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You are here: Home / Nowhere to Run

Nowhere to Run

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Flipping through the channels, and I see that Niall Ferguson has a two hour special on PBS extolling the virtues of the west over the rest of the world, citing, among other things, consumerism and work ethic. Seriously.

If this were a Friday, and I’d already been subjected to David Brooks on NPR, it might well be enough for me to move to a shack in the middle of Montana with a goat and a generator.

Reader Interactions

128Comments

  1. 1.

    Chris from Arlington, VA

    Yep, that sounds about right. I don’t have cable, and both my PBS stations are showing this claptrap. I can’t escape! Time to play some Baldur’s Gate 2.

    Jesus now he’s extolling the virtues of suburbs. Gag.

  4. 4.

    Hill Dweller

    This jackass can get a PBS special, but Voldemort kicking legitimate voters off the FL voting rolls can’t get a mention on the national newscasts nor papers.

  5. 5.

    jl

    Titled ‘The West and the Rest’?

    Is this some kind of spoof you pulling, Cole? Beejus Trikes…

    Edit: And is Tunch inside, yet? I want to see the fall colors this year, and not eager to get there with all the trees flattened like ‘someone’ sat on them.

  7. 7.

    Jade Jordan

    move to a shack in the middle of Montana with a goat and a generator.

    Isn’t this already how people in West Virginia live?

  8. 8.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    If this were a Friday, and I’d already been subjected to David Brooks on NPR, it might well be enough for me to move to a shack in the middle of Montana with a goat and a generator.

    What are you trying to do, attract myiq2xu GoatBoy to some remote location?

  10. 10.

    jl

    Cole, a known ‘lesser person’, considers moving to the boonies, in survival mode, with goats and generators.

    Well, see, Cole already understands Fergie’s message, so doesn’t need to watch the show. He knows the bottom line already.

  11. 11.

    The Institute For A Meaningful Apocalypse

    Jesus now he’s extolling the virtues of suburbs.

    consumerist sheeples got to live somewhere to run their microwaves and spit out little sheeples for another brick in the wall of the content but strangely insane.

    It shant be long now, till some Hunter/Gatherers 2.0 of the coming world, fishing through the debri fields of former affluence, finds a toaster, and wonders what it is, and if it was all worth it.

  13. 13.

    BGinCHI

    That’s funny. I was just scrolling through there and saw that too and laughed out loud. At least the Frontline afterwards (on the Taliban in Yemen) looks good.

    Hey, anyone know when the new episodes of the Sherlock Holmes with Ben Cumberbatch are coming out? Or did I miss them? PBS?

    Oh, and fuck Niall Ferguson. Writing a bio of Henry Kissinger? Classy.

  14. 14.

    gbear

    The same button that turns the TV on can also be used to turn it off. Amazingly enough, if you don’t push the button again, you never have to watch that stuff. First choice of buttons to push should always result in music.

  16. 16.

    Raven

    What is it about the name of one of the greatest flat pickers of all time that triggers the filter on this blog?

    D
    o
    c

    W
    a
    t
    s
    o
    n

    R
    I
    P

  23. 23.

    Alex

    The only thing which could improve this special would be if Victor Davis Hansen appears to explain why we should exterminate those other cultures.

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    Another benefit of KCET leaving the PBS ranks is that they won’t be showing this claptrap — the Orange County stations get stuck with it.

    Though I do love how Egypt has been magically transported to “the West.” Nothing else in Africa counts, apparently, but I guess Egypt broke off and floated away when no one was looking.

  25. 25.

    Dr. Omed

    I’ve been reading books on the subject of empire, so I have read Ferguson’s book “Empire.” It was a reasonably enjoyable read, but then on the page I have no problem distinguishing the bits that interest me from the bullshit conclusions he makes about the material he presents. On the teevee one hears in his voice and sees in his face what a smug supercilious self-satisfied bastard he is, plus more bullshit less detail.

  28. 28.

    cathyx

    Moving to a shack in Montana isn’t very American of you.

