A little anti-Semitism to go with your nonsense?

There is a right-wing web site called Big Hollywood, which is primarily conservatives lamenting the state of the culture and entertainment. Gee, as if that's news. They've been lamenting the state of the culture since slavery was abolished. So there is nothing new there. The nature of the conservative is to whine and bitch because life evolves and they don't believe in evolution. They believe the best is always behind us and cling tenaciously to the past.

Now what does it take to be a columnist on Hollywood for Big Hollywood? David Swindle, one of their writers, lists his credentials as having written for various right-wing websites, doing film reviews for an Indiana TV station and living near Hollywood "awith (sic) his wife and their Siberian Husky puppy." Okay, in other words, he doesn't have any credibility, just the politically correct (in right-wing circles) views. His own comments seem to limit his knowledge of Hollywood to "doing political, ideological readings of films."

Swindle, with his huge credentials in the entertainment business—sarcasm alert for conservatives who wouldn't know better—sings the praises of the smarmy, oily whiner named Ben Shapiro. Shapiro is a right-wing media whore who makes a pretty penny telling conservatives what they most want to hear. He got his leg up, so too speak, by bragging to conservatives that he was a virgin. Apparently his lack of experience in the field gave him all the credentials to talk about sex that conservatives thought he needed.

Now Shapiro is out to attack evil Hollywood. What I found rather interesting is that Swindle was quick to pay the "Jew card" in this promotion piece for Shapiro's smear book. Here is how he describes it: "Shapiro wore his Harvard Law baseball cap and interviewed some of Hollywood's most influential television creators. Assuming from his alma mater and last name that he was one of them, the Hollywood insiders were too honest for their own good."

Get that? They assumed based on Shapiro's "last name" that "he was one of them." One of who? A Hollywood television producer? Nope. A Jew! Sorry folks, but when conservatives start pulling out the Jew card and pointing to "Jews" as being behind the destruction of American values, I get nervous. Normally they hide anti-Semitism a bit more than that. The anti-gay shit they spew, well that's just fund-raising heaven for them, from their bigoted base. But referring to someone as "one of them," because he has a Jewish name, is scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Though I do have to say that the picture of Swindle does look like someone who would hang out at white power rallies, right down to the "working man" baseball cap and, what appears to be, a vein attempt to grow a mustache—but it could just be dirt.

Swindle says that little Ben "documents the subversion of the cop and legal dramas from the early day of righteous cops and prosecutors to the nihilism of Hill Street Blues and Picket Fences." Wow! This clearly shows how out of touch with reality that Swindle and Shapiro happen to be. Yes, the early fiction on television portrayed cops and prosecutors as righteous. It was pure, unadulterated bullshit. Reality was never that way. And any unbiased reading of history shows that police and prosecutors frequently were corrupt and dishonest. They still are!

It doesn't take much to document the violent tendencies of cops and how they will frequently lie in court and invent evidence to convict people wrongly, and exonerate themselves from any wrong doing. Any accurate portrayal of these two groups will show this happening—just as the news reports show on a daily basis. Right now Corey Maye is seeing freedom again. Cops wrongly raided his home, breaking down his doors in the middle of the night in a no-knock raid. Maye defended himself from violent attackers and killed one of them. He was sentenced to death based on dicey evidence. He was defending his home, as he had the right to do, and there was no valid search warrant for his house. The cop who died was white, Maye was black and it was the deep South. The cop went along on the raid for the fun of it. He was on a joy ride basically. Maye sat in prison for years based on a police screw up. Should we portray those officers as "righteous?"

Sorry, but Swindle lives in a fairytale if he thinks cops and prosecutors are always "righteous." They aren't. This love for authority betrays the "freedom" slogans that conservatives chant. In the end, they abandon freedom every time and cling to the lash of the police state because it makes them safe. That's important to Swindle who once wrote that living on "Chetamon court," as a child, made him feel safe, and gave him "a sense of security." That is what Swindle wants, security, to feel safe—and freedom is just so damn risky. Bad things might happen. So, in the end freedom loses out.

