It’s been a long-established tradition to meme (that’s a verb right? Well, it is now) the infamous Chuck Norris. There must be millions of Norris-themed entries on YTMND alone. From ironic to iconic – it seems like he’s unfortunately here to stay, and forum boards may never be the same.
Well, damn it, it’s time to stop.
No more jokes, no more parodies, no more humorous anecdotes. It’s time we buried his Internet personality. Alive. Not because these references peaked comedically years ago (which would seem to be reason enough) but because in all seriousness this guy is a certified nut-job and his disturbing opinions are getting far more attention than warranted. I would have brought this up sooner, but honestly it’s taken this much time for his contrived works to bubble up in popularity enough for me to notice.
He apparently has a biweekly spot on a website that puts the crack in crackpot, WND.com. Here Chuck rants and raves with the wisdom of Glen Beck and the cult-following of Sarah Palin. You can read the articles if you’d like to get a complete picture – but their titles alone make the point: “Chestnuts roasting on a Copenhagen fire”, “Away With The Manger”, and my favorite “What if Mother Mary had Obamacare?” I had heard bits and pieces of his bigotry and ignorance for years now – I honestly never took it serious. But instead of seeing his fame wane, it’s steadily growing. He’s even coming out with a book dedicated solely to his irate political and socioeconomic ideals. It disturbs me how many copies he might actually sell in 2010.
So before he’s gets the chance, it’s time to stop all this. Right now.
At a bare minimum, I could argue his ideas are simply unoriginal, un-insightful, and tedious. From an objective stance – they are mainly just regurgitated thoughts from equally idiotic Fox News correspondents. This should be enough to simply ignore the articles altogether, but with his odd internet-fame he’s managing to get a decent number of hits.
What Chuck does is take seemingly simple ‘crazy’ ideas and add his own special, secret blend of ‘crazy’ to them.The outcome leaves the foreboding taste of good ‘ol fanatical, radical republicanism. Don’t get me wrong here, I have many republican friends, even a few republican ideals myself – I’m referring strictly to the new branch of ultra-rights, Tea Party zombies; if this were baseball, they’d be so far off the right they’d be foul.
Take his article “Chestnuts roasting on a Copenhagen fire” for example. The article mostly just bullet points a series of disjointed “facts” about a supposed global warming conspiracy – I guess taking the Copenhagen emails as some kind of smoking gun. I’ve read several of these emails – it’s amazing what they actually say in context – and many other people (like, actual scientists) have spoken up and said that the emails themselves really don’t show evidence of any coverup or conspiracy whatsoever. It’s also not like these guys are the only people in the entire world to study and document evidence for global warming – and while I won’t make any specific stance here as to weather it’s true or false – these emails are for all purposes inconsequential. Norris states that apparently “32,000 U.S. scientists” don’t think it’s clear humans are the primary cause, which is a fine enough point if that’s your opinion. What’s stupid is how he tries to drive the point home. In the rest of the paragraph he laments that getting people to Copenhagen would release 40k tons of carbon dioxide in the air. If his point is that humans aren’t the primary cause, then in reality it wouldn’t matter if it took 40k tons or 400k tons, now would it? He writes, “Why is our president ‘contributing to global warming’ by flying that super-jumbo 747” - further self-defeating his own argument by both rallying that humans aren’t the cause while asking us to condemn the president for causing more of it. It’s mind numbing logic.
Chuck’s article grandly demonstrates how excruciatingly uninformed (or perhaps misinformed) he is on the subject, compounding the effect by neglecting to provide any actual substance to his position, choosing rather to jump from one disjointed idea to another. He literally goes from Copenhagen to John Holdren to the U.N. to the GRL to NASA to the EPA in just five short sentences. Like a rock skipping across the surface, he simply assumes his readers will connect dots and draw their own skewed picture with him.
