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From Taki’s Magazine:
Exhortation and Megalomania
by Steve Sailer
January 28, 2015It’s widely assumed, both by liberals and conservatives, that the fields of arts and entertainment innately induce egalitarian political leanings. Much of the prestige of the left, in fact, derives from the notion that it’s only natural for creative people to favor equality above all else. …
A more subversive theory is that art is inherently anti-egalitarian, that the entertainment industry thrives by elevating individuals to levels of mass adoration that Belshazzar of Babylon would have found excessive. In turn, the entertainment industry adopts a bogus ideology of promoting equality to cover up its essential tendency toward Caesarism.
Home of the Oscars
For example, this combination of exhortation and megalomania has been apparent for 99 of the 100 years that Hollywood has been making epic films.
Early March will mark the 100th anniversary of the original box office smash, D.W. Griffith’s denunciation of the rape culture of the Reconstruction Era, The Birth of a Nation. Stung by criticism from the NAACP, Griffith released in 1916 a more politically correct and even more ambitious blockbuster, Intolerance. It retold four stories of bigotry and oppression, from ancient Babylon down to the present day.
I’m sure that everybody has taken Griffith’s sermon against intolerance deeply to heart, but, honestly, the only thing anybody remembers from the movie is the Babylonian set that Griffith spent his Birth of a Nation profits constructing.
Read the whole thing there.
Here are some highlight clips of the most expensive shots in the Babylonian segment of Intolerance (keep in mind that these clips are taken at random so they don’t tell a story, which Griffith was notably good at for the time):
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
This White Brazilian man named Dr. Robert Ray seemed disappointed to find out he is genetically 100 percent European according to 23AndMe.
I thought he would be very happy with the results because Brazilian society is all about Whiter/lighter is better. So his negative reaction surprised me.
Unless he has lived in America for so long that it changed his views on race and he has now adopted the Latino is a race mentality.
I agree that Woodstock was a victory celebration, but what it was celebrating was the victory of the young liberals of the Northeast and their NAM allies over: 1) Anyone with traditional American moral standards; 2) Anyone trying to preserve 1950’s-style standards of dress and appearance; 3) Southerners (“He’s a drug store, truck-drivin’ man, a friend of the Ku Klux Klan”); 4) Anyone with conservative politics.
The victory anthem of Woodstock was Richie Havens’ “Freedom.”
Freedom from what? It was freedom from any restrictions imposed by traditional morality, conservatives, racists, and/or the 1955 people. Those people had been defeated and the Woodstock audience knew it. “Clap your hands!”
They were right to celebrate. They knew they were winning. Americans have been ruled by the Woodstock audience and people like them from the 1970’s to the present day.
The 1960's were the decade the grownups left the room.
Woodstock was the musical sack dance for Dixie. Andy Williams, Perry Como, Sammy Davis, Jr, Hugo Montenegro and Paul Mauriat all were, or had recently been, in the Top 20. Nothing like that ever happened again.
Woodstock was just two Jewish boys from Brooklyn trying to making a buck from the bad taste of Americans. Worked like a charm.
Oh, and the real Village of Woodstock turned them down.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Intolerance was remarkable for its editing.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/intolerance/Film?oid=1051740
OT but LOL as this was guessed/predicted by a couple of commenters here:
N.Y. Times’ Charles Blow said nothing about cop who arrested his son being black
The pirate speaks,”T’ cry brought him skulkin’ aft t’ his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit o’ sand, crouched in flight.
He slunk aft in a curve. Doesn’t see me. Along by t’ edge o’ t’ mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He trotted fore and, liftin’ his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. T’ simple pleaayes o’ t’ poor. His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Somethin’ he buried thar, his grandmother. He rooted in t’ sand, dabblin’ delvin’ and stopped t’ listen t’ t’ air, scraped up t’ sand again with a fury o’ his claws, soon ceasin’, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturin’ t’ went t’ Davy Jones’ locker. After he woke me up last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway. Street o’ harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I be almostin’ it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. T’ melon he had he held against me face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was t’ rule, said. In. Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.”
Remember you aren’t who you are until you are somebody else.