Now let's also be clear that Shapiro can easily bias his book by selecting, in advance, precisely who he will or won't interview. It's that simple. And you can then crow that everyone you talked to was a Leftist. Just don't talk to the libertarians like Clint Eastwood, Trey Parker, Matt Stone, John Larroquette, Drew Carey, Kurt Russell, Raquel Welch, Orson Bean, Penn and Teller, Jason Reitman, Tom Selleck, Wil Wheaton, Marc Cherry, Tracy Torme, Dennis Leary and others.

Conservatism has various branches, from the Ron Paul paleoconservatives to the neoCons, to the Religious Right, to Buckleyite Catholics, for instance. I could do an expose of the "Conservative Movement" and then only interview the real loons like Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer, Michelle Bachmann, Gary North and other theocratic authoritarians. Such a book would be dishonest. And I suspect some on the Left would lap it up as indicative of the conservative movement. It wouldn't be accurate but it might be popular.

Shapiro can easily do the same thing simply by ignoring all people in the entertainment world who are not openly left-wing. Here is what I suspect happened. Shapiro decides to make money pimping to the Right again. He can't sell the virgin story again, he's too old and too married to make that fly. And, since the Right loves books bashing someone, he decides to bash Hollywood, a favorite target of the Right for decades. (Contrary to their love fest with the 1950s, the conservatives of the 50s didn't like Hollywood then either, which just illustrates the conservative tendency to consistently like whatever is old, even if they didn't like it when it was new.)

Shapiro then sits down and makes a list of the people he already knows are Left-wing and goes out of his way to interview them. The end result proves what he set out to prove. Which, of course, is precisely what you would expect.

Hollywood is far better than conservatives admit. It is often promoting freedom precisely in those areas where conservatives are enamored with Big Government. While conservatives were still supporting Jim Crow laws, white Southern racism, and "keeping those people in their place," Hollywood was depicting the drama of what happens when you allow racism to dominate politics. Hollywood, not conservatives, was on the side of freedom in that battle. While conservatives were engaging in their "polite" anti-Semitism, while ignoring the more vile kinds that would break out in Right-wing circles, it was Hollywood exposing this sordid bigotry in films like Gentleman's Agreement (1947). Again conservatives were supporting the violation of individual rights while Hollywood took the right side of the battle. Today, slimy toadies of the Right, like Shapiro, are beating the anti-gay drum for what it is worth. Hollywood first portrayed gay people as normal human beings, something that horrified the Right. Hollywood was correct, the Right was wrong, again!

I don't think weasels like Ben Shapiro have a leg to stand on. They are big government advocates themselves, just as long as it's big moralistic, Bible-wielding, intolerant government. For them to chastise Hollywood is ludicrous since their own track record promoting individual rights is so damn pathetic.

And, in closing, Hollywood is market driven. The TV shows that conservatives love to hate tend to be popular and that drives the Right nuts. Glee makes money but conservatives see it as imposition on them, a violation of their rights to control what other people watch. Ditto for the various shows they hate. Yes, now and then, they hate a show that bombs and then they crow this proves they were right. But Hollywood continues to make billions year after year because, more often than not, they sell what the public wants to see. Hate the culture if you want, but don't ignore that it is markets at work, the very markets conservative pretend to support.

Inaccuracy in Media

There is a conservative group which mislabels itself Accuracy in Media. There major justification for existing is to correct the "liberal bias" of the media. By "liberal" they don't mean liberal at all, but socialist. For them unbiased means conservative lies in lieu of socialist lies.

They recently ran an article, very late in the game apparently, reviewing the film V for Vendetta. And their description of it is inaccurate and sometimes funny, albeit unintentionally so.

The most absurd line in the whole piece is this: "I detest an expanding federal government as much as the next conservative or libertarian." First, please don't say libertarian in the same breath as conservative. Libertarians are not another brand of conservative as much in common with Kincaid and his ilk as they do with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro. Libertarianism is neither Left nor Right, but a repudiation of both. Second, if Kincaid detests an "expanding federal government as much as the next conservative" that means he doesn't detest at all. The biggest expansion of the federal government, the most vicious assault on the Bill of Rights in decades, is the work of the current conservative regime.

