Understanding the peculiar loathesomeness of Rick Perry's "Strong"

If you watched Rick Perry's viral campaign video Strong, perhaps you were struck with by how it seemed a little off (and no, I don't mean the fact that a blowdried asshole like Perry recorded a video of himself conducting a homophobic rant while wearing the gay cowboy costume from Brokeback Mountain). No, it was something more sinister and weirder. Something about a rant that goes, "$INFERIOR_HATED_MINORITY has infiltrated our soldiery, and what's more, our educational institutions have prohibited $DOCTRINE_THAT_WE_EMBRACE from being taught to children at government expense."

If, like me, you struggled for an apt comparison, perhaps you, like me, will discover what you seek in this simple bit of netmemery. Maybe this explains how Mr Perry came to produce YouTube's most hated video.

Vote for Lord Perrymort 2012!

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Copyfight • election • Funny • lgbt • politics • separation of church and state • video • youtube

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http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai

I particularly like the code-switching, the language twisting. “Religious heritage” is a much nicer buzz-term for him than “religious freedom” because he’s not for freedom at all; he’s just for a state religion. & really, when has a government led by religious inquisition ever gone wrong?
- cunnilingualism
  
  nitpicking: “code-switching” is when you switch between your two mother tongues, I think you mean “doublespeak”. I doubt very much Rick Perry would approve of bilingualism (a word with both bi- and -lingu has gotta be blasphemous!)
  - http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai
    
    So noted! I read a Derek Bickerton book earlier this year; I must have gotten the term stuck in my head without any context.
hadlockk

The whole point of the ad was to change the discussion from national issues that he couldn’t compete against his fellow candidates, to a wedge issue he can compete on. Giving him more press on the topic exacerbates the problem, you’re not helping it. If we had gone an entire presidential election without gay marriage being a wedge issue, the whole country would have moved forward about a decade in the gay rights agenda.

That’s the story here. Quit buying in to his strategy.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  Wrong. Candidates can’t “compete” on same-sex marriage or LGBTs serving in the military, any more than they can compete on the so-called War on Christmas; plenty have tried this cycle, and they’ve failed. There’s no reason not to make an example of Perry when he tries this sort of desperate dog-whistling. Silence = assent.
  - hadlockk
    
    So the ad, written by a campaign strategist and paid for by his campaign manager – none of them predicted any sort of outrage, or that this kind of notoriety would raise his profile amid flagging poll numbers? This was just a fluke mistake written on a whim and recorded in HD after a near media blackout from Perry? I feel like liberal blogs even commenting on this non-story is having a sort of reverse-Streisand effect on his polling numbers.
    
    I agree that you should call out bad politicians like Santorum and Bachmann at every opportunity, but really you ought to pick and choose your battles. Perry has no personal or career stake in the anti-gay agenda, this would have been a non-event and kept the national dialog on track had he not made a spectacle of himself for a brief momentary gain. A complete media blackout on Perry’s mysterious detour in to anti-gay campaigning would harm him far more than highlighting it.
    - EvilSpirit
      
      It’s a little early to declare that the “national dialog” has gone off track. Come back tomorrow, when Perry will have blown away once again on the foetid wind that brought him.
      
      As far as that goes, though, the impact I’m seeing on the national dialog is a mainstream backlash against gay-bashing, which I’m going to have to argue is a *good* thing. To me, this is what a step forward looks like.
    - Halloween_Jack
      
      Hanlon’s razor, anyone? And whatever dead-cat bounce Perry might get from the whackaloons and homophobes rallying to him won’t be very high, at all; look at how much the backlash against Herman Cain’s accusers helped him in the long run.
- http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair
  
  Are you really alarmed at the prospect of Rick Perry’s “strategy?” What’s he gonna do, surge back up to 4%?
- aynrandspenismighty
  
  All it takes for evil to succeed…
Moriarty

I can’t hate Rick Perry, just because I have a hard time seeing him as a real person. He’s like an especially lazy depiction of “stereotypical Republican” on The West Wing.
- Lurking_Grue
  
  He is George Bush without the nuance or the intelligence.
  - Circe Smith
    
    Heh. I thought that George Bush was George Bush without the nuance or the intelligence.
    - Lurking_Grue
      
      What I mean is without the nuance or the intelligence OF George Bush.
- http://anarchic-teapot.net/ anarchic teapot
  
  The trouble is, Rick Perry clearly has trouble seeing *anybody* as a real person. How many death warrants has he signed, again?
librtee_dot_com

You just have to understand the human ego. Give a person a drop of that massive ego fulfillment of fame – those three weeks where he was top dog, the next prez, all over TV and in front of huge crowds…and then take it away? That’s cruel, there. It will make an ego slither like a salamander.

