NEW DISPATCH FROM THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE. Here to explain the latest innovations in conservative culture war strategy, Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds:

Well, the notion that right-leaning pop culture is driven by politics but left-leaning pop culture is not is transparent twaddle. Leftist political messages have simply become so established in pop culture that people treat them as part of the wallpaper–which is, of course, the Gramscian strategy.

This is an obvious winner. Reynolds should engage flying squads to barge into theaters where people are laughing and enjoying themselves, and cry, "You are the victims of a Gramscian hoax!"



But culture warriors cannot always be on defense -- they must provide something the proles can enjoy. What have you got for us, Perfesser?

One place where conservatives–and particularly libertarians–do pop culture well is in the science fiction field.

Sure, why not. But it's got to be the right kind of SciFi, not the negative stuff  -- say no to SFINO!

Of course, academic-writing-seminar types have been proliferating in the science fiction world (often creeping in via fantasy) and some worry that they’ll ruin the field. But I don’t think so. There’s too much of a fan base for more traditional science fiction. In fact, with the new “Human Wave” movement of prohuman, protechnology science fiction, there’s big pushback against dreary literary antiheroes and dystopian futures.

Hear that, troops? Keep your tits 'n' lizards sagas upbeat and protech, and there'll be some robowhores in it for you comes Der Tag.

The punchline is, the Perfesser's offering is just part of a whole "symposium" on the theme, "Are Conservatives Bad at Pop Culture?" The Big Brain in Charge claims that "Here at Acculturated, we are less interested in politics than we are in how the virtues — like creativity, beauty heroism, responsibility, joy, and generosity, to name a few — play themselves out in the popular culture." But it begins with Ann Coulter longing for more black and Hispanic skels on Law & Order, and the rest of the entries are mostly boo-hoos over how unfair it is that liberals get to wear berets and live La Vie Boheme while the poor conservatives are ignored and have to write cult-crit that nobody reads.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For these people, culture war is war on culture.

UPDATE. Kudos to commenters, even those who just want to talk about science fiction like a bunch of nerds.

Also, some of you pointed out that Lee Siegel's essay introduced a bit of sanity to the sympfest. Another Luke describes it as "essentially a turd in the punch bowl, from the opening sentence, which labels the entire subject of the symposium 'just another way for conservatives to indulge their strange masochistic fantasy of being inferior to liberals,' to the bit where he calls conservatives' belief in a left wing agenda driving pop culture 'a delusion bordering on a hallucination.'"

kth explains how deep the liberal-artistic conspiracy goes:

That clumsy invocation of Gramsci would imply, not just that most big Hollywood types are left-leaning, but that they got into showbiz specifically to bring about the revolution. No doubt that's why George Clooney joined the cast of The Facts of Life thirty-odd years ago: no doubt it was a humbling task for the aspiring insurgent, but you have to look at the bigger picture. They also serve who only stand and wait.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 9/30/22.

Lou Rawls got into some heavy shit during his Axelrod years.

•  So much going on these days -- Vlad P’s little “I now declare these territories conquered” ceremony, Clarence Thomas’ crackpot wife just straight-up telling the House committee Biden stole the election, and Trump’s bought judge further demonstrating her indebtedness, etc. – so the whole rightwing pants-shitting spectacle over Lizzo playing Jemmy Madison’s flute comes as an amusing diversion and a suitable subject for a free issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!).

Watching dullards like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro dig with their sputter-spoons an ever-deeper hole is fun, but it also reminded me of the old days when I used to pay closer attention to the Konservetkult and Sons of Zhdanov, and what has changed since. Back then the ridiculous fist-shaking communiques conservatives regularly issued about how corrupt our “culture” was and how, once the lumpen were suitably indoctrinated with rightwing wisdom, it would become again fresh and pure were just funny – an endless series of reminders that these clowns were as morons before the Muses, that they had no idea what works of art were for and thought they could hector people into accepting their shabby substitutes. As I’ve said more than once, when they say “culture war” they always mean a war on culture. 

That’s still mostly true and the cream of my jest. But in the Trump age there’s been a slight and disturbing change. First, as has happened generally since I began on this beat, the one-time rightblogger small fry have advanced within the conservative movement, so their ravings receive greater attention from the High Command. Once, George H.W. Bush would just make a dumb crack about how Americans needed to be “a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons” and let it go at that. But in the Reign of Tubby, their fantasies were promoted at the highest levels; for example, they started to push through a Garden of American Heroes --  a sort of anti-woke Disneyland where tourists could stare at heroic statues and get Cultivated. Albert Speer might have blushed.

And Trump’s arts-beat acolytes got more belligerent. When a Public Theatre Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar imagined, reasonably enough, Caesar as Trump, the wingnuts went wild because in the play Caesar gets assassinated – and they thought (or pretended to think) this meant liberals (because artists are all liberals) were calling for the assassination of Trump. In one of the creepier Trump-era writings, National Review Zhdanovite Kyle Smith cheered when sponsors began withdrawing funding from the Public and crackpots like Laura Loomer began interrupting performances because it meant that “Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump” – that is, the Trumpkins were terrorizing the Entarte Kunstlers, the logical endgame of culture war when you can't produce any real culture yourself.   

So yeah, it’s still funny that Lizzo and the Founding Flute can set off these clowns (and don’t let me spoil your enjoyment of the story!), but it’s also a reminder of how far they’ll go if they get any power. 

•  Speaking of culture war, one other thing I wanted to mention was the latest entry in the conservative hate-on-for-cities sector: An essay promoted by the hapless Steve Inskeep and written by Hillsdale legacy pledge Carmel Richardson about how all you stupid liberals complaining about housing prices should move to a big house in redstate Bumfuck like she did. Like all her kind, she describes cities as hellholes (“There’s a reason literature’s greatest protagonists [Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, for one] go off the rails while living in seedy rented rooms”); Richardson’s innovation is to attribute the continued – indeed, timeless – appeal of cities to fads spurred by social media:

With the rise of social media and online journalism, key housing markets have become trendy in a way they never could have before. A classified ad now has a national audience, and bougie neighborhoods a ream of TikTok viewers. People are moving to areas they have no connection to and no relatives near because they saw it online and thought it looked cool. I know a few. This has the effect of driving up prices in areas that otherwise would never have known such demand.

Actually, the top end of this price-gouging is driven not by Tik-Tok but by realtor greed, absentee tenants, sub-tenancy gone wild, and other late-capitalism pathologies. But, perhaps owing to her youth (ha, I’m kidding, she’s an apparatchik and must know better), Richardson misses that the big cities she excoriates are always more expensive than cowtowns for a simple reason that people prefer the cities to the cowtowns and people pay more for what they prefer. In fact, she offers as evidence of the attractiveness of Oklahoma and West Virginia that those states are offering cash bonuses to people who come and settle there – as if she’d never heard the old saying “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me.” 

Her closing is a marvel:

It is true that builders cannot keep up with the demand in places like Colorado, Florida, Tennessee, and Northern Virginia, but in the Midwest and other rural regions across the country, in towns no one ever visits on vacation, countless homes stand for sale and empty -- old, beautiful, and undesired by most.

You don’t say. Why “undesired”?

The towns they fill are thinly populated, and the old storefronts are mostly dark. What would happen if we started buying and living in these towns, dusting out the cobwebs and bringing in new life? One has to wonder what kind of people we would have to become to choose a quiet life over nightlife, and a county fair over a $75 brunch.

You stupid libtards with your brunch and nightlife, why won’t you move to a big house out in the middle of nowhere HURRY PLEASE COME KEEP US COMPANY I’M GOING MAD. Maybe the journalism thing is just a front and Richardson is actually working for brokers. 

FREEDOM OF SHIT. It's a longstanding rule among cranks like me that when everyone agrees on something, the wise man should run screaming in the other direction. Like many fun, contrarian sentiments, this one's more honored in the breach than in the observance -- if you find yourself shaking your fist at clean air and water, you should go see a shrink, and start the first session by telling the shrink how you were molested by your high school Debate Club coach.

