Posted on 01/16/2002 6:35:14 AM PST by Antoninus
Correct!
Thanks
Thank you for the ping and thread.
Skousen confuses some things. There were a lot of actors and screenwriters with Communist leanings in the 1930s. There has also been a long-standing hostility in Hollywood to religion and traditional social values. But this doesn't mean that Hollywood is Communist. They just make too much money for that. True, they don't like religion or small-town America. They don't hesitate to villify right-wingers. They give to the Democrats and gush over Clinton-types. But any socialism in Hollywood is more dilettantish than anything else. Like the Democratic Party, Hollywood knows what side its bread is buttered on. There are plenty of reasons to hate Hollywood, but Skousen was as much wrong as right, if not more so.
Militant generations tend to see everything in terms of war, revolution, liberation, struggle. That's why the "culture war" became such a powerful image. People were still fighting about the 1960s. A lot of those fights continue, but subsequent generations don't approach them with the same passion. What's come out since 9/11, if not earlier, is that we are more one country than we thought we were. It's the nature of activists to see everything in terms of a struggle always in progress and never stopping, but most people recognize that the country is less divided than it sometimes seems -- if for no other reason, then because real war has overshadowed our political and cultural conflicts. Political disagreements persist, as one would expect them too, but confronted with the Taliban and al Quaida we find that patriotism and law and order or modernity and cultural freedom aren't so alien to our own make-up or that of our opponents.
The development of new media and promotion of new artists is all to the good, as is the desire to bring conservative voices to art and media, but the culture war doesn't reflect what's going on now. Look at history. The "culture war" was very divisive in the 1920s, as conflicts over prohibition, evolution, immigration, modern art, theology and sex showed. For the next 30 or 40 years that culture war was dormant as depression, war, and cold war took center stage. We may be seeing a similar development now.
They communists knew that the cultural decay would set the stage such that a majority of folks would one day consider communism.
The second thing we need to do is to stop funding the left with our tax dollars.
I'm Gen X, about the least militant generation you can have. I certainly didn't have any passion about the issues of the '60s (which by the way, we were almost forced to care about). But after I became a conservative, suddenly I was utterly indignant at being lied to all these years, and being sold a bill of goods by the folks in the liberal elite. I actually think that the energy lies with the conservative movement right now.
I'm not a pessimist--and I certainly appreciate the cohesion we've showed after 9-11. But the "constant state of struggle" is not an idea confined to activists and insurgents--I think an honest reading of history shows it really is a never-ending battle.
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