The Weekly Screed (#837)

The war between Ellen DeGeneres 
and the Serbian Marines
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My latest dispatch from the Right-Wing Chain-Letter Network hails from a high-school classmate whom I’ll call Big Red (not his real name), because he’s innocent and deserves to be protected.

Big Red forwarded a neatly formatted photo montage of five famous women — Barbra Streisand, Oprah Winfrey, Diana Ross, Meryl Streep and Ellen DeGeneres, each receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, between 2014 and 2016. The text: “The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the Nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.”

Below these photos — of a Jew, two black women, a lesbian and an Hollywood star who criticized Donald Trump at this year’s Academy Awards — is one more, of a double amputee in a U.S. Marine dress uniform. This image bears the message: “Are you F&cking kiddding me?”

Get it? Obama frivolously doled out the nation’s highest civilian honor to a bunch of primadonnas while brave “warriors” were sacrificing life and limb to protect those ungrateful dykes, kikes, bimbos and ham actresses from the global forces of Islamic evil.

I wondered briefly if Big Red had designed this excellent example of bigoted propaganda. If so, he deserves some props. This is a stylish piece of work. But I suspect he picked it up somewhere on social media.
Just to confirm my hunch, I googled Big Red’s headline, “Proper Use of The F Word.” Normally with hate-posts like this, the source pops up there, traceable through dozens of paranoid websites and white-identity blogs. But today, we’re living in Propaganda World 2.0. The progenitors of this sort of crap are dodging Google. They slink into people’s psyches through online trapdoors and digital crawlspaces — like Facebook. Conservative consumers like Big Red, eager to validate their fears, are ripe for “microtargeting.”

Since I couldn’t track, on Google, the viral origin of “Are you F&cking kiddding me?”, I poked into the message’s JPEG file — which led me to…

Serbia!

An acronym in the file sent me to a site written entirely in Cyrillic, which I can decipher (with some difficulty), because I used to translate Pushkin and Dostoyevsky at Beloit College. I eventually determined that the photo montage of Streisand and the other girls had likely been composed in Serbia. Big Red was apparently spotted by an algorithm that suggests he might enjoy (and share) this sort of racist, misogynist dreck.

Another clue in the JPEG file led to a YouTube clip of a speech by Slobodan Milosevic, the strongman who ruled Serbia and Yugoslavia from 1989-2000 and died while on trial for crimes against humanity.

Finally, I studied the punchline. The absent “u” in the “f word” had been replaced not by the usual asterisk, but by a symbol that doesn’t appear on the Western keyboard. I did another search and found this “letter” on a website that compares cursive Cyrillic script in various Slavic languages. The symbol was Serbian. Hah! And then, of course, there’s the extra “d” in “kiddding,” not the sort of mistake an English-speaking Web troll would make.

What we seem to have here, although I’m skeptical of my own evidence — it’s thin but suggestive — is another sign that Eastern European propaganda mills are hunting disgruntled Americans susceptible to right-wing messages, especially images that exacerbate racial and gender divisions. These trolls, possibly on the Kremlin payroll (I can’t prove it but the CIA can) fan the rage that white-identity patriots feel when they see a black president bestowing undeserved presidential medals on his co-racial usurpers.

In a reply that I never sent to Big Red, I noted that the wounded white male Marine — according to the decorations on his chest — had received medals for his combat service far more exalted than the Medal of Freedom. As far as I could tell, Big Red was trying to tell me that if I truly honor the selfless Marine who lost his legs, I must despise the five women recognized by President Obama for their good deeds.

But why not both? Where is it written that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a zero-sum award snatched from one hero and given to another? Why involve the military at all? After all, this is an honor focused mostly on civilian do-gooders. Among hundreds of recipients, only about twenty have been soldiers and sailors — although, for some reason, General Colin Powell got it four times from two presidents. Obama honored two service members, including Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a computer genius who brought the U.S. Navy into the digital era and who has a ship named in her honor.

By the way, not everyone who received the medal from Obama was African-American. Among others tainted by the Kenyan hand of Barack Obama were Madeleine Albright, Isabel Allende, Yogi Berra, Joe Biden, Tom Brokaw, Warren Buffett, Robert DeNiro, John Glenn, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner (two of the three young civil rights activists murdered by the Klan in Mississippi in 1964 — the third was black and, well, he got a Medal, too), Tom Hanks, Bill and Melinda Gates, Robert Gates, Daniel Inouye (lost an arm in WWII), Jack Kemp, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Billie Jean King, Maya Lin (designer of the Vietnam Memorial), Richard Lugar, Loretta Lynn, Angela Merkel, Newton Minow, Stan Musial, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Shimon Peres, Robert Redford, Sally Ride, Vin Scully, Dean Smith, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Marlo Thomas (benefactor of St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital) and President George H.W. Bush.

Do Big Red’s Serbian sources counsel me to hate all these people? Marlo Thomas? Also, is this Republican thing? I wonder if I should also detest the people to whom Bill Clinton gave the award. Simon Wiesenthal?

Not to mention Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez, General Wesley Clark, John Kenneth Galbraith, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gaylord Nelson, Rosa Parks, Eliot Richardson, Walter Reuther, David Rockefeller, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt?

And Martha Raye?

As remedy to all this dark Balkan emotion, I suggested that Big Red do what I did when Ronald Reagan (not my favorite president) hung the Medal of Freedom on guys like Buckminster Fuller, Louis L’Amour, Milton Friedman, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Danny Kaye. I said to myself, “Well, how ‘bout that?” or perhaps, “Wow. Really?” Then I went on with my life.

I didn't conjure up in my mind some sick connection between Norman Vincent Peale’s Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984 and the Beirut barracks bombing that killed, on Reagan’s watch, 63 Marines. When the Gipper gave the Medal to Bear Bryant, I didn't think of pegleg GIs with no future in football and cry, “Are you F&cking kiddding me?”.

No, some things just don’t go together. Like apples and oranges. Chicken liver and whipped cream. Christians and lions.

Serbian trolls and Motown divas.