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THE BLUTARSKY DOCTRINE
Over at The Huffington Post, producer Sean Daniel (the Mummy, Dazed and Confused) looks at one legacy of John Landis’s comedy Animal House: its misuse as a comparison point for current political disasters.
Here’s how he begins, but click to the link above and read the whole piece:
It has happened again and it has to end. The use of the term “Animal House” to represent foul political behavior or historical events gone very badly has got to be stopped. This time the misuse is by the usually very wise Robert Borosage in his recent post on the Huffington Post entitled: “Mathews and Coulter: No Shame.” His column states that having Ann Coulter on the Chris Mathews show Hardball lowered it to the level of Animal House.. Last year Maureen Dowd got it equally wrong in her column about the President’s boorish behavior at a G8 summit entitled “Animal House Summit.” The single most egregious misuse of the term was in James Schlesinger’s report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison describing conditions there as “Animal House on the night shift” (I should add that he was equally off-base in citing the comedy Night Shift).
What really happened at Animal House? Delta Tau Chi or Delta House as its members called it was a place where everyone was welcome. People of all races and religions were embraced as was made clear when John Blutarsky welcomed freshmen Larry Kroger and Kent Dorfman after they had been summarily dismissed from Omega House. They were invited in to a party and offered refreshment and friendship. At no time were they subjected to any of the practices that came to light at Abu Ghraib.
