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.
Conservatives buy real estate and bitch about the trash movies coming out of Hollywood.
I support good art regardless of the politics of the artists. MM isn't a Hollywood elite. His movie was mostly financed by a Canadian company. You never see him with any Hollywood heavy hitters. They've used him as is conveinent for them and I think they are now sick of him. Personally, I doubt he will get a single Oscar nomination.
For HoreyWood to make a significant change, it would have to jettison its love affair with the homosexual community, abortion, and its demon centric horror flicks.
Not gonna happen any time soon unless enough movies flop so badly that there is a financial incentive.
See New and Improved ANTI-DNC Web Portal at --->
http://www.noDNC.com
Radical changes coming after the first of the year.
Hey, if Heretic Ford can cheat and divorce, why not Amy Grant?
Hear, hear. I congratulate you on doing this!
Good luck!
Ditto!
Actually, what I should have said was described as Utopian from a conservative standpoint.
Harrison Ford doesn't run around making money off religious songs.
A tsunami?
She is comparing culture shift to the worst disaster in modern history?
Ditto.
I wondered how the author would try to reconcile two schools of thought that seem to be the antithesis of each other.
I struggled with how to word that in my post, so I just skippped it. Thanks for the clarification. :)
I was only commenting on her looks. Some other poster was defending Heretic's antics.
Yes indeed, Hollywood might be the next to fall. What with the advance of technology, it is now feasible to make high quality movies outside of the "industry" and give wide distribute them. More independents can get into the act and break the Hollywood strangle hold on film entertainment.
...oh, WELL!!...if we're talking LOOKS...there was one pic in the middle '80s in Vogue magazine...a full-page black-and-white shot of Harrison on his Harley...that was the ONLY time I ever paid cash-money for that silly magazine. Still have the pic.
...and yes, he's a doof to leave his wife for that Ally McBeal twit.
Modern Independent film making has been around since the 1950s and the industry actually thrives on it.
We could do Slacker.
We could do Miller's Crossing.
We could do Alphaville.
We could do anything.
What's great is that anyone could do something like 'Slacker'! Or landmark American indie classics 'The Little Fugitive' and 'Shadows'. Which were made by the penny.
Given the lead times for syndicated columnists -- particularly during the holiday season -- I'd bet money that Maggie filed this column a day or two before the earthquake.
Unfortunate, but true...
Indeed. Any Grant is the worst sort of hypocrite. She's been completely rejected by the Christian music community, as she should be.
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