Popular Culture
- In 1964, jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, born John Birks Gillespie, made a semi-satirical run for President, and formed chapters of the "John Birks Society" in 25 states.
- Bob Dylan wrote "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", narrated by a paranoid society member who looks everywhere for Communists, even in his toilet bowl and at one point decides that they are in his television set.
- General Jack Ripper in the movie Dr. Strangelove was based upon the John Birch Society's anti-fluoridation campaign.
- The Chad Mitchell Trio performed the satirical song "The John Birch Society".
- Steve Jackson Games included a mythical "Fred Birch Society" as one of hundreds of groups in the collectible card game Illuminati: New World Order.
- Walt Kelly used his comic strip Pogo to produce a satire that appeared in book form as "The Jack Acid Society Black Book."
- The 1971 Norman Lear film Cold Turkey features a group called the "Christopher Mott Society" that obviously lampoons the John Birch Society.
Read more about this topic: John Birch Society
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)