Posts Tagged → culture
MIssing Charlie, Missing America
Today is the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s murder in Utah, on a college campus supposedly devoted to learning, education, ideas, free speech, debate, and so on. Because you were a kind person with a big heart, I miss you, Charlie, and so do a lot of other people. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 Islamic jihadi attacks on America.
Since the day Charlie was shot by a political leftist incapable of free thought or debate or learning or free speech, America has been subjected to an increasing onslaught of anti-free thought, anti free speech, anti debate, anti ideas by the political Left, especially on college campuses.
Incapable of standing and debating, the political Left and its Islamic jihadi allies always use violence, coercion, suppression, and censorship. Claiming victim status until they have sufficient power to firmly control their political opposition, political Leftists, and their political and cultural allies, demand equal footing in every venue, in every institution. Then, when they have enough votes, they take away everyone else’s vote.
And now, at Ground Zero in Manhattan, where 25 years ago the Twin Towers were hit by two jet airplanes hijacked by Islamic jihadis, and where over 3,000 Americans subsequently lost their lives in horrible deaths, the political Left is once again demanding shared space. Yes indeed, there are demands for a mosque (!) at the Twin Towers site. Because the murderous Islamic hijackers deserve to be remembered as victims, too. As though the murderers are the same as their victims.
Charlie Kirk stood for reasonable debate, but he also stood up firmly for Western culture, Western ideals, Western values. We must carry on this legacy, most importantly through voting for strong pro America, pro freedom candidates.
Charlie’s vision for America (and Europe) challenged people especially on college campuses, because his message was incompatible with the Left’s destructive moral relativism that has taken hold everywhere.
The same moral relativism that demands the 9-11 Islamic hijackers be treated the same as their victims has also infected the minds of the Lindsay Clancy jurors, who are now openly saying in front of cameras in public interviews that Lindsay Clancy was the real victim, not her three little children that she strangled with her bare hands, in her home, in their bedrooms, surrounded by all their teddy bears, toys, and other symbols of safe, happy, hearth and home. These women jurors are talking about “compassion” for the murderer, to the point where they would have her be found not guilty of brutally murdering three innocent children.
In other words, a year after Charlie was shot in the neck by a Leftist, America is still suffering from the Left’s attack on basic human morality and essential civilizational values held the world over, except in materially successful capitalist countries, like America, where citizens have so much stuff that they can afford to invent their own problems. Like so-called “compassion” for brutal child murderers.
Charlie, we miss you, we need you now more than ever, and I know I speak for many when I say that your legacy of freedom, core Western values, and open debate as fundamental to our American culture is not forgotten. Today we remember your martyrdom, and tomorrow we remember the martyrdom of the 3,000 innocent Americans burned alive, crushed alive, thrown into a fifty story fall to pavement alive, by Islamic jihadi murderers.
Hopefully, the lesson we Americans take from all this remembering is that we do not allow yet more Leftists to take elected office and perpetuate, nay, increase, all of this mayhem.
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1932, 451, 1984, and now 722
Numbers are an important part of advanced human cultures. Numbers are how we calculate things. Numbers give substance to the things that advanced cultures measure and value, like raw materials or produced widgets or dollars in your bank account. While numbers are often thought of as mere “math” and thus relegated to the world of nerdy geekdom, in many ways, a particular fixed number can come to symbolize or represent certain ideas or cultural markers, too.
One fixed number that has become common parlance in some political discussions, on both the intellectual left and the violent left, is “88.” Apparently, the number eight followed by another number eight can mean, to some people, the eighth letter of the English alphabet, H, followed by another H. In an apparent crypto secret language, this is supposed to mean “Heil Hitler.”
The number 1932 is the year that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published. Huxley watched the rise of the racialist Nazi German state, coupled with the rise of modern science, and foresaw how such a diabolical mating could produce truly evil offspring. Like selecting which child with what genes to preserve alive, and which to kill off. To the point where the government (in the book) was allocating certain outcomes of intellectual and physical capacity to every human born under the government’s control. Most people (in the book) were designated as low intelligence physical workers, and had their embryo so tweaked while in utero, and a lucky few embryos were left alone to develop normally and live up to their full potential.
