Ferras’ “Hollywood’s Not America” isn’t, as its title led me to expect, a song about Hollywood’s monolithically leftish political culture. But the mere suggestion of that in the phrase certainly rings true and timely as the Oscars approach.
It’s funny: I grew up in Los Angeles as a big fan of the movies. Many of them became (I now recount with no small measure of embarrassment) lenses through which I came to view my own hopes and dreams, cultivate my aspirations, and imagine my possible futures. I would never then have remotely imagined caring as little as I do now what Hollywood’s legions of self-important, self-appointed social commentators think of our country, our culture, our way of life. They’ve gone off the deep end for sure, and the disconnect between the ideological bubble they inhabit and the rest of America has never been more apparent.
In a silly sentimental way, it’s too bad my idealization of Hollywood had to meet with disillusionment. But I’m glad to have realized I have far better things to aspire to than Hollywood could ever cook up, and much better uses for my time than passively taking in the imaginings of others. These days I feel much more inclined to spend my time doing, creating, learning. And that can hardly be a bad thing.
Macworld 2008 is here this week, and, true to form, Steve Jobs’ Tuesday keynote presentation included some pretty neat product announcements. Randy Newman’s accompanying song-form political rant, however, should in a sane world be an embarrassment to Apple. Seems like this should be getting a lot more critical attention.
I found Newman’s performance pretty offensive, but watch the whole thing and judge for yourself. Apparently the song — titled “A Few Words In Defense of Our Country” with no small measure of irony — is an existing element of Randy Newman’s repertoire, which makes it seem implausible that SJ didn’t know what was coming. The song is on the iTunes Store, and several videos of Newman’s performance are now up on YouTube, including this one with helpful subtitles added. (You can also find Newman’s performance in the streaming Macworld Keynote video, if you fast-forward to 1 hr. 18 mins.)
On reflection, I’m not entirely sure what to make of his muddled message. The favorable comparison of our present leadership to historic figures such as Hitler and Stalin, if meant as a compliment, has surely got to be about the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever heard. With defenders like Newman, who needs enemies?
Oh, and apparently it’s PC now to publicly use terms like “tight-assed Italians” (as long as you’re referring to conservative justices on the Supreme Court)? Geez.
For good measure, he even capped it off with a little “I usually root against corporations” talk, and rehashed for us once again the familiar tired accusations of “Empire!”. (I’m willing to bet he hasn’t had the good fortune of reading Bill Whittle’s brilliant 2002 piece on the topic.)
“The end of an empire is messy at best,
and this empire is ended like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea
We’re adrift in the land of the brave and the home of the free
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Yes, goodbye Randy. And next time, if you really want to help us out, please, just stop helping.
There are apparently two Randy Newmans. The Randy Newman we all know writes little ditties for PIXAR flicks and television shows and from the lyrical content of those themes, you might suspect that he’s a big sweetie. Then there’s the Randy Newman who showed up at Macworld 2008’s keynote address. That Randy Newman is quite insane.
I guess that’s one Randy Newman for each of John Kerry’s two Americas?
Cameron Diaz apologized Sunday for carrying a bag with a political slogan that evoked painful memories in Peru.
The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated “Shrek” films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru’s Andes on Friday carrying an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words “Serve the People” printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s most famous political slogan.
The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.
“I sincerely apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently offended. The bag was a purchase I made as a tourist in China and I did not realize the potentially hurtful nature of the slogan printed on it,” Diaz said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press.
It strikes me as a very sad state of affairs that there is seemingly so little awareness of collectivism’s grim and humbling legacy in the West, to the extent that such accoutrements can be considered hip fashion accessories. (I don’t know what things are like in the rest of the country, but such articles are easily found in San Francisco’s trendiest boutique stores.) No one with a shred of decency would think of heading out the door with a swastika and Nazi party slogan emblazoned on their handbag. Why the difference in sentiment, given especially that the likes of Mao and Stalin made Hitler look like a rank amateur when it came to killing?
Seems like it’s none too soon that we’re finally going to have a memorial in the U.S. to raise awareness of the far too many who perished under totalitarian collectivist regimes over the course of the 20th century (and in some tragically forgotten parts of the world, such as North Korea and ZImbabwe, continue to do so today).
A spot-on, beautifully articulated essay from Johan Norberg on the achievements and discontents of entrepreneurship, in the Winter 2007 issue of Cato’s Letter. I haven’t been able to find a plain text copy online, but here’s a PDF link. By all means, read the whole thing. It’s succinct, relevant, and well put.
Think about that heroic journey once again, and think of the persons I just talked about — people like you, thinkers, innovators, entrepreneurs. What makes it possible for us to buy equipment and goods from the other side of the world? Entrepreneurs face ancient traditions, political obstacles, taxes, and regulations, but they also have friends — people with access to capital, to knowledge, to other businesses. If they are lucky, entrepreneurs succeed. If not, they learn something new, make it even better the next time, and bring to the community something new that changes lives forever.
That is the heroic epic. The entrepreneur is the hero of our world. We do not really need the Frodos, the Luke Skywalkers, or the Buffy the Vampire Slayers. We have the Malcolm McLeans of the world.
But as you all know, that is not really what popular culture thinks of capitalists and entrepreneurs today. If you go to an average Hollywood movie, the hero is someone quite different.
The scientist and the capitalist are the enemies in most Hollywood productions. That is a bit ironic, because we would not have film technology if there were no scientists, and we would not have a film industry if it were not for the capitalists. But they are presented as villains.
