Another sign of the coming theocracy

It looks like fundie wingnut closet case pressure has pretty much worked to spell the death knell of public broacasting. ModFab has the sorry story, in which ALL government funding for public broadcasting goes bye-bye. I know this will warm the cockles of so-called libertarian hearts, but when I think about a world in which The Forsyte Saga (the first one, not the pale, if beautiful remake), Upstairs Downstairs, Lillie, Great Performances, Now, Frontline, and Nova don't exist for the growing segment of the population that just doesn't have extra cash for cable, I wonder just what kind of barren cultural wilderness we're going to live in.

Oh, sure, the big markets might still be able to keep their public television stations going. Certainly there are enough patrons of the arts in New York to keep Channel 13 going for a while. But what about smaller markets, where PBS is the ONLY thing standing between the citizenry and the networks?

The chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee would have you believe that this is just less government in action, but his claims ring hollow in the face of the well-documented hostility on the part of the Republican party's wacko fundie base towards public television, with its emphasis on things like literary adaptations and independent thought and real science that isn't based on biblical hoo-hah and children's programming that doesn't involve teaching hatred of people who are different.

The fundie theocracy isn't going to come all at once based on some kind of dictatorial edict. It's going to creep in, sneakily, in the dark of night (as all weaselly movements do), so that you hardly even notice it. And one day, we'll all wake up and we'll be living in a Christian version of Iran.