Brave New World is rightfully an important book because of its warning against too much government power, and against the use of science to artificially manipulate human outcomes from the embryo stage on through the end of life. For a book written almost a hundred years ago, it sure seems prescient! Human DNA, freaky and immoral experiments, coercive governments everywhere… our own 2026 does not seem too far removed from the bad world that Huxley foresaw in 1932.
The movie THX1138 is loosely based on Brave New World, as are many other futuristic, dystopian movies. Most of them have robots controlling human populations with extreme violence, many of them involve humans trying to escape their walled environment.
Another number that is used a lot in all kinds of political discussions is 1984, which is the title of a book by George Orwell. Published in 1949, after the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe and the mask came off of the homicidal Russian socialists, the book 1984 refers to the then-far-off year of 1984, in which Orwell foresees the possibility of a “dystopian” state, where totalitarian government has its boot forever on the human face.
Dystopian is the opposite of utopian. Utopia being the promised land euphoric state of socialist bliss and abundance and easy living harmony absolutely danggummit guaranteed by all socialist dictators and genocidal mass murderers, like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, a few others. And it was the 1945 fall of Adolf Hitler’s racialist socialist thousand year utopia, coupled with the 1947 un-masked USSR socialist project’s oppressive dictatorship, that led Orwell to pen his warning to all who might follow in those same footsteps in the future.
So, the number 1984 has come to mean dystopian, totalitarian government, cruelty, mass surveillance, no individual rights. In a nutshell, socialism.
Another iconic number is 451, the number in the title of Ray Bradbury’s book about the temperature at which paper (books) burn. In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury foresees a society where books are burned by the government, to prevent humans from accessing true knowledge. This is done to keep humans ignorant of truth and fact, to deprive them of access to knowledge, to make them dependent upon the government for all information. And in Bradbury’s book, if you have books, you had better hide them. Because the police will come and put you in jail, and burn all of your books.
Bradbury got a good dose of his fears from the famous Nazi book burnings in the 1930s and 1940s. Those were themselves based on the massive book burnings held by the Church in the 1300s through the 1700s across Europe. Because information control is everything…and ideas about individual freedom and individual rights can never be tolerated by a totalitarian government.
Given the past bout of official censorship that our planet did not enjoy over the 2020-2022 covid19 plandemic, it is impossible to argue with Bradbury’s fears. But that was merely about digital access and digital information. Literally today, we have Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, digitizing rare books, and then shredding them and destroying them.
Now why would someone desire to make digital copies of books, but then destroy the actual physical book? Is it because they want to be the sole arbiter and source of what those original books actually said? What if the digital versions are edited or deleted or monkeyed with? Unless you have the actual physical book copy in your hands, you would have to rely on the digital version being presented to you.
Finally, I would like to introduce a new number to our list of politco-cultural numbers discussion: 722.
The number 722 is the important page number in my edition of the 1965 book Dune, that majestic and iconic sci-fi thriller that has spawned a bunch of movies (the 1984 version of Dune is the best, ironically, if we are talking about symbolic numbers).
On page 722 of my edition of Dune, readers are exposed to a purportedly dangerous and radical idea, at least in the current parlance of our brave new world of socialist academia and its attached totalitarian political functionaries: The human gender binary.
“Paul said: There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…..These things are so ancient within us, Paul said, that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies. We’re shaped by such forces. You can say to yourself Yes, I see how such a thing may be. But when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”
It is interesting to see that the number twelve be shaped so strongly by the Taker today, when the other eleven were all Givers. For today the jury in the Lindsey Clancy trial was unable to come to a unanimous verdict. Lindsey Clancy admits to having strangled her three children to death. The jury was simply charged with finding her guilty of murder, or not. Accounts of those present in the court room say that the eleven women on the jury were openly in support of a Not Guilty verdict, and that the one man on the jury seemed to be the lone voice wanting her to be held accountable for murdering her children, with her hands, in their home.
You know, all these futuristic dystopian books that predicted an upside down world, where government has absolute control through censorship and violence against the population, and where basic truths are no longer accepted by those in power, these predictions or warnings all seem to have come to fruition in the Lindsey Clancy trial outcome today.
