Thursday March 22, 2012
NEXT WEEK: THE MENACE OF RAINBOW PARTIES. Let's peek in at PJ Lifestyle and see what the Kulturkampfers are up to:
Once SNL took off though, the tone of network television would never be the same. If Bill Maher can call Sarah Palin a c*** with impunity, if Cee Lo Green can cheerfully sing a song titled “F*** You” at a Democratic Party fund raiser, well, the tone of the liberal overculture had to first be lowered from Leonard Bernstein on CBS’s Omnibus, Bob Hope hosting the Oscars, the swankiness of the Kennedy-era Rat Pack, and the Carson-era Tonight Show to get to that point. The original SNL was, in retrospect, one of the most powerful of the early battering rams in the New Left’s war on culture.
No, I'm not kidding, Ed Driscoll finds the invention of Saturday Night Live -- 36 years ago -- a fit subject for fist-shaking. His news hook: That a Kindle edition has recently emerged of a 26-year-old book about SNL that he read once. Word count: 3,771.
It's probably best that at PJ Lifestyle they leave contemporary subjects almost entirely alone: No hiphop, no fringe or independently distributed material, nothing anyone under the age of 40 is paying attention to. The closest they get to contemporaneity is John Boot's review of the new Springsteen album:
What [Springsteen] should not do is what he does on his latest album, which is to advocate violent revolution, class-and-politics-based bloodshed, and the murder of bankers and perhaps other capitalists.
Is it any wonder these guys think Rick Santorum is the wave of the future?
UPDATE. I should add that, over at Sadly, No!, Cerberus treats another PJ Lifestyle monstrosity -- Dr. Mrs. Ole Perfesser on how bitches run everything -- with fully deserved and richly detailed contempt.
UPDATE 2. It makes me sad sometimes, just how blind the culture warriors are to the meaning of culture itself. From a Forbes column by John Tammy:
It says here that HBO’s The Wire, which ran from 2002-2008, is the greatest television drama of all time...
Liberals of the American variety seemed to like it for revealing how very crushing and insurmountable poverty is, conservatives perhaps liked it for televising the human error frequently behind poverty, not to mention the corruption inside media and government, and then libertarians including this writer surely enjoyed it for laying out the totally ineffective nature of the "war on drugs", and the sheer incompetence of government.
You read that and think, okay, you're halfway there -- now make the leap and recognize that ideological readings are reductive and beside the point, that there's something universal in a successful work of art that speaks not to your talking points, but to whatever's left of your soul.
Alas, the very next graf:
It’s said about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster novel that will be released in movie form this Friday, that it appeals to a broad demographic ranging from teens to senior citizens. If so, it’s fair to assume that a not insignificant portion of the book’s devotees see a political message within.
No, no...
Back to the malnourishment that pervades Panem, and underlies the story... as Bastiat long ago observed...
These people are hopeless.