In fact, Kincaid's little piece on the film is really an attack on "liberal Hollywood" and a justification for expanding the federal government. He whines that "it is only the federal government that can protect us against foreign threats. That is the one thing that the federal government is supposed to do—provide for a national defense." See, Bush is just "defending America," in spite of the fact that the lion's share of government expansion was outside the military budget and in social welfare. The Republicans, the conservatives, embraced big government with a fury not seen since FDR. And Kincaid is inaccurate to imply that it has anything to do with defense, when most the spending has been on social programs.

Let's look at some of Kincaid's other little lies. In the film television host Gordan Deitrich takes in the character Evey, who is on the run from the authorities. He has a copy of the Qu'ran in a class case in his basement. Not any copy you should know, but an ancient, illustrated edition that is a collector's piece. First, how Kincaid distorts the scene. " The Koran, the victim says, is a beautiful book filled with poetry. " Did he call the Qu'ran a "beautiful book" as Kincaid said "filled with poetry." Nope. Kincaid distorted the film intentionally. I say intentionally because he does it throughout his little diatribe. One can watch the film or read the novel (not the illustrated original but the one based on the film) which was written based on the film script. I recently read the novel and saw the film for the second time, so I know they are pretty much in sync with one another.

The Qu'ran in the film is from the 14th Century. And what Deitrich says is that he isn't a Muslim but "I don't have to be a Muslim to find the images beautiful or its poetry moving."
Notice he did not say the book itself was beautiful as Kincaid makes up. He says the images in this ancient illustrated edition are beautiful. The images, not the book. Nor did he say it was "filled with poetry." In fact he made no quantifiable statement at all about how much of it is poetic. He said that he found "its poetry moving" without once saying how much of it was poetry. For a group that calls itself Accuracy in Media, they aren't very accurate when it comes to the media. But the purpose of this is to bash Hollywood, and if need be, that may require distorting the facts.

I don't think Accuracy in Media exists to be accurate. They exist to tell conservatives what they want to hear and raise funds by doing that. Say what your donors want to hear and the money keeps rolling in.

Kincaid argues that the film "is worth watching only because it sheds some light on the mindset of Hollywood elites who fear Bush more than radical Islam. And it highlights the role of the media in brainwashing the population... If impressionable young people come away from this film thinking that Islamic terrorism is not a threat, then Hollywood will have accomplished its sinister objective." See it's a sinister plot to brainwash kids to hate Jesus W. Bush.

Fact is that the story, which he thinks is about Bush, was written and published as an illustrated novel between 1982 and 1985: long before the big government conservatives anointed Dubya their new messiah. Kincaid says the film is about "a conservative administration." If by conservative you mean fascist then he is correct. Of course, these days I can understand why he gets the two confused. The fascists in the film took over the government and V is fighting them. In fact, the original illustrated version of it was far more left-anarchistic and the film script toned that down considerably much to the displeasure of left anarchists.

I find it just wacko, conspiracist nonsense to say the film’s “sinister objective” was to get “young people” thinking “that Islamic terrorism is not a threat.” It is nonsense because the film is not about this world and current events. It is set in an alternative world to our own when history went in a different direction. It doesn’t deal with Islamic terrorism in the plot and, considering it is based on a story written 24 years ago, that is no surprise. But nutty conservatives love finding “sinister” plots and scapegoating people. So, the film had the “sinister objective” of whitewashing Islamic terrorists. What nonsense. But it is indicative of the mind set of Accuracy (sic) in Media.

