Posted on 02/20/2006 11:52:55 AM PST by LdSentinal
Mickey Kaus at Kausfiles.com says that the gay-cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain has the same marketing strategy as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Both, he says, have been hyped as blue-state movies that are reaching and changing minds in the cities of red America. He calls this the "Heartland Breakout Meme”. ("Meme" refers to a cultural copying unit that hops from brain to brain without much thought or any at all). What Kaus means is that the mainstream media keep reinforcing ideas liberals want to believe, whether they are true or not. But the alleged breakout of Fahrenheit appears to be myth, as Byron York shows by revealing some confidential movie-industry data in his new book, The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.
Kaus thinks preliminary box office numbers indicate that Brokeback isn't reaching red America either. His point is that liberals delude themselves into overconfidence and harm the Democratic Party by projecting a false view of political reality. He writes: "If you think the visceral straight male reaction against male homosexual sex has effectively disappeared...you won't spend a lot of time trying to figure out the possible deep-seated, even innate, sources of resistance to liberalization... At worst, you'll pass them off as sheer redneck bigotry-a proven way to lose the red states for good".
A version of the “Heartland Breakout Meme” appeared when Bill Clinton, under pressure from the gay lobby, agreed to accept declared homosexuals into the armed services. The polls were mixed, and if read carefully, showed that much resistance seemed strong. But liberals thought it would be a low-cost initiative for Clinton. A few howls from the right and it would all be over. Liberals were stunned when the resistance inflicted considerable political damage on the new presidency and resulted in a policy that none had even imagined -- don't-ask-don't-tell.
A related meme is that marriage is a civil right that a just society must extend to gays. "Equality in marriage" reinforces the liberal belief that an entitlement is being arbitrarily withheld from an aggrieved group; again stoking the feeling that anyone who disagrees is a redneck. But societies around the world-maybe all of them-- have disagreed with this allegedly obvious idea for thousands of years because they never concluded that an arrangement built on same-sex love qualifies as a real marriage. Polls show that tolerance and respect for gays are climbing much more rapidly than approval of gay marriage, indicating for a considerable number of Americans, the major sticking point is not bigotry, but a liberal-conservative difference on the meaning of marriage.
"Samuel Alito is out of the mainstream" was one of the strangest of recent liberal memes, relentlessly spread by the media, all with little effect. As U.C.L.A. law professor Eugene Volokh wrote, Alito's views "are majority views, by a wide margin". Legal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr., a centrist and no fan of President Bush, called attention to the large role of reporters in spreading the meme. He showed in some detail that "systematic slanting, conscious or unconscious " in many mainstream press reports "helped fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue”.
Even worse was the "racist response to Katrina" meme. Mostly this was aimed at George Bush, who botched the crisis badly, though not on any racial basis. The idea was to peel away growing Republican support among blacks by playing the race card. It worked. The rapid spread of the meme was the reason why a bland one-liner by entertainer Kanye West-- "George Bush doesn't care about black people"-- unexpectedly became a famous quote. And there was a broader campaign to indict whites in general, who were busy sending in most of the $1 billion in voluntary contributions to Katrina victims, for failing to care about the suffering of New Orleans blacks.
This meme was wildly promoted by the mainstream media, but ultimately it failed, as Democratic pollster Celinda Lake made clear in a recent speech. She said, "It is certainly true that people very quickly got off any analysis that...the patterns of Katrina were due to race”. One reason was that people were pointing to New Orlean's corruption and the city's incompetent black mayor as explanations for much of the post-Katrina mess. Another factor was that the power structure in this black-run city signed off on an explicit arrangement to abandon 100,000 poor residents in case of disaster. That was the city's plan and it worked. No wonder the racism meme faded. “Far from Katrina promoting very much," Lake said, "if anything Katrina is backfiring a little bit". That happens now and then to memes that the public can figure out aren't true.
Dukes of Hazzard made $9m more than that hyped trash!
I have a hetero friend who *loves* to annoy gay people by declaring her "straight pride". She tells me they go ballistic when they find out she doesn't care about their sexual preferences.
People would rather see heterosexual penguins than homosexual humans.
We would not watch the movie if someone gave us the DVD for free.
What does it mean, or how was the word coined?
It means a self-contained "package" of ideas/beliefs/information that gets passed around from brain to brain, propagating itself kind of like a virus spreading through a population.
If I recall correctly, it was coined from the term "memory gene", since their propagation, "mutation", survival, etc. have a number of parallels with the way that various genes arise, change, and propagate via biological evolution. For example, as an idea makes the rounds, some copies of it will change, either through not being described accurately when being passed from person to person, or by intentional adjustment by one of the peoplel who acquired it and then passes it on -- so after a while, there will be various versions of the meme out there in the public sphere, and a kind of competition ensues, like "survival of the fittest". The ones which are more effective at having themselves adopted by people's minds will proliferate, and the ones which aren't as effective will die off (go extinct). The parallels aren't 100% perfect, of course, but there are enough similar processes at work that the spread, change, rise, and fall of some kinds of ideas follow patterns of behavior similar to that of how biological evolution results in changes in gene complexes.
It's also interesting to note that the success of a meme doesn't necessarily depend on whether it's true or not. For example, a meme which contains, as a package, beliefs that include "you must continue to believe me or horrible things will happen to you", and "you must get others to believe me also, whether they want to or not", as well as a few components that appeal to people's deep wants and fear, will spread virulently even if it's 100% false. Now consider Islam as a meme...
I find it amazing because according to http://www.the-movie-times.com/thrsdir/top60dir/top60.mv?feb10_06
it's being shown on 1,966 screens!
I'm acquainted with a few gay "activist types", and they were talking about how they and their friends were going to see it every week to drive the numbers up. Vote early, vote often.
Big movie buff are you?
Excellent post IJ.
There was a thread early in the release of Farenlies 9/11 that detailed a market-by-market breakdown of the theater revenue (i.e., "Little Rock, 1 theater, $2,000"). I have been backsearching through keywords trying to find that thread for the better part of a week. Anyone have a link?
John Leo ruins many otherwise worthwhile articles by hammering in these wretchedly puerile, and easily refutable 'asides', in order to appear 'balanced'.
Great descrption Ichneumon.
The media has supported the meme that "there were no weapons of mass destruction." Correct?
The only person whom I know of that has seen this piece of trash is Fox News Channel's Kiran Chetry. About a month ago, she was commenting on this film and raved about how good it was. Well, at least she let us all know just what kinds of thoughts float around in that mind of hers. Disgusting. Even liberal Julian wouldn't have given this crap the time of day.
Hmm. So BBM was the 33rd highest grossing movie of 1995. Since there were only 33 movies listed, BBM was the bottom(pun not intenional but appropriate) of the heap.
Call me a Homophobe but ain't going to see Buttcrack Mounting or the Olympics!
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
This is not a gay romance film. It is a gay sex movie.
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