[Commie Basher]

What bothers me is that I'm 40, and I've been hearing these complaints for 25 years.

25 years ago, most of my fellow conservatives were "activists" and YAFers who ignored the arts.

25 years ago I was telling them to join and participate in the arts.

And 25 years later, it seems nothing has changed. College age YAFers still whine about the arts, and giggle and smirk over their "victories" with their dittohead websites and phone calls to talk radio. Maybe they'll start a campus paper. But it's just spouting opinions, not really creating.

Meanwhile, young liberals act, write, start a band, make films, et al. They engage and entertain apolitical, moderate Americans, creating art that sells their culture between the lines. Liberal, but not so that you can clearly put your finger on it.

Mike Medved said he thinks the arts are dominated by the Left, partly because conservatives, when they graduate college, concentrate on careers and family, while Leftists are willing to make the sacrifice of doing without while they pursue the arts -- a field with little security, and in which one cannot raise a family.

Medved may be right.

[Regulator]

There have been movies like "Top Gun" which would have been laughed at in 1969; in the 1980's there were television shows like "Tour of Duty" that did not depict every soldier in Vietnam as a baby killer; and just a few short years ago, "Pride and Prejudice" was all the rage. We still have the video, and all the women I know love it. Tom Clancy's novels were bestsellers and the movies made from them made hundreds of millions. All of these productions had their day in the sun, so it's not that a few people aren't trying.

The problem is the critical savagery they face (P&P excluded). Mel Gibson made "The Patriot" and you would have thought that he made a homage to the SS from the BS that was printed about it(Buchanan talks about it in his book). I thought it was a great movie, and so did a lot of other people. But the attacks were ridiculous.

Remember that any script has to be accepted by reviewers and producers who are the worst of the worst. Try pushing a script with an implicit pro-family, anti-gay message. The reviewer will call his boyfriend and tell him how awful his day has been what with these nasty people trying to get him to produce these ugly things. So, maybe people are trying, they just can't get past the gatekeepers....unless you're Mel.