His arguments just get more sensationalized from there. In “What if Mother Mary had Obamacare?”, he writes, “Democrats in Congress drove a sword through the womb of the unborn” and asks us, “What would have happened if Mother Mary were covered by Obamacare?” Firstly, he’s simply missing the point of the section of the bill in question, which provides funding to organizations whose primary doctrines are to promote and better facilitate safe sex through education, testing, and contraception. The article he cites actually describes this mantra negatively, if you can believe it. Frankly if anything, funding these organizations simply would seem to reduce the need for abortion, but that’s apparently beside the point. For some reason, Norris also confuses this regional change in fiscal policy with Obamacare – the term we are all familiar with in reference to the national health care bill. Apparently he doesn’t know the difference. Again, the article is simply low on substance, high on sensationalism. He can’t even stay on topic and by the end of this article he begins ranting about global warming again for no clear reason. When he implies Obama would personally have aborted baby Jesus reductio ad hitlerum - I just lose all respect for the argument and even more for the man behind them.
His latest article is really just more and more of the same bullshit, “Gone are the days when presidents and most politicians publicly rejoice in the birth of Christ.” What days were those exactly? Apparently no one told him that the founding fathers were atheist, agnostic, and anti-government. Also, they forgot to mention Christ wasn’t born on December 25th (the date has many other possible origins, but there is substantial evidence Christ wasn’t born on that day), and that the ritual itself is largely based on pagan ideals. He cites the warm, fuzzy Christmas traditions of many of our presidents of old – like Coolidge, Hover, Grant. I guess it really doesn’t matter that Coolidge was well known at the time for his mishandling of massive floods in a span of mismanagement and government incompetence unparalleled until Bush and Katrina; or that Hoover’s fiscal policies were so inept that it sparked our nations largest depression in our collective history (you may have heard of it, I think it was called THE GREAT DEPRESSION); or that Grant was arguably one of the most corrupt presidents of all time, granting massive retroactive bonuses, running a Whiskey ring with millions in taxpayer funds, and cutting deals with a Navy contractor to earn kickbacks to build himself a summer home. Chuck really didn’t care about any of that though – because damn it, they liked Christmas.
The point, unsurprisingly, was that Obama, “enabled an anti-Christian agenda unlike any former president by revising America’s religious history.” Hmm, I really think the founding fathers might have enabled that more than any other president in history, but maybe he missed that part of the Constitution, I mean it is the first part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”. It’s also ridiculous to require Obama enforce your own Christian ideals. That’s not just my opinion though – it’s also in the damned Constitution, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”. He ironically called for Obama to “use and cite the Constitution” – which Norris so glaringly misinterprets and neglects.
If we go back further into the shit-pile of “articles” Norris has constructed on WND, I can find a myriad of examples of him either misinterpreting the nature of the founding fathers by pushing his ideals onto them, or conversely quoting them directly on issues we really can’t support anymore regardless (usually regarding civil liberties). It’s important that we take their personal views with a grain of salt – I mean a lot of these guys owned slaves, they probably aren’t the modern world’s best template to guide social policy anymore.
Really the very location of these articles is enough to bury them – WND is notorious for this kind of “red literature” – nothing but an endless see of baseless anger and seudo-christian-ideals. Any rational thinker would reject these – but his fame is attracting a disturbing following of non-thinkers. If these few articles aren’t enough for you, he “is against public schools condoning homosexuality,” and fought staunchly for Prop 8. He wrote in November of this year, a quote from Lincoln, ”Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” Ironic considering one of his primary messages is denying the freedom of others. He also had this to say about evolution: “It’s not real. It is not the way we got here. In fact, the life you see on this planet is really just a list of creatures God has allowed to live.” Fantastic.
Norris has been somewhat outspoken about his delirious political views for some time – thankfully his opinions have generally been buried in obscurity, on the fringes. But these biweekly articles, the political books, the syndications – they are lifting this uneducated daytime-TV actor on an ever-higher pedestal, ironically tying his (until now) obscure ideals in with Palin’s. Frankly reading articles from one is almost indistinguishable from the other’s. Which either tells you something about Norris, or more importantly might tell you something about Palin.
At the very least, let’s all be sure NOT to buy his book “Black Belt Patriotism” due in 2010. I guess he’s planning to karate-chop the nations problems? I’m sure that’ll help.
A real American would find this rhetoric baffling. A real writer would find this indecipherable. A real republican would find this garbage demeaning. A real Christian would find this hate-mongering misguided.
His articles are really not all that different than the memes – their just stupid jokes, with no real meaning, no factual basis, and nothing to add to our society on the whole. Time to let him fade back into obscurity, sentenced to toil between the hours of 7 AM and 8 AM on the USA Network for all eternity.
-Andy