At the end of the story people come out to protest the government, and as Kincaid describes it, “Government forces, confused about how to respond, do not fire their weapons.” A minor point perhaps but there is a good reason they are confused here. The government they live under is a dictatorship, which Kincaid equates with being a “conservative" administration—perhaps a Freudian slip. The dictator has died in a coup manipulated by V, but carried out by the head of the secret police. And the head of the secret police is killed by V. In a dictatorship the moment the head is severed the body doesn’t know how to react, until the power vacuum is filled. The soldiers surrounding parliament are waiting for orders. No one acts without orders, it's too dangerous. It’s a dictatorship. In dictatorships, if you want to survive, you follow orders and don't take the initiative. And, when no orders come, they do nothing. That is how dictatorships work.

Kincaid is obsessed with his fantasy that the film is really a defense of fundamentalist terrorism: “Its sounds like a fairy tale, and it is. It is a world in which the American people—and the populations of other Western democracies—have nothing to fear from the Muslims or anybody else. The only thing we have to fear, the film says, is our own government.” His obsession is borderline idiotic since it’s not about that at all.

No, Islamic terrorists are not part of this film. They aren’t part of Star Wars, The Browning Version, Gone with the Wind or thousands and thousands of other films. It’s not a conspiracy run by liberals, Jews, Masons, the Illuminati, homosexuals or anyone else. It’s a film with a plot, set in a future world with a history different from our own. The basic plot never mentions Islamic terrorism as the story was written long before that was an issue.

Now, many libertarians, liberals (classical and modern), and even some conservatives are concerned about the rise of authoritarianism under George Bush. The utter disregard for Constitutional freedoms, the centralisation of power in the Imperial presidency, the lies told to the American public regularly, all are very ominous signs about the state of freedom—something conservatives once said they were concerned about. But Kincaid says: “The real issue is not that the government has gone too far, but that it hasn’t gone far enough.”

Now, that fits into the comic book. Yes, that is precisely the sort of mentality that V for Vendetta was talking about, even though it was not about Islamic terrorism. It was about how fascism arises in a nation with a history of freedom. And, the way fascism replaces freedom is when individuals stand up and say that a government which has spit on the Constitution, has open contempt for the Bill of Rights, and which despises federalism or limited government, “hasn’t gone far enough.”

But, for nutty Kincaid and his fascist fantasies the film is “a justification for Islamic Jihad.” Right.

V for Vendetta does warn us about how people can be terrified into surrendering freedom. And today, it is not Islamic terrorists who control America. Nor are they even likely to do so. The threat to American freedom, the real and potent threat to liberty, can not come from without but only from within. America is too powerful to be conquered, but no nation, no matter how strong, is immune from a cancer that rots it from within.

Bin Laden and the lunatic fundamentalists in Islam might periodically commit some atrocity. But they can’t destroy freedom. They might kill the body, but they can’t kill the libertarian spirit of the American Revolution. That sort of spiritual murder is always self-induced. The American system can’t be murdered, but it can commit suicide. And people like Cliff Kincaid are standing on the sidelines cheering on that suicide in the name of their “war on terror”.

Our illustration is from the original 1982 edition of V for Vendetta.

UPDATE: Given the mental hysteria rampant in the American conservative movement, I should have known that a piece as inaccurate as the Kincaid one would be spread around. Already two other websites for the brain-dead Right have reprinted it. Ann Coulter is all the evidence you need that the more dishonest and shrill a writer is, the more support they get from what passes itself off as modern conservatism. Poor Barry Goldwater is spinning in his grave.

Conservatives, gay cowboys and Hayek

Social conservatives have a real passion about "gay cowboys". They are obsessed over the film Brokeback Mountain.

This site doesn't review films unless they are of particular interest from a liberal position. And Brokeback Mountain doesn't qualify. But the response from conservatives is worth commenting upon.

Take the conservative, sometimes libertarian, website Tech Central Station. They recently published an article which was simply false. John Merline wrote a thinly disguised anti-Hollywood article "And the winner... Isn't Hollywood." His basic point was that films should win Academy Awards based on their popularity. He said it wasn't his point but he spends his entire article singing only that tune.