The ego just likes attention – be it good or bad. Release an ad that will make him an absolute pariah to 95% of Americans, and a hero to the other zealot 5% who complain that he has been victimized by the liberal hordes..and you know what the result is? He’s back in the spotlight, people are at least paying attention to him again..for a bit.

Thus the inevitable, where he slinks off to a life of a loser failed candidate, maybe writes some shit memoirs and goes hunting, is pushed off by another few weeks.
- awjt
  
  That’s the first recipe in the Palin cookbook.
awjt

The scarier thing is that the right-wingers who *don’t* come right out with these absurdities will soon be in the spotlight, while in the shadows the same dark forces are at play to shape their agendas. At least with VoldeRick, he dishes his blasphemy at unintelligible face value. It’s the unspoken that scares me most, because that is what trickles down through the ranks to oppress the populace. /rant
Spinkter

I think I found the problem.

Using variables like $INFERIOR_HATED_MINORITY and $DOCTRINE_THAT_WE_EMBRACE makes it impossible to ascertain whether Perry is writing perl or bash scripts.

I’m withholding judgement until I know one way or the other.
- Phil Fot
  
  It has to be bash, but in the crippleware born-again variant rather than the fully-functional Bourne again version used by all right thinking people.
  
  If he were in Perl, no one would use his PPM module.
  - promethean
    
    TCSH or die!
- echolocate chocolate
  
  More likely to be PHP or XSLT these days, innit?
Ashley Carroll

I wonder what Lord Perrymort’s seven horcruxes are…
- halfpress
  
  I have no doubt that there’s an enchanted blowdryer squirreled away in a cave somewhere in the heart of Texas.
- Felton / Moderator
  
  The other Republican candidates.
- http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/ Joshua Zelinsky
  
  He made three of them. One was a hymn book used in a public school, the second was an electric chair used to kill an innocent man, and I forget what the third one was.
http://twitter.com/Tozetre Tyler Elkink

I agree that Perry’s ad is bigoted nonsense, but his complaint was that children weren’t allowed to pray in school, not that they ought to be getting religious education at state expense.
- chgoliz
  
  But children ARE allowed to pray in school….at any school in the country, public or private.
  
  They’re just not allowed to force everyone else in the room to stop what they’re doing and participate as well.
  - Halloween_Jack
    
    Right. Anyone who thinks that there isn’t prayer in school hasn’t had to take a test for a very long time.
- ab167
  
  I am a substitute teacher in OK public schools. Every single day during announcements, the students are required, in middle and high school, to have a minute of silence “to reflect, meditate, or pray.” That is what the administrator announces every morning. Not only are they not disallowed prayer, they are encouraged and have a specified time to do so (or not, if they wish). They just aren’t allowed to pray in any institutional, forced way. This stupid, conservative red herring is a blatant lie.
  
  Also: guess how many kids I have ever seen praying, even here in the Bible Belt.
- http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/ Joshua Zelinsky
  
  They are allowed to pray. Individuals can pray whenever they want and frequently do. What can’t happen is government sponsored prayer. That means for example that teachers can’t lead students in prayer and schedule time for prayer (although some states have gotten around that by having mandatory moments of reflection which pretty clearly are for praying). To a large part of the right-wing Christians, not having their version mandated is apparently the same as having it outlawed.
  - elix
    
    Ahh, the prosecuted majority. I love the self-centeredness of it all.
lovelystrangeness

Ah, comparing someone to Voldemort. A sneaky way to compare them to Hitler without invoking Godwin’s Law.
- AlanStrangis
  
  Dumbledore’s Law?
MonkeyBoy

Perry’s vid is the #3 most disliked on YouTube. Rebecca Black’s”friday” was removed when it had over 1 million dislikes (wikipedia says 3 million) and there also Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris (2,066,341)
Adrian

Mr. Perry,

Is it really fun to stay at the YMCA?
http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

He reminds me of Greg Stillson in ‘The Dead Zone’. (Also Martin Sheen!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Stillson

“The missiles are flying. Hallelujah, hallejuah!”
Mike Jackson

Can we send Perry a message by filing a complaint with YouTube that the video qualifies as hate speech? Cause I did and encourage others to do so as well.
- http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/ Joshua Zelinsky
  
  No. Encouraging censorship is not a good thing. In fact this is a really good example of why free speech is important- it helps make assholes like Perry easily identifiable.
  - petertrepan
    
    This. In fact, those 450,000 dislikes (as of 1:30 central time, dec. 9th) are a good counterpoint to his campaign, and we got them for free.
Mark Bourne

The key words in Perry’s ad: “As president I…” Not even J.K. Rowling could write a fantasy that big.
Cowicide

Rick Perry. Can’t make this shit up.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-njhcOw7jkEo/TuE7BGF8xOI/AAAAAAAAPmc/NpO4L0_5-EM/s1600/Perry.jpg