STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Kurt Schlichter at Breitbart.com:

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"? 

CULTURE WAR IS TOO IMPORTANT TO LEAVE TO THE CULTURE WARRIORS.

I've mentioned before that Armond White had a good record as a legit if insane film critic before he joined  National Review. I suspect they hired him because he occasionally says mean things about liberals (either that or there's a reeeaally big Spielberg fan over there that I don't know about), but the readership seems not to be responding well to him. I think that's because White is not sort of doctrinaire doofus they usually go for  -- not like Jay Nordlinger, for example, and his "this is really a lovely scherzo in Beethoven's Ninth, it reminds me of how liberals love Castro" horseshit. White is on a mission, and unlike his colleagues he doesn't appear to have read it from a telegram from the High Command.

For example, while NR's Jesus freaks were all in spasms about The Giver, because it's supposed to be anti-abortion or something, White gave them "The Giver: Pseudo-Rebellion for Conservative Sheep." The comments to that one are lovely (sample: "I'm going to see it tonight. Cal Thomas recommended it and I value his opinion on any subject. This movie reviewer? Never heard of him").

Who knows what they'll make of White's last few efforts: First, he describes 2004 as "the year film culture broke" because it saw "the media’s lynch-mob excommunication of Mel Gibson and his film The Passion of the Christ, soon followed by the Cannes Film Festival’s ordination of Michael Moore’s anti–G. W. Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11." So far so compatible, but White works up a rich froth that might have even the regular punters backing away from the podium:

It was moral vandalism, sullying ideas and totems sacred to many. Such a fundamental offense devastated civilized behavior in ways many still have not realized. It drove a wedge between the public and the elites who make movies; the very ground we walked upon as enlightened, cultured people was scorched like Ground Zero at the World Trade Center... 

From 2004 on, even “entertainment” movies were made and received with deleterious political and moral bias.

This is loony and conspiratorial even by culture-warrior standards, but wait, there's more: Later White listed "20 signs of a broken film culture," a list of entartete kunst including some films I'll bet National Review readers like, including The Dark Knight ("used the Batman myth to undermine heroism, overturn social mores, and embrace anarchy"), Knocked Up ("Judd Apatow’s comedy of bad manners attacked maturity and propriety"), and Lincoln ("Spielberg succumbs to Tony Kushner’s limousine-liberal cynicism to valorize Obama-era political chicanery"). Comments to that one so far are also delightful ("How many times are they going to see the comments and realize we don't like him?").

There are all kinds of ways to look at this, but the big point for me is that people who are serious about the arts -- not serious about using the arts as a way to spread the usual dreary propaganda, but about the arts themselves -- are not just capable of surprising readers, but extremely likely to do so. And that's terrific. I hope National Review surprises me and hangs onto White so he can rave away like this on their dime. Who knows, maybe one or two of them will be improved by his example.

CULTURE CLUBFOOT. TRex at Firedoglake (get well soon, dearest Jane) points out rightwing superhag Mona Charen's most recent exhortation to the Kulture Kops -- this one a little more forward looking than most:

When I travel around the country is when people say well you know how do we effect the country, how do we effect the culture, I will frequently say rather than have your kids be business men, teachers, lawyer—many other things—have them either be journalists or movie makers. That's where we have nothing in the culture…

Mona, Mona, Mona. That's not how it works.

Funnily enough, I've been reading a rather poorly written but still fascinating book on a subject of relevance to the topic. A Great, Silly Grin by Humphrey Carpenter is about British satire in the 1960s -- Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the magazine Private Eye, and that lot.

If you're familiar with late 20th century Brit humor high and/or low, you know that it was all over the place in terms of the usual political labels -- Labour got poked as much as the Tories did, and there's nothing a white English comic liked better than to pretend to be one of those silly African despots. ("Ah'm already consolidatin' mah effective position," said John Bird, grotesquely impersonating Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, "as de first Negro Prime Minister o' Great Britain, an' shall soon be rushin' on to de assumin' o' even more gigantic powers as de Queen.")

Obviously these people were not so much ideologues as wreckers -- in fact, Malcolm Muggeridge denounced them as mere tyros for whom all "authority is a schoolmaster who, when his back is turned, can be pelted with paper darts and mocked with mimicry and funny face." Private Eye's Christopher Booker said he "gave up Liberalism as soon as it became fashionable," and his colleague Richard Ingrams alternately described himself as a Tory and as an anarchist.

If you pay any attention at all to the history of art, or to common sense, you will notice a problem with Charen's marching orders for heartland America to produce rightwing "culture." She thinks creativity is something the powerful can order up as easily as room service -- "Get young Jennings to produce us some satire, there's a good darkie!" She has no idea that culture is not created by sub-committees of political action groups, but by the sort of obstreperous, irreverent, fart-blowing people that she and her fellow winger dweebs would normally cross the street to avoid.

I've said it many times before and I will say it many times more: these pricks say they are at war for the "culture," but what they really want is to replace all vestiges of culture wih propaganda -- which is the only thing they know how to produce.

HITSVILLE G.O.P. As we have seen, the trend in culture war is toward the managerial rather than the militaristic: while some benighted souls still crudely bash the impure, contenting themselves with condemnation of entartete Kunst, the new breed posit a conservative aesthetic, cite as positive examples current works that seem to fit its guidelines, and bid artists supply more of the same, please.

Even the old culture-warrior Maggie Gallagher is getting with the program -- though she can only follow it up to a point.

In September Gallagher was encouraged by the rightwing doc In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed, calling it "The must-see movie of the season for zeitgeist watchers." Even this pull-quote did not launch Face of Evil into box-office heaven, but Gallagher remains confident that films like this represent "an unserved market" for people like herself.

In her latest take, Gallagher suggests that Hollywood's current obsession with schmutz is tapped out. "Gay sex, or sympathetic portrayals of pedophilia may still win critical accolades, but the buzz is no longer big box office," she writes. One stops at this: when were guy-on-guy and guy-on-kid films big box office? But Gallagher is on a roll:

Every human heart hungers to be part of a story, to take the disconnected dots of human existence and weave them into a meaningful drama. Yet millions of Americans never, ever see anything of the great aspirational stories of their lives reflected in America's premier storytelling genre, the movies.

Americans are an overwhelmingly religious people, for example, yet the drama of sin and salvation, of divine grace and purpose, is conspicuously absent. Millions of American men and women strive to connect sex, love, marriage and babies into a coherent story for their own life. And yet the particular intense kind of eros that can be experienced only by those so committed to such a connection is almost never glimpsed on television or film. Perhaps Hollywood does not even know it exists.

Now, by changing very few words -- maybe by making "religious" into "spiritual," or denuding the second graf of words reflecting Gallagher's highly particular POV on marriage -- this could be made to resemble the longings of many indie filmmakers and critics. How often have you been implored, in some small corner of Entertainment Weekly or a local free paper, to attend some earnest film about ordinary people, because this is the kind of movie Hollywood doesn't make but should? From Forbidden Games to Sounder to In the Bedroom to The Secret Lives of Dentists runs a thin but unceasing river of smallish films whose makers' point of pride is their relevance to real life.