    I wasn’t very American this weekend either. I stayed home and didn’t spend money.

  29. 29.

    mclaren

    As Shithole America crashes into a supersonic powerdive toward collapse, we’ll see a lot more of this horseshit. Plenty of 2-hour specials boasting and strutting about how “America is the greatest country in the world” and “America is NUMBER ONE!!!”

    Or, as Spiro Agnew put it so memorably, “America is the greatest nation in the country.”

    This is what always happens when a society goes down the tubes. I bet the Easter Islanders had ever more laudatory and increasingly wild celebrations of their greatness right up to the point where they chopped down their last tree.

  37. 37.

    Jeff Spender

    @mclaren:

    Dude, I think you need to try medication. Get out and enjoy the world a little more.

    Societies come and go. That’s the way it works.

    Why should we be any different?

  39. 39.

    jl

    @Raven: I assume a proper memorial post will emerge where people can post links to favorite tunes.

    yr obdt srvt, & etc.,
    hipster geek fuck,

  40. 40.

    mark

    i can’t post a link for something important! must have an offending phrase in it. how can i get it to you FPers??????

  41. 41.

    Carol

    I didn’t think there could be a more banal and inappropriate metaphor than Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” but Ferguson has outdone him with his “Five Killer Apps.”

    His book “Empire” was a good read, and beautifully illustrated. It was all downhill from there.

  43. 43.

    BGinCHI

    @Raven: To be honest, I find it a pleasant surprise that Doc lived this long into a world he must have found pretty nutty. Though he has a shitload of fans in the digital age.

  44. 44.

    RSR

    I recorded both episodes based on simply seeing it listed in the guide and being on PBS. (I record a lot of stuff that I *might* want to watch later.) But I guess I should just delete them without watching.

    The Hoover Institution, huh? Yeah, think I’ll pass.

  45. 45.

    mark

    ht tp://wcm coop.com/mem bers/me et-com mand-cen tral-the-peo ple-in-cha rge-of-wisc onsin-vot ing-mac hines/

  47. 47.

    mark

    no spaces in any of that. there is one in each word, only way i could post that link….

    wth??

  48. 48.

    Raven

    @BGinCHI: I always wanted to go to Merlefest but they won’t let you bring dogs! There is a big pig pickin-pickin party this Saturday that should be a fitting tribute.

  51. 51.

    jl

    OK, now back to business.

    Some enterprizing person needs to Monty Python the Fergie series. For example, you could dub Fergie wandering in awe through a sterile pod of pre boom suburb row McMansions:

    “Behold, stucco, the modern miracle marble for the masses, the veritable building blocks of the prosperous modern social pyramid, was looked down upon by snotty limosine liberals and their silly socialist shibboliths.”

    And, as per a commenter above. I do wonder how history will be handled. Egypt, the West; Nubia, the rest. Ramses, great prototypical rule of an empire, Taharga, savage original gangster from the south, entered and despoiled the hallowed halls of Western Civ, much like….

  53. 53.

    Suffern ACE

    @mclaren: Well, we they might be priming us for a right territorial expansion. Those Persians. We could teach em a thing or two about civilization. Like Alexander the Great did. Yeah. We’re da best. We’ll make em drink coke.

  55. 55.

    jl

    @Suffern ACE:

    Alexander the Great? Wasn’t that the dipsomaniac bisexual rage aholic great dead white male of Western Civ fame?

    Lady Gaga could write a salutory song with a lesson in it, about him. I will wait for it.

  57. 57.

    JPL

    @David Koch: but, but a lot of people don’t think it’s a real certificate. Wolf should have asked who.

    edit.. the second time he did ask.. must give wolf credit

  58. 58.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Raven:

    Oh how odd. I posted an RIP notice to … um, him … on another thread downstream, and my comment just never showed up. But I didn’t get one of FYWP’s “your comment is in moderation” notices, so it never occurred to me that I had triggered the spam filter.

    Wonder what could be in Döç Wåtšøñ that annoys FYWP?

