I’ve always been intrigued my Guy Fawkes Day ever since I read about it in Mary Poppins or wherever it was that I read about it, so I liked this story:
The Republican Governors Association has embraced the symbolism of Fawkes, launching a rather striking website, RememberNovember.com, with a video that showcases far more Hollywood savvy than one can usually expect from Republicans. Again, the Fawkes tale has been twisted a bit. This time, President Obama plays the roll of King James, the Democratic leadership is Parliament, and the Republican Party represents the aggrieved Catholic mass.
The Grand Panjandrum
I’m not sure I’d want to be indentified with Catholic anything right now. Are they claiming to be the party that protects child molesters now? Message Fail.
Will
As much as I love V for Vendetta, isn’t Fawkes normally thought of as a villain and terrorist? “Cowardly gunpowder plot” and burning in effigy, and all.
Maybe the teabagger thing has convinced the Republicans to go full al Qaeda?
Colette
Can we skip directly to the part where the ringleaders get executed?
scav
Paddington Bear is where I first learned about Guy Fawkes. Random comment of the day? Check!
Zach
This video is incredible.
1. Check it out at 1:07 – the terrorist threat level chart flashes for a quarter second or so.
2. There’s the cliche image of a depressed broker overlaid with a plunging chart… same image is repeated elsewhere on the site. The Dow’s up 34% since Obama’s inauguration.
3. The use of the pause button symbol in their logo is hilariously inept. FedEx subliminally tells you they’re going places. Haley Barbour wants to tell you he doesn’t want to do shit.
Anne Laurie
… because they “forgot” the bit where Guy Fawkes was executed for treason, his fellow conspirators either killed or exiled, and the Catholics of Great Britain crushed with punitive laws intended to keep them from getting an education, owning property, or serving in political positions?
Go, Republican Party! — if only Obama’s Chicago Machine Thugs(tm) had one-one-millionth the ruthless efficiency of the British monarchy…
dmsilev
The Republicans want to detonate large quantities of explosives underneath the Capitol? Somebody call the FBI, looks like we got us a nest of domestic terrorists.
dms
Tom Hilton
Holy w’fuh? I mean, I know they’re out of their fucking minds, but for god’s sake–are they out of their fucking minds???
Tom Hilton
Also, Michael Scherer appears to be unaware of Alan Moore.
Zach
The sad thing is that if the GOP successfully courted the Paullites with this sort of thing, it would actually push the party closer to rationality.
John Cole
I see the Republicans are still angling for the youth vote.
Tom Levenson
Huh? Guy Faukes, the sixteenth c. terrorist who sought to blow up hundreds of those who happened to be in Parliament shen the king showed up? The guy who was racked and tortured for the crime of high treason? That guy?
If this is who the GOP wants to take as an avatar, I’d say go for it.
After all, nothing says al Qaeda like religious fanaticism and rooms full of gunpowder.
Aimai
I’m with Josh Micah marshall and Tom Hilton on this one–they are out of their fucking minds. Also, I want to skip the movie and go straight to the grawing and quartering– is that the FBI or the secret service these days?
Aimai
Zach
@Tom Hilton: You’d think that he would’ve come across that in the process of googling the Wachowski’s first names.
MikeJ
Virginia has already shown that Republicans are the party of treason. This just confirms it.
Aimai
Sorry, that should be drawing and quartering, but my iPhone seems not to know that grawing isn’t a word.
Aimai
Omnes Omnibus
DougJ, “Faith and Treason” by Antonia Fraser is a good book on the Gunpowder Plot. It is quite sympathetic to the plotters (not necessarily my take on the Plot, but a valid view nonetheless).
beltane
Wasn’t Guy Fawkes hanged, drawn, and quartered? And England is not a Catholic country, so his efforts were all for naught.
It is my sincere hope that the Republican party goes the way of Guy Fawkes and his failed plot.
birthmarker
This sorta stinks to me. Time is given special limited permission to show the special secretive video? Which immediately goes viral? That just happens to feature scary black men being quoted out of context… and Castro? Corporate media strikes again. And we are amplifying it, of course.
