather on an emotional grasp of medical ethics.

As for Edward Kennedy, he was a drunk who ran into a lake and failed to call the police when his passenger was drowning. As much as I may think of his politics, of which I take a mixed view, you will not get me to defend his behavior, nor that of any of the rest of the spoiled brats sprinkled among his extended family. But for the life of me I can’t see how that has anything to do with the facts we present on our show, or with our opinions about those facts, or with the Schiavo tragedy.

Apparently you are laboring under the mistaken impression that we are loyal and uncritical members of the Democratic Party. Let me assure you, if the Democrats were in charge, and behaving the way these guys are behaving, I would be expressing the same attitude toward them. One of the flaws in partisanship is that in a political party you are aligned with human beings, many of whom do not have the ethical perspective or common sense to restrain themselves from baser impulses. We are small “d” democrats (and small “r” republicans) , certainly, but that is as far as it goes. No one who cares about the health of our republic could be anything but disappointed in the Democrats over the last fifty years. For myself, I am certainly an admirer of many (not all) elements of the New Deal, and I think that a retreat into the 19th century model of laissez-faire capitalism is an indulgence in fantasy at the expense of reality. Things that happen on the scale of the industrial and post-industrial economies need SOME DEGREE of public guidance. (Our politics ought to be openly about how much guidance much that should be, not about whether people have guns, condoms, or religious paraphernalia in their homes)

Since WWII especially, Democrats have succumbed to some of the worst political impulses, including corruption, failure to stand on principle, opportunism, and many others, as the Republicans are doing now. I do not agree with many of the philosophical underpinnings of the Republican Party, but I would have a lot more respect for them if they actually lived by them. I will never forget the rhetoric Newt Gingrich used to stir up (often deserved) righteous indignation against Congressional Democrats in the mid 1990s. It was easy, with the likes of Dan Rostenkowski and Bill Clinton floating around. Now the worm has turned. Seems the Contract with America wasn’t so revolutionary after all, just business as usual with a multifaceted campaign of propaganda and rhetoric designed to deflect attention from the self-serving behavior of the new regime.

Unfortunately, George Washington’s dream of a republic without political parties was never realized; the answer to that has to be more political parties, not fewer. Right now, the radical extremists have taken over the GOP, and I will use any tool at my disposal to help dislodge them from power, including the Democratic Party, but I have no illusions about the Democrats as an organization. Without serious reforms in the funding of public elections and in the stranglehold the two major parties have on the process, we will never fully realize the potential for democracy that this nation has. There are many ways to this end, several of which we have summarized and discussed on our show.

We are at a crucial point in world history, at which the role of the USA will be cast for at least a century. If we fail to behave responsibly, and continue to act as though the future will be just like the past, we will fall into the landfill of history as more coherent (not more desirable) leadership supplants us on the world stage. I don’t know if that is what the Busheviks want to see, but they are doing all they can to make it real, and sooner rather than later.
The Busheviks MUST GO!
They must go for the survival of the nation.
They must go because they are destroying the stability of people’s lives.
They must go because their religious intolerance foments attacks against the U.S. Constitution.
They must go for the survival of democracy and of republican government in the world.
They must go to prevent the ascension of outright global tyranny akin to that of the “Christian” European monarchs of centuries past.
They must go because they are ruining the Earth.

Ed Lacy
UnCommon Sense TV

UnCommon Sense TV receives occasional feedback of various forms, some praise, some thoughtful criticism. Here is a somewhat misguided appraisal (spelling from original) of USTV’s Special Inaugural Edition program, first aired on January 20th, 2005. See our USTV Program List for more details on the episode in question.

I turned to this show and all they did was play clips of the NAZI’s and Hitler. I found it especially disgusting being that it is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwich death camp. I was in very poor taste and show a lack of common sense hence the name of the show. I don’t know what political message they were trying to make but after this a used car salesman is more credible that these idiots!!!

Thank you for expressing your concern about the content of Uncommon Sense TV.

I want to reassure you that UnCommon Sense TV is completely and unalterably opposed to all forms of dictatorship, especially ones that scapegoat the innocent and foment hatred. Our purpose for showing excerpts of the propaganda film Triumph of the Will was to warn people against fascism, and was IN NO WAY an endorsement of Nazism or any of its many evils. We despize Nazism.

We at UnCommon Sense TV believe that there is a very real threat from fascism in the USA right now, in the 21st century. The Nazi propaganda visuals were shown to illustrate for contemporary Americans how easily Germans in the 1930s were duped into supporting some of the most monstrous evil ever to manifest in the history of the human race. We hope that viewers will be able to see how what appears normal to us now in American politics, the rampant nationalism, the glorification of war, and the unleashing of the most selfish elements in our commercial economy, are all eerily similar to the political conditions in the early stages of Nazi Germany.

If you read the series of quotes by both German Nazi and contemporary American politicians that were shown on the screen during the show, you may have noticed that there were numerous disturbing similarities between the rhetoric of our own leaders and the twisted rhetoric of the mid 20th century fascists. It is wholly inaccurate and misleading to characterize the show as nothing but clips of Nazis.

We do not mean by our comparison to trivialize the evils of the Nazis, nor to exaggerate the evils of our current leadership. We believe that both can be seen for what they are, in both similarities and differences. If you have watched any previous installments of USTV, you know thet we are no fans of George W. Bush, and we consider him and his minions a threat to democracy in America, and to both the economic and spiritual health of the United States. We do believe there are several ways in which his administration resembles the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini.

Please take another look at the Inaugural Special the next time it re-airs in your viewing area, and take special care to read all of the quotes and facts that are displayed on the screen. Keep in mind that NONE of the information or quotations originated with our show. We have simply put the facts on the air, and provided what we think is an appropriate context in which to review them. I suppose our fault was in underestimating the number of casual and inattentive viewers who might stumble across our presentation and misinterpret it, either innocently or maliciously.

If you have any lingering doubts about our intentions, note to whom the program was dedicated (see the closing credits). There were three men mentioned. George Orwell, whose classic novel 1984 warned against totalitarianism, Franz Kafka, the greatly respected surrealist author of The Metamorphosis, who was a Czechoslovakian of Jewish descent, and some of whose relatives were murdered by the Nazis, and finally Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb in 1944. Unfortunately, Hitler survived the blast.

Ask yourself: Would anyone sympathetic to Nazis dedicate a program to these men? Resoundingly, NO!

We at UnCommon Sense TV are in favor of a democratic republic, and we are opposed to hate and oppression of all kinds. THAT is why we think there is no better time than now to remember the veracity of the closing quotation from the Inaugural Special, that Fascism doesn’t begin with concentration camps, it ends with them.

Anyone who payed attention to the content of our presentation would know that we also find Nazis distasteful, to say the LEAST. We also know that as the American philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I am certain that the victims of Auschwitz would not want us to forget how the Nazis rose to power, or how their propaganda conflicted with their actual goals.

What is truly tasteless is the willful ignorance of people who like to pretend that The USA is somehow immune to the evils of totalitarianism.
I will have much more confidence in the resiliance of the American people against fascism when they stop allowing people like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al to wield political power.
I look forward to that happy day of renewal in the annals of democracy.

Ed Lacy
UnCommonSense TV
Long live the spirit of Thomas Paine