For almost a whole generation, school teachers and academics, and now elected officials, tell us the un-truth that humans are not binary. They say that there is no woman or man, that the gender lines are blurred and false, and that we each have our “own truth” that may deviate from the measurable and demonstrable truth that we can see, calculate, scientifically map.
We Americans are at profound risk right now. We have a culture where a woman can strangle her own small children, and not only be surrounded by adoring groupies dressed in pink, but where a jury of women, of motherhood and Givers, cannot find this murderous witch Guilty of the crime of murder. Of innocent, vulnerable little children, by their mommy.
This cultural shift away from basic justice might be a result of all the abortion-on-demand-up-until-age-ten stuff that has been pushed, or all the “my truth says I should murder you because I don’t like your politics” stuff that has been pushed. The whole “By any means necessary” socialist chanting stuff. The idea that wrong is right, and murder is justified if you feel OK with it that one time, because her gender is, at that moment, your biggest identity marker.
Moral relativism run amok. The natural outcome of moral relativism.
The number 722 and all that it stands for is going to be attacked, demonized, and Dune will become relegated to the heap of books to be burned, for stating the obvious, the scientifically proven, the basic binary of life on our planet. Get yourself a copy of Dune and hide it away in your attic, for future generations of prospective readers, along with copies of 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451. To know the truth, and how to arrive at right and not wrong decisions.
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Young Washington movie is 9/10
Last night I was encouraged to go see a movie, which happens quite infrequently lo, these many past years. Because, for many years now, Hollywood has dropped the ball, and has produced only dreck. Like most Americans, I do not pay to see dreck. Hollywood box office bomb after bomb after bomb keeps driving home the point that Americans do not want dreck and will not pay for it. Rather, most Americans see movies to be entertained, informed, inspired. Not to be preached at, especially about counter-culture values emanating from failed frootloop academics living in worlds of stupid theory and perpetual Marxist revolution.
I fall into the camp of Americans that will go see a movie if it informs, inspires, and entertains me. So, last night I went to see Young Washington, a movie about America’s greatest Founding Father, George Washington. This movie informed me, inspired me, and entertained me, and I can therefore recommend it to you, too.
But don’t just take my word for it, Men’s Journal confirmed that this movie inspires its audience because it is factual, and the facts surrounding George Washington are inspiring.
Mind you, Men’s Journal is just one of many formerly useful and interesting institutions/ magazines/ information outlets subsequently captured by the far Left and re-purposed to spew anti-America agitation propaganda, far-Left counter-culture propaganda, etc etc. So the fact that this leftwing outlet asked the question if the Young Washington movie is accurate, is not surprising; Men’s Journal will always seek to criticize any popular movie or book that is patriotic or espousing traditional American values. What is surprising is that the magazine published an article confirming that the movie’s main claims are accurate.
Mind you, Men’s Journal did not list the things that are good or inspiring or entertaining about Young Washington, it just confirmed that it is accurate, and left it at that. They did not encourage you to go and see it. They just did a fact check. As if Men’s Journal does this routinely on any other movies.
What is good and inspiring about Young Washington is that it tells us how young George Washington worked hard, took risks, made sacrifices, and heart-felt earnestly prayed to God a lot. What is inspiring about that is that all of this hard work, risk taking, sacrificing, and prayer paid off. It created a man whom his arch enemy, King George III of England, called “The greatest man in world history.”
The movie perfectly and incredibly accurately depicts the American Indians, caught between French and British forces from north and south, and also being pushed ever westward by impoverished European colonists and their feudal aristocratic overlords. The movie also accurately represents the inevitable tension resulting from the American frontier’s merit-based opportunity system clashing with European feudal entitlement, which ultimately gave way to 1775’s violent rupture between serfs-no-longer American colonists and their overbearing, self-entitled, yet unimpressive European overlords.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” is the logical outcome of the American frontier, on which young George Washington was raised, and tested, then confronting and contesting a feudal Europe. And the free and prosperous America we now live in is the logical outcome of the merit-based frontier having prevailed in that contest.