Feel free to flame me if this is just too conspiracy theory-ish. Maybe I am just tired.
Uloborus
I was worried for a moment, but then I remembered the terrifying April 19th Virginia rally to demonstrate the willingness of the Tea Partiers to stand up under arms and resist the goverment.
beltane
@Tom Levenson: Who will we get to burn in effigy for the next few centuries? Newt Gingrich? Sarah Palin?
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
I’ll take them seriously when they portray themselves as the Palestinians and the Democrats as the Israelis.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Guy Faukes Day has a tough road to hoe going up against Baby Jeevus Day, who can be expected to line the Primrose Path with all sorts of dangerous toys.
Alan
So when will the Randian epics be rewritten for the modern age of Republican/conservative epistemic closure? There seems to be an army of Ellsworth Tooheys out there–starting with much of the staff at NRO.
dmsilev
@Aimai: I read it as “gnawing and quartering”, which you have to admit would be a uniquely slow and painful way to be executed.
dms
Anne Laurie
@beltane:
I have the horrible suspicion this is why the Repubs are keeping Michael Steele as RNC figurehead.
Citizen Alan
They’re traitors, all of them. As far as I’m concerned, everyone who stayed a Republican after the Impeachment is a traitor and should be treated as such.
Omnes Omnibus
@dmsilev: Faster than gumming and quartering, though.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
We should have our own day celebrating the wingnuts. Maybe call it “Bend Over For the Kenyan Day”
Exurban Mom
Fawkes? You mean the right wing has given up on fighting the Harry Potter books and has embraced witchcraft, wizardry and phoenixes with healing tears?
Calouste
I see the GOP is working on reestablishing the special relationship with Britain.
beltane
@Tom Levenson: Just the FAIL aspect alone makes it laughable. Not only was Catholicism never again the state religion of England, but thanks to the Gunpowder plot, Catholics were not even allowed to serve in Parliament for a couple of centuries. To this day, the heir to the throne is not allowed to marry a Catholic, and it is not by coincidence that Tony Blair waited until he was no longer prime minster to officially convert to Catholicism.
If the Republicans want to be barred from holding elected office, I am all in favor of their little plan.
Tom Levenson
@beltane: Heh. But no.
If you remember the plot, Fawkes was the hard man, while more high ranking plotters stood behind him.
In that context, Palin and Gingrich represent the would be coup-ists who ran like scared weasels the moment Fawkes was caught — not that such scrabbling availed them.
And if you’re looking for a Fawkes analogue, I’d go with the 1st-time-tragedy-2nd time-farce answer of some member of the 101st Fighting Keyboard brigade — an Eric son of Eric type.
Midnight Marauder
The really amazing thing is that we still haven’t even made it to the general election yet. These clowns are putting out videos like this while they’re still eating each other alive in the primaries!
Omnes Omnibus
@Tom Levenson: To me, Fawkes seems to have a closer analogue in McVeigh than any of the politicians and talking heads around now.
Uloborus
Just an odd, speculative thought. ‘Guy Fawkes Day’ because they know they can’t get away with ‘Timothy McVeigh Day’? I find these kind of things a stretch, but man do the conservatives love them some displacement and code phrases, so I’m just throwin’ it out there.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Since the Republican party has already declared that the teabaggers are its “militant wing” and seems to associate itself with every other insurrectionist group (Confederates, Fawkesians, American revolutionaries, etc) I suppose it’s only a matter of time until the GOP makes common cause with the Maoist rebels of Central America.
Martian Buddy
It seems only fitting that Epic Fail Guy should be the official GOP mascot.
[Warning: some content may be NSFW or for human consumption in general.]
Omnes Omnibus
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: The Shining Path of the Confederate Teabaggers?
Anne Laurie
@Tom Levenson:
To repeat myself: It should be the new Eric Rudolph, but it’ll probably end up as Michael Steele: The figurehead who gets blamed by the ragged rump of the “Republican Party” that remains after the legacy-and-independent voters jump ship and the “we like violence, but only if it’s effective” types finish migrating to Stormfront.
