{"id":10833,"date":"2012-12-05T11:16:47","date_gmt":"2012-12-05T18:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=10833"},"modified":"2012-12-05T11:16:47","modified_gmt":"2012-12-05T18:16:47","slug":"the-pop-culture-political-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2012\/12\/05\/the-pop-culture-political-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"the pop culture \/ political complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The National Review’s “Now What?”, hand-wringing after the election. \u00c2\u00a0Jay Nordlinger “Against the Tide”<\/a> — this is from a mish of his article online and a slightly variation that is in the print edition.<\/p>\n

When Hillary Clinton said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It takes a village,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a lot of conservatives objected. The full saying is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It takes a village to raise a child.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One can certainly understand the objections. But, in an important sense, it\u00c2\u00a0does\u00c2\u00a0take a village to raise a child. Children are shaped by everything around them: in the home and outside it.<\/em>
\n\u00c2\u00a0Way back in the mid-1980s, Tipper Gore wrote a book called\u00c2\u00a0Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society. Tipper and her husband were dabbling in a kind of social conservatism at the time. They dropped it quick \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because all the cool cats, such as Frank Zappa (I remember him specifically), mocked and reviled them. Social conservatism is not the way to rise in the Democratic party. They rose.<\/em>
\nWho runs the village? \u00c2\u00a0What are the forces that shape men and women? \u00c2\u00a0Well, we could name education, IK through graduate school. \u00c2\u00a0The movies. \u00c2\u00a0Popular music. \u00c2\u00a0Entertainment television. \u00c2\u00a0The news media. \u00c2\u00a0In all of these areas, the Left holds sway. \u00c2\u00a0Where does the Right hold sway? \u00c2\u00a0Country music, talk radio, NASCAR, it’s hard to go on<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From Michael Knox Beran’s article on how Obama won 8 of the nation’s ten richest counties and what this means for the whole “Country Club” thing, “Obama’s Coddled Elites<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

And why should they keep track of them<\/em> (deficits, tax dollars), when the most respectable oracles of the coastal suburbs — the New York Times, PBS, Diane Sawyer, Andrea Mitchell, David Letterman, et alia — readily assure you that under President Obama “it’s all swell”?<\/em><\/p>\n

Too busy going back to the well of Clinton — Lewinsky jokes and Bush Dumb jokes is that last one, methinks.<\/p>\n

Well, if hey Left is getting Obama re-elected through its powerful bases in the Hollywood media, what is the Right left with? \u00c2\u00a0They have the important niches in the Military Politico Complex, I think. \u00c2\u00a0Jay Leno, maybe? \u00c2\u00a0Also all military related movies. \u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn and the remake of Red Dawn… from John J Miller’s appreciation of Red Dawn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The violence of\u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn\u00c2\u00a0serves a grander purpose than cheap thrills: It means to show that the Second Amendment is in the Constitution for a good reason. Early in the film, the camera lingers on a Chevy truck\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bumper sticker: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Then the image tilts to the ground, where a Soviet pries a pistol from the cold, dead fingers of a fallen American. It may feel like an ad for the National Rifle Association \u00e2\u20ac\u201d recall the late Charlton Heston\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rallying cry at the 2000 NRA convention, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153From my cold, dead hands!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In this case, the slogan works as an ironic epitaph. As the story of\u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn\u00c2\u00a0plays out, however, America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gun culture allows the Wolverines to fight back.<\/em><\/p>\n

Red Dawn\u00c2\u00a0also fights forward. In 2003, the movie made the news when U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein. The deposed Iraqi dictator was discovered in a location known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wolverine Two\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a raid called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Operation Red Dawn.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The code name was the brainchild of Army captain Geoffrey McMurray, then 29 years old. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think all of us in the military have seen\u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he told\u00c2\u00a0USA Today. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Operation Red Dawn was so fitting because it was a patriotic, pro-American movie.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Milius applauded the effort, telling the\u00c2\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00c2\u00a0that the soldiers who found Hussein \u00e2\u20ac\u0153are Wolverines who have grown up and gone to Iraq.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d A handful of liberals uttered dutiful harrumphs, noting that in Iraq, Americans were the oppressing invaders and the Iraqi insurgents were the scrappy rebels.<\/em><\/p>\n

