Posted on 12/28/2004 3:52:03 PM PST by pissant
A tsunami of conservatism has moved through American institutions over the last 30 years. First the small magazines (National Review, Reason, The Public Interest), followed by the think tanks (The Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, to name just a few).
Maggie Gallagher
In the late '70s and '80s, the Christian right began to create its own huge counterculture: singers and songwriters, Christian pulp fictions and self-help books, coloring books and cartoons, as well as lobbying organizations (like the Family Research Council). In the '90s, conservatives got their own television news and talk radio shows. What will the future bring?
But tsunami is the wrong metaphor altogether, for these creative ventures in conservative culture-making left their secular, anti-religious and/or liberal cousins intact. Fox News provides an alternative voice, but The New York Times endures. A few extraordinary new colleges and universities have recently been founded (Ave Maria, Patrick Henry). But as The American Enterprise magazine reports, Democratic professors continue to outnumber Republicans by lopsided ratios (www.taemag.com). Among political scientists at two major California universities, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans was 46-to-4; among psychologists, 50-to-1; among sociologists 27-to-zip.
Conservative institutions did not overwhelm existing institutions; they simply filled a niche, or rather a huge, gaping void in the marketplace of ideas.
Is Hollywood next?
There are good reasons to think so. In the first place, the market for sexual titillation is now, shall we say, pretty thoroughly saturated. The old Hollywood formula for success -- make a movie that breaks a taboo -- is hard to follow in an era in which there aren't any taboos left, or at least not ones for which a mass market exists. Gay sex, or sympathetic portrayals of pedophilia may still win critical accolades, but the buzz is no longer big box office, simply because the market for such tastes is still tiny.
Meanwhile, capitalism's relentless search for expanding markets is leading Hollywood into a vast undiscovered territory: the red state of mind. USA Today reports that "in a nation still squeamish over wardrobe malfunctions and violence, studios are willing to bet" on "quiet, wholesome entertainment films." "There's been a desire to grow an underserved market with non-cynical family entertainment," said Walden Media CEO Cary Granat.
True enough. But Hollywood will miss something important about the potential new market if it is defined only in reactionary terms (not cynical, not trashy).
Every human heart hungers to be part of a story, to take the disconnected dots of human existence and weave them into a meaningful drama. Yet millions of Americans never, ever see anything of the great aspirational stories of their lives reflected in America's premier storytelling genre, the movies.
Americans are an overwhelmingly religious people, for example, yet the drama of sin and salvation, of divine grace and purpose, is conspicuously absent. Millions of American men and women strive to connect sex, love, marriage and babies into a coherent story for their own life. And yet the particular intense kind of eros that can be experienced only by those so committed to such a connection is almost never glimpsed on television or film. Perhaps Hollywood does not even know it exists.
For millions of entrepreneurial and ambitious Americans, the romance of business is the story of their lives, yet businessman in Hollywood are uniformly portrayed as villains. It took Donald Trump, for goodness sake, to turn the business romance into a surprise television hit in "The Apprentice." Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels in Beverly Hills, but right now, young American soldiers are willing to risk death to fight for their country in Iraq (news - web sites). Where are the epics that express that vision of life?
Putting bodies into seats is the mission of most Hollywood studios, and in their devotion to this mission, Hollywood may well be the next domino to fall. Happy New Year.
Thanks, I'll have to check it out.
Atheism is a vacuum. It will be filled.
The choice is not Christianity or secularism. The choice is Christianity or Islam.
I've read the book many times. Nothing like the movie. The book is as much political commentary as it is a SF story. Being a conservative type, I think you'd like it.
My thoughts exactly. Very Bad Form.
Maggie Gallagher is *clueless.* Hollywood has been cranking out conservative movies for years ... in the science fiction and horror genres. But to Gallagher, those wouldn't be "conservative" movies, because they're not "nice," not "family-oriented," and "not Christian."
The fact that she has the gall to use "tsunami" in her article, made me not want to read it. Trying to get readers based on "buzz words". Disgusting.
Well, they do ... but I don't think Team America is exactly what Gallagher has in mind.
"It is unfair to judge Harrison Ford on the breakup of his marriage"
You're right. He's just following in the footsteps of many other actors who, once they reach middle age and millions of $$, trade in their families for a trophy wife (in Heretic's case, an emaciated one). Hell, sometimes it backfires and the "old lady" shoots 'em first.
Nevermind that the former wife worked 3 jobs while dumb-nuts went to acting school. Cest la vie.
It reminds me of that idiotic baseball manager (name escapes me) who, shortly after 9/11/01, described the possibility of a player's strike thusly; "Well if they do that they're just going to do another 9/11 to everyone all over the place" Or something like that. He was fined by the league. What a moron!
Although I have no evidence to back this up, I am willing to be she wrote this article before the disaster.
His former wife also wrote the scrennplays of 'The Black Stallion' and E.T.
Thanks. :)
Read the book, then reread it.
It depicts, in some ways, an almost surreal description of sacrifice, duty and honor, and a concept of civilization best described as Utopian.
Because it was written for the younger set, it has been dismissed by a good number of Sci-Fi aficionados for years, but I like it.
I have read it every year for over 30 years.
I carried it in my ruck in Nam. People who liked the book will understand why.
The book, Starship Troopers was completely different from the trash depicted on the siver screen. Robert Heinlein wrote an excellent book about the military, albeit set in the future. Read it! You won't be sorry.
It depicts, in some ways, an almost surreal description of sacrifice, duty and honor, and a concept of civilization best described as Utopian.
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Interesting premise, I'll have to read it.
I'm not decrying that crap like The Contender, American President, and West Wing get made; but I don't think that equivalent conservative projects could be made in the current climate of Hollywood. The fact is that not only are most of the creative powers liberal, so too are the studio bosses. That's why I think that if a conservative producer had gone to a network with a conservative version of West Wing, then it would have been rejected. If such a thing could be made, then it would get savaged by critics for its conservative propoganda, whereas much of the critical acclaim heaped upon West Wing has no doubt been due to its politics that the critics agree with.
But anyway, I agree that it is possible and that the right person could conceivably do it, though the mountain would be harder to climb for a conservative Aaron Sorkin.
As to the things I said about Law & Order and CSI: on that I have nothing but contempt for those who do it because it is not what the shows are ostensibly about. I go through stretches where I watch those shows quite regularly, and its quite damn annoying to be watching a crime drama and then out-of-nowhere comes one of these pointless political comments. And they are invariably liberal comments, often made as a counter to some idiotic statement uttered by some conservative caricature.
However, I do think that liberals generally tend to be more involved in artistic/creative pursuits than conservatives.
I'm sure there are plenty of young conservatives going to film school these days. And I will support their movies whenever I have the oppritunity. I hope you will too.
I want to show Michael Moore and the rest of the elites in Hollywood, that the red staters like movies too.
Hey they had a good thing going with Amy Grant, particularly in the looks dept.
...do you mean before or after she cheated on and then left her husband?
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