Seeing a movie capture all of this “first principles” stuff is eminently entertaining, and your money is well spent, because face it, this happens only once every five or twn years these days.
I give Young Washington a 9 out of 10, and not a 10/10, for a couple reasons. First, some of the scenes are kind of hackneyed rote stuff that has been used too many times in most of the Mel Gibson movies (e.g. The Patriot) and similar genre movies. Long, artificially drawn out overly dramatic moments that do not cause tears to fall, but rather tears at the belief and tolerance system. No one takes this long to die in real life. No one acts like this in real life. Ever. Second, I spotted at least two and possibly many more percussion rifles in use by British and Colonial militia troops, as well as by American frontiersmen. Big time no-no for a film based in 1755, when flintlocks alone reigned on the battlefields of Europe and America. Percussion systems first emerged around 1810, and did not become military issue until the 1840s. Lastly, about half of the scenes are filmed in places and on landscapes that just do not physically exist anywhere in Pennsylvania, especially in Western Pennsylvania. That strains credulity, even if I logically accept the plain fact that finding any undistrubed landscapes anywhere to film on is getting difficult.
Many many years ago, as a paid non-profit land conservation professional, I helped the National Park Service conserve the Fort Necessity Battlefield and also Braddock’s Trace, out in Western Pennsylvania. These important places are depicted in the movie. That same NPS park manager and I then went on to work together on conserving the Flight 93 crash site and its surrounding landscape, after 9-11. So, I have some personal knowledge and appreciation for the rugged Western PA topography, and for the specific place where young George Washington put himself to the test, and succeeded.
It was the rugged and demanding wild landscape that created the original Israelites, who gave us The Law, and then it was the rugged, demanding, and wild landscape here in North America that gave the world America, a nation based on The Law and a light unto the nations, really the only light unto the nations on this entire planet. Thanks to George Washington. And this is why conserving rural landscapes is still so important: They are our unique American culture of freedom.
This movie meant a lot to me, more than I would have expected. Maybe you will have the same positive reaction. A lot of us Americans have an awful lot of unrequited expectations built up over the past ten or fifteen years of crappy Hollywood movie output. A lot of un-met need. And this movie, Young Washington, meets those needs.
Poster for Young Washington movie
Memorial Day, does it fit in America any more?
Does Memorial Day fit into American culture any more?
I ask because our national culture is changing so fast, and diverging so hard from the values and principles that founded America. We have foreign-born elected and appointed officials who openly despise America (Khanna, Prayapal, Ilhan Omar, plenty of others, tons of judges including Juan Merchan), and who call our military personnel sacrifices “war crimes” against the foreign countries who still hold their loyalty.
The idea that Americans would mourn the death of our military heroes, whose deaths ensured our own freedom here at home, is not just foreign to a lot of people living in America, it is anathema. Even our own native born youth are being told that the American military is immoral and bad and terrible etc, and because our young people live extravagantly comfortable lives, they don’t question such an outrageous claim.
Our American teachers and college educators are largely tools of our worst enemies – China, Iran, Cuba – and they fill our young people’s heads with exactly the kind of rotten crap a nation’s enemies would say. Globalist moral relativity does not help either, because it is easier to say “America is no different than Iran’s violent theocracy” (or is worse) than it is to actually weigh out and think out and talk out the enormous differences.
Thus does America have pampered middle income White kids giddily marching down our streets alongside White-hating genocidal maniacs waving the PLO Hitler flag, and wearing the ultimate anti-Western jihadi fashion statement, the keffiyeh. Our own pampered middle income White kids wouldn’t know a heroic battlefield military sacrifice from an hour without internet service, so why should they mark this Memorial Day as something significant?
Not only is our broader culture changing, but our young men are changing for the worse, too. As a small business guy who works in the woods, I see it a lot. For every hard working rural young guy, there are now five lazy rural young guys. This is an inversion of the old rural-urban culture break, which now shows that for every five lazy rural guys, there are five hundred lazy urban guys. American culture is suffering, yes, but most of the military-age young men who should be riding to our national culture rescue via military service, training, discipline, and sacrifice are now themselves in need of rescuing.
