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.