Not pop culture, but Ted Kennedy's 1980 speech at the Democratic Convention is a stirring and eloquent defense of liberalism when it was no longer fashionable to be a liberal. I'd recommend any dejected progressives take some time out of their day to watch it.

We were involved militarily in Vietnam as early as the late 40s, or, depending on how you define "involved",1950. So…you're wrong. I think people saying 'Kennedy started it" are generally… less informed indivuduals attempting to impress us with their super secret facts and info!! Too bad it's not actually true.

Whoops, double post.

That basically is the ending King gave us with the original novel. It's more ambiguous than a lot of people seem to remember. And for the record, I still hate the ending, but there is no literal Hand of God descending from the heavens in the novel.

That's not exactly correct. Ralph, who I believe was a Christian prior to the flu/plague/captain trips, says something along the lines of "Look, the Hand of God!" Larry looks over to the soon to be detonated bomb and says "and it did kind of look like a hand". I don't think Emily misspoke. King explains that…

I think the original is far superior. Doubleday did King (and his fans) a huge favor by demanding major cuts to the story. The expanded edition takes an already lengthy book and adds hundreds of pages of superfluous nonsense. King always had a tendency for bloat and I think the 1990 edition of The Stand is a prime…

Yes. Who did you think played the Emperor all these years?