Morning Ed: Society {2017.01.015.Th}

Tod Kelly says:

Man, so much to go over about the Avi point and the comments about it here.

Thing 1

I confess, I can’t quite tell is Avi is being purposefully naive as a kind of narrative device here, or if he truly doesn’t understand that it’s a cliche to envy the rich, famous, and powerful this trappings, even when they have obviously unhappy lives. It shows up everywhere in American literature from Irving to Melville to Twain to Fitzgerald. Our most talked about (and profitable) television programming — realty shows– today are based entirely on this premise. Both Robinson’s poem and Simon’s song are expressions of the American (and anti-British) ideals that the man of lowly birth is as good or better than the man of lineage, and that it is folly to forget such.

Thing 2

@will-truman

I thought the problem was that there was plenty of conservative movies out there and complainers just don’t count anything because it’s not virtually a campaign ad?

Not quite. The point is that most good art, including movies, is both/neither conservative or liberal. To grade movies, music, literature, etc. on the sole calculus of whether of not it falls entirely into “correct” political ideas isn’t a request for better art. It’s one for less interesting propaganda.

Thing 3

@kolohe

But also maybe Field of Dreams fits the participation trophy paradigm better than anything else I can think of offhand – and that one is explicitly an ‘anti-conservative’ movie.

That Field of Dreams — a movie whose overarching message is about the importance of family, tradition, and small town, middle American values — is somehow “anti-conservative” is exactly what I’m talking about above. It might be the single most conservative sports movie of all time. But hey, we were just talking about participation trophies and no one wins a championship in FOD, so let’s call it liberal propaganda.

Thing 4

All of this is what I mean when I caution Will to be careful of pointing at movie characters and calling them conservative ,something I do every time we resist this stuff.

If you see a movie villain who is a greedy Wall Street-er, or a man who dumps chemical in the town water supply, or a bigot, or an Army general who would rather shoot Americans than the enemy, etc., and you complain that Hollywood always makes conservatives into villains, then you’re saying something quite horrible about conservatives.Report