0 comment Monday, November 24, 2014 | admin
It appears that the story that was going around, regarding Jamie Foxx playing Frank Sinatra in an upcoming movie, was just a joke which the media ran with.
Was this really a joke, or was it a set-up? In today's insane media universe, almost anything is possible, especially where far-fetched racial ''statements'' are contained in much of our purported entertainment.
The rumor was not all that hard to believe, considering that modern treatments of the Robin Hood story place blacks in Sherwood Forest, not to mention Moslems, and a recent Oliver Twist production was to have a black ''Nancy''. What next?
Is this just another example of lefty multicultists trying to 'push the envelope' with the racial agenda? It seems as if nothing is to be left untouched by the politically correct meddlers, who feel the need to administer the diversity makeover to any and every part of our culture.
The recent Star Trek movie seems, from what I have read and heard, to be pushing the racial envelope too, but then the series always did that, even way back in 1966 when it first began. Of course then it was a little more low-key, with the underlying message being 'isn't it wonderful that in the future, we will all get along and work together as one united people under a unified global government.' Of course now we have had a glimpse of that possible future, and it is not the utopia some of us wanted to believe it would be.
The one ironic twist to the cozy little Star Trek multicult universe is this: if the idea is that the future will be egalitarian and colorblind, with racial harmony prevailing, why then are there still identifiable races and nationalities? Why aren't the people in Starfleet all of the same color and of similar features and hair texture? Why are there still hideously White people like Kyle or Janice Rand or Nurse Chapel or McCoy? Obviously the racial blender broke down, or something, between our age and the enlightened future.
The idea, though, that so many people were willing and able to believe that Jamie Foxx would play Frank Sinatra shows just how bizarre our racial politics have become. It appears that many people have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that ''race is just a social construct'', or that it's in the (racist) eye of the beholder only.
So maybe it is not so far-fetched that a White icon might be played by a black actor in a movie. If it is not real today, it probably will be at some point, tomorrow or next month or next year. That's the direction in which we are going.
The whole surreal situation reminded me of a movie I saw some years ago. It was a 1993 movie called 'Suture.'
I've mentioned it and I've never encountered anybody who actually saw it, so I might be tempted to think it was all just a strange dream, but no, here it is at IMDB.com, being discussed by the liberal-leaning commenters there.
The plot of the movie, as best I can describe it, is that two brothers or half-brothers meet, after which one is killed, and his identity stolen by the second brother. The twist is that one brother is black, the other is White. Yet in the movie everybody believes the identity switch. The fact that the brothers were of two different races and resembled each other not at all is not noticed by anybody.
What could the point be? That race is not important? That if we, the audience, noticed the racial difference, we are racist? Who knows? The commenters don't even know, and the tone of their comments amuses me:
The concept of all reality being a facade and prey to the unexpected warpings of fate, accident and whimsical doom-laden coincidence is a fundamental aspect of noir. With the twist of no one actually making the obvious connection between the brother's difference and Dennis Haysbert's character Clay gradually absorbing the life of his (not) dead brother without incident, the surreality of the film is magnetically compulsive and as noirish as some of the best films of the 1940s and 50s in dreamy, menacing atmosphere. I found myself deeply caring what happened to Clay on his odyssey towards a (false) identity and finally claiming it.
The whole cast is good, but in this film Dennis Haysbert shows the gravita s and dignity and vulnerability that makes him the real star of the excellent TV thriller '24'. A landmark film of the '90s gone unnoticed!
[...]
The first time I watched "Suture", in 1994, it ripped through me like some kind of high speed extra-terrestrial spacecraft, and I found myself asking, "What was that?" A year later I watched it again and the whole thing began to make sense. This film is unapologetically bizarre, mysterious, and aesthetically engaging -- almost everything I desire in a film. It is more like a piece of music, becoming more enjoyable with each viewing. One reason for the films superb milage is that it can be enjoyed on so many different levels. It is both a mirror image of contemporary society and a message from some alternative universe. The Surrealists made the point that the transcendent is found in the mundane, and "Suture" wallows in the mundane.
[...]
Viewers will not find themselves concerned with such trivia as performances, costumes, cinematography or sets, but rather issues, questions and statements. Issues such as self-awareness, questions such as: "Can we become someone else?", and statements such as: "Skin colour has no relevance to the identification of self". In their black and white feature, McGehee and Siegel fail to differentiate between and African/American man and a man of European descent. We're concerned not with the physical here, but the meta-physical.
As for the answers to these conundrums, one can only reach one's own conclusions. For me though, the personal soul is unchangeable and cannot be interchanged for another's. We may take someone's place, but we cannot become who they are.''
It's strange to see these people dancing around the issue of race while not really touching it. It's as if they have an unspoken agreement not to notice the racial issue.
Only one comment on that page raised the obvious question:
So, some scrawny old balding guy decides to kill his brother who is this big black guy. He slips his magical, indestructible drivers license into the black guy's wallet, and proceeds to blow him up. The dental records won't survive, but the ID card certainly will!
The black guy survives, but has amnesia. But somehow everyone mistakes the black guy for the white guy... Apparently, being in an explosion gives you black skin, African facial features, a full head of hair, and a different voice and personality.
Despite how insanely ridiculous this movie idea is, somehow the film continues to be completely predictable throughout. It's boring to boot.
If anyone can give me one good reason this film exists, please do.''
That last comment is very like the little boy in the Andersen fairy tale ''The Emperor's New Clothes.'' He is the only one who breaks the taboo and points to the obvious, while the others are blinding themselves. This is very much the state of our society, with a large segment of our White population agreeing to ignore the obvious, and to admire something which is not there, something which is only a construct of their minds.
Race-blindness is a social construct.
When I saw ''Suture'' back in 1995 or so, I found it absurd, but now it is becoming more and more plausible. In the context of today's willful race-blindness, in a world in which Ralph Kramden has become black and Morgan Freeman fits into medieval England, anything is possible, including a black Frank Sinatra.
Was this really a joke, or was it a set-up? In today's insane media universe, almost anything is possible, especially where far-fetched racial ''statements'' are contained in much of our purported entertainment.
The rumor was not all that hard to believe, considering that modern treatments of the Robin Hood story place blacks in Sherwood Forest, not to mention Moslems, and a recent Oliver Twist production was to have a black ''Nancy''. What next?
Is this just another example of lefty multicultists trying to 'push the envelope' with the racial agenda? It seems as if nothing is to be left untouched by the politically correct meddlers, who feel the need to administer the diversity makeover to any and every part of our culture.
The recent Star Trek movie seems, from what I have read and heard, to be pushing the racial envelope too, but then the series always did that, even way back in 1966 when it first began. Of course then it was a little more low-key, with the underlying message being 'isn't it wonderful that in the future, we will all get along and work together as one united people under a unified global government.' Of course now we have had a glimpse of that possible future, and it is not the utopia some of us wanted to believe it would be.
The one ironic twist to the cozy little Star Trek multicult universe is this: if the idea is that the future will be egalitarian and colorblind, with racial harmony prevailing, why then are there still identifiable races and nationalities? Why aren't the people in Starfleet all of the same color and of similar features and hair texture? Why are there still hideously White people like Kyle or Janice Rand or Nurse Chapel or McCoy? Obviously the racial blender broke down, or something, between our age and the enlightened future.
The idea, though, that so many people were willing and able to believe that Jamie Foxx would play Frank Sinatra shows just how bizarre our racial politics have become. It appears that many people have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that ''race is just a social construct'', or that it's in the (racist) eye of the beholder only.
So maybe it is not so far-fetched that a White icon might be played by a black actor in a movie. If it is not real today, it probably will be at some point, tomorrow or next month or next year. That's the direction in which we are going.
The whole surreal situation reminded me of a movie I saw some years ago. It was a 1993 movie called 'Suture.'
I've mentioned it and I've never encountered anybody who actually saw it, so I might be tempted to think it was all just a strange dream, but no, here it is at IMDB.com, being discussed by the liberal-leaning commenters there.
The plot of the movie, as best I can describe it, is that two brothers or half-brothers meet, after which one is killed, and his identity stolen by the second brother. The twist is that one brother is black, the other is White. Yet in the movie everybody believes the identity switch. The fact that the brothers were of two different races and resembled each other not at all is not noticed by anybody.
What could the point be? That race is not important? That if we, the audience, noticed the racial difference, we are racist? Who knows? The commenters don't even know, and the tone of their comments amuses me:
The concept of all reality being a facade and prey to the unexpected warpings of fate, accident and whimsical doom-laden coincidence is a fundamental aspect of noir. With the twist of no one actually making the obvious connection between the brother's difference and Dennis Haysbert's character Clay gradually absorbing the life of his (not) dead brother without incident, the surreality of the film is magnetically compulsive and as noirish as some of the best films of the 1940s and 50s in dreamy, menacing atmosphere. I found myself deeply caring what happened to Clay on his odyssey towards a (false) identity and finally claiming it.
The whole cast is good, but in this film Dennis Haysbert shows the gravita s and dignity and vulnerability that makes him the real star of the excellent TV thriller '24'. A landmark film of the '90s gone unnoticed!
