Onestdv, great post, this is why I write about popular culture a lot. Popular culture, is all that is left, with collapse of religious attendance and the nuclear family, to shape people's attitudes.Given that I often write about the intersection of culture and politics, I assuredly agree with this idea. In addition to pronouncements from elite academia and their political sycophants (or is it the other way around?), pop culture is the best means of normalizing behavior and spreading a message. Cultural sway works because it targets the masses, the movie-going public, the families watching primetime TV, and the bored teenagers lounging around with MTV on in the background. And when presented as the normative standard, the masses gradually begin to believe such a characterization.
So those on the Right can look at popular media as motivating many recent political and social trends. Yet, the left doesn't agree or, more accurately, only agrees when it fits their agenda. Take yesterday's Salon.com admonishment of Jonah Goldberg for pursuing a pop culture based argument concerning gay marriage. Though I hate to call it merely an "admonishment", more like a visceral and insulting hissy fit. In it, Alex Preene (a herb if I've ever seen one) calls Golbderg "incredibly stupid" for associating TV shows with cultural mores:
Here's another example at Racialicious where the writers mock the Council of Conservative Citizens for getting angry about the casting of a black man to play Thor:But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning. Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC’s Modern Family.Yep. "Gay people are all bourgeois now, I learned it on a TeeVee show I watch. Liberals stink!"
Verily, these be dire times for the brave souls at the Council of Conservative Citizens: not only is Marvel Comics once again publishing a comic book starring an African character, but at least one member of the overall ensemble cast in the upcoming Thor movie adaptation will be – gasp! – black! You can almost hear the call ring out:Idris Elba as Heimdall? Forsooth! THEY TOOK OUR GODS! Robblerobblerobble …The article also dismisses supposedly unjustified outrage over Captain America's chiding of the Tea Party and a new Black Panther character:
Not only were they outraged at the perceived slight of the Tea Party movement depicted in the pages of Captain America (which the company quickly apologized for), but the mere existence of the Black Panther character is proof the company is in the business of publishing “extremist ‘Black Power comics.”For a less recent example, see the merciless mocking of Dan Quayle for repudiating Murphy Browne's positive portrayal of single motherhood. As in Mr. Preene's article above, the writers of Murphy Browne couldn't help but denigrate Mr. Quayle's intelligence in dismissing his argument as inane.
In all the instances cited, it's clear that the writers present a calculated formulation of peoples and social phenomenon in order to motivate public opinion. Sure, they don't flash on screen, "Gay single mothers are awesome!", "This is Law and Order - skip the first 30 minutes because the detectives will go after common street thugs until we discover that the perpetrator is a conservative, upper class, white man preferably with blond hair", or "Captain Planet - don't have babies or you'll kill the Earth." The message, of course, isn't that explicit. Propaganda, especially that intended to subvert traditional norms, works surreptitiously. It presents radical ideas, such as a prep schooler whose father is a Harvard Law grad killing his friend in cold blood (actual Law and Order episode), as mundane, then lets the audience run with it. Liberal pop cultures pushes and prods, it hints, it gradually tells you what to think is normal and right. Think the Magic Negro as omniscient father figure in films like Bruce Almighty or the unbelievable movie 2012.
Yet liberals think conservatives who connect popular culture with leftism are just plain stupid, as shown with examples above. They're expressing unjustified outrage and reading into stuff way too much. Funny though that liberals expend so much energy on pursuing the exact same line of reasoning - when it fits their agenda. How often have liberals railed against popular media for perpetuating a false construction of man? The site Racialicious has a post every day about some egregious transgression in the media's eternal war against the oppressed. And on Salon.com's front page, right below their story on Goldberg, an article laments the fact that movies such as Juno and Knocked Up callously averted the abortion issue. For more examples, think feminists' complaining about sluts and the gender double standard, modeling and Western beauty, and heteronormative sexuality and the anti-racists about stereotypes and appropriation of minority culture (direct parallel to Thor casting).