But the ABC 9/11 story is a good case study for my rule. Many liberals are going berserk over the whoppers told therein (particularly one in which, if I understand it aright, Sandy Berger lets Osama slip away because he's busy recruiting little girls to blow Clinton). Some conservatives have begun to say that the liberals may have a point.

I understand why the Clinton people are upset: The Path to 9/11 is a consensus reality event, like a war memorial or an official Best Foreign Film Academy Award entry, and it would be injurious to their political health (not to speak of the truth, though we will in a minute) to allow this particular event to tar them as national security slackers. Digby worries that "if this nonsense is allowed to stick, we will be battling these inaccurate demagogic, phantoms for another 50 years."

One should of course call out lying liars, and tell the countervailing truth as eloquently as one can. But when we attempt to manipulate consensus events, we refute the reality of culture. (I know it's a stretch to call an ABC Mini-series part of culture, but hear me out.)

Now I hate to even use the word "culture," because in our depraved era, it's usually on the other end of a little teeter-totter that goes "culture...war." In fact, that's the problem here, and it exercises me sufficiently that I have to talk about things normally best left unspoken.

Any culture worthy of the name is fluid, animated by innumerable human currents -- works of art and works of crap-art, invention of new styles and adaptation of old and even foreign ones, shifts in language, shared experiences, and so on. To the extent that human experience is rich, that is, more meaningful than the life of a cow or a dog, culture makes it so.

The vectors of these currents are to some extent traceable, but not very tractable. Still, there is a base impulse in some people that makes them want to manipulate it, rather than contribute to it in the normal way; to decree, turn right (or left) here.

This motivates the many Kulturkampf buffoons who comprise alicublog's favorite targets -- the yapping dogs like Bozell and Malkin and Reynolds et alia, whose only contributions to culture are insane demands that they be put in charge of it -- and, of course, totalitarians throughout history.

My problem with those guys is not that they are supporting wrong causes (though they usually do that, as well) but that they are engaged in anti-human activity. It is that they see the most natural and wonderful thing in the world, the evolution of human consciousness, and think how much better it would be if only they could control it with the blunt instruments of politics.

Now, culture is in some ways as supple and self-healing as the human body, so maybe in the long term it's a wash. (On the other hand, if you beat up the human body enough, it stops self-healing so good.)

But I worry that too many Americans are taking the bait, and coming to believe that culture is what the goon squad thinks it is: something to be wrestled over for political points.

If this sort of thing spreads much more, we will become a nation of Jason Apuzzos -- crazed nerds unable to enjoy a drama, historical or otherwise, or a comedy, or a trailer or a poster, without fumbling for our calculators, trying to figure out which side is winning the culture war. (The correct answer would be "not culture.")

I choose not to be part of it. Hack writer though I may be, there are some forms of hackery my ink-stained hands will not deign to touch.

In my own practice, I answer bullshit with non-bullshit (or, on slow days, better phrased bullshit). It may not be the most efficacious way to shore up votes in the Third Ward, but it's clean work.

UPDATE. Lots of disagreement in comments, which is understandable. Let me clarify something: I don't disapprove of calling bullshit when bullshit is smelt. Why, that's my hobby.

What bothers me is that ABC has allowed its program to be edited -- at the last minute, no less -- by politicians like Tom Kean. Yeah, he's a producer as well as a consultant, I just found out, so he has some legitimate authority here. But I believe he's been put front and center in this imbroglio because that insulates ABC from seeming to respond directly to pressure from government officials. Call me cynical.

I would have been pissed if Spike Lee's Katrina doc got this kind of treatment, and I can't approve it in this case, either.

DE GUSTIBUS NON EST DISPUTANDUM, MOTHERFUCKER.

I've said more than once that the "culture war" is a war on culture but, as pithy an aperçu as that is, it doesn't draw the whole picture of what's wrong with culture warriors. Sure, many of them are brutes who are frightened by the power of art and think it must be some kind of ordnance liberals possess that they should try to steal. That's why they're so excited by the Harvey Weinstein thing  -- not because they give a shit about sexual harassment, but because they think it's an angle they can use to break Hollywood's alleged spell over the masses and grab it for themselves; you can hear it in the exultations of Kyle Smith ("Hollywood’s image of itself as a morally enlightened congress of tribunes of the people has been destroyed") and Jim Geraghty ("Hollywood, you don’t get to lecture us about anything anymore") who seem to think this has been achieved.

Sometimes I think this ties in with Trump's war on the NFL; Trump clearly envies the violent passions football excites and hopes, by portraying it as traitor-infested, to transfer that passion to himself.  For conservatives of the modern type, the ideal state would be one where citizens are driven away from sports and movies and, indeed, any traditional form of recreation, and instead spend their leisure hours on megachurch services and MAGA rallies.

 But there's also the aspect of culture war that's sad as well as weird, because it shows just how damaging it is to the warrior. Get a load of an article by Theodore Kupfer at National Review called "Conservatives Should Reconsider Their Opposition to Hip-Hop." It begins:

Most conservatives don’t like hip-hop. The typical conservative case against the genre amounts not to music criticism, but to...

Ha ha but come on, though, you didn't really think they'd cop to it?

...the charge that it promotes dangerous behaviors in the culture.

Well, the dog heard it. (Another thing about these guys: With them it's always "the culture" instead of culture -- just as for Putin it's always "the Ukraine" instead of Ukraine.)

Kupfer says his fellow wingnuts, apparently on the strength of a 30-year-old N.W.A. record, believe "most rap... feeds the violent loop that mars inner cities, whose residents scorn the justice system and settle scores outside it." But Kupfer -- look at him, the fightin' conservative who knows how to rap with the kids! -- begs to differ.

The first track on Straight Outta Compton is a clue that the critique might be wrong. The song begins with the sobering reminder that, “When somethin’ happens in South Central Los Angeles, nothin’ happens. It’s just another n**** dead,” letting that last word echo before the music kicks in. In other words, N.W.A., which became infamous among conservatives for glorifying violence, began its first album by noting how pervasive such violence is in their hometown, and how little anyone seems to do about it.

Sure, they talk about violence -- but they think it's bad! And they clearly don't think the state is the answer -- why, it's just a short leap from that to support for enterprise zones.

It goes on like that -- Nas has a tune about how much he loves his son, and we're all about family values, right?  It might be touching coming from a prep school student trying to explain to his ofay teacher what rap is, but at National Review it's just some young "Fellow" trying to make conservatism a little more millennial-friendly -- NatRev and chill -- and the comments section reveals that actual National Review readers aren't going for it  ("97% of it is garbage and probably an even higher percentage is liberal").

But him being a clueless honky isn't the big thing. It's the ending that gets me:

This remains an unfortunate blind spot for a political movement with a checkered record on race. Reform-minded conservatives have convincingly argued that the path up from white-identity politics runs toward a civic nationalism that is pan-ethnic, one that celebrates the shared cultural and artistic achievements of all Americans. If they’re right, then the conservative mind ought to rethink hip-hop, a sometimes-great and always uniquely American art form.

What is "the conservative mind" and why should it be argued into liking a form of music? What has one's tastes or desires got to do with being "reform-minded" or "a civic nationalism that is pan-ethnic"? You might just as well write an article about why, on the strength of recent trends in The Movement, conservatives should embrace sweet potato pierogies. And Kupfer's if-you-believe-this-you-should-enjoy-that formulation implies that conservatives are hypocritical not to like rap. This isn't like opposing gay marriage publicly while picking up men in toilets privately -- this is music, and it is beyond dispute.

I have friends who don't like rap, and/or country, and/or other musics I love. Hell, my wife can't stand most of the music I like. But that is, to those of us whose minds have not been turned to glue, the way of the world and something we can live with, if we have attained a certain very basic degree of perspective. Imagine being the kind of person who felt the need to argue someone into enjoying the music they liked. Sure, the famously ugly John Wilkes said that when he was trying to get laid he could talk his face away -- but, well, he was trying to get laid. What's Kupfer's excuse?

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A CULTURE WAR, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A REVOLVER. More of that culture-war guff I mentioned in my post-election column is cropping up among the tighty righties. Michael Auslin at National Review goes full Goebbels:

Without getting too bogged down in esoterica, it seems uncontroversial to say that, at the end of the day, politics is culture (and of course, political systems reflect the cultures from which they grow). If that’s the case, then we will be in ever greater danger at the national level unless we start winning on the cultural battlefield.