Picture a handful of Confederate Yankees and Atlas-Shrugged holdouts burning a blackface pinata over somebody’s bbq grill every ‘Treason in Defence of Slavery’ month… and then being pissed because they forgot you should get the candy before you set fire to the dummy!
JGabriel
Tom Levenson:
We really should have banned the Confederate Flag after the Civil War. Yeah, the ban would have been lifted on First Amendment grounds, eventually, but it would have set the precedent for how evil the fucking thing is.
So. When does the Secret Service visit the Republican Governors Association for threatening to assassinate Obama? I don’t how else portraying themselves as Guy Fawkes can be read.
.
beltane
@Anne Laurie: Oh dear, you’ve made me feel sorry for Michael Steele. I’m not used to feeling compassion towards Republicans like this.
JGabriel
@Exurban Mom: Actually, Fawkes the Phoenix is named after Guy Fawkes. It’s Rowling’s little pun on the whole going out in a puff of flame business.
.
Calouste
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
The next Contract -on- with America will be called The Great Leap Forward on the Shining Path. And it might not be long before some teabagger start referring to themselves as the Red Brigades.
fred
Corrupt our representatives? Like convicted felon Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham, indicted felon Tom Delay; Jack Abrahmoff?
Fiscal responsibility? Like turning the Democratically created $236Billion surplus Clinton left Bush in to a$2 Trillion deficit?
Oh, right, the Republican failure to defend America on 9-11 changed everything.
MikeJ
@beltane: They’re already pissed at him for admitting the southern strategy exists.
Litlebritdifrnt
As was said upthread, which one of the Repubs are going to be burned in effigy for centuries, cause you know Guy Fawkes has managed to endure as a traitor for hundreds and hundreds of years in the UK. Bonfire Night is a cherished tradition, (baked potatoes and treacle toffee!)
PS) you know they might need to rethink this thing, cause it didn’t work out too well for Guy Fawkes, I am thinking that hanging, drawing and quartering isn’t any sort of fun.
MikeBoyScout
So, am I getting this right?
Republicans are all Fawkers?
And as far as remembering the fifth of November, I remember November 5, 2008 as the first full day after the election of the first African American as President, our nation’s chief executive official.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Someone tell the semi-literate closet cases of the GOP that it’s Guy F a w k e s, not F u c k s.
mai naem
This crap really bothers me. They are egging this stuff along just so that some unbalanced nutcase will actually do something really awful and ofcourse they’ll say “he’s just a nutcase who should have been insitutionalized blah blah.” And because they think it may somehow turn the political tide towards them, they don’t give a crap about how it may actually affect this country esp. it’s very fragile economy. A#*holes.
scav
Fawkes News! of course!
Linda Featheringill
I checked out remembernovember.com.
I found the site to not be very user-friendly. The video did not play well – lots of stopping and scratching. And I wasn’t sure what the site was trying to say.
Maybe I am missing something?
Or maybe the site designers missed something?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@MikeBoyScout:
Mother Fawkers
LondonLee
I know I’m being picky but as a Brit I have to point out that it’s called Guy Fawkes’ Night, not Day.
Yutsano
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: Hey Fawk You too buddy!
scav
@LondonLee: well, that would make it late afternoon for the U.S., no? Mid-day for the west coast. :) Besides, real ‘mercans supersize everything.
tc125231
@Omnes Omnibus:
Liberty60(Veteran, Great war of Yankee Aggression)
Suitable for Confederate History Month:
Virginia recalls Neo-Nazi License Plate
I have an idea this guy is on the short list for a gunpowder plot.
stickler
LItbrit:
Au contraire, as they say in East London. A good drawing and quartering was apparently great fun, which is why the system used it. Of course, it was great fun for the crowd. Not so much for the draw-and-quarter-ee. Samuel Pepys actually got to watch the drawing and quartering of the man who had led the prosecution of Charles I, when said lawyer was convicted of regicide after Charles II returned to England.