Hollywood of course prefers noisy pop sludge, and has since it began fighting to lure audiences away from the quotidian dramas of early television, pretty much. If there have been more tits and taboos in the cinema since the MPAA went to letter-coding in 1968, that's because tits and taboos were things you couldn't get from the idiot box in those days.

A variety of factors, cable among them, have had their impact, but movies are still something you have to get out to the house and pay for, and Hollywood moviemakers still tend toward steroidal entertainments as a means of luring us to them. If you want to see ordinary Joes and Janes hashing out Life As It Is Lived, you're asking for niche entertainment. You can get it, of course, at the local art house or on IFC.

So Maggie has a point, but she also has an agenda. The strategy of playing the noble outsider has served conservatives well in recent years -- which is why, even as they control nearly every part of our Government, so many of them still make a decent living bemoaning their oppression by the ACLU. In the Gallagher version, Hollywood is not just something that evolved out of her liking, but a corrupt institution ripe for reform. And she is not content to watch the stuff on PAX or wait for Mel Gibson's latest Romanist epic -- she demands that Hollywood become "the next domino to fall" in the march of freedom.

So in the last ditch, the old Culture Warrior reverts to fixed bayonets. Still, she has played the Culture Manager role better than I expected. The only question is, why does she bother? The multiplexes are liberally stocked with feature-length cartoons that will not offend her, nor any breeder's or brat's, tender sensibilities -- and some of them are even approved by the Central Committee. There is also, as she approvingly notes, a strong Christian counterculture ready to keep her in Veggie Tales and Billy Ray Cyrus till kingdom come.

I think it's because she's not just looking for something good she can watch. She wants us all to watch it. And like it, and tell her we like it. For Managers as well as Warriors, perhaps, the prefix is nowhere near as important as the root. Culture is just another domino, insignificant but for the pleasure to be had in making it fall.

THE MILLENARIANIST MAKEOVER. A new Wizbang jeremiad:

Our country skates on thin ice today wherein that thin line separates our economy and security (domestic and foreign) from very serious trouble. As Kevin noted earlier, some believe Republicans are leaderless while Democrats are out of control. Others believe Democrats are leaderless while Republicans are irrelevant. Whichever is the case, an earthquake is coming. Evidence of it is in the popular culture where apocalyptic stories permeate television and books. (Hell, even bomb shelters are on the rise (pardon the metaphor).) One wonders if anyone in Washington is actually paying attention.

At about the same time, Mary Eberstadt pens an Irving Kristol appreciation, in which she praises his and his aciolytes skills at culture-warring:

That was how he could speak with such authority about "their turbulent sexuality, their drug addiction, their desperate efforts to invent new 'lifestyles,' and their popular music, at once Dionysiac and mournful." I remember those words leaping from the page upon reading them years later. In New York in the 1980s, new wave and punk rock were still reigning but on the way out, hip-hop and techno on the way in, and like everyone else I'd spent plenty of time slumming in clubs and other waystations of the popular culture, imbibing nihilism. Yet here was Irving, a 65-year-old bookworm who probably couldn't have found CBGB's if he were dropped off in front of it on a Friday night (and certainly wouldn't have gone in if he had), managing a decade later in just a few words to speak more truth about the scene than any of its itinerant habitués

Thus Kristol alerted us to the dangers of nightclubs.

As he put it in one 1993 essay that made waves called "My Cold War," what saddened him above all were "the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society--a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. .  .  . It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers."

Thus Kristol alerted us to the nightmare of the Clinton years. Also, promiscuous sex and so forth. In other words, the usual Kulturkampf bag of tricks, which aren't selling so well as they once did -- Eberstadt admits that "today, of course, many on the right as well as the left would drive social conservatives from the fold if they could." Well, he got rich off it anyway; R.I.P. and so long, suckers!

It may just be, though, that the millenarianist style is getting a makeover. You don't hear Tea Partiers like the Wizbang crew talking much about how techno and blowjobs are going to kill us all. Their signs and portents are kids singing about Obama and Obama holding a nice smile. They insist that the Common People are as worried about this as they are, as proven by their hunger for "apocalyptic stories" (they can't be talking about Left Behind, can they? Maybe they mean Cougar Town) and bomb shelters as promoted by the Ole Perfesser.

The Get-Ready Man is always with us, but now he has handlers, and they change his wardrobe as times require.

UPDATE: Related: "Is the Left Wing Hoping for Violence?" Or if you prefer, "RELATED: Is the Left-Wing Hoping for Violence?"

UPDATE 2: The Ole Perfesser tells his credulous flock that Iran has plunged us into a new "duck and cover" era. Along with offering the rubes new justification for the shivering panic that is their comfort zone, the Perfesser may believe he is turning The Atomic Cafe to his advantage in a daring culture war raid. This schtick is obviously in its developmental stage, but if he gets any encouragement I expect the Perfesser will next start calling Hillary Clinton Dr. Strangelove, which ought to tickle the many burned-out hippies in the Movement.

NOT SINCE "THE DUKES OF HAZZARD"... Pajamas Media TV critic S.T. Karnick:

To be sure, in some ways ["Hell on Wheels"] pays obeisance to modern political and cultural clichés about the nation’s past. Predictably, the United States in 1865 is shown as dirty and corrupt, and life for many is depicted as short, brutal, ugly, dirty, and meaningless. The railroad encampment is a cesspool rife with drunkenness, violence, and sexual license. Although no longer slaves, all the blacks we see are impoverished manual laborers.

So: a documentary, then?

Fortunately, Hell on Wheels producers Joe and Tony Gayton don’t leave it at that. Instead, they convey numerous story elements that contradict the cynical contemporary view of the nation’s history in very interesting and important ways. In the very first episode, for example, common views of the history of American race relations and the origins of the War Between the States are subverted. A northerner is cruel to the former slaves who are working on the railroad, whereas the protagonist, a southerner and former slaveholder, is sympathetic to them and treats them fairly. Later we find out that even though he fought for the Confederacy, the Southerner had already freed his own slaves and suffered privation in order to pay them wages for their services.

Ah -- so,  more of a Freaky Friday sort of thing.

Similarly, Sherman’s March and the Union’s conduct of the war in general are depicted as vicious and unconscionable, whereas the Southern cause is characterized as a matter of honor, which the characters — who would know, of course — clearly accept as true...

Ex-slaves in the North, by contrast, are shown as living under awful conditions that make a mockery of the Emancipation Proclamation... Ferguson foreshadows the argument that the black educator and political leader Booker T. Washington would make near the end of the century: that blacks shouldn’t wait around for political solutions requiring equal treatment from whites, but could only ensure their own betterment through hard work, competition, and entrepreneurship...

Having obliterated the southern half of the nation, the government’s activities in the postwar era seem largely confined to displacing Indians, killing Indians, and seeking out corrupt ways of amassing wealth for the politically connected few...