This is where they get the ugly term "culture war" in the first place -- they think of art as propaganda by definition, existing for no other reason but to advance an ideological agenda, and so see all artistic efforts as part of a war effort. And you're either with them or against them.

The further Auslin gets in his diatribe, the more obvious this becomes: He adopts a wounded, we-are-too-childish-foolish-for-this-world tone, and his self-pity pushes him into a fantasy of vengeance:

There’s also a huge temptation to play dirty, the way Ted Kennedy and his ilk did against Robert Bork; I’m not so sure that’s wrong. They play dirty against us in academia, and mock us on television. We hold ourselves to higher standards, but that’s not much help in an increasingly liberal, dependent society. Maybe we shouldn’t flinch from playing dirty (or dirtier). It certainly hasn’t delegitimized liberals among their supporters. But we have to attack their ideals, their dangerous utopianism, and not the individuals. We shouldn’t pull any punches in highlighting their hypocrisy or their radicalism, the way that McCain pulled every punch in 2008.

They "mock us on television." All bets are off! And this time we won't pull any punches -- release the Crowder!

Someone send this poor guy a Bob Ross paint kit and some valium.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Look, I've been in a middle-late Residents fugue state for weeks,
you're just going to have to roll with it guys.
• I see conservatives are attacking Obama for not keeping France, the 51st State, safe from a truck terror attack. What I often wonder is, what is their plan for stopping such terror -- besides rhetorical muscle-flexing like "peace through strength," I mean, or promising to torture more detainees? Fortunately Newt Gingrich is around to fill us in:

“Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background and if they believe in sharia they should be deported,” Gingrich told Fox News’ Sean Hannity...

Gingrich also said that the attack in Nice is the “fault of Western elites who lack the guts to do what is right, to do what is necessary,” and suggested that mosques in America need to be monitored.

The Washington Post showed some guts, at least, by pointing out that "Gingrich’s proposal, which made no distinction between U.S. citizens and noncitizens, would violate scores of First Amendment-based Supreme Court rulings as well as civil rights laws..." But since we are not at one of those rare "libertarian moments" right now, I doubt the yahoos care. Maybe a war on Tunisia, where the assailant is from? Or, hell, on Iran, that's a popular favorite. If this becomes the Id Monster Election, Trump has it hands down -- which would be okay, because if we fall for this we're finished as a society anyway.

• I subscribe to a wingnut newsletter that connects me with some of the lesser-known culture war scolds, and today it brought me a lulu: At Standpoint, one of those fancy journal only Ross Douthat impersonators read, Daniel Johnson raves at hyperlength about the usual stuff: for example, how Trump is a betrayal of some much classier True Conservatism, the through line of which Johnson hilariously traces "from Edmund Burke to William Buckley, from Samuel Johnson to Paul Johnson, from Irving Kristol to Bill Kristol" -- a classic culture-war tell of conflating the Great Ancients with one's, er, less exalted buddies. But he really gets churning when he reaches a favorite subject of the chin-pullers, How the West Has Lost Its Way and Only My Scolding Will Save Her. Hark:

There are numerous viruses attacking the Western body politic, but only one medicine. To face the future unflinchingly, we must return to the past: listen to the patriarchs and prophets, the ancestral voices of our literature, break open the arsenal of our intellectual history, and mobilise the resources of righteous indignation against the dominions, principalities and powers of darkness that threaten to overwhelm us. The great books, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Plato to Pascal, from Dante to Bellow, must once again not only be assigned to every student, but learned where possible by heart. The music of the masters, from Gregorian chant to George Gershwin, from Sebastian Bach to James MacMillan, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt, must not only float across the courts and quads of our colleges, but fill our airwaves and headsets.

From Shakespeare to James McMillan! Yessir, Johnson sure loves that trick. Note how perfectly this expresses the culture warrior's idea of art as ordnance. Not only in Johnson's imagining is it an "arsenal" to use against the Muslims and the Marxists, it's also a scourge with which to drive Western Youth into battle with them; their headsets must be filled with music selected by the Committee, even if they prefer Drake or 2Chains; they must memorize passages from It All Adds Up, et alia. For them art is not pleasure, and you can't expect even your own people to embrace it; it must be pounded into their skulls. Johnson imagines that by this he will save the West, but can a more despairing view of Western culture even be imagined?

• Oh, yeah, there's a writer named Tom Block who is looking down the barrel of a very tough diagnosis and he is not so financially secure (I mentioned he's a writer, didn't I) that he can be sure of a safe and comfortable place from which to fight it. If you're looking to drop a mitzvah, you could do worse.

CULTURE WAR IS NOT OVER, IF YOU WANT IT OR NOT. Digging through some of my back numbers this evening, I came across old posts about World magazine, the rightwing Christian pub balls-deep in the culture war, which told readers that Prince was only okay to listen to if your English was so poor that you couldn't make out his sexy lyrics, that "baseball fosters the right mentality for sustaining a war on terrorism," and other gibberish.

These days I keep hearing that the Right is soft-pedaling such cultural issues in favor of a Tea Party anti-socialism pitch. I wondered if World had gotten the message. Thankfully, it appears they have not.

Take Marvin Olasky's Easter column. First he fills in the back story, Anne Rice style: In New York in the 1870s, a famous abortionist lived on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, enjoying "immense dining rooms and parlors furnished in bronze and gold" -- a clear victory for Satan. Then St. Patrick's was built, giving Jesus the upper hand. But then John D. Rockefeller, in an obviously Satanic challenge, built his Center:

At ground level the face-off has also been apparent: A two-ton statue of Atlas, the god in Greek mythology who carries the heavens upon his shoulders, faces the doors of St. Patrick. What holds up the world -- the economic and technological power housed in the skyscraper, or the faith of the cross?

Most people don't contemplate such questions...

But Marvin Olasky does! For years the Easter Parade has been a big deal on Fifth, and despite its Godless nature -- Irving Berlin certainly wasn't writing about Jesus -- Olasky approves; but this year the Parade wasn't all it might be, permanent-things-wise:

This Easter the mixture of refinement and ostentation that defined earlier parades was gone. Many women wore flowery hats, but men on display were less Hello, Dolly! and more Salvador Dali dada: They wore three-foot-high apple blossom branches, or tuxedo coats with shorts, or multi- colored bushy beards accompanied by white dresses.

Bearded men in dresses! What would Bing Crosby say? But it gets worse:

I wondered about the absence of the young: On a perfect-weathered day, sunny and 70, why were 90 percent or more of the strollers over 40?

Were the kids all in McCarren Park worshiping the vaginal tree? Well, on the plus side, Olasky saw a lot of them at Mass in the Hunter College auditorium; but on the down side, many cleaved instead to the latest ally of the abortionist and the Rockefellers: "I saw many other 20-somethings lined up to enter a glass cube: the above-ground part of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th."

How will Jesus and Olasky be rescued from despair? By war on Muslims!

Will the Easter battle for the future feature not the cathedral and the statue, but the auditorium and the glass cube?

Maybe, but here's an O. Henry twist to this column: Will those latter two form an alliance against the Kaabah, an ancient granite cube in Mecca that is the center of the Muslim world? The cathedral and the skyscraper won World War II. What can the auditorium and the glass cube do?

And once their combined forces destroy the infidels, the auditorium and the cube can duke it out for supremacy! I'm surprised he didn't work in an NBA Finals theme.

Please remember that however the conservative spin doctors try to spruce up the public face of their movement, these guys are still back there being absolutely mad.

UPDATE. Commenters are especially excited by Olasky's symbology. "Wasn't it an apple that brought about the Fall from Paradise?" asks Halloween Jack. "(The company's symbol, after all, has a bite out of it, and always has; oh, and hey, it used to be rainbow striped, and we all know who's got that symbol these days, eh?)" Wheels within wheels, people!

CULTURE WAR IS WAR ON CULTURE, PART 1,927,922.