Some anti-globalists and people opposed to free trade are now well-paid consultants who sit on the boards of big companies and tell them that what they do is really a bad thing and that they must accept much more corporate social responsibility. In their terms, corporate social responsibility means that what you have done so far is not social. It is not enough to create goods, services, and technologies that increase our life expectancies and save the lives of our children. No, you need to do something more. After making your profit, you need to give something back to society.
Give something back to society? As if the entrepreneurs and capitalists had stolen something that belonged to society that they have to give back! Profit is not something that we have to apologize for. Profit is proof that the capitalist has given something to society that it cherishes more than the material wealth it has given to the businessman.
I must emphasize that entrepreneurs should never be grateful for a society that gives them license to act, to dream, to innovate, and to create. I think that we, the society, should be grateful to the entrepreneur and to the businessman for what they do. Entrepreneurs are the heroes of our world — that despite the risks, the hard work, the hostility from society, the envy from neighbors, and state regulations, they keep on creating, they keep on producing and trading. Without them, nothing would be there.
So many interesting events and great podcast episodes lately, so little time to blog about them… Following are notes about and links to a few from this past week that I especially recommend…
Penn Jillette did a real good show last Monday, September 18th, regarding the Pope’s recent comments and the violent fallout from them. Here’s a direct download link from pennradio.com.
As an agnostic, it’s pretty rare that I find myself paying any attention to what the Pope says, or feeling the need to take up his defense. But man have I felt sympathy for the guy in the very tall hat this past week. Though he seemingly did so inadvertently, in the course of quoting a historic work during a lecture to an academic audience, he’s ended up saying something that I think very much needed to be said, in a way that very few in the West have had the courage to do. As I said here before, in an earlier post titled “Wanting to believe”, I don’t know what it is about the apparent corellation between Islam and violent extremism. But there’s apparently something to the connection that we need to better understand and can’t allow ourselves to be intimidated out of talking about openly. The response from radical Islam this week, unfortunately, only served to illustrate the Pope’s point.
[@ +19:00] Our whole way of forming the world view of tomorrow’s citizens is by raising them in this rather, kind of fluffy non-judgmental cocoon. You know, I find it very interesting in American schools, I’ve got three young children in grade school. And they go on and on about self-esteem, you know, every individual has to have self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important. I went to an English boys’ school where the object was, on the first day of term, to have every last ounce of self-esteem hammered out of you by the end of the first week. So it’s an entirely different system to me. But my kids, they’re taught all the time self esteem, self esteem’s critically important. Well what about societal self-esteem? You know, what about saying that the society that you live in, the inheritance of that society is actually important and worth valuing too. And I think we don’t do a very good job of that, and I think it poses a great question mark in the end over the long term future of that.
…
[@ +22:00] I think a lot of [that kind of] doom-mongering sells precisely because, in a sense, it is so unreal that it doesn’t require any serious effort from you. You know, Al Gore is going around saying that, because of Earth’s “excessive consumption” at the moment, it’s put Earth “out of balance” with the rest of the universe. Well, you know, I don’t know how he’s measured that. But the fact of the matter is, if you pose that as the problem it is so unreal, that there is almost nothing you could do that would have any effect on it. So it becomes, in effect, a simple way of demonstrating your moral virtue to no purpose whatsoever. And there seems to be a streak in the psyche of kind of post-nationalist, post-modern man that would rather do that than actually attend to the hard practical problems that need dealing with now. The more pie-in-the-sky the problem is, the more universal and intergalactic it is, the more it seems to appeal to a particular disposition these days.
…
[@ +29:00] I think America really needs to think seriously about what allies it has, real allies it has, and do its best to shore them up. I’m immensely heartened whenever you go to Australia, because one of the most heartwarming features about Australia is you don’t just get to talk sense with the right there, but there’s a remarkable number of people who would identify themselves on the left in Australia who talk an awful lot of sense on this issue too. And I think America and Australia both understand … what it is about. It’s not about racism. It’s not about being anti-immigration. But it’s about understanding the importance of assimilating immigrants when they come here, and the only way you can do that is to have something they can assimilate with, which is a large part of the problem in Europe. Even if you wanted to assimilate with modern Dutch identity, what would it be? What would you do? And in America, whatever the problems here, there isn’t the same problem with just huge, millions and millions of alienated immigrants that they have in most of Europe now.
There is a very interesting intellectual connection. There’s a book now that is apparently a bestseller in Turkey, which is one of the more moderate Muslim states, and it is called “Attack on the Pope”. This is already a bestseller, this was a bestseller and existed before the pope ever made any comments, which predicts that Pope Benedict will be assassinated in Istanbul, which he is apparently scheduled to visit. There is also a movie, as you well know, about President Bush, “Assasination of the President”, that just won an award at a Canadian film festival, that shows the assassination of a sitting United States president. And I think that it is not a coincidence that these two things exist in both … and are celebrated in the intellectual halls of the Left, and in the intellectual (such as it is) aspect of Islam. There is something very strange going on in the world today, and … the underlying thing is a lot of rage, and anger, and hatred that is coming out in this kind of format.
Glenn Reynolds says he won’t be watching the Oscars this year. I’m not planning to go out of my way to watch them either. I’ve had my fill of Hollywood’s cultural cynicism and misguided activism in recent years, thank you very much. So many better things to do with one’s time…
UPDATE Sunday 3/5: The Manolo is liveblogging the Oscars, with guestbloggers Stephen Green, Gay Patriot, Roger Simon, et. al. Hilarious stuff! OK, so I’ve got the show on in the background now so I can at least get the jokes. So sue me…
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