Nobody embodies the lazy bitchy whiner limp wristed weak-ass little wuss American boy better than Nick Fuentes. His entire life is devoted to breaking cultural taboos by saying naughty and mean spirited things about people. And Fuentes is dragging down a lot of American young men with him.
A serious public ass kicking would benefit both Fuentes and his young followers, and therefore American culture, but somewhere an overly anxious urban helicopter mom is reading this and figuring out how to get at me and any other hard ass dad figure, if only to “protect” her son from the hard comeuppance every boy needs to experience either at home from a loving Dad, at school from fistfighting other boys, or in the military from a tough drill sargeant.
Speaking of messed up young men culture, Jeremy Boreing provides a compelling monologue here.
Remember, young men, you must be able to ride hard and shoot straight. Frontier grit and military sacrifice are what gave you this incredible nation you now enjoy. Do not squander it or allow others to ruin it for you. For America to succeed as the citizen-run republic it was founded as, all of its citizens must be politically and culturally engaged. Hiding behind a video screen or serving only one’s own personal enjoyments is not only not contributing to our national success, it is ceding hard-won battleground to our enemies.
To your enemies.
So saddle up, young men, and dust off your hidden manliness. Show us what you are made of, that old fashioned American frontier true grit and self sacrifice. Show appreciation for those who gave you what you now have here in America.
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America’s 250th Anniversary approaches… how many people care?
America’s 250th anniversary arrives this July 4th Independence Day. A huge milestone, an enormous achievement, a remarkable record, two hundred and fifty years protecting indivdiual rights as a constitutional republic.
I am excited about this event. But is anyone else?
When I drive around, anywhere, do I see extra American flags, extra examples of patriotism or excitement? Nope. Nothing.
The silence is deafening.
It seems that very few Americans are excited enough about our nation’s 250th anniversary to do much about it, to show their extra enthusiasm, or appreciation. Don’t you think this is odd? I do.
It may be that Americans do not know how to celebrate the 25oth. I mean, will we set off more fireworks than ususal? Wave more flags and banners and patriotic bunting than ususal? Hang flags from our vehicles? Drink more, war whoop more, or shoot tracers into the night sky more than usual?
One thing for sure, most Americans seem to take America for granted, as if we are too big to fail. So, they think, why celebrate something that we take for granted, that we already believe is due and kind of boring and unremarkable…
This is how cultures and nations end.
When a nation’s citizens cease being excited about their nation, and about its longevity in a world hostile to individual freedom and liberty, they cease valuing that nation. And when they cease valuing it, they cease protecting it, safeguarding it. They give it away, like give its citizenship and taxpapyer money to illegal border jumpers; they throw it away, engage in all kinds of self-destructive virtue signaling, like calling America bad names and unfairly criticizing her for ridiculous things.
America is not too big to fail, folks. And while there are a lot of folks trying to make America fail, like Barack Hussein Obama, we do not see a commensurate backlash against them.
Mad Magazine’s longtime cover was Alfred E. Newman, saying “What me worry.” Because he was an idiot. Because only idiots do not worry about the future, and stability, and the strength of national currency, etc. Has America become populated by a bunch of Alfred E. Newmans?
The lack of American flags and patriotic fervor about our 250th sure seem to indicate it.
Is this the American citizen on the eve of America’s 250th birthday? Really?!
What NFL football game? Halftime halfwit what?
I keep hearing about this NFL something-or-other, and seeing headlines about this football halftime thingybob today. No idea what these people are talking about, what these events are.
See, in 2015 the National Football League began going “woke” and invoking national politics while trying to pose as athletes peforming circus tricks for audiences seeking a time-out from life. Being politically Leftwing while trying to entertain the masses are two mutually exclusive endeavors. Never the twain shall meet. And both shall fail.
It was intriguing that in 2016 the NFL players began kneeling during the National Anthem, as a sign of disrespect to America. The same America that made these halfwit imbeciles multi-millionaires was suddenly no good, they said, and apparently by demonstrating that they rejected America, the NFL players showed how virtuous they were.