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/01/top-10-reasons-kid-may-be-idiots.html
Hollywood strikes me as an industry with high barriers to entry and most certainly un-egalitarian.
Perhaps the posturing of the people in it betrays some sort of a psychological projection, a la “sin theory of politics.”
TO GARNETT
“In our lands be Beeres and Lyons of dyvers colours as ye redd, grene, black, and white. And in our land be also unicornes and these Unicornes slee many Lyons…. Also there dare no man make a lye in our lande, for if he dyde he sholde incontynent be sleyn.”–Mediaeval Epistle, of Pope Prester John.
I
Across the seas of Wonderland to Mogadore we plodded,
Forty singing seamen in an old black barque,
And we landed in the twilight where a Polyphemus nodded
With his battered moon-eye winking red and yellow through the dark!
For his eye was growing mellow,
Rich and ripe and red and yellow,
As was time, since old Ulysses made him bellow in the dark!
_Cho._–Since Ulysses bunged his eye up with a pine-torch in the dark!
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/41848/
Ode to wireless.
Before Noyes had begun proper work on the final volume in the trilogy, The Last Voyage, two events occurred which were to influence it greatly: his first wife’s death and his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Death is a major theme in The Last Voyage, as its very title suggests. The tone, more sombre than that of its predecessors, is also more religious — though religion was hardly absent from the earlier volumes — and, as might be expected, more specifically Catholic.
The Last Voyage begins at night in mid-Atlantic, where an ocean liner, “a great ship like a lighted city”, is battling through a raging storm. A little girl is mortally ill. The ship’s surgeon prepares to operate, but with little hope of success, for the case is complicated and he is no specialist. Luckily, the captain knows from the wireless news that a top specialist from Johns Hopkins is on another liner 400 miles away – within wireless range. The ship’s surgeon will be able to consult him, and stay in touch with him throughout the operation. Suddenly, the little girl’s chances of survival are much improved. In a manner of speaking, all the scientific discoveries and inventions of the past are being brought to bear in the attempt to save her life. When the poet asks a casually-met fellow-passenger, “You think they’ll save her?” the stranger replies, “They may save her,” and then adds enigmatically, “But who are They?” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noyes#The_Book_of_Earth
The victory anthem of Woodstock was Richie Havens' "Freedom."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5aPBU34Fyk
Freedom from what? It was freedom from any restrictions imposed by traditional morality, conservatives, racists, and/or the 1955 people. Those people had been defeated and the Woodstock audience knew it. "Clap your hands!"
They were right to celebrate. They knew they were winning. Americans have been ruled by the Woodstock audience and people like them from the 1970's to the present day.Replies: @Auntie Analogue, @Reg Cæsar
You got it, nailed it, Jeff W.
The 1960’s were the decade the grownups left the room.
The hippies weren’t all anti-South
It isn't too much of a stretch to say that Carter benefited somewhat from the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, honorary southerners Creedence Clearwater Revival and others.
