Art

The Culture War

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Apparently in the new Odyssey movie, Odysseus suffers from a form of PTSD over his participation in the sack of Troy. Thus one of the problems of crafting a historical epic – complete misunderstanding of how the people at the time viewed the matter.

They did have rules of war! Don’t think for a moment that they didn’t. And those persons and powers who egregiously violated those rules would be hated, perhaps even fought to destruction because of it. There was even a rule about sacking cities – in that if a city surrendered on terms then the conquering power had to live up to them…the terms usually being that the people are spared death or slavery and rather than looting, the wealth of the city is carefully tallied up and transferred to the conqueror, leaving enough for the conquered city to survive (it would, after all, now become part of the conqueror’s realm). But a city taken by assault? Different story: the defender’s lives are forfeit and they’re fortunate to merely be reduced to slavery. Bottom line, Odysseus would not have felt bad about sacking Troy; in the moral code he lived in, there was no problem with what the Greeks did. But if we translated him to 1570 to observe the Siege of Famagusta he would have been outraged that Mustafa Pasha, after accepting the surrender on terms, then went on to murder the defeated Venetian commander, Marco Antonio Bragadin as well as every other Christian he could lay his hands on. This was a rather stupid move by Mustafa as it fired up the Venetians (as well as the overall Christian West) so that a little more than a year later, at Lepanto, the Christians were…well…not very nice to the defeated Muslims. So, rules. Just not our rules. More importantly, just not our rather silly rules.

I’ve talked about this before and in war, very bad things happen. Decent people try to limit the bad as much as possible – and bring any war to as rapid a conclusion as possible – but, mainly: bad. You are, after all, trying to kill people in order to compel them to obey your orders. This is not a nice thing to do and it can’t be done except by being, to some degree, rather nasty. But in the modern West, we’re supposed to believe there’s a method of warfare where everything is done nicely. Can’t happen. As Jackie Fisher put it, attempts to humanize war are akin to humanizing hell. But because we’ve been sold this concept, we can’t imagine an Odysseus not feeling guilty about the sack of Troy…which, to be sure, would entail lots of murder, rape and looting…with the survivors sold off as slaves. But that was the code they all lived by – and the Trojans could have accepted surrender terms. They felt they didn’t have to. Bet wrong!

And that gets me to this: this new movie, like all of popular culture, is an attempt to propagandize us into a certain mode of thinking. Like all those Cold War movies which cast the United States as the bad guys…the unreasonable partners in the global dance. Which cast patriotic Americans as idiots who simply didn’t understand things. On and on like that – it didn’t take with all of us, but it did take with enough…so now we’ve got American citizens calling essentially for the abolition of our Constitution and the rejection of our Declaration of Independence. That is, wishing to replace America with something quite different…something they view as other than the inherent evil which is the United States of America.

None of this is done with a sledge hammer, nor is it done overnight. It is a slow, steady drip, drip, drip of propaganda until the ground is ready for the seed of treason. We’re being told – mostly by allegedly Right voices – that we should ignore the DEI casting decisions in The Odyssey. They are all small roles. Only on screen for a few minutes. Ignore that! Look at the beautiful film! This is why we were losing for so long. We kept just gliding over the subversive aspects…after all, they didn’t work on us! Or, at least, not as much as they worked on others. But by making things like The Manchurian Candidate and Cool Hand Luke part of our shared culture, we were simply internalizing enemy propaganda. In The Manchurian Candidate, the true enemy is anti-Communism. Don’t fight the Communists! Fight the Americans who want to fight Communism – the True Irredeemable Bad Guys are displayed with a pathetic caricature of Joe McCarthy…name never mentioned but everyone knew and he’s just this drunken idiot puppet of malign forces. In Cool Hand Luke the true enemy isn’t a shiftless vandal, but prison guards trying to keep good order among a prison population made of of men with a proven disregard for truth and the property of others. We’re supposed to feel sympathy for Luke – he didn’t really do anything that bad, right? Just a little bit of vandalism. Let him go! I submit Detroit as the result of that attitude turned into policy.