They just refuse to let go \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re already mobilizing against the new\u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn. In September, Joe Leydon of\u00c2\u00a0Variety\u00c2\u00a0mocked \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a premise arguably even sillier than the original\u00c2\u00a0Red Dawn.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He may have a valid point. In the 2012 release, the Soviets are gone, tossed upon the ash heap of history. Their replacements are the North Koreans, whose attempted conquest of the United States requires not just an old-fashioned suspension of disbelief but an indulgence of gobsmacking ignorance<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0More on the implausibility of the Red Dawn redux scenario, here<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0And how maybe something can be said for cutting Defense spending out of it.<\/p>\n

The new version of Red Dawn, like the original, centers around a foreign invasion of the U.S. The country that manages to invade this time is North Korea, a pariah state with a military budget generously estimated at $9 billion, compared with about $650 billion for the U.S. The North Korean economy is so battered that famines are a regular occurrence. This inadvertently lends the movie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plot a smidgen of plausibility, since any North Korean invasion of the U.S. probably\u00c2\u00a0could\u00c2\u00a0be defeated by a misfit band of teenage dropouts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Originally it was China, but China wouldn’t let it — and the studio needs that market and all — so it’s changed from one implausible scenario to a more implausible one. \u00c2\u00a0Just as well — let’s lose all illusion of “moral in the story” of Military Preparedness. \u00c2\u00a0(No. \u00c2\u00a0That’s what Eliot Abrams claimed.)<\/p>\n

From David Sirota’s “Back to Our Future”<\/a> on 80s pop culture and its political imprint<\/p>\n

In 1997, after reports that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Red Dawn\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was one of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s favorite films, MGM\/United Artists vice president Peter Bart revealed to Variety that when his company first considered the movie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s script, the studio\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s CEO \u00e2\u20ac\u0153declared in no uncertain terms that he wanted to make the ultimate jingoistic movie.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The studio subsequently recruited Reagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recently departed secretary of state, retired general Alexander Haig, to serve on MGM\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s corporate board, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153consult with [‘Red Dawn’s’] director and inculcate the appropriate ideological tint.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Though the screenplay\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first draft strived to lament the tragedies of war, Bart recounted how the studio \u00e2\u20ac\u0153demanded to know why [it] should try to remake \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcLord of the Flies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 when it could instead try for \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcRambo.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d […]<\/em><\/p>\n

For that access, the military began exacting a price. The Pentagon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s focus on juveniles created the heavy hand it was beginning to use to shape popular culture in the 1980s. Increasingly, for filmmakers to gain access to even the most basic military scenery, Pentagon gatekeepers began requiring major plot and dialogue changes so as to guarantee that the military was favorably portrayed. In a Variety story from 1994, the Pentagon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s official Hollywood liaison, Phil Strub, put it bluntly: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The main criteria we use [for approval] is \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 how could the proposed production benefit the military \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 could it help in recruiting [and] is it in sync with present policy?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d […]<\/em><\/p>\n

As if that carrot-stick dynamic weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t coercive enough to aspiring filmmakers, the Pentagon in the 1980s expanded the definition of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cooperation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to include collaboration on screenplays as scripts were being initially drafted. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It saves [writers] time from writing stupid stuff,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said one official in explaining the new process<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And so we have Will and Grace and Red Dawn, and I guess it’s the perimeters of what we get elected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The National Review’s “Now What?”, hand-wringing after the election. \u00c2\u00a0Jay Nordlinger “Against the Tide” — this is from a mish of his article online and a slightly variation that is in the print edition. When Hillary Clinton said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It takes a village,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a lot of conservatives objected. The full saying is, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It takes a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10833"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10841,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10833\/revisions\/10841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}