So I'm idly flipping through National Review when I find this by Ian Tuttle:

Novelist? Essayist? Short-story writer? From our friends at Taliesin Nexus, for creative types who love liberty...

"Love liberty" is the hi-sign -- like "getting a little dark in here" and "I hate fags." There follows a prize pitch familiar to readers of Writers Digest: "Calling the next great American author! If that’s you, then September 9 – 11, 2016, have us fly you out to New York City, put you up in a hotel, and spend an entire weekend developing your work at the Calliope Authors Workshop..." This connects us to Taliesin Nexus which, it turns out, was previously pimped at National Review in 2015 by John J. "50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs" Miller as "a 'safe space' for libertarians, conservatives, and other right-leaners who want to work in the arts." I guess they've gotten secretive, since you know how Liberal Fascists are always oppressing rightwing artists.

Anyway, Taiesin Nexus connects us to a delightful blog, "a (loosely affiliated) beta project of Taliesin Nexus," called Smash Cut Culture. Its slogan is "Liberate the Culture" -- in case you haven't caught on that what's happening here is culture war, as opposed to what the libtards call "culture" -- books, movies, pah! What's wanted is wingnut propaganda essays, and Smash Cut Culture's got loads. Here's one:

Sexy Panties and Prison: What Orange is the New Black Can Teach Us About The Regulatory State

Wait, don't go yet -- let's give author Anne Butcher a chance!

If you are a fan of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, you already know that far too much of Season 3 was spent telling the tale of Piper’s Prison Panties. As a fan of the show, I was a bit sad that the screen time invested in this plotline was not spent on some of the more interesting ones. But as a libertarian, I must say that the way this story concluded in Season 4 provides a great parable for how regulation hurts people in the real world.

Yeah I want to run too, but wait -- she's talking about an ep where the female prisoners sell their used panties to pervs (though Butcher seems shy about saying so). Let's see what the libertarian angle is!

At the start of Season 4, Piper has gotten cocky. After mercilessly disciplining some of her rogue employees, she loves her new position of power within Litchfield. But as in the real world, money-making ideas breed imitators. Just like Apple inspired Microsoft, and Coke inspired Pepsi, Piper’s Prison Panties inspired a copycat business as well. This new business, lead by Maria, draws many of of the Latina inmates into the illegal panty trade, and Piper is not happy about it. 

In the real world, there are constantly new startup businesses challenging more established ones. This is a good thing, as it can inspire all businesses to be more innovative, gives the consumers more options, and give employees more freedom to leave unfair employers. Of course we’ll never know if that’s what would have happened to the used panty industry of Litchfield Prison because like other established business people before her, Piper decided restrictive rules were preferable to a free market.

THEY'RE IN PRISON! THEY'RE SELLING PANTIES DRENCHED IN THEIR COOZE BECAUSE THEY'RE IN PRISON! THERE IS NO FREE FUCKING MARKET IN PRISON!

..In real life, protectionist regulation doesn’t just hurt the businesses that challenge more established competitors. It can hurt the consumers who have to pay higher prices.

Yeah, freaks who buy cooze panties from prisoners. Fuck, what's the use of talking to this nutty chick. Elsewhere at SCC:

The Original Ghostbusters: More Than Just Busting Ghosts?

BE NICE, author Brodie Cooper is not like the fedora-heads in your building, bitching about bitches who ruined their childhood. This is about the original, and stupid in a mostly different way:

A lot of public frustration over the government bureaucracy tends to stem from its inaction or overaction resulting in the loss of an individual’s ability to control his or her own decisions. In the case of Ghostbusters, the EPA, which represents bureaucracy, ends up interfering and shutting our heroes down. 

Oh fuck -- the planet is being boiled like a frog, and Cooper is still all about William Atherton getting slime dumped on him because statism.

A recent New York Times poll found that 54 per cent of Americans believe over regulation has stifled economic growth. Furthermore...

OK, Brodie Cooper has ruined my youthful Ghostbusters experience  -- except she's a woman, so yay feminism, it's Thatcherrific. Let's see what else they have --

South Park’s Stance On Censorship: More Relevant Than Ever?

AHGGGHH! OK, I quit, let's go to Acculturated and make fun of Mark Judge.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For the weekend of the glorious Fourth, the obligatory.
• At The New Criterion James Bowman is mad that obituaries of the recently departed Michael Herr often refer to Herr's Dispatches as "the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Stuff and nonsense, huffs Bowman; it was instead a definitive liberal media put-up, as was Herr's contribution to Apocalypse Now. Says Bowman:

Neither the book nor the movie tells us anything about the war that the media, echoing the anti-war movement, hadn’t already told us. On the contrary, both existed to confirm our prejudices about the war as senseless, savage, insane, and criminal.

How else would people get a negative impression of war, if not from mendacious liberals? Bowman also laughs at Herr for having a nervous breakdown over the war, which Herr saw close up as a correspondent ("[we] were all 'traumatized' by Vietnam just like poor Mr. Herr..."]. Bowman is "well known for his writing on honor," according to his bio, which mentions no military experience. I'm pretty well accustomed to conservative culture-war gibberish, but it's always something of a surprise to find it in their actual cultural journals; it's as if Film Comment contained nothing but YouTube comments.

• Good old Nancy Nall reminded me about Jim Lileks the other day and I realized I hadn't read him in a while. So I pulled up a 2016 Bleat more or less at random and there he is complaining that the Oxford American had chosen to write about Terry Southern:

But the hangers-on - who had limited talent, if any, and whose purpose was to flatter the guy who Did That One Thing, would somehow believe that they were part of a great creative era because they had gotten high with the writer while he talked about Mick Jagger, who was interested in this project. Mick Jagger, man! He knows Mick! And the people to whom he's telling the story think then his dope must be really good.

There's a deadness at the heart of the period. Endless hours of unlistenable psychedelic music, endless pages of unreadable prose, cheap movies...

This from a guy who apotheosizes old matchbooks. Here's part of a more recent one:

Lest you think all Traders Joe clerk-customer interactions are a model of sparkling wit and bright banter, I had a disconcerting exchange the other day...

Yes, it's another in Lileks' endless series of insufficiently understanding service workers. They're still letting him down! He told that rapscallion about "Halt and Catch Fire" all right. Then on to Brexit:

The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there's one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they'd love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

You should see those gulags where they sent people who wouldn't use metric! Well, that visit will do for a few years.

• I have Monday off, so like many of my fellow citizens of this wretched neofeudal society I am being crushed with work to make up for that tiny respite, so that does it for this week's 'round-the-horn. This weekend celebrate your country as you see fit: as something to be seized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, by radical Islam, by the glorious sexual revolution or whatever -- remember, it's our dreams that make us Americans!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Warm Leatherette's the killer but I always liked the flip side too

•   I unlocked today's edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which is about the Biden campaign worker who got in trouble for calling Republican "fuckers" and how she had the right idea and rather than apologize she and all of us should tell the pearl-clutching pissants to eat shit, take their nomenclature and like it. I always opposed them because I thought they were wrong and even crazy, but between Trump nihilism, COVID denialism, and QAnon cultism, they've mutated into a clear and present danger. David Atkins got grief for talking about "deprogramming" Republicans ("We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South") but when their major media outlets and elected officials are transparently trying to get the election results overturned -- not because their fraud claims have any merit, but because those results show that their voter-suppression tactics are starting to lose their potency and their minority rule may be coming to an end -- it's clear a Rubicon has been crossed; if they're willing to defy both democratic principles such as consent of the governed and objective reality, they are not in any sense a loyal opposition, and the absolute least we can do is acknowledge that and stop cooperating with the absurdly hypocritical standards by which rampaging Republicans are treated like entertaining scamps while mild incivilities from Democrats are treated like war crimes. Fuck that and fuck them.  