[...]
The first time I watched "Suture", in 1994, it ripped through me like some kind of high speed extra-terrestrial spacecraft, and I found myself asking, "What was that?" A year later I watched it again and the whole thing began to make sense. This film is unapologetically bizarre, mysterious, and aesthetically engaging -- almost everything I desire in a film. It is more like a piece of music, becoming more enjoyable with each viewing. One reason for the films superb milage is that it can be enjoyed on so many different levels. It is both a mirror image of contemporary society and a message from some alternative universe. The Surrealists made the point that the transcendent is found in the mundane, and "Suture" wallows in the mundane.
[...]
Viewers will not find themselves concerned with such trivia as performances, costumes, cinematography or sets, but rather issues, questions and statements. Issues such as self-awareness, questions such as: "Can we become someone else?", and statements such as: "Skin colour has no relevance to the identification of self". In their black and white feature, McGehee and Siegel fail to differentiate between and African/American man and a man of European descent. We're concerned not with the physical here, but the meta-physical.
As for the answers to these conundrums, one can only reach one's own conclusions. For me though, the personal soul is unchangeable and cannot be interchanged for another's. We may take someone's place, but we cannot become who they are.''
It's strange to see these people dancing around the issue of race while not really touching it. It's as if they have an unspoken agreement not to notice the racial issue.
Only one comment on that page raised the obvious question:
So, some scrawny old balding guy decides to kill his brother who is this big black guy. He slips his magical, indestructible drivers license into the black guy's wallet, and proceeds to blow him up. The dental records won't survive, but the ID card certainly will!
The black guy survives, but has amnesia. But somehow everyone mistakes the black guy for the white guy... Apparently, being in an explosion gives you black skin, African facial features, a full head of hair, and a different voice and personality.
Despite how insanely ridiculous this movie idea is, somehow the film continues to be completely predictable throughout. It's boring to boot.
If anyone can give me one good reason this film exists, please do.''
That last comment is very like the little boy in the Andersen fairy tale ''The Emperor's New Clothes.'' He is the only one who breaks the taboo and points to the obvious, while the others are blinding themselves. This is very much the state of our society, with a large segment of our White population agreeing to ignore the obvious, and to admire something which is not there, something which is only a construct of their minds.
Race-blindness is a social construct.
When I saw ''Suture'' back in 1995 or so, I found it absurd, but now it is becoming more and more plausible. In the context of today's willful race-blindness, in a world in which Ralph Kramden has become black and Morgan Freeman fits into medieval England, anything is possible, including a black Frank Sinatra.
Labels: Entertainment Media, Liberals, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Race Denial
0 comment Saturday, November 15, 2014 | admin
In response to a recent blog entry of mine, on pop culture and politics, the subject of television and the role it has played in the dumbing down of our culture, including our politics, was brought up.
I had been thinking of the huge role that the advent of television had in the social revolution that we mostly associate with the Sixties, and with my generation, the baby-boomers. While I acknowledge the foolishness of my generation and the responsibility we bore for some of the social destruction which was in full swing in the 60s and thereafter, I have argued that the changes we all recognize were in fact already well under way when my peers and I were children in the 50s, and even before.
Television, which began regular national broadcasting in the late 1940s, was a huge factor.
Television became an incredibly influential medium, which truly revolutionized the world.
This piece by Hereward Lindsay, called On the Decline of Our People, deals with the changes wrought by television, and the deleterious effects on our culture.
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.
He didn't get any defiance from me. The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors. (Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato's dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or "thought criminals", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.''
[Emphasis mine]
Lindsay goes on to tie together certain trends in our society, factors such as decline in the number of self-employed individuals, and the concomitant decline in the thinking skills and independence of mind of Americans. I am not clear, actually, how he correlates the advent of television with, say, the dwindling number of small independent farmers, but I agree with his argument that television has wielded enormous power in spreading a uniform set of ideas, which have become a stultifying orthodoxy. Received opinion dominates the national discussion, such as it is, thanks to the ubiquity of television, and the monolithic party line which is handed down mostly by that medium.
Newspapers are less and less influential; subscribers are fewer with each passing year, and many newspapers have disappeared because of dwindling readership. But cable news (and to some extent, the internet) are taking over the role once played by newspapers.
Lindsay writes about how the domination by the means of images rather than the printed word has made for more passive, less engaged, less imaginative citizens. It used to be said that radio, in its heyday, was the 'theatre of the mind', requiring considerable powers of active imagination and concentration on the part of its listeners. The visual media like TV, movies and videos, relying on pictures rather than words on a page, tend to 'dumb down' the populace, and literacy declines, along with the attention span.
Lindsay also mentions how political debates have become more simple-minded and devoid of serious content. This is obvious, however it may be less apparent to those who don't remember any other state of affairs. In the past, after some of the early ''debates'' in our present campaign, I drew my readers' attention to a website which contains transcripts of past presidential debates and of course there are now video clips of such debates.
The debates, even as recently as the 1960s, were true debates, and not merely 'panel discussions' and staged, scripted events which our recent debates are. However, the first series of televised presidential debates, in 1960, was the beginning of the trend of focusing on appearance, as Richard Nixon appeared nervous and sweaty on camera, while Kennedy appeared composed and confident.
I've blogged before, too, about our present society's obsession with 'image' and style, and the apparent preference for the telegenic and media-savvy candidate, no matter how inconsequential his ideas or his message. There are limitations to this analysis; if looks were all, John Edwards would be the Democrat candidate (even though some Republicans like to ridicule his looks or hairstyle, he is a telegenic, attractive man). And surely McCain would not be a frontrunner ,as he appears to be, if looks were all. But the truth is, being telegenic and glib, and facile with sound bites and one-liners counts for more these days than it did back in the days of Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
One of the criticisms most frequently made of Tom Tancredo, who has now dropped out of the Presidential race, was that he was a 'poor speaker', too hesitant, not confident enough. On the other hand, we hear that Barack Hussein Obama's voice is supposedly a great asset. Personally, I think his voice is reminiscent of actor Ted Cassidy's.
Again, critics (most of whom, I would say, are already against Ron Paul) criticize and ridicule his 'nerdy' demeanor and his less-than-commanding voice. I say this is a shallow criticism. It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a very weak speaking style, despite his great facility with language in the written form.
Of his first Inaugural Address, it was said that
The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Mr. Jefferson had given your Brother [Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the National Intelligencer] a copy early in the morning, so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately.
The second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, like the first one, "was only partly audible."
Jefferson was by all accounts a shy and retiring man, hardly one of those back-slapping, smarmy politicians who are considered the ideal today. If today's superficial standards had applied in his day, we would have been deprived of his great genius in shaping our country.
The emphasis on looks, style, and image over substance and character are in some part a legacy of television.
Mitt Romney is considered by most to be the most 'attractive' Republican candidate (which is not saying much, considering the pickings). However I find him rather artificial and false, and I usually have a very good nose for insincerity. I was warning people about Bill Clinton from the git-go, and few were willing to be wary then; he seemed so friendly and warm, and people are so easily gulled these days.
But this is the result of looking only at the surface of people and things.
The way the primary season is shaping up, it looks as though Americans are gearing up to elect themselves another silver-tongued deceiver of whichever party, and to give a cold shoulder to principle and character.
The political campaign is just one manifestation of how television has deeply affected our society. The overall picture is that television has ensured that a single set of very liberal beliefs dominates our society, and this set of beliefs was in reality revolutionary, overturning the mores and habits of old America. The pernicious system we call 'political correctness,' which paralyzes us when it comes to protecting our territory and our people and culture, would not be possible without the role played by television in establishing 'respectable' opinion. One need not watch the cable ''news'' channels to be indoctrinated by the pundits and political hacks; one can get the party line via the favorite sitcoms, crime shows, reality shows, MTV, and even Country Music Television. And even if you manage to avoid all those, the commercials also carry the required memes. There is literally no escaping the 'message', the agenda.
And if you don't recognize that there IS an agenda and a message that is relentlessly pushed by television (and movies, and the music industry, etc.) then you are merely so used to it that you no longer see it. It is so ingrained in most Americans (and all Western peoples) these days that no one even notices it, or thinks it to be propaganda. It just 'is.' And for the younger generations, it's all they've known. So it becomes invisible, and second nature to most of us.
Lindsay correctly describes the entertainment industry in general as being about deception. And yes, some entertainment is innocuous, but few today have the discernment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
So we are easy prey for 'whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.'
It's facile to blame the 'liberals' or the baby-boomers for all that is amiss in our world, but the fact is, the process has been under way for some time, and it is not merely 'the liberals' or 'the hippies' who created the monster. It has been a process of collusion, unwitting or witting, between the ideologues who have set out to remake the world, and the people who are out to make a buck via the bread and circuses of television and the entertainment industry. The latter are happy to present subversive material if there is profit in it, and if revolution and transformation of Western society are good for their bottom line, they will happily collude. I don't know who is using whom in this strange alliance of leftists and corporate interests; I think they are both manipulating us.