Readers, I haven't seen this show. Is it really the glowing tribute to the Lost Cause Karnick portrays? Because if so, I think America might be ready for my contrarian take on "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with Ian McShane as a tortured, foul-mouthed Simon Legree.

Even outside of the Southron stuff, the review is full if wonders, e.g.:

The real villain here is clearly government. As Cole’s entreaty indicates, the white people in the railroad encampment want nothing but for the Indians to leave them alone, and vice versa, but the government is intent on forcing them into separate worlds.

Also, in the machinations of the Republican-enabled railroad barons of the Gilded Age Karnick finds "strong parallels to modern-day congressional Democrats."

Well, you go to culture war with the culture warriors you've got, I guess. (h/t Dan Coyle)

UPDATE. "I have no idea about the show's historic accuracy," says Tod Westlake, a fan of the show, in comments, "but it's defintely entertaining. I believe this might have something to do with a literary technique known as 'irony.' I had to look it up, myself." On this head, DocAmazing recommends "Kung Fu," the old TV show about how rural Westerners loved Asians once they got to know/had their bullies beaten up by them. Me, I'm wondering if I had Once Upon a Time in the West all wrong. Maybe Frank and the weaselly railroad builder were the heroes. I mean, what did Harmonica produce?

THEY DON'T MAKE 'EM LIKE THEY USED TO. National Review's latest list of "conservative movies" reminds me of their first such adventure in 1994. Back then the magazine still employed respectable arts correspondents like D. Keith Mano and John Simon, and was less inclined than now toward identifying works of art by politics to brace up casual conservative consumers of culture.

But we had a hint of where National Review was going in 1993, when James Bowman proclaimed Rush Limbaugh "The Leader of the Opposition" in a cover story. "To a surprising number of conservatives," wrote Bowman, "there is a solemn appropriateness about Reagan's passing the torch to the 42-year-old former disc jockey and college dropout." Just so. After their long Reagan-Bush summer, the unthinkable ascendancy of Bill Clinton shocked right-wingers into recognizing that they hadn't destroyed their enemies with tax cuts and sunny patriotism, and they needed new ways to get the punters back on their side.

So they began to heed Pat Buchanan's call to "take back our culture" -- though, unlike Buchanan, they didn't expect to do it with National Guardsmen, but by appropriating existing cultural artifacts in their cause. At the writing of the 1994 list, the Gingrich uprising was still fresh, conservative populism was in season, and some of the brethren may have felt as if the tide could be turned back in their favor if they could just make conservatism look cool by associating with works of pop art.

We see what National Review has come to since then: you certainly don't look to it for serious arts criticism, but for essays on how Adam Sandler movies promote family values it's your best bet. In between imputations of liberal fascism, Jonah Goldberg yammers about the relationship of "Battlestar Galactica" to the War on Terror. Junior operatives are sent hunting after conservative messages in other TV shows.

And though the new NR list is graced by contributions from heavy thinkers as well as hacks, it's remarkably dumbed-down from the original. The 1994 list of 100 movies included films by John Ford and Wajda, Cavalier's Therese, There Was a Crooked Man, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, etc. These were in most cases woefully misapprehended by the editors, but at least they showed some interest in film history. The oldest films on the current list are 1984's Red Dawn and Ghostbusters. The Lives of Others, a favorite of William F. Buckley, is the lone art-house entry. Most of the honorees were originally released after right-wingers started mining movies for affirmation and have already been through the conservetkult's cultural appropriation mill, e.g. The Dark Knight, United 93, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, A Simple Plan, etc.

I don't blame laziness so much as a weary awareness, after all these years of similar work, that they are no longer breaking new ground. Real critics would be excited by any opportunity to reexamine film culture, but propagandists are more easily bored. As culture-war detail is only a part-time job for most of them, why re-invent the wheel? So they grabbed what was handy and did a quick, web-friendly Top Whatever list. Later on they'll get someone to write about the supply-side economic message in Confessions of a Shopaholic, and if it plays they can use it again later.

I notice that National Review is again calling Limbaugh the Leader of the Opposition. This suggests a switch on the old saying: If the first time was farce, what does that make the second time?

ANN ALTHOUSE DOES BATTLE WITH... THE ONION. I shit you not.

At first glance this satire appears to be vigorously pro-free-speech, but I suspect that it's only pro-liberal speech. Maybe my suspicion is wrong, but I'd find The Onion a lot funnier if its satire caused its readers a little pain, instead of nudging them to laugh at people they already hold in contempt.

No doubt she would find it funnier, if by "find it funnier" you mean "howl 'what a hoot!' and point at doll wearing 'liberal elite' sign."

Althouse previously yelled at comedians whom she found "traitors to your craft" because they weren't making enough Obama jokes to suit her. (At that time she also called me "dumb or dishonest" for referring to her as a rightblogger, and probably thinks I mostly leave her alone these days because I fear her stinging wit.)

Thank God America has a Truth Squad at the ready to explain why this so-called "humor" isn't funny!

RELATED: The Truth Squad also finds that a planned Comedy Central Jesus show might be funny, but is the act of "cowards" and thus has no place on a comedy channel.

You know, I actually do miss Bush -- when he was President, they told us we could show our patriotism just by going shopping. Now, to show our love of country, we're expected not to laugh at "the kind of comedy that makes you comfortable" -- as opposed to the comedy stylings of, say, Andrew Klavan, with which we doubt most Comedy Central customers would be comfortable, though not for ideological reasons. A grim business, this War on Whatchamacallit.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is bitching about the fucking Machete trailer.

Oh, and no, just for the record, I don't think this is actually inciting violence. But that's a lot more slack than liberals cut, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck. And they don't even wield machetes.

If it were anyone else in the universe (except Althouse) I'd say he had to be joking.

Between this and the Michael Moriarty Hitler movie, it's clearer than ever: With these guys, the culture war is a war on culture.

A RAD NEW WAY TO STOP THE GAY. Family Scholars is sponsored by the wingnutty Institute for American Values. Its mission is to get citizens to marry and procreate unless they're gay, in which case forget marriage because Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children.

A popular favorite! But alas, now that hot Republican gay sex is pretty much an American tradition, the IAV's kind of culture war yap isn't moving units the way it used to. Worse, evil liberals are making fun of them.

"In today’s NYTs, the columnist Frank Rich gets to call me ugly names again," gay marriage obstructor David Blankenhorn wails, because of a connection to luggage-lifter George Rekers which Blankenhorn says is totally bogus. Why Rekers' name appeared in a "lawyer-generated document" attached to his testimony in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger Prop 8 trial, says Blankenhorn, "I haven't a clue."

That's what they all say. Probably Blankenhorn is just sore that his "expert" Perry v. Schwarzenegger testimony turned out to be a hot mess ("Boies went after Blankenhorn’s credibility immediately, noting that he apparently had only one peer-reviewed article to his credit and that was a thesis on a labor dispute between cabinetmaker unions in Britain") and, as you might expect from someone in his line of work, he's projecting his anxieties onto others.

