| Lary Coppola, apparently at a loss for his own words, presents instead an “angry white male” tirade by rock singer, Ted Nugent. Coppola suggests that people might object to Nugent’s lack of political correctness, but the problem with Nugent’s diatribe has nothing to do with that. The problem is that Nugent’s words are a brew of monumental ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and twaddle.
As a firm believer in the First Amendment, I support Coppola’s right to purvey this nonsense, but I also have the right to respond. If Coppola is correct that Nugent’s ranting, “sums up a lot of the frustration ordinary people have…” we are indeed in serious trouble as a nation.
Nugent says, “I think that being a student doesn’t give you any more enlightenment than working at Blockbuster or Jack In The Box.” Astounding! Who does Nugent think engineered those “big trucks” and “big boats” he likes so much — high school dropouts? And when Nugent gets old and sick, would he like the Blockbuster clerk performing his quadruple bypass operation? No, I suspect that Nugent and Coppola are both more than happy to seek the services of those with a university education when they need them, all the while deriding education as useless. You can’t have it both ways, guys.
Moreover, although “enlightened minds” are rare, the few that I have met over the years have clearly been “students” in the true sense of the word. While it is possible to become a first-rate thinker without much formal education, it is extraordinarily difficult. Only a few true geniuses have been able to accomplish it, and from Nugent’s writing (and Coppola’s endorsement), I can see that both of them are quite a few synapses shy.
Nugent says, “I have the right not to be tolerant of others because they are different, weird or make me mad.” This astonishing statement is wildly inconsistent with Nugent’s other views. For example, Nugent’s exalts “the guys who wrote” the Constitution, but the above statement on tolerance (as well as most of the rest of his screed) would cause the Founding Fathers to roll over in their respective graves. The irony is that Nugent and Coppola probably know next to nothing about these “guys” and probably would have trouble naming more than one or two of them, let alone what they really stood for.
Moreover, given Nugent’s aforementioned aversion to education, it is a safe bet that, unlike the Founding Fathers, neither he nor Coppola have read the likes of John Locke or pondered, for example, the delicate and difficult balance between freedom and justice. These are the things that the Founding Fathers discussed as they were crafting the Constitution, and they would have been appalled by Nugent’s simplistic, xenophobic, babbling, non-sequiturs. Indeed, the Founding Fathers—intelligent, well read, reflective, thoughtful, and tolerant — are the very antithesis of the knee-jerk Nugent. It is astounding that Nugent manages to idolize them and blaspheme them in one stroke.
One can only imagine the type of constitution and government that would have emanated from a Nugent-Coppola collaboration (had they been in charge). The Nugent-Coppola government probably would have borne a strong resemblance to the government that supplanted the German Weimar Republic in 1933.
Nugent states that immigrants are sopping up all the resources, “…while the indigenous peoples [read ‘white males’] can’t get past a high school education because they can’t afford it.” Well, since Nugent finds education worthless (see above) one wonders why it matters that the “indigenous peoples” can’t afford an education. Moreover, I seem to recall reading that when our European ancestors first arrived on the shores of North America, there were one or two small bands of “indigenous” peoples already here. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, Mr. Coppola, but not their own facts.
Apparently, Coppola likes Nugent’s “in your face”, “every man for himself” “get over it”, “screw you if you don’t like it” attitude. But this begs the question: What kind of a world would we have if everyone had that mind-set? Hobbes (no Mr. Coppola, not the one with Calvin) described what it would be like if men lived in a world like the one Nugent dreams about, “…without other security, than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” In his famous quote, Thomas Hobbes said such men would live in “…continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I wonder how Nugent would like this without his bodyguards.
William Jennings Bryan was once described as resembling the Platte River in being “six inches deep and five miles wide at the mouth.” Bryan had nothing on Ted Nugent and Lary Coppola.
Philip Hansten
Port Ludlow. |
