ZHDANOV NEVER LEFT.

This pops up in the middle of a Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke rant about how PC is intimidating professors and you liberals who think Ted Cruz looks like Joseph McCarthy are actually The Real Joseph McCarthy:

But the truth is that if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair.

It seems never to have occurred to Cooke that if his analogy is sound, then The Crucible is already about speech codes etc. -- because it's not a news report but a work of art, which pertains to the universal, and resonates with anyone who has experienced mass hysteria and its attendant repression in whatever form. Other people know that; that's why the play is always getting revived. Audiences get the connection. Cooke might get a theater company together to alterna-stage The Crucible to look like Oleanna if he likes.

I suspect that Cooke's not interested in universals, though: What he wants is an already-famous property that's about how college students are oppressing conservatism -- or, failing that, to get people to believe that the dead author of the famous property was really a rightwinger and just didn't know it. You know, like they do with George Orwell and many others, to avoid the hard work of making (or even seriously engaging with) any art themselves.

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg tells his colleague: You say McCarthyism like it's a bad thing.

THE HACKMAID'S TALE.

The latest surge of Poors-Must-Learn-Morals-from-Their-Betters gush, inspired by the new Robert Putnam book but rooted in traditional Marriage Makes You Rich boilerplate, is best known by its David Brooks effusion, covered here. Since then we've had Ross Douthat and all manner of idiots shaking the scold-stick on this subject. But leave it to Megan McArdle to accelerate the stupid like a Hadron Collider:

There is one place this change might come from: Hollywood. Entertainment is a surprisingly powerful venue for articulating social norms, and if Hollywood decided that it had a social responsibility to promote stable families and changed its story lines accordingly, that might actually do some good. 

Yes, the Artist Formerly Known as Jane Galt wants private enterprise to pitch in with some free propaganda.

I'm not talking about sticking a few propaganda story lines into Very Special Episodes of some sitcom, which wouldn't do a darn thing. Rather, I'm saying that if Hollywood actually believed that married two-parent families were overwhelmingly optimal, that would naturally shape what they wrote, in a way that would in turn probably shape what Americans believe, and do.

Hang on -- this suggests that Hollywood product currently militates against marriage. Is that so? I must have missed the successful sitcoms "How I Met Your Baby-Momma" and "My Three Sons (from Separate Mothers)." And looking at last year's top-grossing films, I'm having a hard time figuring how they could have shoehorned marriage into movies about wizards and superheroes; maybe they could have had Katniss from the Hunger Games movies falter until a priest rushes in to marry her to some guy, like Popeye deriving strength from spinach.

Of course, McArdle's offer isn't serious --

But this is an inherently socially conservative message, and Hollywood is about the furthest thing you can name from socially conservative -- our entertainment industry tends to send socially conservative messages only accidentally, as it did with "16 and Pregnant." And there is nearly as much social distance between David Brooks and your average Hollywood show runner as there is between David Brooks and the kids whose lives he wants to change.

-- it's just more ressentiment for the regular crowd, who sometimes need help believing that social-net-shredding policies have less to do with the parlous state of the poor than evil Hollyweird cokewhores.

UPDATE. Hang on, asks Meanie-meanie, tickle a person in comments: "Hollywood who? Or is that a surname? Joe Hollywood from Detroit? Or maybe Frank Hollywood from Miami?" Tsk, Meanie -- it's a metonym for the cultural apparat -- you know, what such people used to call "Jews." Or maybe McArdle doesn't know this, and imagines herself handing out Operation Hitching Post slide decks to a bunch of guys who look like Robert Loggia, wear their shirts unbuttoned to the plexus, chomp fancy cigars, and produce all the movies.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

This is all I want to hear about fucking llamas anymore, thanks.
•  Dear God -- Ross Douthat reviews Boyhood:

“Boyhood” does a very good job of offering grist for multiple interpretations of its family drama: There are people who watch the movie and come away feeling like Linklater is passing a harsh (maybe too harsh?) judgment on the Patricia Arquette-played mother’s romantic choices, people who feel like the movie is a portrait of her overall parental success in spite of the odds, and people (like me) who read the portrait of the Ethan Hawke-played dad as a case study in how our culture tends lets slacker-ish, slow-to-grow-up men basically Have It All at the expense of their progeny and the women in their lives. But then what you wait for, or at least what I waited for, is to see how Mason interprets things, how the mess around him in his childhood affects his relationships with both parents as he rises toward adulthood, how his desire not to repeat their mistakes or his tendency to fall into the same traps might manifest itself, how the tension and difficulty that he experiences passively as a child will translate into the actions he takes and mistakes he makes as a teenager and young man. 

And that’s what the last hour doesn’t offer. The conflicts ebb, Mason’s family (parents and sister) flatten and diminish, everyone suddenly gets nicer, and the sense of dread and dislocation disappears with nothing dramatically interesting to replace it.

In other words: He wanted a movie about how single-parent families are ungodly and a social drain, preferably one where all the principals realize as much and enter covenant marriages (and maybe all the abortions they ever had go in slow-motion reverse like at the end of The Theory of Everything), and Linklater didn't give it to him, so the movie is a failure. Is there a single conservative left who is not a Child of Zhdanov? (My much better Boyhood review here.)

•  You know I offer this video with all affection -- the now-late Mr. Nimoy singing about Bilbo Baggins:

This is how I will remember him: a serious person who nonetheless was able to give himself over to the ridiculous, and thus made us all a little happier. (Oh yeah -- he was a very good Mustafa Mond.) (Oh yeah, and this -- a story I didn't know before today, but not a shock.) (Oh and yeah also, the story FMguru tells in comments about Nimoy taking a stand on voice-casting for Sulu and Uhuru.)

•  Jonah Goldberg has a post about how liberalism is "exhausted" because MSNBC isn't tearing up the ratings. Samples:

As Josh Kraushaar of National Journal recently observed, Barack Obama has successfully moved his party to the left but has failed utterly to bring the rest of the country with him.

Guess they just voted for him twice because he was black.

If you still think Obama has generous coattails, ask Rahm Emanuel for a second opinion.

Many voters deserted the socialist Emanuel for the arch-conservative Chuy Garcia.

Contrary to myth, Fox (where I am a contributor) is in fact an actual news network, albeit with prime-time opinion shows.

No comment.

CULTURE WAR FOR DUMMIES: AN ONGOING SERIES.

Haven't looked in for a while on Acculturated, the culture-war jump school for would-be Douthats that has given me much pleasure in the past. There's currently a post-Grammys piece there by Mark Judge, the artist formerly known as Mark Gauvreau Judge, beginning thus:

Don’t make Sam Smith gay. 

That is to say, don’t make Sam Smith a representative of the gay community and a symbol for all things gay.

See, Judge hates it when people see sexual orientation -- that is, when gay people recognize gay people -- and also when people see color -- like when black people tell Iggy Azalea to fuck off. It all goes back to a youthful trauma:

When I was in college, the British duo the Pet Shop Boys were key contributors to the soundtrack of my young life. The Pet Shop Boys are gay.

[Blink. Blink.]

When I heard their first album Please in 1986, I felt that delirious swoon of falling in love with a piece of musical art...

I followed the Boys for years, but something started bothering me: they increasingly became known as a gay band and not just a band. Great songs like “King’s Cross,” “Liberation,” and “It Always Comes as a Surprise” were subordinated to the larger theme of homosexuality. The Pet Shop Boys were not brilliant songwriters who could touch the hearts or people all over the world—they were “queering pop.” It was like only selling Van Morrison’s music in Irish pubs...

I was a suburban kid at a Catholic university who occasionally snuck a look at Playboy. If I was to listen to the journalists, and the political club goers, and the subculture police, I would have turned myself away. Because I wasn’t the target audience.

