Update on Alaska as Reality Show Culture

I’ve been known to wonder what the heck goes on in Minnesota as a political metaphor, and our own state of Florida is a literal carnival of crazy when it comes to public affairs.

[I]n Minnesota, home of Pharyngula-famed PZ Myers. . . PZ himself was blacklisted, police on high alert to enforce his, ahem, “expulsion” from this supposedly scientific, open-inquiry teaching of the controversy. Which they literally did, on threat of his arrest — wonder if such ideological use of police power will be decried or defended, by those who characterize as “free speech” what the anti-abortion party-crashers did at the Dr. Seuss movie premiere?

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Mark Drake, of the Republican party in Minnesota, said: “To compare the democratically elected leader of the United States of America to Hitler is an absolute moral outrage which trivialises the horrors of Nazi Germany.”

But today, on the heels of my mentioning Sarah Palin’s personal reality of Alaska as reality show, Alaska repeats as the state throwing me into a state of shocked disbelief:

When Hopfinger continued to try to ask questions, one of the guards put the reporter in an arm-bar and then handcuffed him [and isolated him out of all public view for nearly half an hour.]

Hopfinger was released after police arrived. [But were the guards then handcuffed, perhaps charged with false arrest/unlawful detention/kidnapping? ]

The reporter was on public property where a public event was being held at the time of the incident.

See the latest here if you’re interested in civil rights and constitutional principles as real rather than as scripted skits for world wide wrestling as reality-show entertainment.

The US Senate candidate’s private guards argue the reporter they handcuffed to stop him asking questions of their boss, was just a blogger (not a real reporter IOW) and that at the time, even that wasn’t known to them.

But here’s a contravening fact (you decide if it’s relevant): Hopfinger edits the for-profit Alaska Dispatch, which employs four reporters, two of whom have won Pulitzer Prizes. And even if you decide he wasn’t a reporter and was a lowly citizen on public property, does that make him illegitimate in the role of public question-asker?

OTOH how legitimate is this major party’s nominee telling a public story and asking to be trusted by Alaskans, indeed by the American public generally? Is he a worthy leader to help decide our national questions of security and progress, war and peace, rags and riches, education, ethics, secrecy and transparency, civil rights and basic human dignity? Can he be trusted with the influential power of a Senate seat?

Is he above all questioning to the point that he needn’t even stoop to explain what makes him uniquely so?

That, let us note, is the very question real reporters ask, and the very question private goons both literal and metaphorical are paid so well to prevent being answered! Or more accurately, it’s the question they do answer with all their attempts to prevent it being asked, surely an answer more real in itself than any scripted soundbites on any “news” channel it pays a candidate to prefer as fake public forums, to real ones.

It’s quite clear even when it’s cloudy, that going on the warpath over words ends badly, and leaves behind a populace no more enlightened than it ever was, much less than it could have been. . .

Glad we cleared that up! Have a bright week and clear sailing, whoever and wherever you really are . . .

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