As I've said, we have to free ourselves from the paralyzing effect of the prevailing orthodoxies and opinions, and as long as we are glued to the mass media, whether it's 'entertainment' or junk news on the cable news channels, we cannot extricate ourselves from the snares laid for us.
Fortunately we do have a choice; we can become aware of these destructive influences, and we can walk away, and we can create alternatives. It will be a long-term effort, and distressingly, we have a short time frame in which to try to reverse course, but we really have no choice but to try. The present course is taking us perilously close to a point of no return.
Forum comments here.
I had been thinking of the huge role that the advent of television had in the social revolution that we mostly associate with the Sixties, and with my generation, the baby-boomers. While I acknowledge the foolishness of my generation and the responsibility we bore for some of the social destruction which was in full swing in the 60s and thereafter, I have argued that the changes we all recognize were in fact already well under way when my peers and I were children in the 50s, and even before.
Television, which began regular national broadcasting in the late 1940s, was a huge factor.
Television became an incredibly influential medium, which truly revolutionized the world.
This piece by Hereward Lindsay, called On the Decline of Our People, deals with the changes wrought by television, and the deleterious effects on our culture.
A friend recently sent me an email that concluded:
The cathode ray tube was the most powerful invention of the 20th century. I defy anybody to prove that wrong.
He didn't get any defiance from me. The malevolent impact of television is a subject I have thought about a lot. I have come to the reluctant conclusion that my hyper-Calvinist ancestors were right in their suspicion of drama and actors. (Socrates, by the way, had somewhat similar ideas. Read Plato's dialogue the Ion and you will be astonished at how timely it is with its warnings about actors trying to influence government policy and their inherent bad character as people who are professionals at creating illusions and fantasies, i.e. trained deceivers and people whose minds are not grounded in the concrete and real.)
All of us American dissidents (or "thought criminals", as might be more appropriate) have lain awake at night throughout our adult lives trying to figure out how our race and civilization have collapsed. There is no subject more important and more entitled to consideration.''
[Emphasis mine]
Lindsay goes on to tie together certain trends in our society, factors such as decline in the number of self-employed individuals, and the concomitant decline in the thinking skills and independence of mind of Americans. I am not clear, actually, how he correlates the advent of television with, say, the dwindling number of small independent farmers, but I agree with his argument that television has wielded enormous power in spreading a uniform set of ideas, which have become a stultifying orthodoxy. Received opinion dominates the national discussion, such as it is, thanks to the ubiquity of television, and the monolithic party line which is handed down mostly by that medium.
Newspapers are less and less influential; subscribers are fewer with each passing year, and many newspapers have disappeared because of dwindling readership. But cable news (and to some extent, the internet) are taking over the role once played by newspapers.
Lindsay writes about how the domination by the means of images rather than the printed word has made for more passive, less engaged, less imaginative citizens. It used to be said that radio, in its heyday, was the 'theatre of the mind', requiring considerable powers of active imagination and concentration on the part of its listeners. The visual media like TV, movies and videos, relying on pictures rather than words on a page, tend to 'dumb down' the populace, and literacy declines, along with the attention span.
Lindsay also mentions how political debates have become more simple-minded and devoid of serious content. This is obvious, however it may be less apparent to those who don't remember any other state of affairs. In the past, after some of the early ''debates'' in our present campaign, I drew my readers' attention to a website which contains transcripts of past presidential debates and of course there are now video clips of such debates.
The debates, even as recently as the 1960s, were true debates, and not merely 'panel discussions' and staged, scripted events which our recent debates are. However, the first series of televised presidential debates, in 1960, was the beginning of the trend of focusing on appearance, as Richard Nixon appeared nervous and sweaty on camera, while Kennedy appeared composed and confident.
I've blogged before, too, about our present society's obsession with 'image' and style, and the apparent preference for the telegenic and media-savvy candidate, no matter how inconsequential his ideas or his message. There are limitations to this analysis; if looks were all, John Edwards would be the Democrat candidate (even though some Republicans like to ridicule his looks or hairstyle, he is a telegenic, attractive man). And surely McCain would not be a frontrunner ,as he appears to be, if looks were all. But the truth is, being telegenic and glib, and facile with sound bites and one-liners counts for more these days than it did back in the days of Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, or Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey.
One of the criticisms most frequently made of Tom Tancredo, who has now dropped out of the Presidential race, was that he was a 'poor speaker', too hesitant, not confident enough. On the other hand, we hear that Barack Hussein Obama's voice is supposedly a great asset. Personally, I think his voice is reminiscent of actor Ted Cassidy's.
Again, critics (most of whom, I would say, are already against Ron Paul) criticize and ridicule his 'nerdy' demeanor and his less-than-commanding voice. I say this is a shallow criticism. It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a very weak speaking style, despite his great facility with language in the written form.
Of his first Inaugural Address, it was said that
The speech was delivered in so low a tone that few heard it. Mr. Jefferson had given your Brother [Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the National Intelligencer] a copy early in the morning, so that on coming out of the house, the paper was distributed immediately.
The second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1805, like the first one, "was only partly audible."
Jefferson was by all accounts a shy and retiring man, hardly one of those back-slapping, smarmy politicians who are considered the ideal today. If today's superficial standards had applied in his day, we would have been deprived of his great genius in shaping our country.
The emphasis on looks, style, and image over substance and character are in some part a legacy of television.
Mitt Romney is considered by most to be the most 'attractive' Republican candidate (which is not saying much, considering the pickings). However I find him rather artificial and false, and I usually have a very good nose for insincerity. I was warning people about Bill Clinton from the git-go, and few were willing to be wary then; he seemed so friendly and warm, and people are so easily gulled these days.
But this is the result of looking only at the surface of people and things.
The way the primary season is shaping up, it looks as though Americans are gearing up to elect themselves another silver-tongued deceiver of whichever party, and to give a cold shoulder to principle and character.
The political campaign is just one manifestation of how television has deeply affected our society. The overall picture is that television has ensured that a single set of very liberal beliefs dominates our society, and this set of beliefs was in reality revolutionary, overturning the mores and habits of old America. The pernicious system we call 'political correctness,' which paralyzes us when it comes to protecting our territory and our people and culture, would not be possible without the role played by television in establishing 'respectable' opinion. One need not watch the cable ''news'' channels to be indoctrinated by the pundits and political hacks; one can get the party line via the favorite sitcoms, crime shows, reality shows, MTV, and even Country Music Television. And even if you manage to avoid all those, the commercials also carry the required memes. There is literally no escaping the 'message', the agenda.
And if you don't recognize that there IS an agenda and a message that is relentlessly pushed by television (and movies, and the music industry, etc.) then you are merely so used to it that you no longer see it. It is so ingrained in most Americans (and all Western peoples) these days that no one even notices it, or thinks it to be propaganda. It just 'is.' And for the younger generations, it's all they've known. So it becomes invisible, and second nature to most of us.
Lindsay correctly describes the entertainment industry in general as being about deception. And yes, some entertainment is innocuous, but few today have the discernment to sift the wheat from the chaff.
So we are easy prey for 'whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.'
It's facile to blame the 'liberals' or the baby-boomers for all that is amiss in our world, but the fact is, the process has been under way for some time, and it is not merely 'the liberals' or 'the hippies' who created the monster. It has been a process of collusion, unwitting or witting, between the ideologues who have set out to remake the world, and the people who are out to make a buck via the bread and circuses of television and the entertainment industry. The latter are happy to present subversive material if there is profit in it, and if revolution and transformation of Western society are good for their bottom line, they will happily collude. I don't know who is using whom in this strange alliance of leftists and corporate interests; I think they are both manipulating us.
As I've said, we have to free ourselves from the paralyzing effect of the prevailing orthodoxies and opinions, and as long as we are glued to the mass media, whether it's 'entertainment' or junk news on the cable news channels, we cannot extricate ourselves from the snares laid for us.
Fortunately we do have a choice; we can become aware of these destructive influences, and we can walk away, and we can create alternatives. It will be a long-term effort, and distressingly, we have a short time frame in which to try to reverse course, but we really have no choice but to try. The present course is taking us perilously close to a point of no return.
Forum comments here.
Labels: Corportate Media, Entertainment Media, Identity Politics, Junk News, Propaganda, Societal Decay, Television, Western Decline
0 comment Thursday, November 13, 2014 | admin
I've been coming across a number of posts on conservative blogs or websites recently which have touched on the question of why conservatives seem underrepresented in the arts, or at least, do not seem to exert any influence in that field. Why this is so is something that might be discussed at length, having many possible causes.
However I've noticed, too, that there are precious few critics or commentators on the arts, including popular entertainment, who seem to be conservative or traditionalist or just politically incorrect. This is maddening.
I notice on Turner Classic Movies (a channel which is deteriorating slowly into another American Movie Classics) there is a newer movie called Glory being shown this evening. Now, to me, anything made after about 1960 is a 'new' movie because that time period was when political correctness became established in popular entertainment.
I know nothing about the movie Glory except that it appears to be a movie about the War Between the States, and as it stars Denzel Washington, I am certain the issue of race will figure prominently in the movie. In other words, the movie will be a morality play, and I know before watching a moment of it who will be the bad guy and who will be the sainted victim.