In The Odyssey, the drip, drip, drip is mostly that West doesn’t matter – never did anything. As I’ve said before, it doesn’t really matter what the skin color of the actors are – but it must be placed in a proper context. You can have an all-black Odyssey…but you’d have to set it in Bronze Age Africa. To just slip a black lady into the role of Helen of Troy is to insult the work and those who love it. It isn’t a matter of disliking black, it is a matter of loving the integrity of the story. And, of course, it never goes the other way. If a person in a story is female, black, Asian, gay, Muslim or what have you then the actor portraying that character better match up. We are told we must honor the wonderful achievements of everyone except for the white or the male or the Christian. One thing that did make me laugh was in the reboot of the Star Trek movies starting in 2009, the character of Mr Sulu is gay. He wasn’t in the original series, nor in the first batch of movies. Why is he gay now? Because the actor who played him in the original series is gay. That this didn’t come out until years after the first series went off the air is irrelevant. That there are scenes in the original series indicating Mr Sulu is heterosexual also doesn’t matter. The actor is gay, so Mr Sulu is now gay for all time to come. Just try to make him straight in some later movie or TV show and you’ll get howls of anger. We get erased, they get strictly honored in all things…and get to take over our roles at will…we’re not even supposed to laugh when they cast a black woman as Richard III.

The main take away here is to not give them an inch, because we know they’re going for the mile. Don’t participate in their absurdity. In this, it can be just waiting until The Odyssey shows up on streaming. Personally, I won’t watch it at all – the source used for the movie is a feminist re-write of the original, the DEI casting decisions are absurd and the scenes I’ve seen from it don’t impress me at all. Nolan is a pretty good movie maker but I think he got way off course on this one. Don’t concede the point. Don’t be like, “well, I didn’t mind the casting”. Mind it. Say it. Call it the idiotic twaddle that it is, even if you otherwise like the film. Point and laugh at it – don’t get yourself invested in it. That is, don’t feel like your intellect requires you to say you like something you don’t. Don’t be one of those people who simply want to sit at the cool kid’s table and so will say something nice about nonsense.

And, of course (and once again) we on the right simply must start building a replacement entertainment industry…one that will subvert the Left rather than the Right. We do have talent! We just don’t have institutions willing to pass us bundles of cash for garbage, like the Left does.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan13 Comments

The Democrat establishment wants Platner out. And, lo, how the mighty have fallen. When Franken became a liability they found some relatively minor dirt on him and he was gone fast…whats coming out on Platner is quite bad and so far the man isn’t budging. A DNC to MSM hitjob just ain’t what it used to be.

What’s the dirt? Well, the rumored dirt the GOP has on him is supposedly hideous…I won’t repeat what I’ve heard (and, of course, the rumors can be wrong, but they come to be via people who’s integrity I respect) but it would be very bad for Platner and the Democrats if such stories were to drop in October. So, different dirt was called up – this time an accusation that Platner broke into a lady’s home and sexually assaulted her (this being less objectionable than what the GOP has on him!). As is typical with these sorts of thing, no apparent eye witnesses nor any contemporary police report. But, believe all women, right? Well, not the Republican woman who came out with similar accusations ages ago…you don’t believe them! But when a properly Democrat lady comes out, it is five alarm fire time. The reality is that Collins is surging, Platner is flat-lining and at least some of the dirt the GOP has is credible and, so, he’s become a liability…Democrats got their Uber-Dirts order filled and that was supposed to do the trick by July 13th (the deadline for replacing Platner with someone else).

Will it? I hope it doesn’t. Not that I like Platner: even if the accusations are false he’s a complete creep, anti-American, anti-Israel dripping sack of…well, you know. But the Democrats dug this grave all by themselves. They were warned in advance – including by some voices on the Left – that Platner was not the guy. But he hates Trump and Israel so all the upper class, liberal white women flocked to him. Now, they got him. I want them stuck with him. I want them sick at heart from now to November trying to decide if they vote for the Nazi rapist or the Republican.

Mitch McConnell seems…not totally alive. Which is not surprising given his age and overall health…but the Senate GOP is locking arms and pretending he’s fine. Fearful, I guess, that we’d get a GOP Senator who didn’t hate Trump if McConnell were forced to resign. While our prayers are for recovery (or a holy death) for Mitch, his condition is emblematic of the old GOP…rigid, dying, but still clinging to power. The sooner he’s out of office, the better.