Of course Oscars are awards to the industry from the industry. It has nothing to do with popularity. But the part that is really dicey is when Mr. Merline says: “Not one of the nominees for Best Picture managed to make it into Top 20 in terms of box office receipts. Brokeback Mountain came in 26th, according to Box Office Mojo. Capote barely made it into the Top 100. The winner, Crash, was ranked 49th.” This is not true.

We can take Brokeback Mountain as the example. The film was released in December and it placed somewhere between 15th and 18th place consistently. That alone would prove he was wrong when he said it never made into the Top 20. But it didn't end there. One week after it premiered it entered the top ten. It slipped a bit but didn't go below 20th place. It then jumped back into the top ten. For three days, January 17 to 19, it was the top grossing film in the US. After that it remained in the top five for just over three weeks. And since then the lowest it has fallen is 14th place. In other words not only has it been in the Top 20, contrary to Merline's claim, but it has never been out of the Top 20 as of today. Of course eventually it will have to and probably soon as it's reaching the end of its theatrical life cycle and will be out on DVD shortly.

The oddest, and most absurd, claim by Merline was a comment that said that by nominating films that are not box office hits the Academy is insulting those attending the films. He snidely said that while people might be "too stupid to understand quality film making" the drop in ratings for the Academy Awards show proves they are "not stupid enough to take such insults lying down." This is so irrational that one can only conclude that Mr. Merline is acting out conservative prejudices against Hollywood. Big Macs are more popular than Filet Mignon with Merlot Cream Sauce. That the Michelin Guide rates many restaurants highly, but that McDonalds isn't one of them, is no insult to those of us who enjoy McDonalds.

Conservatives frequently praise the quality of books which are shunned by most readers and pan books that are embraced by the public. Does that sort of critique of literature mean they are insulting people? Of course not. Merline is merely Hollywood bashing. The classical liberal is not as uncomfortable with Hollywood as is the conservative. Conservatives oppose social freedom. Conservatives were especially upset because Brokeback Mountain showed two men, who they falsely called cowboys, as gay. It's not quite accurate but it's not critical either. Even before anyone saw the film the Religious Right, which has US conservatives by the gonads, was attacking the film. The most verbal among them never bothered to see the film. They simply knew it was evil. And so they harped on the issue of Hollywood being out of touch with their audience. It's part of the conservative mantra. The classical liberal may disagree with some of the messages of Hollywood films when it comes to anti-business attitudes and the like. But there are also good films and very libertarian films. And the liberal has no problem with Brokeback Mountain.

Actually one of the best statements on the "out of touch" theory was made by George Clooney. And while Clooney is often wrong on this issue he was spot on. Clooney noted that conservatives attack Hollywood for being "out of touch" (which is really Merline's thinly disguised message). Clooney said that Hollywood was sometimes out of touch and that it was a good thing. He said: "We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects. This Academy, this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theaters. I'm proud to be a part of this Academy. Proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch."

Clooney reminded me of something the great liberal, free market economist Ludwig von Mises once said. While he was writing about literature it applies to film as well. "Those authors who merely repeat what everybody approves and wants to hear are of no importance. What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones. he is by necessity anti-authoritarian and anti-governmental, irreconcilably opposed to the immense majority of his contemporaries. He is precisely the author whose books the greater part of the public does not buy." Or the film the greater part of the public does not view.

The great student of Mises was F.A. Hayek and in his essay "Why I am Not a Conservative" he made clear one distinction between the conservative and the classical liberal. The conservative wanted to stop change: "But the main point about liberalism is that it wants to go elsewhere, not to stand still." Hayek noted that libealism is "not averse to evolution and change". Liberalism always wants to see liberty extended and the equality of rights applied more consistently.

Hayek wrote: "This brings me to the first point on which the conservative and the liberal dispositions differ radically. As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead. There would not be much to object to if the conservatives merely disliked too rapid change in institutions and public policy; here the case for caution and slow process is indeed strong. But the conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will be brought about. It is, indeed, part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self - regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance. There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly."

And those "gay cowboys" up on Brokeback Mountain help illustrate the point.