So I go to IMDB.com to read the comments on the movie. Knowing how firm a grip PC has on our society,I fully expect that all the reviews will be glowing and full of quasi-religious language. I was correct. Commenters speak of their 'emotional experience' watching the movies and it's clear that these movies about race issues in the Bad Old Days are to them what Foxe's Book of Martyrs is for Christians.
This comment is an example:
I find this one of my most difficult reviews to write. Even as I sit here for what must be the 206th viewing, I marvel, as acutely as I did in the very first viewing, that this tale has the compelling and overwhelming power to touch aesthetically, viscerally, profoundly and emotionally my sense of pride,injustice, soul. Even if this were not a true story, I would still recommend this movie to everyone with awe and reverence. And even as I watch, there is goose-flesh and damp eyes. As there always is...''
Political correctness, leading to what seems to be self-flagellation for white people, is a religious thing these days. Do these people who experience some kind of numinous experience watching the villainy of their ancestors, or take some form of twisted pleasure in seeing their forefathers painted as inhuman sadists or cold-blooded oppressors? Or do they comfort themselves that it was ''those other white guys'', somebody else's great-granddaddies who were the villains? Or do they accept that yes, their own forefathers were ''racists'', and do they then thank whatever gods they believe in that at least THEY are enlightened and better than their kin a few generations ago?
Is it some kind of catharsis that they experience through these movies? Do they experience some feeling that they have expiated their 'original sin' of Caucasianness by weeping over play-acted scenes of Denzel Washington being mistreated?
Who can fathom what goes through the minds of the self-castigating white people? I don't think that even in my liberal days I experienced this kind of emotion in watching these kinds of things, so I can't put myself in the place of these commenters.
I do notice that whichever movie you look up on IMDB, the comments are always uniformly liberal. I truly cannot ever recall reading any kind of dissenting conservative comment on any movie there. This leads me to wonder: does IMDB censor the comments based on PC or even political orientation? It would not be surprising or unprecedented if this were the case.
There seems to be a crying need for some kind of non-PC criticism of popular entertainment or the arts in general. There are examples like this
but this is rather mainstream 'conservatism', and mainstream conservatism tends to be politically correct.
Most of the 'conservative' blogs on movies that I've seen are politically correct.
This discussion on Free Republic about conservative movie reviews degenerates into a slanging match between some Christian social conservatives and the 'South Park' Republican types who sneer at Christian conservatives as being prudes.
Many 'conservatives' are conservative only on fiscal and military matters, and socially liberal, or perhaps libertarian on just about everything else.
So is there any hope of any politically incorrect counter-influence in the arts, even if only in the form of criticism or commentary dissecting the propaganda? Or is the answer to just 'enjoy' the low-quality tendentious garbage put out by Hollywood and MTV?
It does seem that as long as the enemy controls all the media and the subliminal and overt images our society absorbs, they will control minds and hearts. What can we do, if anything, about that?
However I've noticed, too, that there are precious few critics or commentators on the arts, including popular entertainment, who seem to be conservative or traditionalist or just politically incorrect. This is maddening.
I notice on Turner Classic Movies (a channel which is deteriorating slowly into another American Movie Classics) there is a newer movie called Glory being shown this evening. Now, to me, anything made after about 1960 is a 'new' movie because that time period was when political correctness became established in popular entertainment.
I know nothing about the movie Glory except that it appears to be a movie about the War Between the States, and as it stars Denzel Washington, I am certain the issue of race will figure prominently in the movie. In other words, the movie will be a morality play, and I know before watching a moment of it who will be the bad guy and who will be the sainted victim.
So I go to IMDB.com to read the comments on the movie. Knowing how firm a grip PC has on our society,I fully expect that all the reviews will be glowing and full of quasi-religious language. I was correct. Commenters speak of their 'emotional experience' watching the movies and it's clear that these movies about race issues in the Bad Old Days are to them what Foxe's Book of Martyrs is for Christians.
This comment is an example:
I find this one of my most difficult reviews to write. Even as I sit here for what must be the 206th viewing, I marvel, as acutely as I did in the very first viewing, that this tale has the compelling and overwhelming power to touch aesthetically, viscerally, profoundly and emotionally my sense of pride,injustice, soul. Even if this were not a true story, I would still recommend this movie to everyone with awe and reverence. And even as I watch, there is goose-flesh and damp eyes. As there always is...''
Political correctness, leading to what seems to be self-flagellation for white people, is a religious thing these days. Do these people who experience some kind of numinous experience watching the villainy of their ancestors, or take some form of twisted pleasure in seeing their forefathers painted as inhuman sadists or cold-blooded oppressors? Or do they comfort themselves that it was ''those other white guys'', somebody else's great-granddaddies who were the villains? Or do they accept that yes, their own forefathers were ''racists'', and do they then thank whatever gods they believe in that at least THEY are enlightened and better than their kin a few generations ago?
Is it some kind of catharsis that they experience through these movies? Do they experience some feeling that they have expiated their 'original sin' of Caucasianness by weeping over play-acted scenes of Denzel Washington being mistreated?
Who can fathom what goes through the minds of the self-castigating white people? I don't think that even in my liberal days I experienced this kind of emotion in watching these kinds of things, so I can't put myself in the place of these commenters.
I do notice that whichever movie you look up on IMDB, the comments are always uniformly liberal. I truly cannot ever recall reading any kind of dissenting conservative comment on any movie there. This leads me to wonder: does IMDB censor the comments based on PC or even political orientation? It would not be surprising or unprecedented if this were the case.
There seems to be a crying need for some kind of non-PC criticism of popular entertainment or the arts in general. There are examples like this
but this is rather mainstream 'conservatism', and mainstream conservatism tends to be politically correct.
Most of the 'conservative' blogs on movies that I've seen are politically correct.
This discussion on Free Republic about conservative movie reviews degenerates into a slanging match between some Christian social conservatives and the 'South Park' Republican types who sneer at Christian conservatives as being prudes.
Many 'conservatives' are conservative only on fiscal and military matters, and socially liberal, or perhaps libertarian on just about everything else.
So is there any hope of any politically incorrect counter-influence in the arts, even if only in the form of criticism or commentary dissecting the propaganda? Or is the answer to just 'enjoy' the low-quality tendentious garbage put out by Hollywood and MTV?
It does seem that as long as the enemy controls all the media and the subliminal and overt images our society absorbs, they will control minds and hearts. What can we do, if anything, about that?
Labels: Arts, Cultural Marxism, Entertainment Media, Liberalism, Movies, Popular Culture, Revisionist History
0 comment Saturday, August 30, 2014 | admin
I came across this piece at Lew Rockwell.com and it describes a cultural phenomenon that is part of America's problems.
Christmas Music: A Postmortem Reflection
Karen De Coster
While surfing the web recently, I noted that one Christmas music-hating blogger asks, "Why do I have to hear Little Drummer Boy on the radio over and over again?" The answer is fairly straightforward: the giganta-corp, media conglomerates turn out uninspiring, repetitive rubbish they think the dumbed-down listeners want to hear.
The problem with radio is that it is a government-controlled medium. It is government-regulated because the airwaves are considered to be a public good. Oh sure, the media conglomerates are "private" in the sense that they are publicly-owned corporations, but they operate on publicly-owned airwaves and are nothing more than government propaganda mills. They offer the public a service � superficially "free" music � and what you typically hear on their radio stations reflects the reality that there is no free-market price system to encourage a higher-quality, more diverse product.
So often, you hear people say they "hate" Christmas music � they are tired of the same old, repetitive songs that drive them batty year-after-year. This is because most consumers of commercial radio are content with the status quo found on the government airwaves. They don�t seek alternatives because radio, with all its talk, news, and music, is supposed to be "free." People are conditioned to believing that certain goods have to be public goods, and accordingly, the idea of paying for a competing product seems highly unreasonable.
Consequently, when we listen to the "all Christmas music" stations post-Thanksgiving, we hear ruthless renditions of Santa Baby and Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. Sure, these dumbed-down, pseudo-Christmas songs appeal to the inner imbecile in some � but not all � of us. The more immediate problem is that the recurrent comic relief being passed off as Christmas music suffers from an old disease known as "political correctness."
[...]
The real problem with the current crop of Christmas songs on the radio is that Christmas, and the music that goes along with it, has become politically incorrect. Christmas music, these days, has come to mean "holiday" music, minus the Christmas. The word Christmas, you see, has become taboo in a period where diversity reigns � except for when it comes to a traditional, Christian celebration like Christmas. The publicly-owned airwaves have long been expunging traditional, religious Christmas music in favor of secular tunes and clownish melodies that reflect a generic "holiday" theme. Of course, broad-category tunes like those can�t possibly offend those who celebrate atheism and demand that age-old customs be banished from the public airwaves. Thus we hear "safe" songs like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Happy Holidays replacing more conventional themes that center on the birth of Christ or the celebration of religious life.
[...]
You can expect to hear Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer at the beginning, middle, and end of the hour, and in between, Nat King Cole�s Christmas Song battles with some version, any version, of Winter Wonderland for most airplay. Nat King Cole, in fact, has a magnificent catalog of Christmas songs that never see the light of day due to their traditional flavor.