  59. 59.

    lamh35

    Ugh, I am so pissed by the last segment on Rachel Maddow where John Harwood was on and basically said that yeah Romney is using Trump’s birtherism to raise money and as a way to “stick it to the lefttis and the Rachel Maddow and MSNBC” and let them know that they dont’ plan to buckle down to the left and that Romney was actually joking about birtherism and the campaign released Romney’s birth certificate today as a way to put the Rachel Maddows and MSNBC of the world that the campaign won’t be apologizing for anything.

    Harwwod basically said that hey what backlash, people already consider Trump a clown, so hey who really cares if Romney dabbles in birtherism…I think Rachel was stunned by Harwood. She seemed speechless that Harwood was actually saying that hey it’s no big deal that the Romney camp is happy to out right court racist idiots like Trump. It took her a moment to try to push back, but it was half-hearted at best since, IMHO, she just seemed shock that Harwood was so blase’ about the whole thing.

    If Harwood is the voice of the village, then I feel sadder than I already felt for the citizens of US who gets their info from feckless hacks like Harwood and the like.

    ETA: Rachel’s intro was great though, but Harwood completely pissed on it.

  62. 62.

    jl

    @lamh35: Spells loser in general if big turnout to me, so disgusting, but might not be bad news. If the GOP and Romney go this route, it has to all be about low turnout and voter suppression, and that is very disgusting.

  63. 63.

    realbtl

    @Raven:
    “Windy and Warm” got me started on finger pickin’ about 50 years ago. Need to get out the guitar and see if I still remember it. Truly one of the greats.

  65. 65.

    Raven

    @jl: Maybe they are trying to sandbag the Obama campaign into coming out full blast anti-mormon.

  70. 70.

    vhh

    we’ve been here b4, in the 1960s:

    Little boxes on the hillside,
    Little boxes made of ticky tacky
    Little boxes on the hillside,
    Little boxes all the same.
    There’s a green one and a pink one
    And a blue one and a yellow one,
    And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
    And they all look just the same.

  73. 73.

    lacp

    @Raven: The Magic Underpants Cyborg vs. Black Metrosexual Lincoln? This will be awesome – kinda like Alien vs. Predator dialed up to infinity! And we can watch it for free! Is this a great country, or what?

  74. 74.

    WereBear (itouch)

    So John is gonna be a dental floss tycoon?*

    There is always a recognition lag in anything. As institutions that were once taken for granted start losing their grip, it takes a while to realize they no longer make sense. Much like a relative sliding into dementia.

    The good news is that it is becoming obvious, and younger generations will not take them seriously. TV is losing traction as a source of news that is not actively on fire.

    *Zappa

  75. 75.

    Hill Dweller

    @lamh35: Don’t count on the MSM committing any actual journalism. Willard is one of the worst presidential candidates(and certainly the biggest liar) I’ve ever seen, but you’d never know it listening/reading the press. They want a horse race.

  76. 76.

    piratedan

    Breaking News on MSN! Mitt Romney wins Texas! Guess their lege went to Vegas and Romney placed an over bet on the amount of loons in the state lege and ended up with the state since they were short of cash on hand. My guess is that he’ll break up the states and offer bits and pieces to the surrounding states since that’s his MO as a businessman.

  78. 78.

    mark

    /members/meet-command-central-the-people-in-charge-of-wisconsin-voting-machines/

  79. 79.

    Librarian

    I saw a few minutes of it, in which he says essentially that the west won the cold war with blue jeans. This asshole is still fighting the cold war. Speaking of East Germany, I wonder if he says anything about the fact that his precious USA is becoming a stasi surveillance state as he speaks. He writes a book and makes a TV show bragging about how great the west is at the exact moment that the west’s economies implode- great timing, asshole.

  81. 81.

    lacp

    @piratedan: Shit, that’s right – when Texas joined the USA, I think it reserved the right to split into 6 smaller states. Willard will Bain-Capital the shit out of those puppies.

  82. 82.

    mark

    WHY CANT I POST MY LINK FIND?!?!!!???

    i can post the whole thing in pieces, but not the whole thing!!!