The Odyssey flick is getting a huge number of puff pieces in the MSM…which tends to confirm its going to be lousy.

[The Iliad] might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

— GK Chesterton

He goes on:

The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

The reviews are telling us it is a fresh and subversive look…with, I guess, their not understanding that to subvert is to destroy. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of ways to play out the story. Illiad, Odyssey and Job can be mined 10,000 times and you wouldn’t exhaust the source material (and I do wonder why we don’t get more books and movies on Job? I put a bit of into Book X…but it is so central to a true understanding of our position in the Universe). But they are their stories. You can’t alter them without wrecking them. The reason you can mine them endlessly is because all three – as Chesterton noted – deal with some major aspect of the human condition. What are we do to? Where do we go? Why are we here? The problem with modern literature, movies, etc is that they shy away from these questions…they deal with our animal appetites. That we don’t want bad. We do want good. But nothing about what is bad, or good, or why we should prefer one to the other. Some ancient, Bronze Age authors (one we assume Divinely inspired) wrote it out for us in three books. It is all there. All your questions are answered. Often with another question, but that is of the nature of things…because just where were you when the foundations of the world were laid?

It isn’t that they cast a black woman as Helen of Troy (absurd – stupid – as that is), it is that they don’t understand the story…they’ve probably created a technical marvel which will be forgotten in a decade…while Homer will be read to the end of human existence.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan23 Comments

China Joe announced that we’ll be sending 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine – this, apparently, is what the Kraut’s demanded before they would agree to send Leopard tanks. Ukraine is getting a hodge-podge of military equipment which they have no training or maintenance facilities for. This will get interesting.

Russia, meanwhile, continues to push forward in certain areas, likely to prep for an offensive after the Spring rains. We’ll see how this comes out – but I suspect, long term, that Russia will have some Abrams tanks to sell on the international arms market. The bottom line, absent a collapse of Russian will to win, is that Russia has vastly superior numbers over Ukraine and the outcome is only a matter of time.

New York City erected a Medusa-looking statue on their courthouse – in honor of RBG and abortion, so at least kinda appropriate. Very ugly, though. But that is the point of modern art: to be ugly. To be something you hate but can’t get rid of.

Also in New York City – for ages they had de-facto segregation in their schools. This was to allow New York’s rich progressives to have high quality public schools while proclaiming their allegiance to diversity without, you know, the diversity. There merely skimmed the cream of the crop of minority students to put into class with the kids of rich, white Progressives. Former Mayor DeBlasio, true to his Leninism, put an end to that – rather than have test scores determine who got into the swanky, Manhattan public schools, they created a supposedly scientific algorithm which would decide…naturally, it really just managed to shove into these schools kids who were in no way prepared for high education achievement. There is a bit of poetic justice here in that rich, white liberals lost their little education plantation…but the bad news is that now all of New York’s public schools suck. This is considered fine by the upper end of the Ruling Class because they send their kids to private schools and, hey, who wants to take the time and effort to improve all schools? Better to just score some DEI brownie points by wrecking the few remaining good schools.

Surrounded by armed guards, California Governor Newsom proclaimed in the streets that “weapons of war” have no place there. Make no mistake about it: Newsom will be hard for the GOP to beat. He’s good looking, sounds good on TV and, of course, the MSM will cover up his crimes and puff him up as the Second Coming. But he can be beat – his State is a complete disaster outside a few, rich coastal enclaves. The way to handle him in debate is to simply get truthful about him: “Governor, you hate the people of California. You want them to suffer. You talk about ‘weapons of war’ but what you really are trying to do is make honest citizens into criminals while you deliberately and maliciously allow real criminals to run amok.” Words like that – 100% true – will put that arrogant ass into a defensive mode and he won’t know how to deal with it as he’s never had a hostile question asked of him.

What do to about rising egg prices and people suddenly dying? Claim that the eggs are causing sudden death. I’m serious: it is what they are trying to assert. This after they tried to assert that all the sudden deaths are due to climate change.