If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.And what sort of discussion would that be?
Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.
But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:
You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:
The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.
It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.And your co-workers will nod thoughtfully and say, "Boy, that Obamacare's pretty socialist, huh?"
You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers, but step one is to be a part of the discussion. And step two is eventually taking over the reins of pop culture ourselves.This is the "Step 3: Profit!" of all time.
We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?
Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:
What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.
UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:
We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.
"Boys"?