“Samuel Pepys wrote an eyewitness account of the execution at Charing Cross, in which Major General Harrison was dryly reported to be ‘looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.'”
I will here refrain from describing the procedure in detail, even though imagining say, Glenn Beck, undergoing it might provide a prurient thrill for this audience.
scav
Wait a minute, they announced this on St. George’s Day?! Jaysus, they have skipped back past the Revolutionary War and checked the “other” box. \
And speaking of the preriod, there were a lot of Priests in Priest Holes all over England at that time . . . hmmm.
MikeBoyScout
@LondonLee, April 23rd, 2010 at 9:26 pm:
As an American I apologize for any slight any Brit may feel due to the historical inaccuracy of our rump party’s expropriation of your history, but our rump party eschews historical and factual accuracy in favor of Orwellian propaganda points.
Lord only knows what our rump party will do if Clegg and the Liberal Democrats do well in your election.
NickM
The ad attacked people pictured holding dozens of American flags. Yet another sharp right turn.
Joel
Will @ 2:
Yes, Fawkes is remembered as a terrorist. He tried to blow up Parliament with gunpowder kegs placed in the basement (hence the name of his rebellion, the “Gunpowder Plot”).
The whole point of Guy Fawkes Day is not to commemorate the man or his achievements, but to mock and ridicule him remorselessly.
stibbert
well i think its got possibilities for fund-raising, w/ children in every locale pushing an effigy of Reagan around in a busted-up old pram or wheelchair, asking, “Penny for the Guy?”
ain’t there fireworks, too? i’d happily contribute my $0.01, so long as there were skyrockets &c.
NickM
Depending on how you define “priest hole”, there still are.
mikey
They’re gonna keep fucking around until some deranged southern wackadoodle with issues, no meds and a lot of guns spills a whole lot of blood over incoherent fears of “tyranny” and “socialism”, then they’re gonna clutch their pearls and cry NO FAIR.
All this dancing on the edge of incitement has the problem of needing more and more extreme hits to yield the same buzz, and that this population IS actually heavily armed.
One wonders what can be done to put the violence genie back in the bottle. Three more years of an Obama presidency, and quite possibly seven. This is not going to end well….
mikey
scav
@NickM: :-)
WereBear
Get out of town.
Might as well order the I <3Treason tshirts now.
PaulW
Um, did anyone remind the Republican Governors that Guy Fawkes and his buddies were executed for being TRAITORS and that they aren’t really that fondly remembered in the UK?
PurpleGirl
Maybe they got Guy Fawkes mixed up with William Wallace. After all, he ended up being hung, drawn and quartered too.
Jennifer
Ok, I’m compelled to re-post my poem from Nov. 5, 2008:
LiberalTarian
@Aimai:
I don’t know–grawing sounds pretty scary to me, more like guts falling out all over the ground than “drawing,” which sounds like something fun kids would do nowadays.
SiubhanDuinne
Yes! I, too, first came across Guy Fawkes in *Mary Poppins Opens the Door* (probably my favourite of all the MP books) and was most intrigued with GF from age about 5.
That said, Republicanz iz weird.
ETA: Very O/T but TCM is showing 2001: A Space Odyssey. I came in just at the start of the 25-minute dialogue-free journey through space, and I was just *wishing* that I still smoked, cause if I did I would’ve, and it wouldn’t’ve been tobacco, y’know?
PurpleGirl
That is one crappy website and video.
JGabriel
I first learned the Fawkes story later in life, via either JK Rowling or Alan Moore – not sure which came first.
.
Montysano
So….. who shaves their head and plays the Natalie Portman part? Bachmann? Megyn Kelly?
Calouste
@stickler:
There’s a pub in London that has that Pepys quote on the outside. Nowhere near Charing Cross actually, It’s called the Hung, Drawn and Quartered (should of course be Hanged), presumably because it is close to Tower Hill, were people were executed in the olden days. Except that only nobles were executed on Tower Hill, and nobels were never hanged, they were beheaded. Mishmashing history, it’s not just for Americans. Wouldn’t be surprised if the quote was a mistake as well.
