Posts Tagged → american sniper
Women marching in DC + Hollywood = end of an era
Hollywood had the power of suggestion, once.
Producing movies that highlighted the best of human attributes, the best of Americanism, of small town communities resulted in Americans spending their hard-won dollars for more meaningful entertainment. Heroes sold tickets.
Then came the strictly action genre, still riding on the saddle of good vs. evil Westerns. Still we were on board, as the Soviets really were an evil empire worthy of being blasted out of the sky by Rambo. Heroes had bigger muscles, bigger guns.
Then came the sanctimonious genre, and Hollywood really poured on its power of suggestion. Stretching Americans’ willingness to budge on principle, Hollywood mistakenly comingled emotion with contrary logic. And so here we are, treated to a long line of Hollywood stars openly at war with the very people and fans who made them stars to begin with. Americans still believe in God and the Bible, even if they are willing to look the other way on certain policy issues. But they are not willing to abandon their core beliefs.
Drawing upon my work as a conservationist, this Hollywood pickle reminds me of the faux “Highbridge/Sturbridge/ Scarsdale/ Woodcroft Crossing” – type low-density developments ravaging America’s best farmland, destroying the very beauty which first drew Americans to live in those places to begin with.
The similarity and irony are too much to ignore. A sense of invulnerability and profligate spending of hard-won resources drive this mentality in both models. But whereas America has a lot of open land left to develop, Hollywood can ill afford to burn its bridges and crossings. If Hollywood becomes the permanent home of the goofball aggrieved and whiny upper middle class, it will not sustain itself. Hollywood may say it is against capitalism, but without capitalism, Hollywood ceases.
Perhaps the strangest example of this self destruction is actor Bradley Cooper’s choice to abandon the heroic persona he adopted for American Sniper, and trade it in for open contempt of Donald Trump and support for Crooked Misogynist Hillary. Cooper had a fan base across America rivaling any actor, and then he detonated it. Similarly, Jack Nicholson is a talented actor garnering appreciation for being a chameleon, but who knew until recently that he not only supervised Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old-girl, but then applauded Polanski years later when he received a Hollywood award in absentia?
Need anything be said about Meryl Streep’s recent hypocrisy? She has been held accountable elsewhere, so we move on here.
These are the acts of clueless people, whose once gentle powers of suggestion once held sway over an American public willing to forgive small differences of opinion, but who are now greatly inflamed by the many acts of war and outright treason committed by their former heroes and heroines.
If you are an actor, whose job it is to pretend to be things and people you are not, then it is highly unlikely you are qualified to comment on anything serious, is what America has learned.
After looking over the signs and placards those marchers carried, and listening to their speeches and bad poetry, I could not help but feel sorry for them. They really do not know what they are protesting.
Oh, sure, they did not vote for Trump. OK. But it is very rare for Americans to protest against the outcome of a fair and square election result. That would be really bad form. Super sore loserish. Wearing suggestive hats isn’t a substantive statement, either. It is juvenile.
The women and men who took to the DC streets Saturday with their Hollywood escorts, protesting God Knows What, are coming from a distant past.
Emerging from their caves, where there was once inequity, to be sure, the America around them today does not square with their views. Take all the updated statistics like, for example, women outnumbering men in American medical schools and law schools. Trying to resurrect the distant past and fuel it with Hollywood’s now over-played power of suggestion just gives us a bigger bonfire on which to watch all of the old vanities burn.
You all can go to bed now. I will be happy to kick the dying embers and watch them blink out into darkness.
On Being a Dinosaur
I am a dinosaur.
In so many ways, my beliefs, ideals, values, education, outlook, hobbies, lifestyle, and behavior seem as outdated and as uncommon as the dinosaurs that died out long ago.
Put another way, I am one of the Last of the Mohicans, certainly not THE last, but one of a dwindling group that sees the world differently than the corrosive pop culture fed daily to Americans by Hollywood.
And I am proud to be this way, to be a patriot, to exalt individual citizen rights and liberties above government intervention, to take risks and make sacrifices in a free market capitalist society that rewards hard work and penalizes laziness. American Sniper, Act of Valor, and Lone Survivor are the only movies that moved me in many years because I believe in military heroes, although the Lord of the Rings productions are highly entertaining.
Meanwhile, pop culture would have every American equally unhappy, equally deprived of their rights and liberties, equally planted on a couch eating junk food and watching mindless TV shows that are at war with the underpinnings of Western Civilization.
(A short, hard-hitting article about Hollywood’s destructiveness by one of its most famous writers is here.)
And I am also an old-fashioned “Hook-and-Bullet” conservationist, a hunter, life-long gun owner and fisherman, an NRA member and even more so, a FOAC member who means it when I say “You can have my guns when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.”
But did I mention that conservation is a huge part of my identity? You know, farmland preservation, wildlife habitat protection, forest land acquisition for public ownership, and wilderness areas where I can hunt, fish, camp, and hike without seeing or hearing another human being for as long as I am out there.
And why is it so hard for so many traditionalists to see that traditional American values are directly tied to, and derive from, rural landscapes? And that our remaining rural landscapes are precious fragments of the great American frontier, on which our national identity and Constitution were forged?
So why wouldn’t a conservative want to conserve those rural landscapes that gave birth to his identity and values, that enshrine Constitutional rights and self-reliance?
For some strange reason, an increasing number of gun owners are not hunters, and do not really show that they care about wildlife populations or wildlife habitat, or about land and water conservation. When I attend meetings at different sportsmen’s clubs, like Duncannon Sportsmen, and I hear the Conservationist’s Pledge, my heart wells up and I nearly get as teary-eyed as when I hear the national anthem, or the Pledge of Allegiance. It doesn’t help that most of us in the room are sporting lots of white in our beards and on our heads. The next generation seems to have taken a lot for granted, because all of the battles we fought decades ago bore such abundant fruit.
All this makes me a dinosaur, and although I recognize it, I am not happy about it. I feel like I am watching the greatest nation on Planet Earth disintegrate under my feet, and it scares me, makes me sad, and makes me want to do what I can to try to prevent it from happening.
I do not want traditional American values to go extinct, like the dinosaurs, because although those values may not be in vogue right now, America was founded on them and the nation cannot successfully continue on without them.