In the face of such disaster, Family Scholars is pursuing new approaches. As these people cannot engender new members and so must recruit, they are trying to make their pitches more kid-friendly.

Blankenhorn’s fellow Values vulture Maggie Gallagher runs over to National Review to pimp a "mind-blowingly new" experiment from their culture-war labs:

An article on the travails of... sperm donor babies.

You think I'm kidding? Get a load of "Taboos and the New Voiceless Americans":

Gay couples are having children. Single women are having children. It’s just that we, the children, haven’t been empowered to vocalize our issues yet. But just wait, the monsoon is coming. All you adults get so mad and upset demanding you have the right to marriage and biological children because you want what everyone else has. Well- us kids want what everyone else has too (a mother and a father). And we’re pissed we’ve been denied them.

The big twist in this saga is that, in addition to being an entitled drama-queen, authoress "Alana S." isn't strictly heterosexual! Or at least she wasn't. "I’ve had crushes on women that have swallowed me whole," she informs her (now undoubtedly uncomfortable, whatever their politics) readers. But then one fine day (wavy lines, lap dissolve):

I used to date them, until one woman I was dating demanded to know why I didn’t want to get more serious. “I just don’t see the point in getting too serious with a woman because I want to marry someone I can have kids with,” is what I told her (anticipation of motherhood is a defining point in my personality). She got really sad for a second (lesbians hate bi women), then it occurred to her that she knew something I maybe didn’t, “You know Alana… you don’t have to have a man in your life to have children.” Oh God, I thought, there’s no way I can continue this.

And this is where the gay menace comes in: In addition to hating bi women, lesbians want to perpetuate the cycle of dadlessness that has left Alana S. a broken husk of a woman. Read deets & weep!

But you know what I am afraid to tell people? I’m afraid to tell them that my dad was a sperm donor. To me, that is creepy. To me, that sounds disgusting. To me, there is something wrong with that. It embarrasses me. So for the most part, I don’t tell anyone. I tell them my dad is dead.

I would be weeping real tears for Ms. S. (rather than my current tears of laughter) except, by a strange coincidence, my dad actually did die when I was little. And oh, how very sad it was. Maybe I should use it to both self-aggrandizing and political effect: "My old man died because we didn't have national health care! Well, not really, but -- boo hoo hoo hoo! On Father's Day I made a card for my creepy uncle! There was no one in the house to tell me there'd never be a center fielder like Tris Speaker, or that my hair was gay! Support National Health Care!"

What made Blankenhorn, Gallagher, and the rest of the kampfers run with this? Maybe they think it's modern. Alana S. does suggest that she made it with chicks, which will get the guys at the Promise Keepers meetings interested. And when she goes on and on about how homosexuals have it easy compared to her, she refers to "my old friends at Tranny Shack," and Lady Gaga.

That ought to get the kids rallying to the anti-gay-marriage cause! Until the inevitable unmasking, when we find out Alana S. is just Ben Domenech in a dress.

NOTES ON THE CULTURE WAR. Big Hollywood:

Add one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News: Oscar the Grouch.

Oh, wait, it gets better:

Last week, in a re-broadcast of an episode that originally aired two years ago...

Aw, c'mon guy -- it only took Fox eight months to catch up with the Obama children's song.

Oscar starts his own news network, GNN (Grouchy News Network). An irate viewer calls in to berate him that the news is not grouchy enough:

“I am changing the channel. From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.”

Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume...

Now they're complaining that the liberal conspiracy won't make up funny names for their heroes. Next week: Media fails to give Hannity a high-five.

The post is over 900 words long, by the way. But that's nothing -- Jonah Goldberg cracks 2,500 words with "How Politics Destroyed a Great TV Show" at Commentary (!). Warming up with a mixing bowl of warm cake-batter and a lament that one line in the last Star Wars movie "unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise," Goldberg goes on to bitch about a bunch of TV shows that offended him ideologically before deciding that "denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves." So he jumps on his trampoline and heads for the loftier reaches of Battlestar Galactica.

Goldberg, who thinks Norman Mailer was overrated, explains that the show was boss when he was able to read its plot threads as against abortion and communism but sucked when he could no longer find a way to make it conform to his views on the Iraq War. In a final insult to all that's Goldberg, "for having the 'bravery' to tackle the occupation of Iraq, the producers and lead actors were invited to a panel at the United Nations to dilate on the war on terror." It's worse than when Joanie married Chachi.

Money quote:

It’s been said that the difference between the truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. After its third season, Battlestar Galactica steadily failed on both counts.

Well, I say the difference between a Magic 8-Ball and Jonah Goldberg is that a Magic 8-Ball has to be right sometimes, and Goldberg fails on both counts.

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART ONE.

(Here's the first installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. Read 'em and weep!)

10. Dunhamania! Culture war, as we call the unpleasant ruckus that ensues when political obsessives blunder among the muses, had another big year, with conservatives shaking their fists at everything from opera to comic books. Rather than survey all these cases, let’s focus on the instructive example of the one cultural artifact that seems most reliably to excite them: That marketing phenomenon known as Lena Dunham.

Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce. The brethren hate other entertainment professionals, of course, but Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics.

This reached critical mass late in the year when Dunham released a celebrity memoir containing (as tell-all tradition demands) salacious details, including the news that, when Dunham was seven, she looked inside her one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina and found she had stuffed pebbles in there. Truth Revolt reported that Dunham was seventeen years old at the time (later correcting this “typo”) under the headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.”

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson dug in -- “Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it… There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode” -- even though he found the story “especially suspicious” — which just made it worse; imagine, lying in a celebrity memoir! When Dunham complained of this rough treatment — ensuring more press — the investigators of her celebrity memoir high-fived each other. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,” gurgled Don Surber while strangling a pillow.

Then Breitbart.com investigated another Dunham story about a college Republican named Barry who took advantage of her, and found that -- get this! -- some details were not verifiable (“A longtime employee at the Oberlin library could not recall working with any student with a flamboyant mustache”). A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too. “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…” The publisher instead agreed to add “a disclaimer that explains that the Barry described by Dunham was not really named Barry” and pay court costs, per Fox News.

There followed much popping of rightwing corks. "LENA DUNHAM WALKS BACK FABRICATED RAPE CLAIM" unh-unh-unhed John Hinderaker at Power Line. RedState called Dunham part of a “Rape Accusation-Industrial Complex” of women who habitually lie about sexual assault in order to advance a “victimization narrative.” The American Spectator’s Ross Kaminsky went further, tying the case to what he called the “lie” that Michael Brown didn’t deserve to be gunned down, and declaring that the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.” Ann Coulter added that Dunham, like all women who disclosed sexual assault after an interval, was just “trying to get attention.”