•   One good thing about Kyle Smith's (roundly mocked) stupid column about Joseph Epstein's (roundly mocked) stupid column about how Jill Biden shouldn't use her "Dr." honorific is that it exposes more people to what a piece of shit Kyle Smith is. You can find several references to Smith's career as a culture-war creep at the New York Post and National Review by searching his name at this site. Among the highlights: Smith venturing into theater criticism solely, it would seem, so he could yell at Will Ferrell for unpatriotically making fun of George Bush ("Is it too much to ask for Hollywood's leading comic actor not to use the deaths of our troops in combat for a giggle?"); the logical culture-warrior conclusion to years of rightwing rage-wank over Lena Dunham, entitled (amazingly) "Lena Dunham’s Ultimately Conservative Message"; and Smith explaining that while Republicans enlist in the armed services for noble reasons, Democrats only enlist to disguise the fact that they hate America.

Smith's absolute nadir, though, came when New York's Shakespeare in the Park did Julius Caesar and made Caesar a Trump look-alike, leading conservatives to the insane conclusion that the venerable theatrical institution was calling for the President's assassination; Smith went further still, exulting that the theater got some of its funding cut and that "Lefty Actors Are Beginning to Fear Donald Trump," as if that were something anyone who pretends to care about culture as opposed to culture war would be happy about.  Well, everything else conservative has degenerated; I guess it's only natural that they culture warriors would, too. 

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PART 534,556. Joe Carter at First Things examines Picasso, and if you've ever been to First Things you have some idea of what to expect. But I think Carter may exceed your expectations here.

The post is mostly about how Picasso was a shit with women, which we knew, and how that led Picasso to attack women with cubism:

On learning that Picasso was out, Hemingway decided to leave him a present. He went to his car and returned with a case of grenades, on which he wrote, “To Picasso from Hemingway.”

While an appropriately symbolic gift, Picasso didn’t need the armaments: He had already been lobbing grenades for nearly half a century…

The grenades he tossed also left more than a few wounded women.

See, they don't call it "culture war" for nothing. Not content to attack his wives and mistresses, many of whom "led tormented existences that ended tragically," with his artistic grenades, Picasso went rogue:

What begins in the glow of realist love -- or at the very least infatuation -- ends in the violent disgust of Cubist distortion. Picasso’s love-hate relationship with the visible world was a visual expression of his love-hate relationship with the women in his life. Cubism, according to the evidence in Picasso’s paintings, is less an abstract juggling of shapes and colors than an index of sexual disgust.

So even though Picasso also famously expressed his cubist disgust toward musicians, fruit and tableware, and himself, it was really all about the misogyny. Carter charts how Picasso made women purty like a photygraph when he loved 'em, and all cubey when he got sick of 'em. As for his "teenage mistress, Marie-Therese Walter," Carter determines, "being only an object of lust rather than of love, Walter never rated a fully realistic portrayal." And people say conservatives don't do feminist outreach!

But that's not the end; it never is. Picasso's grenades detonate to this day!

But Picasso’s story is not merely his own. As Arianna Huffington wisely discerned, his story is “the twentieth century’s own biography.”

The dehumanization trope can also be found in the works of such artists as Allen Jones and Robert Mapplethorpe, men who have embraced the objectification of the human form and who reduce the individual to an object.

I don't know much about art, but I'll say this: When Mapplethorpe stuck a bullwhip up his ass, you by God knew it was a man with a bullwhip up his ass.

Meanwhile, the fear and disgust surrounding female sexuality has become so pervasive that it is almost passé. Castration anxiety is now a major theme in rap and hip-hop music, and extreme images of the female threat, such as vagina dentate, appear in popular films (for example, in Teeth).

Oh, I remember Teeth; big hit. (Aren't they on Teeth VI now?) My only question is, what's this vagina dentate thing? It sounds Latin, but since sexism began with Picasso the term must date from the turn of the last century at the earliest.

Meanwhile if you like your culture-war more in the fake-C.S.-Lewis mode, you can visit Fr. Dwight Longenecker at Pantheos, where they send First Things writers when they get too reactionary, apparently. Longenecker's Professor Slubgrip conducts a Pop Cult 101 class at the University of Bowelbage (how do they think of these things?) and promises his demonic worm-students that they will be soon be "working in film, television, and 'media.'" Mwa-ha-ha! This threatens to be part of a series, and I only hope Fr. Longenecker learns to be faster at getting to the punchline.

UPDATE. More historical revisionism from commenters. The Dark Avenger: "I blame Marcel Duchamp for the post-colonial mess in the Congo, with his infamous painting Ce n'est pas un massacre." Zen Comix: "The presence of a Cubist Fernand Leger painting in The Omega Man's apartment is proof that Charlton Heston's gun fetish is about subjugating women to his Republican penis." Hogan: "And don't get me started on the rampant taurophobia displayed in Guernica."

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? I must give big ups to elementropy on this post concerning the poisonous confluence of art and propaganda. I hope Retardo will not mind if I quote his quotation of Christopher Hitchens -- from back in his more lucid days -- concerning Norman Podhoretz' ravings against Norman Mailer:

This is not just boring and tenth-rate. It is sinister. Like Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's literary enforcer, Podhoretz doesn't content himself with saying that a certain novelist is no longer in favour or no longer any good. That would be banal. No, it must be shown that he never was any good, that he always harboured the germs of anti-party feeling, that he was a rank rodent from the get-go. Then comes the airbrush, the rewritten entry in the encyclopaedia, the memory hole. But even Zhdanov's hacks would have made the effort to employ some new phrases and new disclosures.

We've been around this mulberry bush before, but I will have another go. For a while, back in the 90s, the culture war was salutary, bracing, tonic. It caught people's attention, perked up artists, and got the juices flowing. But these are different times. The big political machines have extended their tendrils so deep into every aspect of our lives that it is impossible to refer to any aspect of society without some Scrutinizer ascribing it a value, plus or minus, left or right.

The by-now old-fashioned term, P.C., never very meaningful, has been rendered utterly irrelevant by numerous flying squads of rightwing Kulturkommando, whose overreach in these matters is gloriously exemplified by Rod "Flanders" Dreher's denunciation of The Hours (yes, that innocuous little movie about Virginia Woolf and stuff) as an "apologia for evil" on the grounds that one of its characters, who leaves her husband and son, is portrayed sympathetically. (For God's sake, nobody tell Flanders about Medea!)

Not to say that the squads' efforts are all negative. At OpinionJournal yesterday, some guy tried to make the case that a Lebanese reality-TV show indicates the future of democracy in Arab nations -- at least, democracy of a sort:

To be sure, over the past century many Arab nations have experimented with democratic reforms, some going so far as to establish constitutions, regular elections and institutional checks and balances. But in the end the overwhelming tendency has been to assume the rhetoric and rituals of democracy without actually putting it in place.

Into this environment comes an independently produced TV program that both celebrates personal achievement and puts Arab audiences at the center of the decision-making process. "Super Star" encourages, in fact depends on, the active involvement of ordinary Arabs in a "democratic" endeavor with real-time, mutually beneficial results. If the Arab people cannot choose their political representatives free from coercion, at least now they can select a cultural representative to champion their musical tastes.

I'd like to believe that any person of normal intelligence would comprehend the crucial difference between a simulacrum of democracy -- e.g., the "thumbs-down" of the Roman Coliseum -- and the real thing. But the new culture war -- much more savage and damaging than the old one; a total culture war, to avail an old phrase -- will probably, soon enough, render all such fine distinctions imperceptible.

Then art will not exist, except as an arcane misnomer popularly applied to the circuses glorifying whomever is in charge.

It is embarrassing to have to say it aloud, but some things are more important than politics.

MINISTRY OF CULTURE. Ah me, the culture wars again. It is generally hard to figure out what Reihan Salam is trying to say, due perhaps to the dilatory influence on his prose of whatevs.org. (Please, please don't let him near a copy of Vice magazine.) But he is sufficiently clear in his trifurcated essay on culture wars, in which he suggests that, to reclaim the culture, conservatives (by which he seems to mean the Republican Party) must

...break the stranglehold of Big Media by reversing copyright laws that stifle free expression. Strengthen the hand of the innovative entrepreneurs behind peer-to-peer networks, spread-spectrum radio, and other technologies that have the potential to restore creative power to individuals and communities. Over time, you’ll see a more diverse media culture that will be far more in tune with -- here it comes -- our shared values. Larry Lessig’s notion of a "free culture" has a lot to offer conservatives vexed by the cultural hegemony of a narrow corporate elite.