So while the left chides conservatives for blaming media as a motivator of social pathology, they actually engage in the exact same type of discourse. Once again, the left pursues a sneaky strategy at propagating their message as they shame conservatives into ignoring popular culture while they attempt to take it over completely.
25 comments:
Well the acknowledgement of popular culture being an influence on society means that liberals can not pretend to be victims anymore. They have to admit that they are not powerless. Thats why their very hypocritical on the subject of media criticism. They need to maintaian their victim status, and admiting in one way or another they are not victims is hurtful to their sense of well being. This same hypocracy is also true for conspiracies. Liberals will laugh at Glen Beck for being obsessed with George Sores, while being themselves obsessed with the Koch brothers. Liberals like to think of themselves as victimized autodiacts. People who are above influence, and have been oppressed by the powers that be.
I don't believe for a minute that pop culture shapes people's attitudes. Pop culture is a whim of the cultural mentality of the time...pop culture in 1940 (if it could even be called that) is obviously nothing like pop culture in 2010. You are basing your opinion on the notion that pop culture has a life of its own which is unquestionably ridiculous. Pop culture is an outgrowth of our mass mentality at any time in history. I think it's best to determine first what are the true cultural catalysts for the present social environment. I think all manifestations of pop culture through time are built upon the previous generation's personality, which in turn is built upon the previous generation's...social mores and affinities are evolved. We would not be seeing garbage like Modern Family if are culture didn't demand this crap in one form or another. Remember, the ultimate shaper of pop culture is MONEY. Hollywood and American mass media represent fierce "social capitalism." There are no ideals or principles; it's only about leeching every last cent from an audience whose intelligence dwindles precipitously every day. Sometimes it seems to me the Right loves to vent its repressed frustrations on the media when in reality, they should direct their anger and frustration at those they admire the most...the capitalists looking to maximize profit. It's like blaming illegal aliens for illegal immigration.
Blame the result, not the cause!
Remember, the ultimate shaper of pop culture is MONEY. - An Unmarried Man
There are lots of ways of making money. Dirty Harry made money. Steve McQueen had a decent salary, I think.
There are a limited number of ways of shaming, degrading, and dispossessing the people who invented automatic weaponry, germ theory, and space travel, i.e. white males. Companies that don't portray straight/ white/ gentile/ married/ males as dirtbags, idiots, ugly spuds, and nonentities make plenty of money, they just don't do so in TV land. Why?
@ Unmarried:
It's all a feedback loop with capitalism (money), mass media, and organic cultural "progression" acting in concert and sometimes amplifying each other.
One,
Great post and what is ultimately funny (or tragic from my point of view) about Salon going after Jonah Goldberg is that I think Jonah is actually wrong about "Modern Family". Mainstreaming gays, especially gays who raise children, is not something any self-professed conservative should applaud.
A perfect example of this is Jon Stewart's convenient flip-flops on whether he's a "just" comedian.
Unmarried Man is either foolish or a troll. TV is not democracy, it's controlled by a tiny handful of mostly Jewish elitists (racists) who are not elected. You get what they give you, take it or leave it, all they have to concern themselves with is the minimum that prevents you from leaving it. That's why favored PC groups, with that spunky little group with its origins in the Middle East at the top, are almost never attacked on these shows. The idea that that there is a spontaneous groundswell for gay characters that is only being serviced by the media for business reasons is laughable. There ARE ideas and principles in the media, and they all break one way - to the left.
You are reading way to much into all this.
Repealing DADT and expanding gay rights is NOT an attempt to subvert your precious lily white America it is all about treating people like human beings.
"You are reading way to much into all this."
Not.
Just like when libs complain about skinny models picked by fag fashion designers.
"Repealing DADT and expanding gay rights is NOT an attempt to subvert your precious lily white America it is all about treating people like human beings."
No, it's not. It is about humiliating the brave men serving like men in the military. It is about debasing an institution that they despise.
Actually, it was a liberal organ, The New Republic magazine, that first remarked on the fact that "gay people are all beurgeois now." The did a 1994 cover story on it - I think colorful sweaters were somehow involved. Don't know if Andrew Sullivan wrote it, but he was editing the magazine then.