  85. 85.

    patroclus

    Thankfully, Craig James, who totally ruined two college football programs in addition to killing five hookers while at SMU, is going down in a massive humiliating landslide tonight in Texas!!

  86. 86.

    jl

    @lacp:

    I’m thinking more like an Abbot and Costello remake.

    Wikipedia says that they made ‘Mexican Hayride’ and ‘Africa Screams’ back to back.

    There is a definite pitch there, just waiting to be made.

  87. 87.

    rikyrah

    there’s a GOP Congressman who has to be a write-in for the primary – cause only 244 of his sigs were legit

    Only 244 of McCotter’s 1,830 submitted signatures were valid; official calls it ‘unprecedented’ fraud
    12:17 PM, May 29, 2012

    The uphill slog of a write-in congressional campaign begins today for U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Livonia.

    “It’s going to be very difficult,” he said in an interview with the Free Press this morning. “But the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee) supports it. The state party supports it and the people in the district support it.”

    It’s not a position that McCotter wants to be in. But his campaign failed to file enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. A congressional candidate must submit at least 1,000 and not more than 2,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot.

    The Secretary of State’s website said McCotter’s campaign initially submitted 2,000 signatures.

    http://www.freep.com/article/20120529/NEWS15/120529029/U-S-Rep-Thaddeus-McCotter-R-Livonia-write-in-campaign

  90. 90.

    Violet

    @patroclus:
    Can’t believe how well Dewhurst is doing. Sarah Palin endorsed Cruz and I figured Cruz would at least be competitive. The GOP Establishment is winning at the moment.

  91. 91.

    Elie

    @John – A Motley Moose:

    He is a disgusting, semi-literate propagandist. Other than his British accent and upperclasswhiteboy appearance, what does he present?

    Honestly. A signficant proportion of American white people have had a brain infarction over the last few years. What do you do? They are not on life support so there is nothing to turn off, so to speak. Yet they scream out, attack others and are otherwise noxious. What the hell? What do you do when granny rolls her poop into balls and throws them at you? Part of you remembers other times but the other part knows poop is flying past your ears. And, seriously, many of these folks are not people you once loved, like granny.

    Its gotta play out and we have to let these folks “run with the line” until they wear out enough for us to set the hook or let them be pulled onto deck — exhausted and irrelevant.
    Still — as much as I hate what they do and how they sound == they are part of us. LIke our weird cousins — they are our folks, our blood as a nation. We aren’t always speaking to them or on the same side of stuff — but we are all kindred fellows — sorta and imperfectly…

  93. 93.

    gogol's wife

    We were settling in to watch “Inspector Morse” (the greatest television series ever filmed) the other night, and the announcer said, “Coming up . . .” followed by Niall Ferguson and his killer apps, and I almost threw my shoe through the television screen. Luckily I restrained myself and it turned out to be a 30-second promo, followed by the soothing, intelligent face of John Thaw.

  94. 94.

    EIGRP

    Some anagrams for “Niall Ferguson”:

    Foul Learning
    Flourine Glans
    Arson Fuelling
    Ill Nun Forages
    Our Fallen Sign
    I Long Funerals
    Long In Earfuls
    Full on Erasing
    Angel or Sinful
    No Sinful Lager
    Flog Inane Slur

    I can’t believe I just wasted time doing that.

    Eric

  95. 95.

    mclaren

    @jl:

    Some enterprizing person needs to Monty Python the Fergie series.

    The problem? Modern reality in America has superseded satire.

    “Most experts were unable to articulate a scenario under which parody and satire could recover. However, at least one long-term analyst envisioned a resurgence contingent upon a direct asteroid strike on the earth that wipes out all existing life, after which single-cell organisms might once more emerge and evolve to acquire language skills.”