This is meant to mark a distinction, I guess, between the Pat Buchanan types who want to "take back our culture," as Buchanan famously put it in 1992, by armed military intervention, and those like Salam, who want to use cool technology.

We might call this perspective "managerial." The part of actual culture -- you know, books, movies, songs, that stuff -- is left hanging as Salam concerns himself with the dissemination thereof by a "Benevolent Despot." We do get a feeble hint of what he and others in his less-miliaristic faction of culture warriors have in mind as to the content end. Among the very few of Salam's supporting documents that are fully available online (which is odd, considering his faith in the creative commons) is a Ross Douthat essay declaring that bitching about bad culture is a loser's game, and that conservatives have to go beyond preaching-to-the-choir, Michael Moore Hates America -type gestures, such as he saw at the American Film Renaissance Festival, and "roll up their sleeves and start writing some entertaining television shows and movies and books of their own."

So all that remains is for somebody to write good conservative entertainments. You Douthat, and Salam Reihan and his P2P hipsters will do the rest!

When you read stuff like this, you have to wonder if any of these guys have ever played in a rock and roll band or tried to write a story or a poem or done anything that was purely creative. They perhaps believe that we all show up at weekly meetings where the latest meme is announced, and go forth and sing about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and other Satanic things that will achieve our dark end of corrupting the culture.

Maybe they think that way because that's the only way they are able to think about anything. Maybe, being would-be managers rather than creators of art, they don't know what makes people want to be artists. They only know that such people are useful to them, and believe that, just as you can get actors to perform in commercials and musicians to make crappy pop records and draughtsmen to provide illustrations for corporate brochures, you can enlist artists to make conservative art. When a Christian commenator on Douthat suggests that conservatives "build a cultural infrastructure that will rival the political one that has contributed to so much success at the ballot box," you are hearing the voice of the manager, ordering HR to round up some talent.

The joke is that there are certainly plenty of very fine artists who could do something "conservative" enough without being bribed. Whit Stillman, for example, has made some films (Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco) that would seem right up their street. Stillman hasn't made a movie since 1998. Where's Rupert Murdoch? Where's Sun Myung Moon? These guys could bankroll a full-blown Hollywood production for him.

Maybe they actually do have some idea of what artists are like, and know they mightn't necessarily get from them a result they could approve. Even Sam Goldwyn and Harry Cohn had trouble with the talent, and they weren't even commanding that they make movies showing the folly of the estate tax. Conservatives who strongly approve, for instance, The Incredibles, which they seem to see as some sort of Ayn Rand allegory, usually fail to note that the film was made by Brad Bird, whose Cold War fable The Iron Giant was so annoying to conservative sentiments that the New York Post actually ran an editorial denouncing it ("Hollywood is taking up the cudgels to maintain the left-wing fiction that those who hunted Communists were hopelessly paranoid").

Creative types are famously pesky that way. And so, if Salam is any kind of harbringer, we may expect to see more culture-war managers devising ever more intricate distribution schemes, economic models, and business plans for right-wing cultural product, and waiting for that killer screenplay about The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew to turn up, summoned by the invisible hand of the marketplace.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

In a mellow mood.

•   For grins (grim grins, but still) here's another newsletter Oval Office scene unlocked for your pleasure. Don't thank me, just subscribe!

•   David Fucking Brooks:

There is Donald Trump’s culture-war Theyism: The coastal cultural elites hate genuine Americans, undermining our values and opening our borders. And there is Bernie Sanders’s class-war Theyism: The billionaires have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and impoverish everyone else.

Each of these stories takes a genuine tension in society and blows it up into an all-explaining cartoon in which one part of America is trying to destroy the other part.

The G.O.P. has been swallowed by Trump’s culture war, and many Democrats seem to be rushing to join Sanders’s class war.

Trump convinces rubes that liberals and Messicans stole their good jobs and made their kids gay; Sanders wants health care and income equality. Same diff! And anyway, David Brooks says, capitalism isn't your enemy, it loves you, but it hates your boss and that's why you'll die in penury:

As Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute puts it, capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more productive. If you improve worker bargaining power, that may help a bit, but over the long run people can’t earn what they don’t produce.

Third, and most important, most of the increase in earnings inequality has happened between companies, not within them. As John Van Reenen of M.I.T. has found, all over the world superstar businesses are racing ahead of their competitors. As those companies grow more productive, they earn more profit per employee and pay their workers more. Companies that can’t match that productivity don’t, and their workers lag behind.

So if your Uber, housecleaner, and journalist gigs aren't paying enough to feed you and protect you from medical bankruptcy, blame your employer for not working you hard enough. Go to work for a superstar! Use the keyword search on Monster.

Successful executives are doing what’s best for their companies, gathering as much talent as they can. This isn’t evil. It’s not exploitation.

And by "much talent" he means "many stock buybacks." As long as Brooks draws fat paychecks for his bullshit, he'll assume it's because "capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do." The rest of us can draw our own conclusions.

•   The fuck:

pic.twitter.com/RhidNMrOex

— HYDE for U.S. Congress (@rfhyde1) January 17, 2020

I'm beginning to think Idiocracy undershot. I mean, at least Macho Camacho showed up sober.

THE U.S.S. POSEIDON. Ross Douthat has up a couple of unusually contemplative posts about the unacquaintance with war of many war fans. From the latter:

Specifically, if you believe fervently in the idea that the War on Terror really is World War IV, the defining foreign-policy moment of your generation and the most important challenge facing the United States for forty years to come, and you happen to be the ideal age, marital status, and so forth to sign up to serve your country - in the military, the CIA, wherever - then you have a real obligation to strongly consider it. And I do mean strongly - not just bat it around as a possibility, as so many of us did after 9/11, knowing that we would never actually do anything about.

I should add that Douthat favors this POV over an alleged declaration that non-combatants should never authorize military force, which I have never heard anyone seriously make.

Actually Douthat takes the thing further than I would. He suggests that involvement in combat would make policymakers and pundits better qualified to decide matters of war and peace on a human level -- chickenhawkery as "less a problem that flows from cowardice, and more one that flows from ignorance."

But it should be pointed out that there are already plenty of active-duty soldiers who favor the war -- and many of them have blogs. Their writings are available to all Americans with internet access. Why then not fire the chickenhawks, or at least push them to one side, and back to the max the folks who are already living the Douthat dream?

I assume that Douthat knows about these guys, but isn't getting from them what he wants -- because no one, not even a grunt with a way with words, can give him what he really wants.

Today there is much talk among the cognoscenti about World War Whatever, but while we are often told by our leaders about threats we must defend ourselves against -- "one vial, one canister... to bring a day of horror like one we have never known" etc. -- no one has been able to tell the American people what shared cause they must fight for. War advocates frequently admit this, but suggest terms that are not very rousing -- e.g. Victor Davis Hanson:

The Bush administration should stop repeating that it is fighting the war on terror for truth, justice and the American way. Instead, the president and his staff should be blunt and explain that, since Sept. 11, it has had to choose between options that are bad or far worse.

This is a war cry as given by realists, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" it ain't. The basis of their argument is not a shared American purpose, but a shared American fear. We are not put in the position of patriots fighting to keep aloft the flame of liberty, but of movie characters trying to get out of an upended U.S.S. Poseidon -- though the overwhelming majority of us feel not the rising waters.

I have puzzled for a long time over the ungodly fury of conservative writers at Hollywood and other outlets of popular culture for not providing war propaganda. Why don't they make their own movies, I have wondered, with the backing of one or another right-wing millionaire, of which there are plenty? I see now that they are actually pleading for help. They don't have what it takes to reach their fellow-citizens at the deepest level -- they have the reach, the money, and the power, but they don't have a song. And without a song a man ain't got a friend; without a song the road would never bend. Despite their political dominance, their ideas -- being paltry things, having to do with the right of people with money to more money, and hatred of homosexuals -- only accumulate upon the topsoil of culture, and do not penetrate to the water-table from which dreams are fed.

By throwing some of their fair-haired boys into combat, they may hope to get some war poets for themselves. That crop doesn't always come out as they might want. But if gets Jonah Goldberg into a uniform, I'm all for it.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I had heard Carla Bruni had been a songwriter and singer

before she married Sarkozy, but I didn't know she was good.