Despite their best efforts, or perhaps partly due to them, Dunham remains on the best seller list — without resorting to bulk sales to think tanks, imagine that! — and in the celebrity pantheon. Conservatives, for their part, maintain their place at the wrong side of a peephole, banging on the fence with one hand and doing God knows what with the other. Between the sexual rage, the rolling-out of big guns to prosecute a flimsy piece of pop-art crap, and the ultimate, flaccid ineffectuality of their efforts, could there be a more perfect example of culture war?

9. The right comes out for income inequality. The term is relatively new to common discourse, and in years past was mainly engaged by wingnut think-tankers to explain why such a thing didn’t exist. But Piketty’s big book and Obama’s mention of income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union led lumpen conservatives to modify their argument to: income inequality doesn’t exist, and so what if it does.

When rich guys complained the poor were giving them stink-eye, conservatives rushed to comfort them the best way they knew how: By associating their opponents with Nazis. At the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Peters compared resentment of the rich to Kristallnacht; in the same venue, Ruth R. Wisse asked, “Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them?” and answered yes, because anti-Semites often complain about wealthy Jews, which makes any complaint against American oligarchs, despite the impressive number of goyim among them, a veritable Blood Libel.

Daniel Henninger (also at WSJ — these guys know their audience!) suggested that Putin was getting belligerent because he “surely noticed” that “the nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality,” and were too busy coddling paupers to trouble with the Ukraine. Ace of Spades protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.

And forget about trying to level the field with a higher minimum wage — that’s socialism. If you asked why the current minimum wage isn't already socialism, the brighter bulbs would tell you, you’re right, it is — let’s get rid of it altogether! Libertarian Virginia Postrel wept over all the folks out there with multiple jobs — not because they had the work multiple jobs, but because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.” The injustice of it! In fact, if you complained about getting your tiny wages ripped off by your boss, that too was socialism, or at least rather petty of you.

The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech, who attributed any concerns over the ginormous 99%-1% gap to “jealousy… in real life, the money doesn’t stay in Scrooge McDuck’s vault, it goes into investments which pay more people to do more things.” Scrooge McDuck may someday build a condo, and you may get to clean its hallways, which along with your others job(s) may permit you to rent a hovel. Now stop complaining, anti-Richite!

8. Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

But never mind those details -- the real issue for conservatives was less geopolitical than psychographic — rightwing pundits, however pencil-necked, worship butchness and reflexively attribute it to their heroes, such as former cheerleader George “he’s got two of ‘em” W. Bush, while portraying their opponents as sissies.

Judging from conservatives’ previous investigations of Obama’s wearing of mom jeans while pretend-shooting and bike-riding, not mention his unwillingness to punch down on the poor, clearly the President fits their definition of a sissy. But it’s hard to identify a domestic conservative with whose roughness they can creditably contrast Obama’s affect. Mike Huckabee? Newt Gingrich? Chris Christie, being a bully, might do, but he betrayed the brethren by accepting Federal help on Hurricane Sandy.

With such a weak bench, it was perhaps inevitable that conservatives would find a foreign dictator to embrace. Putin is ruthless, rugged, and hates homosexuals — really, their dream candidate if they could get the citizenship thing sorted. They’d been contrasting bare-chested manly man Putin with metrosexual Obama on flimsy pretexts for years (“IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH,” etc), but Ukraine really brought it out of them. They were especially fond of funny pictures, but employed wordcraft, too, e.g. “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

Putin received perhaps his most eminent conservative blessing from Sarah Palin, who sneered at Obama as “as one who wears Mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates” and sighed over Putin as “one who wrestles bears and drills for oil.” But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess — in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.” Hanson did put in some mild admissions that Putin was not really a role model, in much the same way that the Shangri-Las told us their guy was good-bad, but he's not evil.

Months later, with the ruble crashing, Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.

(More later.)

A SHORT TOUR OF THE CULTURE WAR BATTLEFIELD.

Well, boys, how's the culture war going?

How Big Government Ruined Parks and Recreation

Clickbait for sure, among a certain population! Spencer Klavan (Jesus, Andrew has a brother? I weep for the Republic) complains at PJ Media that the show "has devolved from incisive comedy into aggressively unfunny propaganda." See, once it was about "the morass of self-importance and illogic that results when people get together to plan other people’s lives for them" -- that's conservative for "small-town government," folks -- but then "the writers replaced it with a dogmatic fantasy world based on the unexamined conviction that everyone needs a hyper-attentive government mommy. That’s when Leslie Knope became a hero, and Parks and Rec became about as entertaining as a health code referendum."

Wow, so they beefed up the role of the star? And a cynical supporting character became more cuddly? Just like in nearly every sitcom that lasts more than three seasons? What a bunch of statists!

But courage, kulturkampfers -- it's not all liberal fascism on the TV; here's a show that Matthew Rousu of The Federalist says teaches a conservatarian message:

What TV’s ‘Suits’ Tells Us About The Job Market 

...Ross and Spector form a great team. They trade witty rejoinders and provide incredible service for their clients. But in the United States, for the most part, it is illegal to practice law without passing the bar exam. That Ross is practicing law illegally — and what he must do to avoid being discovered – provides part of the show’s drama. While I find the show entertaining, it troubles me because these types of situations happen in real life. There are people who would be good at a job, but restrictions make it illegal for them to work...

Yes, it's the old licensing-restriction rap, with which max-freedom fans sometimes get liberals to agree five minutes before they call them hypocrites for thinking polluters can't regulate themselves. Mentioned in essay: Uber. Not mentioned: State medical boards.

Meanwhile at Acculturated, Erin Vargo:

Drugs are ruining EDM...

Which is like saying sugar is ruining cake, but go on:

...and not only as a matter of individual health and safety (a sobering topic in and of itself). Drugs at EDM festivals ensure that Calvin Harris is virtually indistinguishable from a remix DJ at a wedding party.

[pause, suppressing laughter]

Sure, he showed everyone a good time, but the event wasn’t really about him or his skills and talents and creative capacity.

[pause, stabbing myself in the thigh with a pen] For our reductio ad wingnut let's go to The Federalist's Rachel Lu:

Is it possible that Clueless Dad (that tired old television trope) is going into decline? He’s long since outworn his welcome. And General Mills seems to have gotten the message. 

Their new commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios...

For some reason I'm reminded of the end of The Incredible Shrinking Man, though it's not so much the "closing of a gigantic circle" as a disappearance up one's own asshole.

BUT IN THE END, THEY'RE ALL LOSERS.

The Oscar nominations are out, and if I get some time I hope to watch more of the nominated films and luxuriate in stupid prognostication like I used to do back when I was single and had nothing to do but attend the ci-ne-ma. Speaking of nerds, I see the wingnuts are having their usual allergic reactions. Kyle Smith, who went from pretending to be a film critic at the New York Post (and sometimes a theatre critic -- see his review of Will Ferrell's one-man George W. Bush show, "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?" Never forget!) to full-blown kulturkampfer at National Review, tells his readers what they want to hear, i.e. that the nominations prove "#OscarsSoWoke" and are all about appeasing the dark gods of liberalism: in this "highly politicized year... Academy voters are going to be very eager to send a duly left-wing cultural message" and so, Smith predicts, moviecommies will vote for The Shape of Water which he says is leftwing -- because of the human/nonhuman miscegnation, I guess. Then he says,

As for Get Out, I think this is a very fine movie that is being hugely overrated because it’s about racism and I can’t imagine Oscar voters, who are mostly senior citizens, will be as impressed with it as critics have been.