  96. 96.

    patroclus

    @Huckster: Indeed, aside from his gay bashing, his admitting to taking payoffs while at SMU (30 years later), his bizarre campaign commercials which consisted of his daughter “interviewing” him on why he hired a PR firm to slime Mike Leach, his denying to Chuck Todd that he hired the PR firm despite the fact that he obviously did, his weird “John Q. Texan” shtick, the fact that every single college football fan I have ever met avidly hates him and the fact that he never polled better than 5%, he had a chance…

    I hate Craig James with a passion bordering on insanity. Tonight is a glorious night and a victory for justice! The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice!

  97. 97.

    workworkwork

    @BGinCHI:

    They’re currently available on iTunes, in their full BBC length.

    (PBS cut about seven minutes per episode out on broadcast.)

    I really liked season 1 but I LOVED season 2.

  98. 98.

    Mike G

    Other than his British accent and upperclasswhiteboy appearance, what does he present?

    Right wingers are suckers for a plummy English accent, seeing how most of them are parochial and pig-ignorant about the rest of the world. They have contempt for most foreigners, so hearing one of the only kind of foreigner they like recycling their propaganda back at them is a giant thrill.

  100. 100.

    mclaren

    @EIGRP:

    Anagrams for “Neill Ferguson”:

    Foul Learning
    Arson Fuelling
    Our Fallen Sign

    Since Neill Ferguson is our most redoubtable fellatiast of American hubris, I should’ve known.

  101. 101.

    Bruce S

    I look forward to the “Western Clothing” segment as potentially Ferguson’s greatest scholarly contribution to date.

    Ferguson is the thinking man’s Charles Murray.

  104. 104.

    chrome agnomen

    tell you what: the gardening up here in montana is a little dicier than in west by god.

  106. 106.

    Steeplejack

    @mark:

    Pshaw. FYWP likes to see a full hyperlink, including the http:// at the front, so make sure you always include that.

  107. 107.

    Quaker in a Basement

    the virtues of the west over the rest of the world, citing, among other things, consumerism and work ethic

    Right. Those lazy bastards in China and India don’t know anything about hard work.

    Sheesh.

  108. 108.

    catpal

    the Best anti-birther rant that I happened upon was from Chris Matthews with Jon Ralston in NV was on tonight

    msnbc

    starting at about 7:00 Matthews just totally Rips into Romney, then Ralston is great too.

  109. 109.

    Jibeaux

    I don’t want to impugn John’s character, but what sort of legitimate capitalist enterprise does one undertake with just one goat?

  111. 111.

    Hill Dweller

    You never know with our shitty media, but I think Willard is going to pay a price for releasing his birth certificate today. They would have probably tolerated having Trump as a Romney surrogate, but releasing his birth certificate was too cute by half.

    As an aside, the First Lady was pretty good on The Daily Show.

  112. 112.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ben:

    I didn’t realize that Ferguson works at Harvard like one of PBS’s big stars. Is this some kind of affirmative action program for Harvard professors who aren’t Skip Gates?

  113. 113.

    lamh35

    @Hill Dweller: She even charmed the pants out of Jon Stewart and basically had him eating out of his hand. Michelle O is def the best surrogate PBO has! I see why Ann Romney was given a press secretary cause she can’t handle what Michelle O is bringing to the First Lady arena.

  115. 115.

    stickler

    Ferguson’s magnum opus, sort of, was _Pity of War,_ where he used an economic abstraction to argue that the Germans did a better job in a bad war (WWI), since they killed more Allied soldiers for lower cost than their opponents managed. The argument was unique and provocative.

    It also rather elegantly elided the fact that the Germans still lost WWI.

    He’s become a lot less subtle since then, arguing (as he does again tonight on PBS) that European empires brought rather more good than evil to places like West Africa. (No! Really! He makes that argument!)

    I turned it off after he started talking about 800 million Chinese wearing pajamas. In 1989.

  116. 116.

    DaddyJ

    I was channel flipping tonight and landed on the doc about maybe halfway in. Couldn’t place the guy. I kept watching, frankly, because I was baffled as to what his point was; he never explicated it directly. At the point I checked in he was quoting some horrific racist description of the machine-gunning of some Somali soldiers during (as a precursor to?) WWI. He segued from there to some anti-Facscism (eugenics and Hitler bad!) Then he seemed to make the point that after WWI the West gave up on militarism and embraced clothing design. WWII never made an appearance.

