Monday May 22, 2006

HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER!

"Let's play on this big piano -- Mr. Hanks sez it's okay!" Moments later the boy was sucked into a world of polygamy and free-thinking, where his only friend was a free-thinking polygamous volleyball named Wilson.

Mistah Kurtz, he nuts:

The battle is radicalizing. Big Love and The Da Vinci Code are far more direct and brazen attacks on tradition than we might have anticipated just a few years ago. Conservatives are the targets, and Hollywood is aiming and shooting repeatedly. Give credit to Tom Hanks, by the way. As producer of Big Love and star of The Da Vinci Code, he is clearly one of the captains of the not-so-secret conspiracy.

The Da Vinci Code is bullshit, but a not-so-secret conspiracy against conservatives led by Tom Hanks is the God's honest truth.

Somebody explain to Kurtz that movie stars are not appointed by the Illuminati (well, except for Steve Guttenberg), that "control of our critical cultural institutions" is won by talent and ambition, not by whining, and that the pills he keeps spitting up are for his own good.

UPDATE. Kurtz may be mollified to learn that, according to Michael Long, there is such a thing as "conservative rock songs," from which scraps and shards of culture a new civilization may be built.

Long's primary example is "Wouldn't It Be Nice" by the Beach Boys, because

...Brian Wilson and Tony Asher do not say: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have sex? These cultural mores have got to go!”... No, these are kids who accept that there is a place and time for everything, and that some urges are best delayed—even if we don’t see any good reason past faith to do so. They are looking forward—something rarely done anymore—to a time when what they want comports with the rules they trust, rules more important than an impulse or a wish, rules that preserve civility and order and life.

Long probably hasn't heard the latest re-issue of Pet Sounds, featuring the alternative lyrics: "Wouldn't it be nice to be on mushrooms/With lots of rum and fresh fruit juice to drink/And sit inside a sandbox, play piano/And talk about the martians with my shrink?/You know I'm scared a giant bug will eat me/I still have bruises where my old man beat me..."

UPDATE II. This is turning into one of The Corner's crazier days. Goldberg tries to conciliate the agitated Kurtz ("And, more simply, the book is by most accounts a lot of fun to read. Surely that explains some of this too"), but Kurtz won't have it: "I also think the popularity of the book says something about where we are as a culture," he insists -- which is something you could say about just any book, including The Gospel According to Peanuts, Interview with a Vampire, and The South Beach Diet. Saner minds would append to the observation the old Latin phrase, so what? Kurtz, though, ruminates darkly on "the number of folks who see themselves as unconnected to any organized religion... especially in blue cities and counties." Time perhaps for Kurtz' Destroy America to Save It plan.

The crown goes to K-Lo, though, with this (warning: if you are not aware of current trends in conservative arts criticism, this may blow your mind):

I haven't seen [Oliver Stone's] World Trade Center... I had at least one problem with the trailer... Nicolas Cage has a moustache, for instance, in the movie, to establish "working-class bona fides." But John McLoughlin, the Port Authority police sergeant who Nicolas Page plays in the movie actually has a moustache. So it doesn't strike me as too odd...

I can't believe I'm defending an Oliver Stone trailer...

And I can't believe these people are walking around loose.