So Academy voters are too "senior citizen" to vote for Get Out, but "woke" enough to vote for some other woke movie? Maybe there's something in there about Hollywood liberals being The Real Racists™ -- I'm stunned Smith didn't tease that out!

In another post called "The Anti-Trump Oscars" (these guys are nothing if not subtle) Smith explains why The Post can't win even though, if we follow his Zhdanovite logic, its journalistic-heroes-beat-Nixon story would seem to be the obvious choice: "Perhaps the Academy found the film just a bit too by-the-numbers... or voters thought the film was a bit too blatantly intended to capitalize on the anti-Trump mood. The Oscars are a fan dance..." It's all so complicated! Or maybe it's actually simple: the whole idea of everything that happens in movieland being a proxy battle between Republicans and Democrats is a bunch of bullshit. C'mon, Agent Smith, think outside the box!

Also, while I think people who mope about "snubs" because their personal love-objects didn't get Academy recognition are silly, at least they're just harmlessly indulging fan-crushes; Zachary Leeman's "Conservative Movies Snubbed by the Academy" at LifeZette, on the other hand, is like a cross between 1984 and Tiger Beat. For example, Leeman tells us Wind River is conservative because it's "about the mental and physical stability and fortitude still needed to survive in some parts of the country." You know, like Cimarron or Walkabout! Thus it "deserved recognition for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay," and because it didn't get it Leeman has thrown himself on his bed sobbing and kicked off all the frilly pillows. (The other snubbed movies were ignored, Leeman says, because they have uniformed personnel in them, and Oscar never honors servicemembers except for The Hurt Locker and Platoon and Saving Private Ryan and Platoon and Patton etc. etc. [voice trails off])

Speaking of snubs, if you thought Wonder Woman didn't get any nominations because, news flash, not every big-budget comic-book movie gets the prestige awards that lonely dorks holed up with their "light saber" and a box of Kleenex believe it should, Brandon Morse of RedState is here to tell you it's really because "Hollywood, being the left wing haven that it is, couldn’t stomach a few of Wonder Woman’s glaring politically incorrect flaws." That seems weird, as I remember when the movie came out conservatives were mainly tumescent with rage at all-female showings of the film. But no, Morse tells us,

For one, feminists didn’t seem to think Wonder Woman was suitable as a rep for their narrative. She was too sexy and too beautiful.

And when he unsheathed his light-saber, an usher threw him out of the theater.

Others among the brethren run their own little fantasy factories -- like Victory Girls' Kendall Sanchez saying Get Out is about "how progressives attempt to understand the cultural experience of African Americans." I know, that's what we all took away from it. Also, while Kyle Smith thinks Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is "about a vengeful feminist looking for answers after her daughter’s murder and also has a racist character" and therefore is "just as woke as The Shape of Water" -- a damning assessment, indeed! -- Kendall thinks "it’s a great movie about a desperate mother urging police to find her daughter’s murderer. I went into the movie thinking it would be a giant slam against police" -- and therefore bad! -- "but it turned out to be a humble and empathetic story that emphasized all humans are 1) intention-driven and 2) both good and bad." Ebbing, Missouri is a land of contrasts!

Maybe Smith and Kendall can do a podcast where they argue over whether a movie is conservative-therefore-good or liberal-therefore-bad. That'll really show the libs and send the walls of Hollyweird tumbling down, and our children's children's children will have nothing to watch on the telescreen but Veggie Tales, God's Not Dead 1-3,927, and the Two Minutes Hate, as God intended.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For conservatives, culture war is not a war for culture but a war on culture.

FRENCH TWIST.

David French is on fire this week, by which I mean more ostentatiously nuts than usual. (Can you blame him? Strategery Presidential candidate Evan McMullan seems to be making some progress in his bid to take Utah and, if the prognostications of Josh Gelertner mean anything (spoiler: they don't), throw the election to the House. French, who rejected the Billy Kristol Party presidential bid earlier this year, may be eating his heart out over what might have been.)

One French post is about the depressed viewership of NFL games on TV. French naturally blames Colin Kaepernick and other protestors:

While it’s difficult to explain the behavior of millions of people by reference to any single cause, I’m dubious of the NFL’s attempt to rule out player protests as offering any explanation for the ratings drop. The NFL isn’t the NBA. Its fan base isn’t as clustered in progressive urban centers but is far more equitably distributed across the country.

As the Coach says in That Championship Season, basketball is no longer the white man's game, so You People in your urban hoop-ghettos can protest all you want, but we white men out here in the Big Suburb demand you calm your black folk down or it's bye-bye Pennzoil ads.

Thus, it plays a doubly dangerous game by embracing the social justice left. It stands to alienate more fans than it attracts, and it’s in bed with a cultural force that ultimately despises the league itself. Social justice warriors hope to destroy football. They don’t want what’s best for the league or the sport. Instead, they want to use it until they kill it.

The National Football League -- betrayed from within! You fellows in the executive suites are deceived -- Those People aren't your friends, they're trying to kill you. In NFL, pass-catcher mau-maus YOU!

Sometimes I think modern conservatism is just one long riff on the word "nigger-lover."

Elsewhere French gets into the pussy tape, and echoes Trump agent Betsy McCaughey and others with a oh-yeah-well-you-libtards-love-sex defense. Remember, this guy professes to despise Trump, so this shows how insanely devoted to culture war he has to be:

This is one for the Vox record books. The liberal site — which purports to “explain” the news...

Impudent liberals! Only Jesus can explain the news!

...— is now trying to explain why some conservative Christians are sharing Beyoncé lyrics and passages from Fifty Shades of Grey in response to the Trump tapes. Their explanation? Christians view dirty words and sex assault as basically the same because, well, read it for yourself...

French argues theology with the Vox quotes for a while ("all sins are certainly not 'equally' bad in their moral gravity or their earthly consequences") before proving their main idea right:

Second, regarding pop culture, it’s not that pop culture is just crass — it celebrates perversion. Fifty Shades of Grey seems to describe its own sexual assault. Here are key passages, via Rod Dreher:

Imagine David French and Rod Dreher examining the evidence! "Look, Rod, have you seen this?" "Wow! I don't even know what that is and I'm gettin' a boner! [stabs self in leg with penknife]"

I’m not even going to attempt to quote Beyonce’s lyrics. They don’t describe sexual assault but instead a quid pro quo-style sex relationship where she grants all kinds of favors to men she has sex with — the kind of relationship that women have forever rightly condemned as sexual harassment.

You libtards say you're against sexual assault but she took his ass to Red Lobster -- according to the Bible that makes her both a whore and a whore-monger!

