The Appealing Lure of the Biggest Most Bodacious Kulturkampf---the War Between "Culture" & REALITY

Phoney Values? What would Holden Caulfield Say?

"Gatekeeper" is the term mental schlubditzes persist in calling the role of he/she who weeds out unacceptable truth when it conflicts with doctrines of "social justice" and apparatuses of "feel-good" Panglossian hallucinatory schlubditzthink. George Orwell and G.K. Chesterton are among the many outcasts who represented that Truth of an objective sort exists. But the gatekeepers serve as a sort of Dr. Mengele sorting out truth as it arrives in the marketplace of ideas and dispatching it immediately to obscurity/oblivion. What remains is the mirage of whatever lies over the rainbow, the elusive quest for what W.B. Yeats somewhere described the basis of metaphor: "the desire to be someone else somewhere else some other time." Andrew Klavan explains in a very cogent very short essay:

Culture in America is an enchanted place where the conservative facts of life are magically transformed into liberal fantasies. In movies, TV shows, novels, even comedy routines, our intellectuals, entertainers, and other fools are busily reshaping reality into works of art through their piercing insights into what will get them good reviews and awards, and through their rich and varied experience of the café in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples. See if you can spot the difference between reality and American culture. In reality, President John F. Kennedy was a fierce Cold Warrior who twice tripled America’s military presence in the Vietnam War to try to stop the spread of Communism and risked nuclear disaster by standing up to the Soviet Union in Cuba. He was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an America-hating leftist who had once defected to the USSR.

Now, the culture: in Oliver Stone’s film JFK—nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 1991—Kennedy is a peaceful lefty contemplating a withdrawal from Vietnam. He’s assassinated by a vast right-wing cabal that includes every single person in America except for Oliver Stone. Reality, culture. Can you spot the difference?

Here’s another: in reality, Terri Schiavo was a severely brain-damaged woman who was judicially starved to death in 2005 at the request of her husband, while evangelical Christian right-to-life groups unsuccessfully petitioned to keep her alive. In the culture, a 2005 episode of Law and Order entitled “Age of Innocence” depicted a severely brain-damaged woman whose husband tried to euthanize her—until he was murdered at the instigation of an evangelical Christian right-to-lifer. In reality, evangelical Christians try to keep people alive. In the culture, they murder people. That’s a subtle one, I know—but can you spot the difference?

Let’s try again. Isn’t this fun? In reality, anthropological studies have shown that primitive societies are even more violent than civilized ones. Primitive life is pretty miserable in general, with no protection against drought or famine, no medicine—so that even the simplest diseases can be deadly—and no equality for women, who have zero defense against pregnancy or oppression.

Now let’s look at the culture. In films such as Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and now Avatar—which are really all the same film—a civilized man enters primitive society and finds its values far superior to his own. The collectivist natives are peaceful, the women are treated with respect, and ancient forms of medicine work as well as modern ones.

Spot the difference? Right! In reality, it’s civilization, democracy, capitalism, and technology that give us greater health, equality, and happiness. So when you go to see Avatar and enjoy its special effects and 3-D imagery, just think to yourself, wow, we’d never have anything as cool as that if we lived like the Indians. I mean, they never even invented the wheel!

Hey, and speaking of Avatar, it not only celebrates being at one with the sacred Earth, but portrays U.S. soldiers as evil sadists out to destroy native peoples. Can you spot the difference between Avatar and, say, Haiti, where our old pal the sacred Earth slaughtered innocent people by the thousands and the U.S. military turned out in a massive rescue effort?

But in our culture, the U.S. military is always evil, housewives are always desperate, corporations are always corrupt, and poverty is always the fault of wealthy people’s greed. Can you spot the difference between those assumptions and reality?

If you can’t, you’re probably a liberal. And a knucklehead.

Thankfully, Superschlub Michael Moore wasn't mentioned, nor was the patron saint of schlubthink James Earl Carter.

But you can understand it best if you realize that the international left lives like in cloud-cuckoo land. Its doctrines such as AGW & the immanent goodness of humanity, though contradicted by facts, persist. Director John Ford, though a cultural conservative, summed up the sort of mentality required to succeed in a culture based on unreality---"when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend."

So Michael Moore can preach the superiority of Cuban health care to America's, but the Canadian premier goes to the USA for treatment of his heart ailment. You can only take the pretense only so far. When it comes to life and death, the real world kicks in.