Actually, it was a liberal organ, The New Republic magazine, that first remarked on the fact that "gay people are all beurgeois now." The did a 1994 cover story on it - I think colorful sweaters were somehow involved. Don't know if Andrew Sullivan wrote it, but he was editing the magazine then.
Anonymous said...
Repealing DADT and expanding gay rights is NOT an attempt to subvert your precious lily white America...
Precious lilly white America, the SWPL crowd, is on your side.
It's your black, brown and muslim brothers who are MORE likely to oppose the "fag agenda" in all areas of law and culture.
And I think you understand that on some uncomfortable level.
The best example of this is never-ending complaints from liberals about Fox News, with many prominent liberals demanding it be shut down or regulated because of its supposedly pernicious influence.
"it is all about treating people like human beings"
What is it about these vacuous platitudes that liberals find so persuasive? Rapists and murderers are "human beings" too, and I think we should treat them to a long drop on a short rope.
Whiskey is a frequent (and somewhat notorious) commenter across the alt-right sphere
Could you do the rest of the non-paleocon HBDers a small marketing favor and please not conflate the "Alternative Right sphere" with HBD.
It's already hard enough to get a conversation about heredity going with ordinary Republican voters without making HBD's job orders of magnitude more difficult by linking HBD with fringe crackpots like Richard Spencer, Richard Hoste and their army of Nietzschean homosexual go-go dancers who want to exterminate baby Jesus and replace the little bastard with Thor worship.
Jesus extermination is an especially problematic strategy for conservatives considering how the evangelical proles you apparently admire so much would rather import the entire population of SSAfrica in 1 year than throw baby Jesus overboard and worship a "false god" a la Thor.
Whiskey pointed out the importance of popular culture and its corresponding effect on political and social behavior:
Popular culture is a lagging, not leading, indicator of social behavior.
Agnostic in his classic "Your generation was sluttier" demonstrated how the sexual revolution took off like a rocket in the late 1960's (and before) even when Hollywood produced nothing but pro-nuclear family entertainment and then showed how youth sexual activity peaked in 1988 when overly sexualized movies were just going mainstream.
Underground youth culture (or lack thereof) is probably a better leading indicator of where popular culture is heading because the major media is more hesitant to jump on a trend that may or may not become popular.
The Undiscovered Jew,
I honestly think the percieved threat of nuclear war occuring at any time in the public mind greased the skids of the sexual revolution and the sexual landscape of the boomer's own first children in the late 1980's. A kid growing up back then was told that if the Russians pushed the button, we'd only have 30 minutes to live. Movies like "The Day After" aired on network television, having an enormous impact on youth.
If you throw in the facts that AIDS wasn't much of a factor (and in the late 60's it wasn't even on the radar), abortion was legal, contraception was cheap and affordable, and penicillin could still kill just about any venereal disease (or that was the perception anyway), I think you have a "dangerous-times" kind of environment that Agnostic has written about that is going to be rife with intense art and less inhibition. People thought that it could all end at any time back then in the backs of their minds (which the media constantly blamed on Ronald Reagan).
The entertainment media didn't have the sway over kids that it did in its peak of the 1990's, which will forever be MTV's heyday. It will never have that kind of raw cultural power again (which is a good thing).
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It really isn't a coincidence that 1)white males are constantly portrayed as criminals and idiots on televison and in television commericals.
2)Its also not a coincidence that gays are almost always positively portrayed.
3)Its not a coincidence that white dads in particular are portrayed as ineffectucal dolts with archaic outlooks, and
4)its not a coincidence that kids are portrayed as "knowing better than their parents".
5)Its also not a coincidence that Western Civilization's past (and America's past in particular) are generally negatively portrayed as extremely racist and sexist.
The series "Deadwood" in particular made the old West look as if it was populated by muderers, thieves (big or small-time) and connivers almost exclusively. There was that element, but there was also hordes of deeply religous, very decent, extremely hard-working people. Many cable televison series (Rome, Mad Men) seem to slander the past in my opinion. Our grandads weren't raping our grandmothers across their desks in high-rises (Dammit!).