[...]
Only those songs with the secular, fluff lyrics are heard in the normal rotation, while the traditional, popular Christmas songs receive very little time on air.''
She is exactly right. It is all about dumbing down the 'holiday' music and making it as innocuous and neutral (no mention of Christ or Christianity) as possible, so as not to provoke the perpetually offended, or even the potentially offended.
This is a subject that I have brought up with a lot of people during the Christmas season over the past, say, five years. That's around the time when there seems to have been some kind of edict passed down that any religious Christmas song was banished from the commercial airwaves. Some of the people to whom I've mentioned this subject claim they haven't noticed anything different in our Christmas musical fare, but it's glaringly obvious.
I often wonder about how these things happen as if by some agreed-upon signal. The change seemed to be noticeable all of a sudden. Is there some kind of group mind in the media, so that all those executives are part of some kind of gestalt? Or are there directives passed down from on high, from the FCC or somewhere, that are not made public?
Why did the media suddenly decide that the old religious songs were no longer publicly acceptable, and only the bland, banal 'holiday songs' were fit to be heard?
I notice the trend accelerated after 9/11; did this all begin as an effort to placate the growing Moslem population? Or the increasingly vocal atheist malcontents?
The old news media insist on politically correcting their news and 'information', the entertainment outlets of the old media empire politically correct the 'entertainment' they present to us. But just as the Internet provides a less controlled, more demotic alternative to the old news media, satellite radio and the Internet offer an alternative source of music. The old media with their narrow and restricted content will, I hope, be superseded by the new media because the latter actually provides a choice.
The old media court the few at the expense of the majority, and this is true of the news media and the 'entertainment' media. One wonders how profitable this can be over the long term; would it not make more economic sense to go after the majority? Why is it suddenly practical or profitable to ignore the many in favor of a small segment of the population?
The majority of the population, unfortunately, are content to passively, uncritically accept the inferior products that are offered us. This seems to be a weakness of the American people these days; we acquiesce too easily, and are content with the pabulum that dominates the media.
And this is true in all areas of life; too many people are quite content with the dumbed-down selection of Presidential candidates who are presented to us as the best our country has to offer. Sometimes one wonders if the most unpalatable candidates are presented alongside the anointed one that the elites want to place in the White House, so as to make that pre-selected candidate appear more desirable.
It seems that whether we are talking about music or politics, we are too passive in accepting whatever is put before us. Until we begin to assert our will and exercise the power that rightfully belongs to the majority, we will be given only a Hobson's choice of inferior alternatives. We will get more of what we tolerate.
Christmas Music: A Postmortem Reflection
Karen De Coster
While surfing the web recently, I noted that one Christmas music-hating blogger asks, "Why do I have to hear Little Drummer Boy on the radio over and over again?" The answer is fairly straightforward: the giganta-corp, media conglomerates turn out uninspiring, repetitive rubbish they think the dumbed-down listeners want to hear.
The problem with radio is that it is a government-controlled medium. It is government-regulated because the airwaves are considered to be a public good. Oh sure, the media conglomerates are "private" in the sense that they are publicly-owned corporations, but they operate on publicly-owned airwaves and are nothing more than government propaganda mills. They offer the public a service � superficially "free" music � and what you typically hear on their radio stations reflects the reality that there is no free-market price system to encourage a higher-quality, more diverse product.
So often, you hear people say they "hate" Christmas music � they are tired of the same old, repetitive songs that drive them batty year-after-year. This is because most consumers of commercial radio are content with the status quo found on the government airwaves. They don�t seek alternatives because radio, with all its talk, news, and music, is supposed to be "free." People are conditioned to believing that certain goods have to be public goods, and accordingly, the idea of paying for a competing product seems highly unreasonable.
Consequently, when we listen to the "all Christmas music" stations post-Thanksgiving, we hear ruthless renditions of Santa Baby and Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. Sure, these dumbed-down, pseudo-Christmas songs appeal to the inner imbecile in some � but not all � of us. The more immediate problem is that the recurrent comic relief being passed off as Christmas music suffers from an old disease known as "political correctness."
[...]
The real problem with the current crop of Christmas songs on the radio is that Christmas, and the music that goes along with it, has become politically incorrect. Christmas music, these days, has come to mean "holiday" music, minus the Christmas. The word Christmas, you see, has become taboo in a period where diversity reigns � except for when it comes to a traditional, Christian celebration like Christmas. The publicly-owned airwaves have long been expunging traditional, religious Christmas music in favor of secular tunes and clownish melodies that reflect a generic "holiday" theme. Of course, broad-category tunes like those can�t possibly offend those who celebrate atheism and demand that age-old customs be banished from the public airwaves. Thus we hear "safe" songs like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Happy Holidays replacing more conventional themes that center on the birth of Christ or the celebration of religious life.
[...]
You can expect to hear Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer at the beginning, middle, and end of the hour, and in between, Nat King Cole�s Christmas Song battles with some version, any version, of Winter Wonderland for most airplay. Nat King Cole, in fact, has a magnificent catalog of Christmas songs that never see the light of day due to their traditional flavor.
[...]
Only those songs with the secular, fluff lyrics are heard in the normal rotation, while the traditional, popular Christmas songs receive very little time on air.''
She is exactly right. It is all about dumbing down the 'holiday' music and making it as innocuous and neutral (no mention of Christ or Christianity) as possible, so as not to provoke the perpetually offended, or even the potentially offended.
This is a subject that I have brought up with a lot of people during the Christmas season over the past, say, five years. That's around the time when there seems to have been some kind of edict passed down that any religious Christmas song was banished from the commercial airwaves. Some of the people to whom I've mentioned this subject claim they haven't noticed anything different in our Christmas musical fare, but it's glaringly obvious.
I often wonder about how these things happen as if by some agreed-upon signal. The change seemed to be noticeable all of a sudden. Is there some kind of group mind in the media, so that all those executives are part of some kind of gestalt? Or are there directives passed down from on high, from the FCC or somewhere, that are not made public?
Why did the media suddenly decide that the old religious songs were no longer publicly acceptable, and only the bland, banal 'holiday songs' were fit to be heard?
I notice the trend accelerated after 9/11; did this all begin as an effort to placate the growing Moslem population? Or the increasingly vocal atheist malcontents?
The old news media insist on politically correcting their news and 'information', the entertainment outlets of the old media empire politically correct the 'entertainment' they present to us. But just as the Internet provides a less controlled, more demotic alternative to the old news media, satellite radio and the Internet offer an alternative source of music. The old media with their narrow and restricted content will, I hope, be superseded by the new media because the latter actually provides a choice.
The old media court the few at the expense of the majority, and this is true of the news media and the 'entertainment' media. One wonders how profitable this can be over the long term; would it not make more economic sense to go after the majority? Why is it suddenly practical or profitable to ignore the many in favor of a small segment of the population?
The majority of the population, unfortunately, are content to passively, uncritically accept the inferior products that are offered us. This seems to be a weakness of the American people these days; we acquiesce too easily, and are content with the pabulum that dominates the media.
And this is true in all areas of life; too many people are quite content with the dumbed-down selection of Presidential candidates who are presented to us as the best our country has to offer. Sometimes one wonders if the most unpalatable candidates are presented alongside the anointed one that the elites want to place in the White House, so as to make that pre-selected candidate appear more desirable.
It seems that whether we are talking about music or politics, we are too passive in accepting whatever is put before us. Until we begin to assert our will and exercise the power that rightfully belongs to the majority, we will be given only a Hobson's choice of inferior alternatives. We will get more of what we tolerate.
Labels: Entertainment Media, Old Media, Political Correctness, Politics, Popular Culture
0 comment Friday, August 8, 2014 | admin
Mike Tuggle at Rebellion points us to this interesting piece, with the rather ponderous title How the West Was Changed: Degradation of the Townspeople After World War II in the American Western.
The obvious change in Western movies was that the townspeople were portrayed in a less and less sympathetic light, and in some cases, white American townspeople were no longer part of the storyline, as in 'The Magnificent Seven', in which the townspeople were Mexican.
The reason, per Mike Tuggle:
Simple, says the author -- the Hollywood elite, angered by Middle America's rallying around Joe McCarthy -- had declared war on the white middle class...''
The Nous American blog had an interesting series of pieces on Hollywood Westerns and the way in which they reflected the social revolution of the late 50s and early 60s. (Unfortunately the pieces are not all linked to each other, so one has to navigate through the archives to find the pieces in question.)
The blogger, GMason, describes some of the reasons why the Westerns shifted. Up until the mid-20th century the Westerns, particularly 'B Westerns' were 'morality plays', with positive values -- the chivalric code exemplified by the 'good guy' hero, and the triumph of the good and decent people, including the honest townsfolk.
B westerns operated as though they were under some special ethical directives. In fact, Bs have often been called "morality plays," and they were. Some made better use of their moral situations and portrayal than others, but none blurred the distinction between good and bad, or good and evil.
