Posted on 07/30/2014 6:49:04 AM PDT by Chainmail
I understand the passion but would like conservatives to become more interested and engaged in the arts - abandoning the arts to the Left has been a huge mistake for this country. There are people on Free Republic who understand absolutely nothing about the art of acting (much less music, ballet or opera) and yet continually spout off about who is a good actor and who is not. It would be like me going onto one of our brilliant threads about gun control, hunting and the military and giving a completely ignorant opinion because - hey! - I gotta opinion!
And again, it’s just a fact of life that great artists are rarely good people. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is, maybe, Leonardo Da Vinci who was quite a lovely man.
“...abandoning the arts to the Left has been a huge mistake for this country...”
That’s an Interesting perspective. I never thought of it that way; but now that you bring it up, I don’t see it as Conservatives “abandoning” so much as it is the natural progression of the left taking over the things that they absolutely set out to and stated they would.
Bottom line - They had a game plan. Our side didn’t and still doesn’t.
Where Conservatives are at fault, it’s in NOT believing the left when they say they’re going to do something. In the 1963 list of communist goals, they stated plainly that they were going to capture the media, films, cinema, academia, etc. The fact that that list was from 1963 means nothing - it was just an enumeration of the long-term goals that they’d had for a very long time in this country, and Leon Skousen just wrote them down and spelled it out.
It’s in the United States Congresisonal record - look up “Communist Goals: 1963” if you haven’t seen it already.
Evidently, those folks on our side charged with making sure that the takeover of these institutions didn’t happen weren’t paying attention or were negligent. By infiltrating and eventually changing the ideological direction of those institutions, they changed the culture, so here we are now - watching Jane Fonda get “honored”.
Imagine if John Wayne had done what this woman did, but in 1943, going over to help the Nazis. Charles Lindburgh, one of America’s heroes, expressed admiration for some of the Nazi’s policies, and was publicly pilloried for supporting the enemy.
As William Manchester said in “Goodbye, Darkness” - “That was THAT kind of time.”
And unfortunately, we are, right now, in THIS kind of time.
But things change. Culture, like Life, is a wheel. What goes round, comes round.
Limburgh accepted the Iron Cross from Hitler, as I remember. As his wife was standing by she remarked: “Ah, the albatross!” No fool she.
Since I’m in the arts, I pay attention to the right’s abandonment of the arts. Yes, it may have been inattention and negligence but it really happened. The interest in the arts starts very early in life. There are people all over Free Republic who think that giving their kids piano lessons, violin lessons or encouraging them to appear in the high school play are encouraging homosexuality in their kids. I am not making this up. This is a sad development - and ironically enough, because of this attitude, gay men have completely swamped theater and movies. They, in turn, bring their twisted sense of drama and humor to ordinary middle class Americans who don’t even comprehend what they are watching.
I always remember the lowest point for me here was when it was reported that “Kismet” - that old-fashioned American musical - was being put on in a high school and freepers thought it was a jihadi play because of a song mentioning Baghdad. As Captain Hook might say: oh, how that cancor ga-nawed!
National Review this month has this as their cover story. I wasn’t that crazy about it because the author was convinced that the right should abandon movies for right-wing novels. I mean, why can’t we have it all?
Yes, movies and concerts are too loud for me. Beside the noise, I just boycott the liberals in LA and other movie capitals by not spending my money to support them and the dims.
Well, see, this is what I mean about conservatives abandoning the arts...
I can’t remember who said this, but it was something to the effect that the less you know of the political persuasion of an artist, the better.
I actually like the work Jane Fonda and Ed Ames and Alan Alda and others did until I learned of their politics. Now it’s hard to watch anything they do.
Loved Paul Newman all those years until I heard of his, and now we learn of George Clooney and Harrison Ford.
Best not to know how they stand on things, because once you do it’s hard not to ignore it.
Look the good news is she may be dying.
They usual do these type of shows for people near death.
Let us hope.
I ignore all the political views of actors.
I love my idiot lib friends who refuse to watch The Duke or Walter Brennan or Tom Selleck because of their political views. Idiots all!
‘Cat Ballou’ Lee Marvin won an Oscar. He said the horse won it.
https://tomschrat.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/leemarvinincatballou_thumb.jpg
Movies are all make believe. Our daughter worked in holly weird for six months and decided there were too may libs there. She and her conservative roommate left and got real jobs. She has pictures of them with Jay Leno on his show.
We went through some of the sets one Thanksgiving. The entire Jaws series was filmed in an area just larger than our lot. The “ocean” was just about as large as our back yard. I don’t consider that art.
RE Lindburgh’s Iron Cross:
That I did NOT know...! Will do some research on that one!
“...Since I’m in the arts...”
Well, I’m a musician too, so I think that also qualifies as “arts”, haha! I’ve run into my share of liberal “artistes” over the years.