The Gay Gay Gay took my babies away! The subculture police with their phallic nightsticks tried to drive Judge out of the disco, just as the black radicals tried to spoil his appreciation of Motown, I suppose. I'm surprised he survived with his perfectly-unexceptional tastes intact.

This is a high point of the issue, though you might also enjoy Acculturated's "Celebrities Behaving Well Award" nominations, including "Taylor Swift for reaching out to one of her adoring fans to give her real, thoughtful, honest advice about an unrequited love," "Kate Middleton for maintaining a certain level of class and decorum in the pop-culture sartorial scene," and "Justin Timberlake for his unprecedented awe and humility during his recent visit to Israel" (by which I assume they mean he didn't come onstage wearing a BDS shirt and a keffiyeh). "The winner of our contest will be announced on Monday, February 23," Acculturated says, "and we will award their charity with a $2,500 donation." $2,500! Dunno who's giving this ad-free site its wingnut welfare, but if they can come up with that kind of scratch  for a contest, I'd be happy to explain to their readers (for a reasonable fee) how my heart was broken the day Camryn Manheim became a fat activist.

UPDATE. In comments, tigrismus encapsulates Judge's problem: "He gets to decide what's universal, and quelle surprise, it's him."

ZHDANOV'S CHILDREN.

I like Clint Eastwood movies, therefore I want to see American Sniper, therefore I hope it's good. But I have to say, the political ravings about the movie are pretty annoying. Like a lot of people, I thought Dennis Jett's review based on the trailer at New Republic was stupid; but, as I've pointed out before, conservatives do this sort of thing all the time and no one cares -- because no one expects them to treat films or any other works of art as anything but propaganda. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:

I’ll reserve any serious comment on the film until after I have seen it – I guess I’m just not up to the standards of The New Republic –

Haw haw.

– but whether or not American Sniper is “pro-war,” it appears to be resolutely and proudly pro-soldier. And that is a giant factor in moviegoers’ enthusiastic embrace of it. Note that American Sniper isn’t afraid to showcase the painful and difficult parts of military life for soldiers and their families, and my suspicion is that audiences love that part, too – because showing the pain makes it honest. Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper and company don’t want to tell you only one part of Chris Kyle’s story. They want to paint as complete a picture as they can in the running time that they have. If you made the story about the battlefront, without the home front, or vice versa, you would only be telling about half the story.

So in the very next breath, Geraghty reviews the film he didn't see -- though I suppose "serious comment" is the crossed fingers behind his back. (This is the sort of thing I did as a kid when I wanted to pretend I had seen some big movie of the moment. I wonder if adults do this anywhere but in the pages of rightwing magazines.)

Geraghty also quotes TruthRevolt rageclown Kurt Schlichter on the subject and it's every bit the table-pounder you'd expect, with yips about "the narrative" and Michael Moore Is Fat. (Set the Hot Tub Time Machine to 2004!) Best part:

Next, chunky iconoclast Seth Rogen weighed in with his observation that American Sniper reminded him of the fake Nazi propaganda film at the end of Inglorious Bastards. What a scumbag. This came after we conservatives stood with him when the Norks threatened him over The Interview – even to the extent of watching his piece of garbage on VOD – while his hero Barack Obama whined about people actually exercising their free speech rights.

First, this supports my perception that the only part of arts journalism conservatives genuinely relate to is gossip columns. They don't know what art is, but they sure know who did what to whom! Second, it figures that Schlichter would be enraged that Rogen didn't repay the debt Schlichter imagines he owes "we conservatives" for yelling about North Korea in blogs and switching off porn for a couple of hours to watch this bro-com. Everything is politics to these people; movies, plays, novels, and choc-o-mut ice creams have no value for them except as symbols on a bloody flag to wave at their base. Sometimes I think when they relax at home in front of the TV, they actually watch a placard that says HOME ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCT (CONSERVATIVE).

Hopefully by the time I get to the theater they'll be yelling about some painter who made Jesus look bad or something, and I can watch my movie in peace.