Techn-opolypse, courtesy Barry Goldwater

Now that the Republican Party has apparently declared intellectual jihad on such bastions of knowledge as academia, the news, and scientists I've been rooting through some old thinkers of the conservative movement to see if there once existed some good ideas. I came across these videos of old campaign commercials on the internet archive, and was extremely impressed by Barry Goldwater's mix of homespun imagery, an almost literary conceptualization of Evil, and the verbosity of his own language. The second video takes you through some of the boilerplate talk show points about "big government," but then Goldwater adds a much colder element: that large government is eroding our very identities as individuals. His descriptions of government touch on physical aspects of everyday life creating a poem of a weakening substance. The tag line further promotes the viewer to absorb the subtle implications of Goldwaters message, "in your heart... you know he's right." Here's the downloadable file.

Also, Barry G. looks a little bit like Bevis, no?