too dumb to play with themselves volume 6

I've seen this I think twice in the past week, and I want to drop a hammer on it, hopefully always already everywhere. "this" & "it" are celebratory/positive invocations of a movie line, best exemplified by Peter King:

What we have here, a wise man once said, is a failure to communicate.

WHO IN THE HOLY MOUNTAIN OF FUCK CALLS THE CHAIN GANG CAPTAIN FROM COOL HAND LUKE A WISE MAN? If there's a better indicator of how NFL owners view the players (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chattel) than their spokespuppy Peter King citing approvingly a faux-kindly prison warden who talks bullshit and carries a big, big lieutenant with a rifle? I'm not sure I want to see that clearer indicator.

Let's contextualize. Cool Hand Luke is widely viewed as a Jesus allegory, which would make the warden something like a Pilate figure. I don't want to push too hard on this allegory, but let's go ahead and roll the rest of the tape on the "failure to communicate" speech, eh?

What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.

Though reeking of Rumsfeld, I fail to see how these prevarications count for anybody as the words of a "wise man".

I don't want to pick on Peter King, the Thomas Friedman of sports entertainment--and there are people already working that side of the street anyways. But I do want to make clear that this line is in no way about a failure to communicate; it is, and always already was, about a failure to extract obedient behavior from a recalcitrant freethinker. Note the clip, yo: the claim that this is a "failure to communicate" comes when? After an act of physical violence. This is not an accident.

Probably in no other film is the ruling class' use of police to impose ideological domination, and not just standard behavioral knuckling-under, made so clear.

Which is to say, the bosses don't just want you to toe the line, they insist that you say the right thing--and reserve the right to kick your teeth down your gagging throat if you don't sound sufficiently sincere.

So maybe we can knock it the hell off with the fawning invocations of that particular moment from filmic history.

--Collision, who cannot eat 50 eggs