None of it made any sense, until we realized that it all had to do with rejecting Donald trump’s Make America Great Again political message and movement, and the capitalist American culture that created the NFL among many other things.
So, since 2016, I have ceased watching football. I refuse to support something and somebody that does not support me. I refuse to embrace and celebrate people who reject and denigrate everything I hold dear and value the highest (America, our flag, our anthem, our 250 year old identity as a constitutional republic etc etc).
So, no NFL game for me today, and no halfwit time-out “entertainment” freak show by a South American man in a woman’s dress who sings about how much he hates America, followed by a Canadian band called Green Gay or Green Bay or something, who also sing about how much they hate America.
None of this makes sense to me, none of it is entertaining to me, but all of it does make me recognize, yet again, just how acidly destructive the political Left is. Because the Left makes every effort to take over every institution it can get ahold of, and then bend that institution to its ideological purpose of promoting Marxist revolution and destroying freedom and capitalism, it will destroy the very things that the people hold dearest. Like football.
At one time football was “America’s sport,” and from PeeWee Football on up to the NFL, young men from every corner of our great nation aspired to qualify to aggressively compete in front of the nation. It was fun, it was an honor, and the NFL was a good income. Now? To quote Rush Limbaugh, watching the NFL games is like watching the Crips versus the Bloods, a gang fight. Very little class, all violent, all selfish and arrogant behavior, and now in 2026, with a huge helping of We Hate America FU poured on top of it.
No thanks, NFL. You can stick your crappy event and your crappy business up your you-kn0w-what. You lost me. I will be spending my evening reading by the fire, maybe smoking some cherry cavendish in my pipe, maybe a glass of whisky at my elbow. Things here at my home will be peaceful, happy, and all-American, not that you NFL people have any idea what I am talking about.
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Trump-Kennedy Center Vacancies Create Opportunity
Nature abhors a vacuum, goes the tried and true adage. This adage is true because wherever an opening occurs in the natural state of things, like a fallow farm field, or a wildfire’s burned out charred hole in the middle of a woods, some plant or animal will find a way to adapt to that unique opening and move into it, make it home. The newly open space creates a home for those who will move into it the fastest, while many cannot or will not leave the comforts of their present niches.
This dynamic fact of life on this planet is the quintessence of competition and adaptation, two primary forces of nature and, as the main tools of God, the main way that living things evolve and develop here.
And so must this same rule apply to the Trump-Kennedy Center in Washington DC, a place I have sat in many times before. Last time was some years ago, to see “War Horse.” Which was quite good as theater goes, which is a big critical compliment from me. See, my theory on theater is that if a play is any good, it will end up as a box office smash movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, etc. et. al.
Every other kind of play will inevitably cause me to slump in my uncomfortable folding chair, and sleep contentedly among the anonymity of a large audience. And also often earning hard nudges from left and right, because apparently I snore when sleeping in public. Most plays are hardly worth the effort of keeping my eyes open.
Which is to say, I am a professional art and theater critic, because I am very experienced, tough to impress, and quite discerning. And I have the acid tongue to match. And thus, my opinion on the ever longer list of “artist” cancellations at the Trump-Kennedy Center is that we now have a gigantic and rare opportunity. In other words, all of the prissy leftist brats who have recently canceled their appearances at the Trump Kennedy Center have left a hole into which other talent can and should move. And it should be new talent, different talent.
Conservative talent.
Patriotic talent. Non-Woke talent. America First talent. Traditional values kind of talent. Stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and cry at the National Anthem kind of talent.
America has a new and ever larger opportunity at the Trump Kennedy Center to showcase pro-America/ pro democracy/ pro elections/ pro open minds/ pro thinking entertainers, artists, circuses, acrobats and tumblers, drunks, comics, poets, and writers. Hell, throw in some Capitol Hill staff skits, and the place should be rockin’.
Point being, the absence of the traditional self-anointed far Left entertainment industry (complex) people has created a vacuum into which a new tradition should step and grow. I am thinking Lynyrd Skynyrd or Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs a la 2026, whoever that may be. Kid Rock would be a good team leader here, maybe the new facility director or artistic creator or whatever silly high falutin’ name the industry typically uses. Except that whatever it is, we need to mock it into oblivion, like put Kid Rock in a top hat and tails and have him put on dramatically fake airs of superiority and faux seriousness.
