Insatiable Extremism: Where Right and Left Meet

by Orson Bean

Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray. Bob Elliot was the father of Chris Elliot, who we didn’t know at the time would turn out to be funnier than his dad. The magazine was started by a guy named Al Feldstein. Well, actually, it was started by a guy named Harvey Kurtzman, a brilliant genius who lasted three issues and then got kicked off his own creation by the publisher, who hired Feldstein to take over. I guess Kurtzman was a little too nuts even for Mad. He was a powerhouse of a guy whose girlfriend at the time was a hot young babe named Gloria Steinem. Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

Anyway, I guess Feldstein was just crazy enough to make the magazine a huge success. Now long retired and living in Montana (which seems to be a magnet for marginally crazy people), Feldman, an old lefty, recently forwarded an e-mail to a friend of a friend of mine who forwarded it to me. A million plus people have watched this e-mail by now. It’s a slickly produced film attacking Barack Obama. Any surprise that the President’s base is now turning on him?  It explains that he (Obama), is in the pocket of some amorphous, only hinted-at, world-wide society of manipulators who are behind everything bad in the world: “The Trilateral Commission, founded and conceived by David Rockefeller and his obscenely wealthy (redundancy?) Bilderberg Society cohorts… an amalgam of carefully chosen members of ‘The Elite’… the powerful rich… from the three main areas of the world: The U.S.A…. Europe… and Japan… who would slowly and carefully maneuver the free people of the Earth into a ‘One World’ system of Corporate/Fascism.” This is very old stuff. Conspiracy fodder. Been around for years in one form or another. International bankers turning Canada, the U.S. and Mexico into a single country, etc. And it’s all slickly packaged with music and graphics. (more…)

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Posted May 7th 2009 at 12:33 pm in Celebrity News, Featured Story, Politics | 6 Comments