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Paddling with Hollywood

Cheerfully our little crew paddled down the river, enjoying small Class II splashy whitewater rapids here and there, swift enough currents everywhere else that we need not really paddle much, if at all.

Turning aft, I squawked captain-like from my otherwise supine perch in the bow “Hard to the oars, ye pack o’ worthless lazy bones!”

The kids would laugh a bit at my best captain o’ the high seas bit, tepidly dip their paddles in the water like they were thinking about trying to paddle, and then go back to chattering amongst themselves about school, fellow students in school, classes, interpersonal politics and Politics with a capital P in school. Overall it was what had been hoped for when I made reservations with the outfitter the week before. Time with my kids and their friends, in nature, floating down a river, watching bald eagles, osprey, mergansers, wood ducks, migratory songbirds, deer, and on the lookout for bear.

Pausing to listen for and then spot white waterfalls cascading steeply out of the high canyon walls, I, the lookout, would occasionally point out where the crew could perhaps look up to if but briefly admire these little moments of grandeur passing by us. They did look the first half dozen times, and then tired of being bothered to do anything. I ended up dragging my hands in the cold foamy water, hoping to create some drag that would necessitate some serious paddling. When my hands turned red and then a purplish blue and stopped responding to commands to open or close, I gave up on influencing the kids in any way and just quietly admired the ride.

About two and a half hours into the drift, the kids started to sing. At first these were summer camp songs, and then theme songs from movies complete with beat-box noises from my daughter, and then songs from movies, mostly being rap-like. Their voices were sweet, and they would constantly run over each other, and then good-naturedly correct someone, and then try to get back on track in harmonic unison. Being of free and easy spirit, the kids were into having fun, and they would individually or together abruptly break out into a song-ending editorialization about the singer, the performer, the musician, or the movie the particular song came from.

The Earth Day environmental song, apparently popular now, was a big hit on our boat. They sang it over and over and over.

“And the zebra, I like how he says ‘I’m a zebra, I am striped, and I don’t know if I am black or if I am white’,” said the girl of this apparently surprising revelation, unaware that Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, and a slew of other radio talk show hosts and conservative politicians have been preaching an equal opportunity color-blind society for many decades.

And after about half an hour of back and forth chatter about this environmental planet cartoon movie and its song, it dawned on me that these kids are deeply enthralled by Hollywood and its entertainment business. They and their young impressionable minds are completely captured by images and made-up voices from highly paid songwriters and movie scripters, whose lines become memorized as moral guide posts along their young lives.

Many adults over the past ten or twenty years have bemoaned the advent of and then exponential increase in realistic at-home video games, the prevalence of handheld devices, and the trance-like state our children have grown up in glued to and Matrix-like plugged into these things. Well, I saw that we have transitioned beyond the gluing-in-and-tuning-out stage where we had to scream two inches from our kids’ face to ask them what they wanted for dinner.  Now we see the fruits of others’ indoctrination labors playing out over a decade or more: Our kids are wholly owned little robots of the entertainment industry, which is vacuous, morally bankrupt, materialistic, shallow, value-less, corrosive, and meaningless. No wonder our kids parrot all kinds of silly nonsense that emanate from movies and popular music; they are constantly bathing their brains in it.

And people like me thought the fight for America’s soul was a political one in Washington, DC!

Nope.

I learned on that day-long raft trip through spectacular natural beauty that the fight for a solid America is still at home, where we thought we had some influence, and we still might, and on college campus, where our parenting has been outsourced to welcoming Marxist professors eager to turn our kids inside out.

Yes, on this trip I had been paddling along with my kids and their friends, enjoying their happy company, but really I had been secretly and unknowingly paddling with Hollywood that whole way, and did not realize it until the very end, when I could say nothing.

The sea captain and his crew taking a break in a wondrous, magical waterfall in the middle of nowhere, on the run from Hollywood and pop culture

Thor & Moore: Media-Entertainment Complex On Defense

What does the new Hollywood “Thor: Ragnarok” movie have to do with the NFL and Judge Roy Moore’s US Senate campaign?

A lot.

Besides both being part of the Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry complex, both Hollywood movies and the NFL have been on the decline. A freefall might better capture these downward slopes.

Hollywood managed to combine insipid and pedantic movies appealing to very few people for a long time, and watched its profits end by simple market forces of supply and demand.

But Hollywood also has a preponderance of sanctimonious fools, professional actors and producers living life so far removed from the great deplorable unwashed that they openly mock the very people who spend their money on Hollywood products, and then wonder why their “art” goes unappreciated. And unprofitable.

Ditto for the NFL, where guys who get paid millions of dollars for simply running up and down a field decided they knew better than their fans what their fans wanted. And so they, too, became sanctimonious fools, hectoring people in the bleachers about phony political issues. Only to wonder why the stands are now so empty.

Enter politics! Whoda thunkit, but yes, politics is now heavily laced throughout everything in America, whether you want it, or not.

The same newspaper that endorsed a far-left candidate in Alabama for the US Senate three weeks ago suddenly publishes fake sex accusations against that candidate’s opponent. The accusations are so wild and out of character that voters would just have to believe them. I mean, that bad, that crazy, they gotta be true, right?

And that is how the Washington Post tries to shoehorn in a blue candidate into a red state. Just make stuff up. Like they did with our current president, when they couldn’t defeat him with facts, too. Lots of fake news. Fake news defines the Washington Post, and for good reason.

The Washington Post is simply one communication arm of one political party. It is not a news organization in the sense that it reports actual, factual news. Rather, the Washington Post creates news, suppresses news, edits news, and interprets news to support a political narrative conducive to its political favorites winning and its political opponents losing.

So it should come as no surprise that this same newspaper is trying to discredit destroy Judge Roy Moore, the conservative candidate in Alabama who sure looks like he is going to win that US Senate race. A charismatic, principled guy like Judge Roy Moore in the US Senate is a huge threat to the two-party career political hack dominance of the DC swamp, of which the Washington Post is the written record of record.

And in the same Washington Post this week there are scads of sugary sweet write-ups and promotional “reviews” of the new “Thor: Ragnarok” movie.

This is a movie carefully designed to have enough violence, unvarnished manliness, and traditional iconic weapons that red-blooded Americans just might be enticed back into an evening with Hollywood, even if just for a couple hours. In a way this movie is a last gasp from an industry that is fast taking on water and looking like it is about to go under from the one-two punch of having bad products and bad people.

The Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry complex that has for so long softly, gently held America by its throat is now struggling to maintain its grip. America has slowly awakened, sat up, and recognized what has been done to her while she slept. NFL players slapping Americans across the face, Hollywood actors spitting in America’s face, newspapers and media personalities laughing in America’s face…at some point America was going to wake up from it all.

If “Thor: Ragnarok” is as much of a financial disaster as it deserves to be, and if Judge Roy Moore wins his special election the way he deserves to, the evil Media-Academia-Entertainment Industry empire will have taken two hard blows. Not fatal, but enough to stagger an opponent backwards.

So this weekend I WILL be mailing a donation to Judge Roy Moore’s campaign, and I will NOT be watching the silly Thor movie.

Take that, swamp critters.