America needs new curators of popular culture, which has traditionally been established by our artists, actors, and writers, who like a herd of lemmings in the past fifty years have unsustainably embraced economic and cultural anti-America Marxism. And now we have an opportunity to evolve and build an entire new pro-America genre, housed at the Trump Kennedy Center.
Some nameless, talent-less Washington DC based opera company was among those who ridiculously quit the place in a huff because of the partial name change. Turns out this lame group was only a group because they were based at the Trump Kennedy Center. As in housed there, subsidized there, lionized there, cradled there, simply for being there. May I suggest their replacement? A new group?
We, the new group I am promoting, are named The Kings of Toxic Masculinity, and we may not always sound in tune, or get our lines right all the time, but by God, we will be entertaining as hell for any red blooded American who wants to laugh, cry, celebrate America, and not fall asleep in the usual uncomfortable chair.
Hope to see you there, fellow American!
UPDATE: Days after this essay, President Trump announced the closure of the Trump Kennedy Center to fix the place after decades of deferred maintenance. Smart decision, because there were whole corridors there that smell like mildew, which means physical rot had set in to the building. What a symbol! Nice to know it will be overhauled and fixed up in two years.
Two Hollywood legends I will actually miss
Normally I am not a fan of Hollywood in any sense. In recent times, including just days ago, America lost two Hollywood legends, two actors who personified Hollywood at its best and maybe its worst, but also at its most colorful. I will miss them both, for very different reasons.
First up is Rob Reiner, apparently murdered two days ago by his own son. Both Rob and his wife Michelle were found deceased in their home by their daughter. Their throats had been slashed. Their son Nick has been arrested and charged with their murders. Apparently Nick has had a long history of drug abuse and all of the resulting relationship challenges that come with it. We now see the gruesome result, and can easily imagine the victims disbelievingly pleading with their own son not to harm them…
…their murders are a tragedy on its face, as well as a statement about the unworkable culture that is “inside Hollywood.” A mix of libertine excess and constant parental indulgence and allowance followed by inexorable failure. What a symbol of the whole place.
Rob Reiner really began his Hollywood career as “Meathead,” the abrasively sanctimonious know-it-all liberal son-in-law of appropriately named American workingman archetype, Archie Bunker, in All In The Family TV sitcom.
Relying on a well-scripted, well-played political and cultural tension between old guard Archie Bunker and Hippie “Meathead,” Rob Reiner gave effective voice to his generation’s anti-war, anti-tradition, anti-religion, anti-America liberalism.
The show captured the “generation gap” of my 1960s-1970s childhood, where older Americans held the traditional values that built a fully functioning nation, and the younger Americans were utopian meatheads with unrealistic, unsustainable expectations guaranteed to derail the nation.
Confusingly, Rob Reiner never grew up or let go of his Meathead persona, nor his destructive goofball political views. I suppose to his credit, in a way, neither have nearly all of his contemporary eldering-in-place fellow ever-child meathead Hippies. I will miss his entertaining online rants against Trump, MAGA, conservatives, Republicans, regular working Americans, essentially against everything outside of the tiny bizarro world Hollywood bubble that Rob Reiner inhabited.
Rob Reiner created the living liberal strawman that conservatives easily use to prove their points. In essence, Meathead grew up proving that Archie Bunker was right, decade after decade. And so, as much as he was strange, he also contributed well to the American political discourse. Rest in peace, Mr. Reiner. I am genuinely sorry you left us in this horrible way.
The other Hollywood person who recently left us is actor, producer, film maker Robert Redford. Easily the best looking man in American history, and also the one Hollywood actor least addicted to plastic surgery as he aged, Redford inhabited a very different cultural place than Reiner.
Famous for playing a variety of all-American hero and anti-hero roles, from gritty to suave, from cowboy to playboy, Robert Redford was a fixture in Hollywood for a really long time. He also fueled the Sundance Film Festival, an alternative to Hollywood, where low-budget art films and documentaries could gain audience and funding outside of Hollywood’s metrics and politics.
