Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Bird Brains
How desperate is the radical right now? Having apparently missed the evidence from a few Tuesdays ago as to who is really out to get them, they are hanging out at the Saturday matinees searching among animated movies aficionados for demons to bludgeon. "Happy Feet," an animated film about a dancing Emperor penguin that has right-wing bloviators such as CNN's Glenn Beck and Fox News' Neil Cavuto crying "fowl" over its supposed promotion of environmentalism and global warming theories. ...
In "Happy Feet," a tone-deaf young penguin who doesn't quite fit in with his peers ends up discovering the world, encountering unpleasantries such as polluted oceans along the way. That led Beck to label the film an "animated version of 'An Inconvenient Truth'" and Cavuto to say he "half expected to see an animated version of Al Gore pop up."
It's the second time in as many years that the celluloid penguins have irritated America's ever-fragile political nerves. When the very successful "March of the Penguins" hit screens last year, conservative groups and radio hosts such as Michael Medved co-opted the film's message as a galvanizing call for Americans to emulate the on-screen penguin family values - monogamy and good parenting.
But back to "Happy Feet." The people in the street are taking this about as well as they took the idea of D.C. drones interferring in the Terri Schiavo case:
"It's a movie for Pete's sake," said Mike Grabner of Davison, who laughed and nearly cried during "Happy Feet" with his wife and two daughters.
"And so what if it talked about pollution and global warming or whatever they're saying? I don't think there are many people who don't believe that those things really happen."
That they have to attack a cartoon is pretty sad. It sounds like something Rush Limbaugh would do.