Anyway, lessons to be learned here, no one was going on about restoring the Protectorat, having Oliver Cromwell fanclubs or Protectorate History Month after hanging, drawing and quartering a few of his generals.
SiubhanDuinne
@Tom Hilton #9:
OTOH, Alan Scherer is acutely aware that Michael Moore is fat.
Martian Buddy
I think the message of the site is supposed to be “Obama = Fawkes,” actually (because winning an election is just like mass murder.) It’s hard to tell since I can’t get the video to load and the site has little else to it.
OriGuy
I read Frasier’s book not long ago. I would say it was sympathetic toward the Catholics, not so much the plotters. There was genuine oppression during the Tudor and Stuart periods. James I was thought to be sympathetic to them, until the discovery of the Plot. I did see parallels between the Catholics and today’s radical Republicans, except that the Catholics’ grievances were genuine.
sfHeath
I have a very strong feeling that Michael Scherer recently sent back V for Vendetta to Netflix (Why was this recommended for you? Because you liked “Matrix” and “The Golden Compass”) and just made an assumption that the RGA was referring to it with the rhyming title of their website.
I think the simpler explanation is that U.S. elections are in November, and someone rhymed it thinking they were making up a poem. I really don’t expect the RGA to have Guy Fawkes’ Night at the forefront of their minds. I certainly don’t expect their target audience to see that video and be all “Oh! like Guy Fawkes! absolutely! rebel against the government! rebel! rebel! I totally get it!” I mean, srsly? How plugged in to cultural references are these guys?
SiubhanDuinne
@litlebritdifrent, LondonLee, and other BJ Brits:
It’s tomorrow already for you across the pond, but please allow me to wish you all a heartfelt and sincere, if belated, happy Saint George’s Day.
OriGuy
@Calouste:
Four of the plotters were hanged in St. Paul’s courtyard. Four others, including Fawkes, were hanged in Westminster. All of them were drawn and quartered. Fawkes jumped from the gallows, breaking his neck, so that he avoided being alive for the rest of it. Three others were executed outside of London.
In the old days, traitors like Wat Tyler and William Wallace (unjustly executed; he’d never sworn loyalty to an English king) were executed at Smithfield, near the meat market.
Zach
@sfHeath:
And the V is drawn in red in their logo only because it looks like a checkmark on a ballot.
SiubhanDuinne
@scav #60: sorry, missed your ref to St George’s Day. Should have read through all posts before posting my own comments!
sfHeath
@Zach: You might be completely right. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d been completely wrong. I didn’t see the red V in their logo before I wrote my comment. However, their logo V doesn’t look much like this.
I still would like to know whether Scherer asked if the allusion was conscious before he wrote the swampland post.
Brachiator
@dmsilev:
I’ve got this image of the executioner using little sharp toothed rats to do the gnawing.
Oh, and let’s see. Fawkes was tortured at some British equivalent of Gitmo, but didn’t reveal anything significant:
Do the wingnuts really want to use this as their example of defiance against established order?
scav
@SiubhanDuinne: You were nicer in that you wished the UK-BJer’s a Happy St. George’s! I merely commented on the oddity of the date some chose hold up treasonous gunpowder exploderings of government buildings and peoples as an object worthy of emulation. Given where Republican Governors probably spend their day working and/or downloading pr0n, they may wish to think a wee bit harder about the whole thing. . .
DougJ
@SiubhanDuinne:
Yes! Many people don’t realize just how many volumes there are in the Mary Poppins series.
Martian Buddy
@sfHeath: Actually, it looks like you’re right [Warning: link goes to an Allahpundit article] and the idiot wingnuts just decided on “remember November” without googling the phrase first to see if it had any pre-existing connotations. Kinda like, say, “teabagger.”