Typically in a B western, there are men who want something that is not theirs and intend to get it from the honorable persons who own what the bad guys covet. This may involve cattle, land, water, oil, gold, bearer bonds, stagecoach contracts, and so on. The baddies violate the sovreign rights of those who possess what they covet. To achieve their nefarious ends, they initiate all sorts of physical force, including fraud.
The defenders of the good must discover, then uncover, and deal with the issue and its instigators. Adding to the plot complexity are mistakes of knowledge, bad assumptions, and ignorance, which delay rectification. Invariable, however, retaliatory force, in the name of the law, of rights, of property ownership, of the good, etc., must be used to correct the situation. There are fist fights, brawls, major and minor shootouts, right on up to the cavalry arriving to restore right from might. Good always triumphs. That was standard moral fare in Bs.''
On the subject of Westerns and European culture, Cambria Will Not Yield also had a good piece, which I referenced here before. Those who missed that piece might like to read it here.
But returning to Aaron Barlow's above-linked 'How the West Was Changed', we find that he indicates that the most obvious change was in the way the townspeople were regarded. In the old 'poverty row' B Westerns, pre-1950s, the ordinary people were presented as deserving of protection from the 'bad guys' who threatened their way of life and their peace and safety. And it was such people, mostly white 'average' people, who were the audience for these Westerns. It would seem odd to present them with movies which showed their ancestors in an unfriendly light, but that is what happened after the end of the B-movie era, and as only 'A' Westerns were made.
'The movie Western had moved from "poverty row" (abetting the demise of these poor-cousin studios) and firmly into the mainstream. Along with a changing social and political climate, better production values, actors, writers, and distribution led to a Western quite different from what had been presented before. Yet, though many of the Westerns of the 1950s are among the best the genre has ever seen, something is lost whenever a change of this magnitude occurs.
In this case, it was the people. Their protection once having been the rationale behind the Western, they now played�at best�the role of oppressor in scenarios where attention is turned to other problems, or had disappeared completely from consideration while questions of individualism and personal morality began to dominate the genre.
[...]
After World War II, however, the "good" population began to disappear from sight in the Western.
Why?
Why, for example, was a cultural split added to The Magnificent Seven (John Sturgis, 1960), the Hollywood remake of Shichinin no samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)? In the original, the townspeople are simply poor and oppressed; they share a cultural background with the samurai they hire to protect them as well as with the people who are expected to see the film. In the remake the townspeople are alien�to their protectors and to most of their intended audience. Why? Why make it a Mexican town in need of protection by Americans?''
The essay ties together a number of things: the changing portrayal of the average small-town American in the 1950s and 60s, the Cold War, the McCarthy era, and the increasing media hostility to rural white America.
The Hollywood elites probably had always felt that they were outsiders in Anglo-American culture, and they, being mostly urban people, of more recent immigrant roots in many cases, were distrustful or even disdainful of the rural or small-town white culture of America. In the 50s and thereafter, in the divisive atmosphere of the 'Red Scare', small-town Americans increasingly became depicted in movies as sinister or at least as ignorant and crude and unfriendly. We saw this trend culminate in the 70s and thereafter, with many Western movies depicting bigoted whites persecuting Indians, and in the old 1970s TV series 'Kung Fu', the ''Chinese'' character Caine. Each and every episode of that series had scenes of leering, slavering bigots attacking Caine while calling him racial epithets.
Dances With Wolves, in the 90s was another movie whose depiction of whites was relentlessly disparaging, with the only exceptions being the hero, who turned his back on white civilization and went native, and his love interest, another white-gone-native.
Another way in which this manifests itself is in the negative image of Confederate soldiers or former confederate soldiers in recent movies; in the past, portrayals of Confederates or ex-Confederates were often sympathetic.
This is just one more front in the war on our past and on our ancestors. Can't Hollywood just let our forefathers rest in peace, or must they repeatedly exhume them for a posthumous flogging?
Although Barlow generally makes good points in the essay linked above, One quibble that I have with 'How the West Was Changed' is that the writer seems to presume that McCarthyism, so-called, was some kind of political witch hunt; he does not seem to credit the idea that there was substance to McCarthy's allegations, despite his personal flaws. And there is no hint that the writer believes that Communism was a real threat which should have been confronted and dealt with. The fact that some people in Hollywood were 'blacklisted' and could not find work in the industry for a while (many of them were back in the industry later) seems to be considered 'persecution' Soviet-style by many Americans. As if 'blacklisting' were morally equivalent to gulags or mass purges.
But it's an interesting piece overall. It is obvious to most people, except the most willfully blind, that Hollywood and the media in general have an ideological agenda, and that they subtly -- and sometimes not-so-subtly -- shape our ideas about the past, and about the present and about ourselves. In this sense they have enormous power, and we really ought to scrutinize the 'entertainment' media (and the news media) as much or more as we scrutinize elected officials. Politics takes many forms. 'Entertainment' these days is all too often another form of indoctrination, but it's presented to us in a shiny, attractive package rather than in the form of lectures and polemics. It's the spoonful of sugar; we watch a Hollywood movie or a TV program or a music video or even a commercial these days, and we have images and subtle messages implanted in our consciousness. And when you try to point out to someone the messages in the media, often the response is: ''it's just a movie'' or 'it's just a TV show; lighten up.' Yet it does have an effect; sometimes it's a gradual, subtle effect, but in some cases, especially among the more impressionable young, a movie or a TV program (or less frequently, a book) will profoundly affect the thinking and beliefs of the target. If my readers remember I posted a link to a thread from a liberal blog where the subject of discussion was 'what movies have changed your life?' Many of the people claimed that a movie did in fact change their lives. Sometimes, especially in this present subjective age, people are more susceptible to manipulation via visual images, especially when their emotions are aroused by the images. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the trite (but true) old saying has it.
It's been said before, but I think we need to look at our entertainment with a critical eye and point out the ways in which it is destructive to us. The politically correct, anti-white left absolutely dominates the media, including the entertainment media, and they are challenged far too infrequently on the heavy-handed propaganda they peddle. We need more voices on our side to provide some perspective on this, and to try to counteract it.
The obvious change in Western movies was that the townspeople were portrayed in a less and less sympathetic light, and in some cases, white American townspeople were no longer part of the storyline, as in 'The Magnificent Seven', in which the townspeople were Mexican.
The reason, per Mike Tuggle:
Simple, says the author -- the Hollywood elite, angered by Middle America's rallying around Joe McCarthy -- had declared war on the white middle class...''
The Nous American blog had an interesting series of pieces on Hollywood Westerns and the way in which they reflected the social revolution of the late 50s and early 60s. (Unfortunately the pieces are not all linked to each other, so one has to navigate through the archives to find the pieces in question.)
The blogger, GMason, describes some of the reasons why the Westerns shifted. Up until the mid-20th century the Westerns, particularly 'B Westerns' were 'morality plays', with positive values -- the chivalric code exemplified by the 'good guy' hero, and the triumph of the good and decent people, including the honest townsfolk.
B westerns operated as though they were under some special ethical directives. In fact, Bs have often been called "morality plays," and they were. Some made better use of their moral situations and portrayal than others, but none blurred the distinction between good and bad, or good and evil.
Typically in a B western, there are men who want something that is not theirs and intend to get it from the honorable persons who own what the bad guys covet. This may involve cattle, land, water, oil, gold, bearer bonds, stagecoach contracts, and so on. The baddies violate the sovreign rights of those who possess what they covet. To achieve their nefarious ends, they initiate all sorts of physical force, including fraud.
The defenders of the good must discover, then uncover, and deal with the issue and its instigators. Adding to the plot complexity are mistakes of knowledge, bad assumptions, and ignorance, which delay rectification. Invariable, however, retaliatory force, in the name of the law, of rights, of property ownership, of the good, etc., must be used to correct the situation. There are fist fights, brawls, major and minor shootouts, right on up to the cavalry arriving to restore right from might. Good always triumphs. That was standard moral fare in Bs.''
On the subject of Westerns and European culture, Cambria Will Not Yield also had a good piece, which I referenced here before. Those who missed that piece might like to read it here.
But returning to Aaron Barlow's above-linked 'How the West Was Changed', we find that he indicates that the most obvious change was in the way the townspeople were regarded. In the old 'poverty row' B Westerns, pre-1950s, the ordinary people were presented as deserving of protection from the 'bad guys' who threatened their way of life and their peace and safety. And it was such people, mostly white 'average' people, who were the audience for these Westerns. It would seem odd to present them with movies which showed their ancestors in an unfriendly light, but that is what happened after the end of the B-movie era, and as only 'A' Westerns were made.
'The movie Western had moved from "poverty row" (abetting the demise of these poor-cousin studios) and firmly into the mainstream. Along with a changing social and political climate, better production values, actors, writers, and distribution led to a Western quite different from what had been presented before. Yet, though many of the Westerns of the 1950s are among the best the genre has ever seen, something is lost whenever a change of this magnitude occurs.
In this case, it was the people. Their protection once having been the rationale behind the Western, they now played�at best�the role of oppressor in scenarios where attention is turned to other problems, or had disappeared completely from consideration while questions of individualism and personal morality began to dominate the genre.
[...]