But as for abandoning... look at this way: for a couple decades, Hollywood was dominated by the likes of John Ford and other people - directors, actors, producers, down to the guy who runs the lights - who had gone away to war in WWII and come home seeing what socialism and fascism had done to the world. These folks served in uniform, and were Patriots. Their movies showed their attitudes towards America.
That changed in the 60s; the folks who fought WWII came home and had their kids; but while they were overseas, the left was putting professors into the universities and colleges, and these POSs were now teaching the kids. There was a profound shift in the ideology of young vs old.
Those kids grew up into the Oliver Stones, the Steven Speilbergs, etc., and THEIR movies show their attitudes towards America.
When you have a group of people who went through a cataclysmic event such as WWII come home and use their talents to support their country, Hollywood reflected it. The same is true - in reverse - for what we have now.
“...why can’t we have it all?...”
Because there are no more John Fords, William Wylers, George Stevens’s. I think John Milius is the only one left that you could consider a Conservative...
You have to change the culture back, and maybe, after ten+ years in Iraq and and Afghanistan, and many young servicemen - and women - coming home, after having seen the crapholes of the world, they’ll bring with them a new understanding and appreciation of what we have here, what they helped to protect, and be a force for positive change - back to a new, muscular sense of Americanism and all the good that we’ve done.
You’re just confirming what I already know - conservatives want absolutely nothing to do with the arts. It’s not about becoming some occultist Hollywood commie with roots in the Spanish Civil War (!) - it’s about writing, producing and creating genuinely good plays and movies. There are thousands of theaters all over this country willing to put on good plays with conservative (and crypto-conservative) themes. No one has to put a foot in Hollywood to create movies or plays. I write plays and produce them myself along with my husband. A friend of mine is an established playwright who often writes with religious themes - she gets produced all over the USA, damn her eyes! There is more to the performing arts than NYC and Hollywood - there are other worlds as Mr. Coriolanus once said.
I think there is a certain right-wing conservative who is now producing highly successful documentaries these days. I haven’t seen his movie yet but it’s been playing at my local theater for several weeks now. He actually does have some Hollywood money behind him although he’s not some communistic, Soviet Union loving, black-listed writer circa 1959. Let’s not be simplistic.
Well, the Hollywood leftwing was well-established in the 1930s. The brutal, internecine fights of the 1950s among members of the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild was a direct result of insults and betrayals by leaders of those unions in the 30s and their direct line to the Soviet Union - forcing talented writers to rewrite their scripts to flatter that murderous regime and denying work to actors who would not bend to Moscow’s will. Ronald Reagan rose to glory fighting those bastards.
Parodoxically, most people think the “naming of names” and resisting HUAC was only about politics when in fact a lot of it was just personal betrayals in the hot-house of Hollywood. Jilted lovers, ripped-off actors and scriptwriters and overall the disgraceful, bullying behavior of one John Howard Lawson led to this miserable debacle for America.
“...Ronald Reagan rose to glory fighting those bastards...”
My hero, Ronaldus Magnus.
I was fortunate to be able to vote for that great American man in my first Presidential election ever.
He is dearly missed.
Great book about him, if you haven’t read it. Reagan’s War, by Peter Schweizter.
http://www.amazon.com/Reagans-War-Forty-Year-Struggle-Communism/dp/0385722281
Worth your time. Excellent book detailing the Hollywood you just described.
Thank you so much for pointing out this book - I had no idea there was a book on this!
LOL, you’ll note that I did not say that conservatives should want nothing to do with the arts.
As you say, they should and could jump in to that industry.
The challenge is to avoid the people who would be seeking to undermine the conservativism when selecting actors, directors, financing, etc., so the end result can live up to the original goals.
The godless people will slyly try all sorts of ways to undermine the efforts, even if only a tiny bit at a time.
Conservatives should be not only participating but becoming leaders in these and many other fields that they typically avoid.
There is zero reason to have to be in Hwood or NYC with today’s technology. Many towns and cities would love to have a new job-producing industry. In the end, money talks.
Conservatives need to get motivated and work together.
Anytime! Always glad to share knowledge.
I learned SO much about Reagan and what he went through - what the COUNTRY was going through - from that single book.
Schweizer did an excellent job with it.
Reagan was orginally a Democrat who saw how that party was being infiltrated and hijacked by communist/socialist elements, and set about fighting them at all levels.
That’s it, exactly. I would not be too purist in this, though. You will never, ever get a group of theater professionals together and have them all agree on politics or religion. The important thing is to make sure you have the script you want to produce and a good director. If you pay your actors (even if it’s only bus fare), they will adhere to your vision. That’s just an actor’s job.
I also believe that until conservative parents allow their kids to audition for the school musical, none of this is going to happen. And if you don’t like the musical? You hit the school board with everything you’ve got. Most American actors all got their bug for theater from starring in the school musical. Also, community theater. My husband and I came from the same NJ community theater group that produced Nathan Lane - he was then known as Joe Lane.
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