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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Where have all the heroes gone? |
| 2019-09-19 |
| [American Thinker] In a season of grotesque sexual misbehavior by (as always) men of the Left, one sorta wonders how it ever came to be. Not that long ago, the women of the Left assured us that Bill Clinton's misbehavior in the Oval Office was "just sex" and no big deal. It was a sixties attitude ‐ free love and get-out-of-our-bedrooms and such. In that spirit at least one female reporter volunteered a gratitudinous freebie to the then-president for his, uh, services to the cause. No trace of that attitude attaches to #MeToo, the latest version of the Left's complex and contradictory approach to relations between the sexes. If the sixties attitude treated sex playfully (at least as re: Bill Clinton), #MeToo seems convinced that men are too dangerous for sex and must be punished for their maleness. To be sure, the Epstein revelations seemed to underscore the point about toxic masculinity. If you ever wondered what a toxic male looks like, look no farther than Jeff. Into this alarming environment comes TV fare showcasing the idea that women aren't as good as men, but better. Computer hackers, car-jackers, detectives, doctors, lawyers, spaceship commanders ‐ all better than their male counterparts. And they can fight! Little bitty women with toothpick arms beat up whole gangs of muscular male brutes with square jaws and hairy bellies. In the next scene, these gals turn on the charm in scanty evening gowns as the guys line up panting. I don't watch the comic book flicks where the female hero with exaggerated curves, dressed to bring these assets into unmissable relief, beats up the worst villains in the universe, but it's hard to escape the ads. Gotta be quick on the remote. The point, among others, is that the male hero has all but disappeared from the cultural scene. For that matter, so have just ordinary guys who do what ordinary guys do, who laugh a lot and look on the sunny side, who aren't wimpy and weepy and angst-ridden. For the female-driven Left, only girls have complex personalities drawn with depth and (possible) insight, who bravely overcome abuse and march grimly on to set the example for the abused sisterhood coming up behind them. If this is how progressives see the world, small wonder we normals (hat tip: Kurt) don't get it. Progs choose to hang out down in the dumps, moping about how unfair it all is, rather than focusing on the fun things, the funny things, the gorgeous things, the interesting things, the curious things, the sweet things, the awesome things. It's true that the world is full of evil, but this ought not shut down seeing the rest. It's lefty despair that makes modern culture so unbearable. Despair drives lefties from one extreme to the other so that what they said in their youth contradicts what they say in their oldth. They are out of balance, and instead of swinging back toward the center, they go ever farther out, getting ever unhappier. And completely unnecessary. You can't control much of what the world throws at you, but you can control your attitude toward it. For most of us, it is possible to choose to look on the sunny side, to keep that stiff upper lip, to opt for good cheer over blue funk. Seeing the human condition as both comedy and tragedy keeps us in balance and out of the Lefty Slough of Despond. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #11 Watched it. The ending depressed me, but Karl Urban is awesome |
| Posted by: Frank G 2019-09-19 19:34 |
| #10 Everyone should watch 'The Boys'. I think it's on Amazon but may be on some stream site too. I think the liberal producers were going for a conservative-bashing tirade on the icons of Americanism and the esteem of the armed forces. But the direct archetypal parallel to liberal, media savvy 'hero' leaders that hits you is unmistakable. From a team of PR managed bullies and crazies posing as saviors of people, to their acts of incredible audacity covered and protected by legalities and the government. It shows some maverick humans trying to expose them and kill them with conventional weapons, and that too presents a clear parallel to the conflict between the democrat crazies and an indignant part of the population fighting to keep the right to protect themselves, and not surrendering it to saviors with media halos around them. Some right wingers rejected the show too soon, hence the bad reviews. I saw it through and found everyone from the Clintons to Obama, Pelosi and Kamala types in there. Try it for repose if nothing. |
| Posted by: Dron66046 2019-09-19 15:45 |
| #9 The heroes are in the dungeons, battling monsters and the bosses, with the occasional treasures found. Oh wait, it does sound a lot like the political process nowadays. |
| Posted by: Seeking Cure For Ignorance 2019-09-19 15:20 |
| #8 Tune out, switch off, drop out, embrace the OLD / TRADITIONAL culture. Solzhenitsyn was right: the modern mass culture of the West is a "swamp of nonsense." Tell the junk-woke culture to screw off. Scrap it, and go back to slow media, long novels, the old poems, the old music. Culture is the new counter-culture. |
| Posted by: Lex 2019-09-19 13:01 |
| #7 The heroes have not gone anywhere. There are plenty of heroes. The Left just has to value heroism and look in the right places. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2019-09-19 12:19 |
| #6 I started watching anime because my son needed to learn English, and ex-wife - who's used to be an English teacher - wasn't doing very well with him. So I remembered how I learned English and went to get him some comics. In the used book store I patronize comics were mixed with manga. I picked up Gintama, and fell in love. Grom Jr. fell in love too. the Orientals have different quirks than ours I like their quirks. They seem to have a firm grasp on gender roles. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-09-19 11:50 |
| #5 It was a sixties attitude ‐ free love and get-out-of-our-bedrooms and such. In that spirit at least one female reporter volunteered a gratitudinous freebie to the then-president for his, uh, services to the cause. No trace of that attitude attaches to #MeToo, the latest version of the Left's complex and contradictory approach to relations between the sexes. If you're in the Club, you can do what you want; if not, you're doomed. That's what the above tells us. It's lefty despair that makes modern culture so unbearable. Despair drives lefties from one extreme to the other so that what they said in their youth contradicts what they say in their oldth It's not despair. They still think the future belongs to them. It's hatred of anyone not in the Club and the desire to make them suffer. For most of us, it is possible to choose to look on the sunny side, to keep that stiff upper lip, to opt for good cheer over blue funk. That's fine, so long as it's not whistling past the graveyard, and if the "positivity" doesn't shade over into deluded passivity. Norman Vincent Peale will only take you so far. Here's a test for people like the author. Would you go up to one of our troops in Afghanistan or Iraq and tell them "Just smile and everything will be fine!"? For all their self-dramatizing gloom, the left is still winning or holding on most fronts. Maybe the "despair" is actually energizing and justifying, and therefore a source of power? Would the Right be more active and effective if we cultivated just a bit of that for ourselves? Who can say? |
| Posted by: charger 2019-09-19 11:23 |
| #4 ^^About the third Sit-com where I was unamused or flat out annoyed at the lines that the laugh track signaled I was supposed to find hilarious was when I clicked the remote 'Off" ... permanently. |
| Posted by: magpie 2019-09-19 10:45 |
| #3 Watch Anime... I started watching anime because the Orientals have different quirks than ours. Partly because it was entertaining to see the differences between cultures, but mostly because I was so totally tired of the Made For Snobbishly PC East/West Coast drones... |
| Posted by: magpie 2019-09-19 10:41 |
| #2 Watch Anime. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2019-09-19 08:21 |
| #1 Where? We're all reading Rantburg! |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2019-09-19 08:15 |