•   Let's start with some free issues from this week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (I do five of these every week! I'm an unstoppable content machine!): The one about small-time secessionists and what they say about the conservative movement, and a special sneak preview of the revival of Frasier. 

•   I'm against the strike on whatever-it-is in Syria for the same reason I'm always against these things no matter who's in charge -- our record in the Middle East is a serial clusterfuck that, it's fair to assume, every new assault will simply painfully prolong. (And at least Obama had the excuse that he was black and if he'd failed to do any war-on-terror and there happened to be any 9/11ness stateside, he would have been lynched.) I could be persuaded by a good argument but one never emerges. 

I see that, as usual when a Democrat is in office, conservatives are also denouncing Biden's attack -- some with a twist: Here's a Twitter thread with video of an Assad speech, purportedly against "neoliberalism" on the grounds that it promotes "degeneracy" like "gay marriage," offered as a defense of Syria against Biden:

My favorite response: "he's right except for the marijuana part.  There is lots of scientific evidence that points to it being very safe for consumption, and even less psychoactive than alcohol." Come let us horseshoe together! I suppose this could all be a hoax (though Assad has in fact used gay marriage as a distraction, so there is some U.S. Republican overlap there), but how would we be able to tell?  

•   Speaking of Rod Dreher, this is great: 

I went somewhere I wasn't wanted and talked a lot of shit, and people had the nerve to complain -- CANCELCULTURE!  

•   Wondering what the intamallectual conservatives are up to? Let's see, here's an article by Jack Fowler at National Review about the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Finally, something about the pre-eminent conservative research and policy institute -- I guess not everything on the Right is about Trumpian chest-beating and culture war. Let's read:  

Stanford Lefties Must Swallow Their Hoover Hate — for Now

It gnaws away at Stanford University’s woke faculty: Harbored in their midst is that nominally conservative outfit, the Hoover Institution, which more than a few professors hold as an infestation of the liberal citadel. It is, after all, named after a Republican president — never mind being home to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson and H. R. McMaster (and yes, plenty of establishment GOP types, and even a lefty or two). And there’s this: The campus is visually dominated by the striking eleven-story Hoover Tower, which scrapes the Palo Alto sky like some right-hand middle finger. Housing vast and important archives (much of the contents are about the evils of Marxist-Leninism), the tower is crowned by a 48-bell carillon that no doubt triggers faculty and students with the occasional auditory reminder of Hoover’s confounding and unwelcome presence.

 OK, scratch that, it really is all Owning The Libs, even if it comes in academic robes. 

I mean even J.D. Vance has given up on his  "outreach" pretense -- remember when his "Barack Obama and Me" thing was published by the easy marks at the New York Times? "Here was the president of the United States, a man whose history looked something like mine but whose future contained something I wanted... For at a pivotal time in my life, Barack Obama gave me hope that a boy who grew up like me could still achieve the most important of my dreams..." 

LOL. Here's a Fox News report on Vance's recent appearance on Tucker Carlson: "Identity politics, critical race theory 'destroying our society': J.D. Vance." 

Yep, J.D.'s hitting that cancel-culture-war grift hard. No wonder: There's an Ohio Senate nomination race in the offing and, as NBC News puts it, "Competition for 'Trump lane' heats up" --  to win, Vance will have to beat Jane Timken, who NBC says is "offering herself as a 'conservative disrupter' who helped sweep out moderate allies of Ohio’s anti-Trump former governor, John Kasich," and Josh Mandel, who "tweeted an old photo of [Timken] embracing Kasich, signaling how he will move aggressively to frame her as insufficiently loyal to the Trump cause."  Vance is gonna have to put on a heap of war paint to obscure the stigma of having once spoken warmly of the Kenyan Pretender!

ANOTHER CULTURE WAR CASUALTY.

Remember that "Intellectual Case for Trump" made by Mytheos Holt at The Federalist a few weeks back? If you saw it, surely if nothing else Holt's tale of how he turned out a racist chick when she let him "probe her ideology" stays seared in your brain. Did you know that was only Part One? Yeah, I blocked that out too, but Part Two has arrived and it's even stupider. A lot of it is about how liberals got bored with free speech and now they're Hitler -- but God help us, Holt also has a Culture War angle:

For decades, the institutional Right has ceded American culture to the Left, in spite of many voices who pointed out ample areas where the Right could carve out a countercultural movement against leftist domination, or even co-opt some of modern culture for itself.

Not sure what "voices" have advocated a "countercultural movement" as Holt provides no link -- but the voices urging conservatives to "co-opt some of modern culture for itself" we have heard; they're the guys who write articles like "How Star Trek Explains The Decline Of Liberalism" in rightwing rags, and who come up with concepts like "South Park Republicans" to make their sponsors feel au courant.

Holt is true to the template -- he even devotes a paragraph to a South Park episode recap! -- and tells us that the problem with conservatism is that it has become infested with "young fogeys" who are no fun at all, which is why all the cool conservatives are flocking to Trump: "Trump is many things, but a fogie he is not." Trump makes liberals mad, see, just like us cool dudes make our parents mad; he's "taking his cues from his time as a pro-wrestling heel personality," and when all those WWE fans get old enough to vote they'll vote for him, or maybe for Triple H -- he's pretty awesome too.

Eventually Holt gets to the inevitable "choc-o-muts ice creams is conservative" list:

The Right doesn’t have to conjure up its own art from scratch. It can and occasionally has co-opted modern entertainment as well. After all, don’t films like Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” series make the most powerful statement about the tension between chaos and civilization since John Ford? Don’t Nietzschean fairy tales like “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” or even “True Detective,” not to mention most video games, utterly brush aside the Left’s fantasies about Rousseauistic, universal human goodness?

Boring a girl at a party with a rant about how your favorite TV show means Social Security sux is the revolution, comrade -- I mean bro!

These people are always going on about Saul Alinsky -- and The Frankfurt School and the Long March Through The Institutions and all those other wingnut equivalents of the Illuminati -- so naturally they think culture is not something to make, or even to appreciate and enjoy, but something to "co-opt."

UPDATE. Sorry, I can't leave out this bit from Holt's essay about Bill Clinton yelling at the Black Lives Matter guys and how it shows liberals went fascist:

In this, they break from the past in many respects. Bill Clinton himself revealed how significant this shift was when he challenged Black Lives Matter. Clinton was advancing a policy argument in defense of his approach to crime in the 1990s, in the face of protesters who would hear none of it. His arguments were based on the facts, where the BLM protesters’ signs were based on the equivalent of brand loyalty to a cultural movement. No matter how correct Clinton’s case was, it inevitably fell on deaf ears.

No, you read that right: he's really saying BLM's protest signs lost an argument with Bill Clinton. I'd say the signs were at a serious disadvantage; maybe they should have used dry-erase to reduce response time.

A CLOCKWORK BREITBART. The L.A. Times has engaged David Ehrenstein (film nerd) and Andrew Breitbart (culture warrior) to discuss Hollywood and the War on Whatchamacallit. (First two parts up now.) We have gone round this particular mulberry bush many times before, but Breitbart's ravings are proving classics of the genre.

Most notable are Beitbart's mood swings between professions of conservative cultural impotence and professions of conservative cultural power. On the one hand he accuses "the politically correct architecture of the creative process in Hollywood," where "pro-victory voices are reflexively ridiculed, cold-shouldered and made pariahs of on the party circuit [! -ed.]," of "reverse McCarthyism" (Watershed! They're against McCarthyism now!). On the other, he declares that "my side has talk radio, best-selling books, top-rated cable news shows, blogs, Op-Ed columns and even the presidency to make our points," and that "millions of other American filmgoers" share his politics and find their needs ill-served by Hollyweird, despite record box-office figures.

At one point, perhaps a rare moment of equilibrium in his brain chemistry, Breitbart turns introspective on behalf of the Movement: "Yet the conservatives who defend and, to a great degree, prosecute this war [? -ed.] have only themselves to blame for not putting enough emphasis on popular entertainment, and refusing to get bloody in the trenches of Melrose and Vine," he says, before (alas) reverting to form and calling on Ehrenstein as a "gay expert on gays in cinema" to help him with a Hollywood "diversity" project.