    His main gag seemed to be asking provocative rhetorical questions and then pirouetting into a fan dance of shallow historical anecdotes that never really answered those questions. He did spend a long time, maybe twenty minutes, on his “bluejeans brought down the Soviet Union” trope. I started to smell eau d’Friedman.

    Still on a clothing jag, he started talking about burqas. His point seemed to be that if the Soviets could be laid low by bluejeans, then burqas posed a risk for the West.

    From there he moved into a discussion of the Christian work ethic — sorry, the *Protestant* work ethic, he was most pointed about that — and asked another rhetorical question along the lines of: has the west turned its back on God and hard work?

    At which point I thought to myself that the people least likely to understand hard work are glib, privileged, pretentious, smoke-blowing twats like this guy. At which point I flipped the channel.

    I only later looked it up and discovered it was Niall Ferguson.

  118. 118.

    A Humble Lurker

    @lamh35:
    Rachel seems to have more faith in people than I do, so she’s surprised by assholes sometimes. Me, not so much.

  119. 119.

    GxB

    @The Dangerman: Milk… With Benefits!

    There’s a why buy the goat when you get the milk for free joke in there somewhere, but it’s too damn early.

  121. 121.

    Barney

    2 hour special? No, that’s just the first 2 hours of a total of 6. And digging up the ‘killer app’ metaphor from the early 90s is a really lame hook to hang 6 hours of bloviating on.

  122. 122.

    Schlemizel

    The sad thing is that the topic really deserves closer examination. Particularly now that it appears that more than the East is red (to misappropriate an old ChiCom slogan)

    The Chinese had weaponized gun powder, movable type, huge armies, a limited but successful navy, and a cultural core hundreds of years before Europe. What happened to make them such a push over for Western power & eventually a ward state?

    Unfortunately the job of explain it in this case went to someone incapable of performing the task in an honest and accurate way. But it did make us white folk see how superior we are to all the various mud people we have screwed over for our benefit.

  124. 124.

    bjacques

    Ferguson bonus fact: He had a posh wife who he left for Somali-Dutch opportunist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a real piece of work. She fled an arranged marriage in Somalia and got refugee status in the Netherlands by claiming to be from Kenya, which at the time was going through rough times. To be fair, this kind of thing was winked at back then. She started out as a center-left PvdA (Labor) politician, but moved to the center-right VVD (Privatize Everything Party) when the political winds shifted (and alas they haven’t really shifted back).

    She campaigned against honor killings and female genital mutilation, which is a good cause, but she mostly used those practices as a club to beat Muslims with. After picking numerous fights with Muslims here, the Dutch got sick of her antics, meaning they wouldn’t pay for her bodyguards 24*7. She went to the US, got a job with the American Enterprise Institute, and wrote some piece of neo-con hackwork.

    Ayaan and Fergie deserve each other.

  126. 126.

    Rheinhard

    Also too: did you notice who helped pay for this wonderful documentary about the superiority of Westerners and the need for the proles to get back in the churches and put their noses back to grindstones? None other than our good buddy, Pete “Catfood” Peterson!!

    On the small plus side, at least Fergie did make a few statements indicating that maybe we really oughta consider doing something about this not-faked global warming thing.

  127. 127.

    pseudonymous in nc

    @bjacques:

    Ferguson bonus fact: He had a posh wife who he left

    And who, based upon what I’ve heard, raked him over the coals in the divorce settlement. Sue Douglas isn’t just “posh”: she’s a former editor and friend of lots of Tory pols, and played a pretty big role in helping Fergie go from being a talented young academic to an extremely rich media tart who jumps on every bandwagon in sight.

  128. 128.

    schrodinger's cat

    @bjacques: I think they recently got married, Sully had tearful post about not that long ago. Ferguson is an apologist for the British Empire. His latest books makes Friedman’s books seem scholarly. Why is PBS giving him a forum to spew his bigotry?

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