At the heart of the conservative critique, however, is something very real — calling out a Left that has helped sexually debase our culture to such an extent that only one moral norm remains, and even that’s truly optional in the right context. All the Left cares about anymore is consent, but its icons (like Bill Clinton) get a pass even then, and if a novel gets popular enough — like Fifty Shades of Grey — then it exists in its own exempted, subversive category.

David French answers your "consent" argument with unproven allegations and fiction! Now who's a dirty bird?

Heather Mac Donald says it well:

Ugh. All you need to know about that is Mac Donald has taken time out from her usual job -- warning white America of the national Negro uprising -- to explain that women are whores ("Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects? Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels...") and parse Beyoncé and Jay-Z with a Talmudic intensity seldom seen outside a Black Studies seminar or the writings of Victor Davis Hanson. Mac Donald is also mad at Amy Schumer: "She confesses to a 'weakness for orgasms.'" In short, the Clenis and Hollywood made everything badsex and we need to get back to "the chivalric ideal that gentlemen should treat females like ladies," which comes with permanent inferior status for women but, on the bright side, maybe marginally fewer rapes, at least outside of wedlock or the manor.

Imagine a normal person reading these posts, and you'll see why their movement is in trouble.

IT'S OUR OWN STORY EXACTLY! HE BOLD AS A HAWK, SHE SOFT AS THE DAWN.

Acculturated is a new dispenser of culture war ordnance that yells "WHY POP CULTURE MATTERS" from the masthead.  Connoisseurs of the genre will find it a little bit Culture 11 and a little bit Speculative Rightwing Ladymags The Perfesser Wants Created.

One thing the Acculturati like to talk about is Downton Abbey. (Here's a thing where Emily Esfahani Smith twits Simon Schama for calling it "snobbery by the bucketful." "The scenes take place in and out of a manor inhabited by tony aristocrats," sniffs Smith. "Its appeal is aesthetic. As an art history professor, Schama should know this." I'm pretty sure she's not kidding.)

And in case you thought Jonah Goldberg had farted the last word on the subject, get this: Ashley McGuire lets us know up front that she's sophisticated and Has Agency --

I’m no dummy. My last order from Amazon included The Feminine Mystique, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics.

-- But she watches crummy TV shows. Why? Not merely to relax; that'd be common.

I simply think that I (like my fellow educated female consumers of garbage television) am looking for intrigue. Intrigue that gives us something to talk about. Something to think about. A framework to ponder our sex. 

Television is a sort of social barometer, and as women we are particularly inclined to take the temperature of our society and it how it views us and treats us.

Those days when you were a kid and imagined TV shows really spoke to you and your generation? That's why you have this coming to you -- McGuire pondering her sex:

It’s a sort of lifeline to any woman drowning in the thick waters of modern culture... 

Indeed, the show evokes wholly contrary thoughts about womanhood and feminism. As I watch the show, I find myself fighting between two selves. One side of me hardly envies the women of the era, when marriage was a woman’s only ticket in life, when the corset still grasped the fashion industry, when one make-out session with an exotic boy could ruin your prospects for life. 

But then one side of me envies the women of Downton ever so slightly. Envies the thought of my husband referring to me as “her ladyship.”

In previous sub-generations, ladies who didn't want to live in Dallas might yet have envied the women of Southfork and dreamed of falling under the spell of courtly if amoral J.R. Ewing. But when the show was over and the Asti Spumante drained, I don't think their fantasies spurred them to social analysis like this:

Are we happy with where we are? Do we demand enough of men? Do we demand enough of ourselves? Can we do better than table flipping in Jersey or ten plastic surgeries? Are we really that much better off today, or are today’s television shows any indication that there is still much work to be done?...

The women of Downton want driving lessons, they want jobs, they want the vote. But are there things from that era that we have thrown away that might have had value?...

If only we had cars and servants with crisp aprons! Clearly society has failed us.

Did respect for a woman’s reputation keep men in check and protect ourselves from winding up like Ethel, pregnant and scared? Did good-old-fashioned esteem for women raise the odds of winding up like Anna and Mary, wives who had been thoroughly woo’ed by good men?    

We'll never know now; there's no time machine to whisk us back to the days when women were thoroughly woo'ed and could do without that spinster's toy, the Vote. Ah well; there's still a little Red Bicyclette left, and a page where one can send eloquent essay-length distress signals that Ross Douthat may pick up. In the words of Martin Mull: It's not that great and it's late and once again, honey, you lose.

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR. What are the conservative art critics up to? At First Things, here's Ethan Cordray on zombie movies:

But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation... And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control...

As we become more and more zombified, as our culture becomes ever more adept at amplifying our desires through advertising, pornography, and a media culture obsessed with gratifying every appetite, we can see the inevitable results of that process shambling along on their rotting legs...

I notice that kids these days are also going for vampire movies and TV shows. Vampires seem to be the opposite of zombies, at least behaviorally; they are very self-aware, and Lord knows they wish to preserve their eternal lives. And they're hungry for blood -- as Christians are for the blood of Christ! Doesn't this say something positive about our society?

I can play this game all day, but no rightwing think tank is paying me to play it.

UPDATE. All the comments have been lovely, but I liked Jay B imagining Cordray's interpretation of "squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg": "What if this song isn't about citrus juice? What if it's about yearning and the consummation of the sexual act?" I would actually expect Cordray to find in it a condemnation of the sexual act, because that's what, as a good little theocon, he has been trained to find -- you know, the way Jonah Goldberg looks at the work of David Simon and finds it conservative because fart snort black people.

It's also fun when commenters pretend to play Cordray's game ("No, no, no. Zombies aren't collectivists. Zombies are the Galtian Superman. Consider: Each zombie works for itself, without concern for other zombies...").

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR, PART 432.333.

Big claim in this headline by Andrew Klavan:

There’s Something Happening Here: Conservatives Are Catching On to the Culture!

That would indeed be news. So, did they finally make The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew or any of the other big-budget projects I've recommended to them? Don't be silly; "It’s not enough to have talented artists and good works," says Klavan, which is why instead of supporting any such specimens as exist they "catch on to the culture" by piling on a lefty artist they don't like -- and surprise, the target in this case is their traditional fantasy hate-fuck object, Lena Dunham.

Recently, my friends at Ben Shapiro’s website Truth Revolt did for Miss Dunham what the economy and ISIS have done for Obama. They introduced her to non-leftism, also known as reality. They quoted sections from her recent autobiography Not That Kind of Girl under the descriptive headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.” Miss Dunham threatened to sue the site for quoting her verbatim! Then she canceled parts of her book tour. Then she went on a “rage spiral.” Then she jumped up and down three times and went through the floor like Rumpelstiltskin. Okay, that last part is a joke — but only just.

In other words, they kept Dunham's book, which if James Wolcott is any judge (and he is) has little intrinsic value of its own, in the headlines for a few more weeks. That's good culture-warring, soldier!

The whole thing is priceless but for my money this is the best part:

But the point is that the folks at Truth Revolt have recognized the revolting truth: liberty lovers need a cultural echo chamber of our own.