There are many different ways to relieve a creative urge, and those of us who toil both in blogs and in other formats must be careful not to shoot too much of our wads on internet prattle. That's why I continue to hold out sympathy and hope for guys like Jason Apuzzo, whose rages against the Hollywood machine are punctuated by efforts to make the sort of movies he wants to see.

But as Breitbart's case shows, the pure culture warrior finds making actual culture a "bloody" business and beneath him. His talents are instead devoted to concocting syrups of outrage thick enough to suspend bombast-fragments like "heroin-addled reality star," "self-congratulatory award show pronunciations," and "Gulfstream-flying, eco-warrior billionaires" for the delectation of undiscerning goons. The hard work of pursuing a coherent idea from start to finish -- whether in a story, script, or even a blog post -- is for the gloopy ones, while the oomny ones use, like, inspiration and what Bog sends.

It seems clear that our culture warriors are not engaged in a war for culture so much as a war against it.

THE NEW BLOOD-'N'-GUTS.

Fresh from his bizarre WOT slash-fic "Wildman" story about how a real-man President will bomb the Middle East into powder and win a grateful nation's respect, Schlichter is here to tell us "Why the ‘Jon Stewarting’ of America’s Youth Is Awful For Political Discourse." Right out of the gate:

Of all of the many plagues Obama’s reign has unleashed upon America...

Come on, tell me that wasn't impressive.

...the way he and his TV acolytes have empowered stupid people to smugly share their lefty wisdom may be the most tiresome. Firmly resistant to facts, evidence, and truth, his fans have been liberated to unleash their numbing dumb without the shame at their own ignorance that once would have deterred them from sounding off. As a result, America becomes a little more annoying every time some aspiring assistant barista tweets out a link to a YouTube clip titled, “John Oliver TOTALLY DESTORYS racist Ben Carson!”...

There's culture war, and then there's culture total war, and Schlichter's approach here is, like that of Wildman and President Cruz, indiscriminate carpet-bombing. He rages that, because his enemies "can’t argue, they seek to silence," but instead of explaining silence how? he leaps for the throats of the "Millennial doofuses" because they "have crummy jobs, crushing student debt, and no future. They have zero money or fame..." Not like when he was a rich and famous kid! It's like Peter Boyle in Joe underwent a Flowers for Algernon transformation, then took a bunch of meth.

No one thinks this stuff is actually funny; it’s all about solidarity. You never hear real laughs on these political shows, just cheers of approval.

You'll laugh when Schlichter tells you to laugh -- like in his previous column, "Let’s All Laugh As Liberalism Commits Ritual Suicide On Campus" ("And we will sit back and point and laugh as the weak-willed, spineless liberal losers of academia abase themselves before their whimpering student bodies..."). But here's where it really gets weird --

I recently posted a column on a plan to destroy ISIS which involved actually destroying ISIS. One gentleman in the Washington Post pointed out some flaws in my ideas, I think incorrectly, but certainly fairly. This is called an “argument.” But the Jon Stewarties had to pipe up too. I don’t expect them to be retired Army colonels or War College graduates, but I do expect them to know some basic facts about the subject before weighing in. Yet their ignorance was no deterrent.

The "gentleman in the Washington Post" is to all appearances Daniel Drezner, who treated Schlichter's Wildman column as a serious proposal and politely offered a conclusion ("To put it gently, that’s a horrible assumption"). Maybe Schlichter was holding a gun on him.

So: Schlichter apparently regards his macho fantasy as the equivalent of a paper from the Army War College and, when people make fun of it, he fact-checks their jokes -- or rather alludes to facts against which he has, at some undisclosed location, checked and found the jokes wanting.

Schlichter calls to mind one of my old favorites, Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters. Peters does most of his fulminating on TV these days, alas, and I've missed his jacked-up columns. But Schlichter has come into his own and may serve as my go-to military lunatic now as we head toward Gulf War III.

CULTURE OF COMPLAINT.

The title -- "Sanders and Trump Have Risen from the Wreckage of a Broken Culture" -- makes it look like yet another of those "I literally can't tell them apart" comparisons of the share-the-wealth Senator to the TV bully-boy. But National Review's David French doesn't explain the rise of the two candidates or what it means, and I'm not sure he was really trying. He mainly talks culture war. That's his usual hobby horse and it's even lamer than usual, but in an instructive way. He begins:

Pop culture can normalize radicalism with astonishing speed. Conservatives have long known and lamented the truth of Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher’s famous declaration: “Let me write the songs of a nation — I don’t care who writes its laws.” Artists and the media shape our cultural environment so profoundly that their progressivism has become the default, the air we breathe. Wherever the progressive current flows, the people will drift.

Taking his own Zhdanovite POV for granted -- that liberals have the Billboard 100 while conservatives have Congressional majorities -- I'm not sure what this political operative has to complain about. If you're getting the laws you want, why do you care what the art looks like?

Since its birth, the modern conservative movement has fought bravely to create its own counterculture, in hopes that at least some people could drift the right way, and eventually the current would be reversed.

"Fought bravely to create its own counterculture"? What could that possibly mean? Have they been woodshedding or workshopping their counterculture in a black-box theater at the Heritage Foundation? Before attempting to explain, French bitches about how hard it is for such as he to make how-you-call-the Culture:

But it’s impossible in one generation to either replace or match liberal-dominated institutions that have existed, in some instances, since before the founding of the nation. One doesn’t simply create a conservative Harvard out of thin air. Hollywood is the product of generations of artistic effort. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast media are collectively immense institutions, governed by a set of shared assumptions and located in geographic regions where dissent is rarely heard.

This makes no sense. If you don't like Harvard, why not build up Bob Jones University and other Bible schools into the academia that you claim to desire? If you don't like Hollywood, why not make your own indie flicks? People do it all the time. And haven't you guys been telling us that the Liberal Dinosaur MSM is dead as the dodo, and pumping out conservative newspapers, magazines, and TV networks for literally decades? But French goes on whining:

The Right, by contrast, hasn’t truly had time to build institutions, so it has built celebrities.

OH COME ON.

It’s easier to make one man famous than it is to make Harvard --

Oh, well, if it was easier I don't see what else you could have done

-- so conservative culture is dominated mainly by a series of personalities, and those personalities are often defined and exalted not so much by the quality of their distinct ideas but by personal charisma, with particular emphasis on anger and “fearlessness.”

Long story short: The dog ate their manifesto, so instead of building a counterculture they built a living pantheon of radio shouters, bow-tie dicks, and other assholes, and now one of them is the Republican Presidential front-runner and it's someone else's fault.

... As William Butler Yeats wrote at another time of existential crisis, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” We’re left with a world where “the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When a culture breaks, so does a nation.

Buddy, you don't know what culture is. Nor counter-culture. Those movies, books, videos, songs, etc. that you wish were promoting your values? You can have them -- all you gotta do is make them yourself. Don't waste time squawking about how Big Culture is against you -- or go ahead if it makes you feel better; avant gardists and punk rockers did it all the time, when they were the new kids on the block. But they also did work. That's the only way anything gets done. If Jasper Johns or Patti Smith just bitched about how they ought to be the next big thing, raised a bunch of money off that, and didn't use that money to make art but instead used it to bitch some more about how they ought to be the next big thing, you never would have heard about them.

I mean, holding the back of your hand to your forehead and moaning like Dr. Smith on Lost in Space isn't getting you anywhere -- unless you goal is to get some saps to pay you good money for it, in which case mission accomplished.

UPDATE. As is traditional at alicublog, comments are excellent. Yestreblanksy gives us the full provenance of that Fletcher quote, and it's so much richer than the looka-me-I-read-books use French put it to. MichaelNewsham posits:

If only there was a vast entertainment complex producing its own movies and TV shows, owning its own studios and broadcast and cable network, owned by a right-wing billionaire who also had an enormous chain of newspapers to help push his conservative productions without fear of the liberal MSM.

As I've been saying for years, Murdoch knows better than to throw good money after bad.