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This is priceless.  

 

Bill O'Reilly notices that the Gangnam Style video has gotten 800 million views on YouTube, so he decides to train his analytical eye on it, inviting psychiatrist Keith Ablow to help him out.               

 

 

What does this video MEAN?  Ablow says some people will dismiss the video as meaningless, but not him.  After 800 million views, there must be some meaning there.  And for him that meaning is: people crave meaninglessness!    

 

After all, the words in the song are "unintelligible."  Don't tell our fearless cultural analysts, but the words are in a non-English language called Korean.  I can picture the two of these guys walking around Seoul, saying, "Everyone here speaks gibberish.  I guess they crave meaninglessness here.  Sign of the times."

 

O'Reilly laments the lack of meaning and substance of internet phenomena like this:  "The internet is a place where people want to numb themselves."  It sure isn't a place where people want to go to do a 30-second Google search to find out what Gangnam style means before going on national TV and pontificating about it for five minutes.

 

Not that you need to do a Google search to get the general gist of the actual meaning of the video — it's simply a satire of the glorification of wealth.  And it's very effective and funny.  It's silly, and not exactly deeply meaningful, but its intention is absolutely, obviously clear to anyone spending more than a couple of dismissing seconds glancing at it.

 

And then, the money shot:  Bill O'Reily's "YONG YANG" comment.  Is he trying to say Pyongyang?  If so, (i) that's in North Korea, where it would truly be a meaningful political statement to make this video, and (ii) the artist's name is Psy, but not all Ps are silent.

 

Note: at the point of that comment, O'Reilly is comparing the inherent entertainment greatness and English-speaking caucasian-rifficness of Elvis Preseley, vs. this "little fat guy" from [insert oriental slur, or dericisively mangle the pronunciation of a city in a neighboring country] jumping up and down."

 

Truly, this segment is a masterpiece of lazy, egocentric, racist cluelessness. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it became so popular it surpassed Gangnam Style as the most-viewed video in the history of YouTube.

 

Thanks to the great Greg Pak (@gregpak) who pointed this out on Twitter.

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 [Edited, to relfect the possibility that O'Reilly was attempting to make a reference to Pyongyang when he said "Yong Yang."]

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 THIS WEEK'S COMIC:

BILL O'REILLY'S "LEAVE IT TO BEAVER" NIGHTMARE

 

 

CLICK HERE TO READ IT ON BOING BOING

 

I was struck by the comments (I first saw some of them on The Daily Show) from Dennis Miller, Bernard Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly on FOX News about how the re-election of Barack Obama could mean the end of "traditional America."

 

O'Reilly's definition of "traditional America" as "Ward, June, Wally and the Beave" is a prime example of the right's fetishization of the America of the late 1950s and early 1960s as the hallmark of American gung-ho individualism, self-reliance and unfettered capitalism.

 

So the point of this comic was to take him at his word, and look at the Leave It to Beaver world to see whether the values fit in with O'Reilly's definition of "traditional America."  This comic focuses on issues of egalitarianism, but my old friend David Frum points out that there is also far more freedom from government than there was in 1962, when Leave It to Beaver was on ABC, Saturdays at 8:30:

 

"In 1962, the government regulated the price and route of every airplane, every freight train, every truck and every merchant ship in the United States. The government regulated the price of natural gas. It regulated the interest on every checking account and the commission on every purchase or sale of stock. Owning a gold bar was a serious crime that could be prosecuted under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The top rate of income tax was 91%.

 

It was illegal to own a telephone. Phones had to be rented from the giant government-regulated monopoly that controlled all telecommunications in the United States. All young men were subject to the military draft and could escape only if they entered a government-approved graduate course of study." 

 

O'Reilly also refers to the rise of secularism as a move away from "traditional America," but even if that exists, what does Obama have to do with that?  He's a fairly religious Christian man:  when asked how old the Earth is, he gave a Biblical answer that didn't differ much from the answer scientists pilloried Marco Rubio for.  By the way, in all my research of Leave It to Beaver for this comic (and I did a lot!), I saw no church-going, praying, or mentions of God.  If they existed in the show, it was very infrequently.

 

I would argue that it is the vision of America's current conservatives — the Paul Ryan budget plan's utter dismantling of the non-military Federal government, policies that encourage the already obscene income disparity, etc. — that is the radical, "untraditional" view.

 

Remember: NORMAN ROCKWELL was a staunch New England liberal, and Andy Griffith actually supported Barack Obama in 2008.

 

So, what is it exactly that Miller, Goldberg and O'Reilly find so comfortingly "traditional" about the Leave It to Beaver world?  Hmm, I guess that's the kind of truth that only gets blurted out as one is startled awake from a nightmare.

 

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