Also, this comment from that article was pure gold, too:
scarshapedstar
Wow, the GOP praises McVeigh and Fawkes in one week. I guess Oswald and Bin Laden are next?
BTW, I read that Fawkes had piled up enough gunpowder to destroy not just Parliament but also about half of London.
Jamie
Well Fawkes was tortured into his confession, so you can never tell about things past.
Jamie
They have the record of Fawkes’s confession and his signature in the tower of london. I’m guessing most of the bones in hiss hand were broken during his interrogation.
FlipYrWhig
Everyone else has pointed out that the whole idea of Guy Fawkes Night is to commemorate that they caught that bastard Fawkes before he could blow everything up.
Anyway, if they’re looking for a 17th-century English figure to serve as a mascot-slash-rallying cry, I suggest Titus Oates. He was fond of inventing ludicrous conspiracies, profiling, and fucking up the lives of innocent people too.
Brain Hertz
They’ve lost their minds. Do they realize that the point of Guy Fawkes’ night is to celebrate the fact that would-be terrorist Guy Fawkes was caught and executed for treason? It’s not celebrating the fact that he tried.
I always remember growing up in the UK that it was generally referred to as “bonfire night” on account of the giant fucking bonfire that was constructed for the purpose of burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes on top of it…
Brady
Does anyone know what music — from which motion picture soundtrack, I presume — they used in the video?
‘Remember November’
http://vimeo.com/10896301
sfHeath
@Martian Buddy: Thanks, I appreciate it. But AP doesn’t know either. They’re just partisans hoping that their leaders (the RGA) aren’t idiots. I’d like to know if Scherer sourced this post or if he just guessed. I almost want to contact RGA to ask, but I don’t write for TIME and I don’t ultimately care one way or the other.
Joey Maloney
@Jennifer: Or, closer to the original source,
Remember, remember, the fifth of November
Republican treason and plot.
I know of no reason Republican treason
Should ever be forgot!
Mr. Furious
@Uloborus:
That’s the first thing I thought…
Porlock Junior
I’ve been present at a Catholic mass or two, but I didn’t know about the aggrieved kind. Maybe I’m better off, if that’s the kind where they blow people up.
My apologies to Catholics for the bad joke; but the GOP guys owe them more than a little apology for digging up Guy Fawkes — just the maneuver that will appeal to Catholics about as much as the California party’s firm policy of repelling any sympathy from the traditional family-values Catholics who make up so much of the Latino vote here. Makes the Democrats look clever, so I really can’t complain.
Suicidal Zebra
@scarshapedstar:
Nah, the destructive effect of the actual bomb (about 1 tonne of gunpowder) would probably have been limited to area very close to the House. Widespread destruction of London would only probably have occurred with the aid of secondary fires.
Here’s a little snippet of a recreation performed by ITV in the UK a few years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFytcsA9mU8. It would definitely have taken out the Lords in the House, and then some.
matoko_chan
Eureka!
conservatives aren’t anger whiggas….they are emos.
Cue Oh My Stars.
And when December comes and all the blood dries up
the snow will cover the tracks
I’ll never look back
I’ll start a new
Exurban Mom
@JGabriel: Um, yes, dear, I know that….
scarshapedstar
Hmm. Yeah, somehow I was under the impression that it was waaaaay more than 36 barrels.
oh my
@Brady: I’ve been looking for an answer to this too. The score sounds ripped-off from a movie, but I don’t know which one. The overall tone and tenor is in keeping with Dario Marianelli’s work on the V for Vendetta movie but I can’t say for sure where the GOP got it.
John
Watching the video, it seems like Michael Scherer is extrapolating a bit (a lot?). Besides the use of “Remember November,” there’s nothing about Guy Fawkes or the Gunpowder Plot.
There is a lot of what appears to be taking Democrats’ quotations completely out of context, and editing them in a misleading way.
evinfuilt
@Will:
Yes..
Back home in England, Fawkes is the bad guy, he was a stooge for the evil Vatican that wanted control of England. Yet again, Republicans are showing their Fatwah Envy.