Not only was there a shout-out in last week's episode to the Port Huron Statement, but both House Next Door and Sepinwall reacted with the same "Big Lebowski" reference! And speaking of the Dude, there's a great piece on Slate today on the "prescient politics" of the Coens' 1998 masterpiece:
Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He's a neocon.The biggest difference between Walter and most neocons, of course, is that he actually served in a war. Still, I would hate to be in a bowling league with Richard Perle, Doug Feith or Paul Wolfowitz. Posted by Stephen Silver at September 11, 2008 04:16 PMIf that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, "is gonna be a piece of cake"; in the original script, he calls it "a fucking cakewalk"); nostalgia for the Cold War ("Charlie," he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a "worthy fuckin' adversary"); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream"); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin's given name and admits to having "dabbled in pacifism").