After World War II, however, the "good" population began to disappear from sight in the Western.
Why?
Why, for example, was a cultural split added to The Magnificent Seven (John Sturgis, 1960), the Hollywood remake of Shichinin no samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)? In the original, the townspeople are simply poor and oppressed; they share a cultural background with the samurai they hire to protect them as well as with the people who are expected to see the film. In the remake the townspeople are alien�to their protectors and to most of their intended audience. Why? Why make it a Mexican town in need of protection by Americans?''
The essay ties together a number of things: the changing portrayal of the average small-town American in the 1950s and 60s, the Cold War, the McCarthy era, and the increasing media hostility to rural white America.
The Hollywood elites probably had always felt that they were outsiders in Anglo-American culture, and they, being mostly urban people, of more recent immigrant roots in many cases, were distrustful or even disdainful of the rural or small-town white culture of America. In the 50s and thereafter, in the divisive atmosphere of the 'Red Scare', small-town Americans increasingly became depicted in movies as sinister or at least as ignorant and crude and unfriendly. We saw this trend culminate in the 70s and thereafter, with many Western movies depicting bigoted whites persecuting Indians, and in the old 1970s TV series 'Kung Fu', the ''Chinese'' character Caine. Each and every episode of that series had scenes of leering, slavering bigots attacking Caine while calling him racial epithets.
Dances With Wolves, in the 90s was another movie whose depiction of whites was relentlessly disparaging, with the only exceptions being the hero, who turned his back on white civilization and went native, and his love interest, another white-gone-native.
Another way in which this manifests itself is in the negative image of Confederate soldiers or former confederate soldiers in recent movies; in the past, portrayals of Confederates or ex-Confederates were often sympathetic.
This is just one more front in the war on our past and on our ancestors. Can't Hollywood just let our forefathers rest in peace, or must they repeatedly exhume them for a posthumous flogging?
Although Barlow generally makes good points in the essay linked above, One quibble that I have with 'How the West Was Changed' is that the writer seems to presume that McCarthyism, so-called, was some kind of political witch hunt; he does not seem to credit the idea that there was substance to McCarthy's allegations, despite his personal flaws. And there is no hint that the writer believes that Communism was a real threat which should have been confronted and dealt with. The fact that some people in Hollywood were 'blacklisted' and could not find work in the industry for a while (many of them were back in the industry later) seems to be considered 'persecution' Soviet-style by many Americans. As if 'blacklisting' were morally equivalent to gulags or mass purges.
But it's an interesting piece overall. It is obvious to most people, except the most willfully blind, that Hollywood and the media in general have an ideological agenda, and that they subtly -- and sometimes not-so-subtly -- shape our ideas about the past, and about the present and about ourselves. In this sense they have enormous power, and we really ought to scrutinize the 'entertainment' media (and the news media) as much or more as we scrutinize elected officials. Politics takes many forms. 'Entertainment' these days is all too often another form of indoctrination, but it's presented to us in a shiny, attractive package rather than in the form of lectures and polemics. It's the spoonful of sugar; we watch a Hollywood movie or a TV program or a music video or even a commercial these days, and we have images and subtle messages implanted in our consciousness. And when you try to point out to someone the messages in the media, often the response is: ''it's just a movie'' or 'it's just a TV show; lighten up.' Yet it does have an effect; sometimes it's a gradual, subtle effect, but in some cases, especially among the more impressionable young, a movie or a TV program (or less frequently, a book) will profoundly affect the thinking and beliefs of the target. If my readers remember I posted a link to a thread from a liberal blog where the subject of discussion was 'what movies have changed your life?' Many of the people claimed that a movie did in fact change their lives. Sometimes, especially in this present subjective age, people are more susceptible to manipulation via visual images, especially when their emotions are aroused by the images. A picture is worth a thousand words, as the trite (but true) old saying has it.
It's been said before, but I think we need to look at our entertainment with a critical eye and point out the ways in which it is destructive to us. The politically correct, anti-white left absolutely dominates the media, including the entertainment media, and they are challenged far too infrequently on the heavy-handed propaganda they peddle. We need more voices on our side to provide some perspective on this, and to try to counteract it.
Labels: American History, Entertainment Media, Leftism, Old Movies, Political Correctness, Popular Culture
0 comment Tuesday, June 17, 2014 | admin
Here's a cartoon from the 1940s which tells us 'what has made America the finest country in which to live.''
Watch for the zoot-suited snake-oil salesman, Dr. Utopia, and notice how the ''imported ideas'' , or the "isms' that he is selling are still on offer now -- and actually sold very well in the last election.
Some things in the cartoon are poignant now, like the story of the American free enterprise system, wherein the narrator tells us about all the jobs created by the American auto industry. It seems very ironic now in light of recent developments.
The line early in the cartoon about America being ''all races, nationalities, and religions'', along with an image of a ''diverse'' group of schoolchildren, is an early example of the multicultural-''ism'' that so tyrannizes us now.
I think the melting pot sentimentality of the 'all races, nationalities, and creeds' business was in part played up during World War II in order to try to be more inclusive so as to say ''we're all in this together', and to rally people to the war effort.
But little did the makers of the cartoon seem to realize that this melting pot propaganda would be just one more ''ism'' being peddled in the future, one more utopian pipe-dream, that would further infringe on our liberty.
Anyway, despite all this it's an entertaining and nostalgic 9 minutes or so watching this.
Labels: American History, Entertainment Media, Leftism, Nostalgia, Propaganda
0 comment Saturday, June 7, 2014 | admin
Some time back I wrote a piece called 'No escaping politics' in which I lamented that even when I try to take a break from Internet controversy and surf some non-political blogs, I found that many bloggers who blog about, say, old movies or vintage photographs or art or music (or even cute animal pictures) insist on thrusting their political (leftist, PC) views into the forefront. This was nauseatingly on display during the last endless election cycle, with many non-political bloggers devoting their non-political blogs to paeans to The One.
Oftentimes when I like to take a break from all the controversy, I take refuge in music. It's a great healer for me. Recently somebody had sent me an album by a group called The Flatlanders, who are a West Texas group who do a rather quirky, 'Alt-country' style of music. In the past, I've liked their music, including that of band member Jimmie Dale Gilmore when he made solo albums. His music is rather eccentric, with occasional allusions to his New-Agey religious affiliations (he apparently followed a guru in Colorado for a while; how does a West Texas boy end up in that situation?). But I liked his music generally.
However, this Flatlanders effort has a song called 'Borderless Love' which contains something like the following lyrics:
A wall is a mirror that can only reveal
One side of a story that passes for real
But break it all down, it all becomes clear
It's the fearless who love and the loveless who fear
Borderless love, the land of the free
Borderless love, how far can you see?
Borderless love, there's no fear at all
In a borderless love there's no need for a wall...
And on a song called Homeland Refugee:
There�s some refugees from Mexico
Behind an abandoned Texaco
We nod and smile, it�s clear we�re all the same
For everything this world is worth
We�re all just migrants on this earth
Returning to the dust from where we came
So you see, it's all in vain, trying to escape from the propaganda. It's everywhere. You can run, but you can't hide.
People who dislike Christians have a term, ''Bible-thumper'', for those they perceive as aggressive proselytizers who zealously preach their religion and impose their moral framework on all and sundry, every chance they get.
We need an equivalent term to describe the leftists who can never shut up about their ideology/religion.
Generally when I rant about this kind of thing, somebody will tell me, ''oh, they're all leftists, but I just tune all that out and ignore it and enjoy the music (or movie, or TV show).'' I find that hard to do. I won't buy music that forces this pushy worldview on me, nor will I see movies or TV shows, or buy products, which force their goody-goody PC on me as the price of 'enjoying' their entertainment.
As the book title has it, ''shut up and sing!' And 'entertainers', please leave your half-baked beliefs out of it. You go to your church, I'll go to mine.
Oftentimes when I like to take a break from all the controversy, I take refuge in music. It's a great healer for me. Recently somebody had sent me an album by a group called The Flatlanders, who are a West Texas group who do a rather quirky, 'Alt-country' style of music. In the past, I've liked their music, including that of band member Jimmie Dale Gilmore when he made solo albums. His music is rather eccentric, with occasional allusions to his New-Agey religious affiliations (he apparently followed a guru in Colorado for a while; how does a West Texas boy end up in that situation?). But I liked his music generally.
However, this Flatlanders effort has a song called 'Borderless Love' which contains something like the following lyrics:
A wall is a mirror that can only reveal
One side of a story that passes for real
But break it all down, it all becomes clear
It's the fearless who love and the loveless who fear
Borderless love, the land of the free
Borderless love, how far can you see?
Borderless love, there's no fear at all
In a borderless love there's no need for a wall...
And on a song called Homeland Refugee:
There�s some refugees from Mexico
Behind an abandoned Texaco
We nod and smile, it�s clear we�re all the same
For everything this world is worth
We�re all just migrants on this earth
Returning to the dust from where we came
So you see, it's all in vain, trying to escape from the propaganda. It's everywhere. You can run, but you can't hide.