I honestly think the percieved threat of nuclear war occuring at any time in the public mind greased the skids of the sexual revolution and the sexual landscape of the boomer's own first children in the late 1980's.
I'd assign it more to contraception and improved treatments for STDs.
The entertainment media didn't have the sway over kids that it did in its peak of the 1990's, which will forever be MTV's heyday. It will never have that kind of raw cultural power again (which is a good thing).
The media has had less influence from the 1990s going forward than it did in the 1950s to the 1980s because media viewing habits have become much more fragmented than in the days when almost the whole country watched shows like Leave it to Beaver and MASH at the same time.
Thanks for the kind words. Yes I am notorious.
What changed (Unmarried here is wrong) in entertainment was: 1. a huge shift to almost exclusively female audiences in TV and mostly in Movies, along with #2, a few very profitable projects subsidizing most of the losers, with social networking and backslapping pushing projects like Battlefield Earth or Grace is Gone.
For the first, women are (due to shifts in the sexual marketplace, mostly not needing Beta Males anymore) fairly hard left and PC-bound. All the things that are presented: White beta males are idiots, magical Black guys, sexual libertinism, promotion of gays, fit comfortably in the White middle class female belief/value system.
For the second, the complete unwillingness to maximize money (because the people getting the money, stockholders in vertically integrated media companies, are not those creating it) is a classic "agency problem" and accounts for conservatives, men, etc. not being served by the entertainment industry.
TVByTheNumbers.com did a post "Ladies Night" showing the Mon-Thurs shows by gender breakdown. Only the Simpsons, Family Guy, Cleveland Show, American Dad, Chuck (and barely, 24 and Fringe) skewed male at all. Every other show was very, very female. The highest rated like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars are almost exclusively female skewing.
TV is not "mostly controlled by Jews," an argument could be made that Gays not Jews control TV and movies. AfterElton ran a list of the most powerful gays in Hollywood. Rich Ross now heads all of Disney. Indeed Disney's Princess Factory is almost exclusively the province of gay male producers who conceive, cast, and hire writers to produce said fantasies.
And the whole female-pandering, often gay produced, fantasies about culture and politics are harmful in creating any response to a dangerous, chaotic, and now very changing world. The AP reports that US companies are creating millions of jobs ... in China. US competitiveness requires both naked protectionism ala China (products sold here must be produced by US labor and companies, entirely) and an honest assessment of which populations have skills to create high cost / high reward products.
Magical Black guys, Middle Class gays (most gays are far more Bobby Trendy and Johnny Weir than say "Modern Family"), and the noble White guy/gal patronizing "poor downtrodden illegals" evoke FEELINGS (like a roller coaster) but not logic about how to construct an economy that produces lots of wealth and stability in the US.
Look at popular culture. It is all about stimulating a female audience's feelings, from Twilight to Vampire Diaries to Glee to Jersey Shore to "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." And along with the feelings are very direct messages. Beta White guys are losers. Non-Whites are always magical supermen/victims, Western culture is worthless. Gays are all middle class and harmless (in reality they tend to molest young boys at alarming rates).
I WISH we had old line Jewish control of Hollywood like Louis B. Mayer. We'd get new Yankee Doodle Dandy movies, or Casablanca, or Why We Fight, and a positive, pro-America message celebrating the common man. Instead we get a culture catering to the worst (not the best) of female culture.
Could you do the rest of the non-paleocon HBDers a small marketing favor and please not conflate the "Alternative Right sphere" with HBD.
I didn't capitalize it, so I wasn't referring to Spencer and the like. The problem is I have trouble coming up with a particular name for this blogosphere. I don't like HBD because I think it's not expansive enough. Perhaps I'll start using the reactionary-sphere or New Right more often.
Jesus extermination is an especially problematic strategy for conservatives considering how the evangelical proles you apparently admire so much
I admire evangelical proles? Not sure where you got this idea from. As for my opinion of proles, I can't stand the ones that exhibit prole behavior (watch 16 and Pregnant on MTV). But the hard-working, blue collar people, maybe I wouldn't get along with them personally, but I do somewhat admire their school of hard knocks, conservative, salt of the earth lifestyle. I guess I've always romanticized blue collar work, especially farming and rural.
