You may remember Ellis Washington, the part-time instructor at Savannah State University who styles himself a “professor of law and political science,” in much the same way I inform bouncers and maitre’ds that I’m a NASCAR champion and the crown prince of Liechtenstein.
Around these parts Ellis is probably best known for getting the point of Orwell’s 1984 completely backwards, but the professor is large, he contains multitudes, and he also thoroughly misunderstood the 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs:
In an earlier article titled, “The Savage Silence of the Lambs,” I compared the Machiavellian and unjust blacklisting of Savage by our strongest ally, England, to the movie “Silence of the Lambs.” Here is Part 2 of that offering. As a reference, I quote in part from my original article of May 20:
In the 1991 movie “Silence of the Lambs,” …Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant but evil psychiatrist, begins a game of quid pro quo with Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), a young FBI trainee…In one telling scene, Starling tells of how she was orphaned, relocated to an uncle’s farm, discovered the horror of the lambs going to the slaughterhouse and unsuccessfully tried to save one of the little lambs. That horrific, indelible scene that haunted her all those years was the lambs’ seeming indifference and silence in the face of utter slaughter.
Yep. Except the point of that “indelible scene” was that Agent Starling was haunted by the screaming of the lambs, and hoped that by helping a kidnapped young woman escape death at the hands of a serial killer, she could finally silence their screams:
Hannibal Lecter: Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it? [...]
Clarice Starling: It was… screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice. [...] Lambs. The lambs were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: They were slaughtering the spring lambs?
Clarice Starling: And they were screaming.
Hannibal Lecter: You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.
Clarice Starling: Yes.
Hannibal Lecter: And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.
Hannibal Lecter: Well, Clarice – have the lambs stopped screaming?
You may also recall that the professor believes his man-crush, Michael “Savage” Weiner, is the modern day incarnation of Prometheus, and has been unfairly abused by both Zeus and the British Home Secretary.
Do you hear that sound, America? It is the tormenting sound of crickets chirping. It is the sound of Prometheus groaning in utter agony as his liver is daily eaten by a giant eagle commanded by Zeus. … It is the sound of the Savage silence of the lambs.
So a man having his vital organs devoured by a raptor makes the same sound as crickets chirping, which make the same sound as lambs making no sound at all?
Okey dokey.
Why, after two weeks since the release of a major profile of Michael Savage by the venerable liberal magazine The New Yorker, has not one TV network, not one major newspaper, not one conservative, libertarian or independent think tank, not one liberal or conservative talk show host invited Michael on their show to interview him regarding this unique and monumental achievement?
It is the Savage silence of the lambs.
Michael Savage’s career is being systematically destroyed by a conspiracy of ungulate mimes!
New Yorker magazine writer Kelefa Sanneh did an excellent job in profiling my friend and intellectual mentor, Michael Savage, not because he was complimentary or unduly fawning of his subject, but because he was fair, honest and introspective in his psychological treatment of this authentic American conservative intellectual. Kelefa effectively moved himself out of the way and allowed the reader to use his own intelligence to understand Dr. Michael Savage, the man.
By this point in the column, Professor Washington was so far up Dr. Savage’s sigmoid colon that he ran into Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher coming the other way, pursued by Injun Joe.
I would like to echo the comments by Jeff Kuhner who frequently hosts “The Savage Nation” in Michael’s absence, particularly his revelatory monologue on Aug. 5. Jeff eloquently voiced the passions and frustrations of Michael and “The Savage Nation” audience, pointing out that normally when someone is profiled in the revered New Yorker magazine, they are granted instant celebrity status and given entree to all of the major network news, cable, newspapers and radio media.
Yeah! And when a caricaturist depicts you and your wife as terrorists on the cover, you get to be president! That’s the law!
In other words, everyone knows that a profile in the New Yorker is usually a career maker, not a career breaker. However, with the conservative nationalist Michael Savage, all one has heard over the past two weeks since the publication of his New Yorker magazine profile was the deafening Savage silence of the lambs.
To be fair, though, most ruminants read Kerrang! and Good Housekeeping.
In conclusion, compare the Michael Savage affair to Josef Stalin’s redacting of history.
Um. Okay…
Look at the pictures above: If Stalin’s own personal assassin and chief of his notorious secret police, the NKVD, wasn’t safe from Stalin’s “purges,” what makes the GOP, the RNC, conservative radio hosts, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Fox News and the rest of the state-controlled media think they will be safe from President Obama’s fascist and censorship tactics? Surely these people and organizations must know they will be next.
So it’s Stalin’s fault that people don’t care Michael Savage was mentioned in The New Yorker?
What, therefore, is the response from all the champions defending freedom of speech and freedom of expression regarding the case of Michael Savage, this modern-day Alfred Dreyfus affair?
Right, right, I forgot. Savage is a man of many metaphors: Prometheus, a soft-spoken sheep, and Alfred Dreyfus.
… All I can hear is the hypocritical, unconsoling Savage silence of the lambs!
Oh, sorry, Prof, I couldn’t hear the silent lambs. I had John Cage’s 4′33″ turned way up.