Maybe he thinks a bigger and better right-wing echo chamber will work like a Large Hadron Collider to advance his Zhdanovite cause, instead of just increasing the maddening din of their Bedlam.

"LET'S ROLL" YOUR OWN. Jason Apuzzo is issuing one of his occasional calls for right-wingers to make their own movies. Regular readers will know that I have endorsed such an approach: I would much rather see a Unification Church production of Petreus: Man of Iron than another silly rant about how Hollywood is engaged in treason. It doesn't matter much what particular belly-fire spurs artists to action; whether they are animated by vanity or a cause, if it gets them to do something constructive, and employs talents, it can't be a total loss. Many otherwise shiftless musicians have been driven to greater productivity by fealty to indie rock or the straight-edge scene or the kids who, once united, would never be divided, or some other tommy-rot, and we got some nice records out of it.

Still, at the risk of killing their buzz, I continue to ask what this is supposed to mean:

You would think conservatives/Republicans would understand this. You would think they would’ve learned by now that what happens on the battlefield isn’t the whole story. You would think they would’ve learned a lesson from World Wars I & II (entertainment industry rallies public support for war = we win) or from Vietnam (entertainment industry undermines public support for war = we don’t win), but apparently not.

I have to side with the conservatives/Republicans on this one. No one has ever explained the mechanism of action for this formula to me. When Hollywood was allegedly losing Vietnam for us with such potent weapons as The Strawberry Statement, Nixon was twice elected President. Which is the more reliable indicator of political will? Despite what Apuzzo apparently sees as a barrage of hippie celluloid bombs, the Silent Majority stood by their man and his Vietnamization plan. And political forces, including Watergate (the actual Watergate scandal, not All The President's Men or any other movie), brought about the end of Nixon and of the war.

In the current war, George W. Bush is standing firm and the Democrats can't get anti-war traction -- so the war goes on, despite the existence of V for Vendetta and Jarhead. What happens in Iraq is determined by Washington, not Hollywood. Apuzzo says, "We need stuff like The Passion, stuff like 300, Team America, whatever. Edgy, in your face films." Well, we've had those films; which battles did they win?

Culture works in mysterious ways, yet these guys constantly mistake it for a simple tool -- something like a sledgehammer for the soul. Still, if it keeps them busy...

RED LIGHTS ARE FLASHING AROUND ME/ GOOD LORD IT LOOKS LIKE THEY FOUND ME.

I'm beginning to think I've been too generous in my assessment of the Republican Party. I assumed they had enough ward-heelers, shoulder-hitters, and all-around goons to defend against the Trump onslaught, but it looks as if they can't even keep it close enough to steal.

Well, if I'm disappointed, you can imagine how actual Republicans think about it -- and by that I don't mean a majority of Republican voters, I mean Republican operatives who got #NeverTrump tattoos and whose media perches are now under threat. Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal seems to have suffered a brain injury. He's tut-tutting Trump's adoption of "America First" as if seven years of boob-bait articles about Obama's "apology tours" hadn't crossed his field of vision without raising so much as a Bretpeep. Oh, and get this:

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase?... 

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

I guess in this reading Rodney Dangerfield is the muse of ignorance and Bruce the muse of provocation, though I can't imagine how his editors let him speak better of Bruce than Dangerfield. Oh, but the follow-up makes it:

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering.

No wonder he's got it in for comedians -- in the depths of his seriousness the guy's a laugh riot.

UPDATE. Ted Cruz has dropped out, and the #NeverTrump gumps have gone gaga. National Review's primary Jesus freak David French weeps, as is such people's wont, over the "culture" that kept Trump prominent even while French was furiously writing nasty columns about him. If only we could do something about that damned culture! one imagines French seething -- though his own writing suggests that culture, as understood by normal human beings rather than culture-war dumbbells, had nothing to do with it:

The great tragedy of Trump’s Republican establishment is that — unlike mainstream media outlets that are built from the ground up to chase ratings — these “conservative” institutions and individuals were allegedly built around principles. Yes, they wanted eyeballs and page-views, but until this presidential race, many of them took great pride in their ability to attract an audience through the force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions. Indeed, these individuals and institutions used to pride themselves on policing the conservative movement, on calling out the “RINOs” and moderates in our midst.

And who are these "tragic" figures who once stirred the masses with the "force of their ideas and the strength of their convictions" -- like Burke, like Buckley? According to French, they are "Breitbart, Sean Hannity, Drudge, multiple Fox News personalities, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and... Rush Limbaugh."

I'd say part of the problem, at least, is that conservatives have been grading tragedy on the curve.

Oh, for lagniappe let me mention that French also denounces (now that it hasn't worked for him) "furious rhetoric" because it's "polarizing." You can search my archives for evidence of French's moderation, but spare yourself and just take in this item about French denouncing Griswold v. Connecticut -- yes, the landmark 1965 birth control decision -- as a tribute to "the awesome power of the sexual revolution over law and logic." In short, French is nuts, and now he's standing in front of the Trump mob screaming I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS! Notwithstanding that this is the fall of the Republic, you have to admit it's damn funny.

Anyway, all hail Donald Trump -- Republican standard-bearer! It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.


UPDATE 2. French is getting weirder:

Now is an ideal time for the Libertarian Party to get its act together and nominate a truly serious candidate — a person who may not meet the party’s typical purity tests but who can at least make a serious argument and advance a range of policies that unite both conservatives and libertarians.

The Libertarian Party! This, from a guy who thinks birth control should be illegal. Well, libertarians aren't too into women's rights anyway; in fact, sometimes I think Reason magazine's refreshing opposition to trans bathroom laws is based on the fact that some of the persecuted parties have penises.

CRUNCHY CONS GO DOWNMARKET. I see that Rod Dreher has moved his Crunchy Con blog to Beliefnet. Time has not been kind to his movement, and it seems the come-down in venue has made Dreher more anxious to boost his conservative niche brand into the big time: he's talking less now about the relation of medieval theology to organic food, and more about gay toilet sex:

...a gay Republican male -- very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll -- told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar"...

...what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?... it's pretty clear to me that the media, as a general rule, have a habit of sanitizing coverage that reflects badly on gay male culture...

Yeah, the media never asks Elton John if he likes it up the ass in a crapper. (Maybe Dreher's gay Republican friend can do a special report on Fox!)

Most of Dreher's recent posts are about your basic culture-war bullshit -- like how kids don't say sir or ma'am no more (especially when they's raised by New York bitches!), or how no one takes time to be pals anymore (and neither does Dreher -- oh well, that's life! Bye!) -- or standard-issue conservative belligerence: posts about how Israel must kill more, we must kill more, here is one of God's creatures I really want to die, etc. Not much here about Heraclitus or wheat germ.

Apparently the Crunchy book didn't summon an army of Ned Flanderses, marching with a cross in one hand and a bucket of Seven Stars yogurt in the other, so Dreher's going back to being a ordinary pain in the ass.