One of my favorite Redford movies is Spy Game, with Brad Pitt. Redford plays the role of a CIA spook and patriot, who in a former job as Cold War spy went so far as to unilaterally murder/ execute a known American traitor in Europe. This role alone sends a loud message about Redford’s politics: He was no leftist, no Hollywood commie, but rather he was a true American patriot in every conservative sense of the phrase.
But Redford also promoted environmental quality, and public lands, two things that are close to my own heart and not always present in the conservative movement. Not that Redford followed the leftist doctrine of heavy regulation and anti capitalism, but rather, he simply said that these things are important. And of course, they are important. And there are other ways of achieving environmental quality and public lands conservation without following leftist doctrine. Such a moderate stance is unheard of among Hollywooders.
Redford played very well a famous, iconic role that still speaks to men of my generation, that of historic mountain man Jeremiah Johnson. Filmed right before the 1976 American Bicentennial, Jeremiah Johnson captured the spirit of the American frontier, Westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, rugged individualism, self reliance, urban vs rural, and the European-American conflicts with the western Indian tribes (Crow, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Lakota and others) in the Rockies.
Many of these themes and character traits are still central to the American identity that us older Americans have. Including Archie Bunker.
Jeremiah Johnson promoted the now-underappreciated but still central role of undeveloped American open lands in forging the tough American frontier spirit and Yankee ingenuity that built our nation. That conservatives miss or ignore this link, or misunderstand it, is just as much a crime as leftist attempts to essentially shrinkwrap public lands and make them off-limits to humans.
Robert Redford represents an image and political philosophy almost at the other end of Rob Reiner’s place on the political bell curve. Both men played important parts in shaping American culture, and I appreciate them both. However, Robert Redford will forever be an aspirational icon, whereas Rob Reiner represents a dead end on the political evolutionary tree.
Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, iconic American frontiersman
Best tattoo, ever
I am not a tattoo person. No one in my family had or has tattoos, including me, same for my wife. The rural people I grew up with occasionally had tattoos, all associated with their military service. When this current tattoo craze took off, what, fifteen years ago, I admit to being surprised. Some of the choices I have seen are… curious. When I ask the wearer why this particular tattoo, I usually get back an indifferent shrug and something like “I was feeling especially whimsical that moment.”
My various sports coaches all taught me one important lesson: Your body is your temple, and you must respect it. I am not judging anyone, but please think a little harder or look at some pictures of pretty flowers, before deciding to forever alter the body God gave you at birth with some of these tattoos. Yes, the Maori warriors have some gorgeous tattoos representative of their culture as head hunters and cannibals. But your culture is mid-America white girl and white boy, not savage warrior, nor tough about anything, really.
Because I work with a lot of rural loggers and machine operators, who are the epitome of tough as hell and who in my book earn the right to even culturally appropriative self expression, I do get a pretty dandy gander at tats running from hand to neck, and, I am told, in other more “remote” body locations. I admire the ones that had a lot of thought, deep symbolic meaning, planning, and careful execution put into them.
Starting decades ago in the military services, which until Marxist in Chief Obama and China’s Man in DC Joe Biden was largely populated by rural Americans, tattoos are no longer just a military or rural fad, as the entire country became enamored of the self expression and inevitable interesting interpretations of sagging aged flesh sure to come with time. Even demure, serious soccer moms have Playboy Bunny on their ankles. I have even seen effete feminine urbanite Marxist hipsters with their own tattoos (I wish I was rich enough to be a socialist like them), as well as the myriad blue and pink haired far left, Antifa, even conservative patriot bikers, too.
Well, today I got to see the best tattoo ever, in the history of tattoos. It wins all the awards for creativity, simplicity, symbolism, etc. The owner is covered feet to neck in tats, and when I asked her if she had any regretted old boyfriend names lurking anywhere among the visual mayhem, she said “just the initials of my ex husband, now artfully incorporated into and erased by a tattoo of the toxic waste symbol”. She then showed me. It is small, easily lost among the rest of the colorful inks, and not particularly artistic or flowing or eye catching, but I swear, it is the best tattoo ever.