People who dislike Christians have a term, ''Bible-thumper'', for those they perceive as aggressive proselytizers who zealously preach their religion and impose their moral framework on all and sundry, every chance they get.
We need an equivalent term to describe the leftists who can never shut up about their ideology/religion.
Generally when I rant about this kind of thing, somebody will tell me, ''oh, they're all leftists, but I just tune all that out and ignore it and enjoy the music (or movie, or TV show).'' I find that hard to do. I won't buy music that forces this pushy worldview on me, nor will I see movies or TV shows, or buy products, which force their goody-goody PC on me as the price of 'enjoying' their entertainment.
As the book title has it, ''shut up and sing!' And 'entertainers', please leave your half-baked beliefs out of it. You go to your church, I'll go to mine.
Labels: Entertainment Media, Leftism, Music, Political Correctness, Propaganda
0 comment Thursday, May 15, 2014 | admin
What a long way we've come since 1961, when Kennedy appointee Newton Minow of the FCC proclaimed television to be a 'vast wasteland.' The television of 1961 was certainly full of vacuous programming and commercials, but compared to today's TV, it was high art. And bad as it may have been in parts, it was at least mostly entertainment without an 'agenda' or without heavy-handed messages bludgeoning viewers over the head, and without the steady propaganda that is the whole purpose, seemingly, of much of what is on TV in 2008.
You can't watch TV without being aware of the propaganda and the conditioning. The commercials seem as much or more concerned with selling a politically correct message than with selling a product or a service.
Today as I was watching the National Geographic channel I saw this VISA spot, which I've learned is narrated by Morgan Freeman (who else?). It's ostensibly about the upcoming Olympics, but if you haven't seen it, click on the link and watch it. It's short, but they do manage to pack a lot of propaganda into a short spot. If you want to be really discouraged, read the mindless comments following the spot.
In a ubiquitous Vonage commercial, it isn't the globalist agenda so much as the feminist, anti-White male agenda. Vonage seems to heavily favor ridiculing and belittling White males while exalting snarky, superior females. I am sure you've all seen this particular one, which is inescapable on TV these days.
The smug, sarcastic female seems to be a stock character in commercials these days, alongside the inept, awkward, clueless White male.
But the global agenda and the 'we are all the same' message seem to be promoted more heavily than ever in recent months. I've mentioned the History International Channel before, with its obnoxious 'Globalize Yourself' slogan.
For History International, the image makers at ZONA Design, Inc. created and produced a :30 image spot that encourages each viewer to "Globalize Yourself"; To explore the lives, the cultures, the various histories that shape the world we share; To try and better understand the world's peoples as what happens elsewhere on our planet profoundly impacts our daily lives here at home.
[...] To artfully make the network?s point, the ZONA creatives transitioned a series of images from diverse cultures - Russian, Tibetan, Peruvian, Aboriginal - and faces of African, Asian, Muslim and Hispanic men and women, one to the other, in the process weaving a global tapestry. Each day the world seems to be getting smaller so we created a travelogue that we hoped would help viewers make the connection that, as the History International tagline states, what happens over there indeed matters over here,? explained ZONA Creative Director/Designer Zoa Martinez.''
Celebrate diversity. Or else.
And then the BBC has its 'One World' mantra going. A few years ago, the BBC even ran a poll to find out who most people preferred as leader of a one-world government, which they clearly think is the future.
Now the "Beeb," as it is known, recently announced the results of a poll to find out who its audience would choose to head a worldwide one-size-fits-all government. And the winner was: Ex-South African President Nelson Mandela. According to the BBC, about 15,000 people voted worldwide and the contest was an interactive Power Play game modeled on Fantasy Football; participants were instructed to choose a team of eleven to run the world, from a list of about 100 people offered, coming mainly from the left-liberal end of the political spectrum. About half of the participants were apparently American, and for this reason if no other, the runner-up was William Jefferson Clinton. ''
I guess we all know who would be chosen today to head up this 'one-world' regime. And the media can take most of the 'credit' or more accurately the blame for that.
I suppose these propaganda efforts, obvious and overbearing as they are, must be somewhat effective, judging by the way the young are flocking to Obama and cheering 'Go World.'
But to return for a moment to Newton Minow's 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, if we read what he says, we can see the direction in which the elites were taking us even then.
Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.
Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.''
He concludes:
I urge you, I urge you to put the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom. You must help prepare a generation for great decisions. You must help a great nation fulfill its future.
Do this! I pledge you our help.
Thank you.'
The cause of freedom. It all sounds good. But between the lines, it seems he is talking about the global community, in today's terms, and about the media exercising 'leadership'. The media, though some of them purport to provide strictly entertainment, are now involved in what they think of as 'moral leadership' but which is really social engineering and propaganda. And they believe it is for our good, that they have to enlighten us because we are ignorant and narrow.
It's easy to recommend going TV-free, but the fact is, we still live in a world in which most people spend hours of their lives each day in front of the TV, uncritically absorbing what they see and hear on it. That, in large part, explains the phenomenal rise of Barack Obama, and it explains the political correctness which has infected our society, particularly among the younger and more impressionable.
By all means, keep your children from TV if you can, but it's getting harder and harder to separate oneself from the all-pervasive messages being spewed from television.
You can't watch TV without being aware of the propaganda and the conditioning. The commercials seem as much or more concerned with selling a politically correct message than with selling a product or a service.
Today as I was watching the National Geographic channel I saw this VISA spot, which I've learned is narrated by Morgan Freeman (who else?). It's ostensibly about the upcoming Olympics, but if you haven't seen it, click on the link and watch it. It's short, but they do manage to pack a lot of propaganda into a short spot. If you want to be really discouraged, read the mindless comments following the spot.
In a ubiquitous Vonage commercial, it isn't the globalist agenda so much as the feminist, anti-White male agenda. Vonage seems to heavily favor ridiculing and belittling White males while exalting snarky, superior females. I am sure you've all seen this particular one, which is inescapable on TV these days.
The smug, sarcastic female seems to be a stock character in commercials these days, alongside the inept, awkward, clueless White male.
But the global agenda and the 'we are all the same' message seem to be promoted more heavily than ever in recent months. I've mentioned the History International Channel before, with its obnoxious 'Globalize Yourself' slogan.
For History International, the image makers at ZONA Design, Inc. created and produced a :30 image spot that encourages each viewer to "Globalize Yourself"; To explore the lives, the cultures, the various histories that shape the world we share; To try and better understand the world's peoples as what happens elsewhere on our planet profoundly impacts our daily lives here at home.
[...] To artfully make the network?s point, the ZONA creatives transitioned a series of images from diverse cultures - Russian, Tibetan, Peruvian, Aboriginal - and faces of African, Asian, Muslim and Hispanic men and women, one to the other, in the process weaving a global tapestry. Each day the world seems to be getting smaller so we created a travelogue that we hoped would help viewers make the connection that, as the History International tagline states, what happens over there indeed matters over here,? explained ZONA Creative Director/Designer Zoa Martinez.''
Celebrate diversity. Or else.
And then the BBC has its 'One World' mantra going. A few years ago, the BBC even ran a poll to find out who most people preferred as leader of a one-world government, which they clearly think is the future.
Now the "Beeb," as it is known, recently announced the results of a poll to find out who its audience would choose to head a worldwide one-size-fits-all government. And the winner was: Ex-South African President Nelson Mandela. According to the BBC, about 15,000 people voted worldwide and the contest was an interactive Power Play game modeled on Fantasy Football; participants were instructed to choose a team of eleven to run the world, from a list of about 100 people offered, coming mainly from the left-liberal end of the political spectrum. About half of the participants were apparently American, and for this reason if no other, the runner-up was William Jefferson Clinton. ''
I guess we all know who would be chosen today to head up this 'one-world' regime. And the media can take most of the 'credit' or more accurately the blame for that.
I suppose these propaganda efforts, obvious and overbearing as they are, must be somewhat effective, judging by the way the young are flocking to Obama and cheering 'Go World.'
But to return for a moment to Newton Minow's 1961 speech to the National Association of Broadcasters, if we read what he says, we can see the direction in which the elites were taking us even then.
Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.
Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.''
He concludes:
I urge you, I urge you to put the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of freedom. You must help prepare a generation for great decisions. You must help a great nation fulfill its future.
Do this! I pledge you our help.
Thank you.'
The cause of freedom. It all sounds good. But between the lines, it seems he is talking about the global community, in today's terms, and about the media exercising 'leadership'. The media, though some of them purport to provide strictly entertainment, are now involved in what they think of as 'moral leadership' but which is really social engineering and propaganda. And they believe it is for our good, that they have to enlighten us because we are ignorant and narrow.
It's easy to recommend going TV-free, but the fact is, we still live in a world in which most people spend hours of their lives each day in front of the TV, uncritically absorbing what they see and hear on it. That, in large part, explains the phenomenal rise of Barack Obama, and it explains the political correctness which has infected our society, particularly among the younger and more impressionable.
By all means, keep your children from TV if you can, but it's getting harder and harder to separate oneself from the all-pervasive messages being spewed from television.
Labels: Advertising, Entertainment Media, Globalism, Indoctrination, Media Bias, One World, Political Correctness, Propaganda