The problem is I have trouble coming up with a particular name for this blogosphere. I don't like HBD because I think it's not expansive enough.
I'm in the same boat. I'm not sure I would even call myself a conservative, more like a libertarian who has adopted some hereditarian policies, albeit I also differ with libertarians on individual issues such as gay marriage because I think promoting traditional marriage produces desireable social effects.
Agnostic in his classic "Your generation was sluttier" demonstrated how the sexual revolution took off like a rocket in the late 1960's (and before) even when Hollywood produced nothing but pro-nuclear family entertainment...
Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy were certainly touching paeans to the nuclear family.
Thanks Hollywood!
Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent was an excellent book. It has been 20 years since I read it so I cannot remember everything about it, but he hit on an incredibly potent issue, namely that much of what we see is shaped by corporations. If I recall, my critique of his book 20 years ago was that of his five filters, they get progressively weaker as he needs to stretch his argument to fit his world view that corporations (and the white conservative men that run them) are evil and that were not for them, we would live in socialist utopia because then people would be able to see things the way he does and because he is so smart and logical naturally everyone else would come to his point of view.
Following up on Whiskey’s thread, what Chomsky missed, perhaps intentionally, is that corporations are simply chasing advertising revenues. The demographic that have all the disposable income in this country are women. Roughly 85% of said purchases are controlled by the females not males. By focusing on the evil corporations, it serves as a propaganda sop that distracts attention away from one of the prime pillars, if not the prime pillar of leftist spending priorities and policy.
As a result, the media caters to women. Not only do they need to attract female eyeballs but they must not offend any of their target audience. This means that all the networks go to great length to purge anything that might “offend” women or other cohorts that make up their precious coalition of victims, social justice crap, etc.
My contention is that all it would take is for ONE truly male oriented mass media outlet to break the monopoly. What worries the left is not that Fox News or any other network is so bad but that it could potentially morph into a much more effective propaganda outlet (America is the only place in the Anglosphere where the word propaganda is a pejorative). The goal of the minority is to keep the majority from organizing. This means whites, men, native born and conservatives.
The important point of the Goldberg article is the way he tries to spin defeat into a victory, or at least a non-loss. This is the standard practice of crooked pseudo-conservatives and neo-cons who are only interested in access to the system to further their pet projects (like Israel or continuing to funnel the nation's wealth toward their country club buddies), they don't give a damn about the fate of the nation or the civilization. Just try to get one of these scumbags to say there should be a moratorium on immigration or that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to colonize the West. They'd rather pull their teeth out with pliers. In the future when the system orders whites-who-don't-hate-whites and other enemies of the state to report to the gas chambers because shooting is taking too long, Goldberg (and he'll probably still be around and pimping) will at first support shooting them like we did last week because that's the conservative way, before embracing gassing as inevitable and actually a conservative victory. And if the gassing program includes a tax break for golf courses, even more so.
Fifteen years ago the Republicans and conservatives fought the Clintons over homosexuals openly serving in the military. Fifteen years from now the Republican candidate for President will be selling himself as the the New Barry Obama. This in not a joke, it's not even a prediction, it's inevitable.
Kanazawa had an interesting paper out that described an increased tendency among the low IQ to treat TV characters as "real friends" - http://www.akademiai.com/content/515lw151181332u1
Afterthought: As an interaction of this and race, I'd guess that Black people are probably the most led by the media, while Jewish folks would be the least...
Women also apparently strongly prefer fiction (google it if you're interested) while men have a relative (even if not absolute) preference for non-fiction.
So totally fictionalised media probably affects women disproportionately, while non-fiction, which may often be rather fictional once fully manipulated and spun, probably affects men disproportionately. If non-fiction is less malleable, and the media does have an effect, perhaps men are less easy manipulate than women, due to this.
"I admire evangelical proles? Not sure where you got this idea from"
It is a byproduct of TUJ's Christophobia/anti-Christian bigotry.
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