When the Martin guitar company in Nazareth, PA repaired that little guitar you see Joan playing (this was back in the late '60's or early '70's), the repairmen wrote, on the inside of the guitar (where she couldn't see it) "Too bad you're a communist!" A pretty apt sentiment. Like most rich celebrity communists of the time, she had little use for people who weren't like her, including southerners.Replies: @donut
The Accusing Ghost[edit]
In 1957, Noyes published his last book, The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement (US title: The Accusing Ghost of Roger Casement). In 1916, the renowned human rights campaigner Roger Casement was hanged for his involvement in the Irish Nationalist revolt in Dublin known as the Easter Rising. To forestall calls for clemency, the British authorities showed public figures and known sympathizers selected pages from some of Casement’s diaries – known as the Black Diaries – that exposed him as a promiscuous homosexual. In an era of unthinking homophobia, this underhand tactic worked and the expected protests and petitions for Casement’s reprieve did not materialise.[44]
Among those who read these extracts was Noyes, who was then working in the News Department of the Foreign Office and who described the pages as a “foul record” of “the lowest depths that human degradation has ever touched”. Later that year in Philadelphia, when Noyes was about to give a lecture on the English poets, he was confronted by Casement’s sister, Nina, who denounced him as a “blackguardly scoundrel” and cried, “Your countrymen hanged my brother Roger Casement.”[44]
Worse was to come. After Casement’s death, the British authorities held the diaries in conditions of extraordinary secrecy, arousing strong suspicions among Casement’s supporters that they were forged. In 1936, there appeared a book by an American doctor, William J. Maloney, called The Forged Casement Diaries. After reading it, W. B. Yeats wrote a protest poem, “Roger Casement”, which was published with great prominence in The Irish Press.[45] In the fifth stanza of the poem, Yeats named Alfred Noyes and called on him to desert the side of the forger and perjurer. Noyes immediately responded with a letter to The Irish Press in which he explained why he had assumed the diaries were authentic, confessed he might have been misled,[44] and called for the setting up of a committee to examine the original documents and settle the matter. In response to what he called Noyes’ “noble” letter, Yeats amended his poem, removing Noyes’ name.[45]
Over twenty years later, Casement’s diaries were still being held in the same conditions of secrecy. In 1957, therefore, Noyes published The Accusing Ghost, or Justice for Casement, a stinging rebuke of British policy[45] in which, making full amends for his previous harsh judgement, he argued that Casement had indeed been the victim of a British Intelligence plot.[44]
In 2002, a forensic examination of the Black Diaries concluded that they were authentic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noyes#The_Book_of_Earth
Tilt…
Forewarning to JFK assassination?
“… you will usually find him in church on Sunday morning, maybe even a Catholic church. But as a member of the United States Senate, running for the presidency, and smart enough to know the strong Communist support behind-the-scenes which he will have to get in order to have any chance of being nominated in 1960, such an amoral man can do a tremendous amount of ball-carrying on behalf of the Communist aims here in the United States…
–Robert H.W. Welch, founder of John Birch Society (1958)
John Birch Society–Another False Flag?
The future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles arrived at his first paying job as an English teacher at Ewing Christian School, the same school where George Birch taught agriculture for three years, 1917-20 at the school which evolved into the Sam Higginbottom Institute {See Note 2 below}. Ethel May Ellis Birch had been the one to apply for the passport for herself in the summer of 1917 with George’s passport being something of an afterthought. Two of their children would be born while they lived in Allahabad.
John Birch, a toddler, returned with his parents and infant brother from India in August 1920. Then between 1922 and 1930, five more siblings would be born in Vineland, New Jersey, where Ethel had been born and reared. Her parents were Walter Haskell and Liberty “Bertie” Cosman Ellis. When her father died before 1930, Ethel’s mother went to live with a maiden sister, and the Birch family moved back to Georgia, where John’s father’s family had lived for generations. George Birch had obtained a teaching job at the Martha Berry College near Rome, Georgia, but in 1935 his name appeared in the Macon, Georgia city directory at the County Agricultural office where he supervised the screw worm program there.
Irony
Ironically, the “Communists” whom the John Birch Society was organized to warn against were the very people for whom George Birch worked, i.e., the organized public health organization supported by the Rockefeller Foundations. The second irony is that, though Welch repeatedly called John Birch a “fundamentalist Baptist” (page 41) in his Indianapolis speech (see The Blue Book), his parents reported to the same Presbyterian missionary network in Allahabad, India, for which Allen W. Dulles (who then headed the CIA) worked for a year. It is as though Robert Welch was a propaganda tool operating on behalf of the very elite clique he seemed to be attacking. Using the word “fundamentalist” ten times in his speech, Welch rang an alarm about the diminishing numbers of evangelicals attempting to convert the heathen:
Some have merely watered down the faith of our fathers, and of theirs, into an innocuous philosophy instead of an evangelistic religion. Some have converted Christianity into a so-called “social gospel,” that bypasses all questions of dogma with an indifference which is comfortable to both themselves and their parishioners; and which “social gospel” becomes in fact indistinguishable from advocacy of the welfare state by socialist politicians.
http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2013/10/john-birch-society-warning-to-jfk-in.html
I’ve never been able to watch movies from before 1962. Something about the pacing and editing fail to keep my attention.
I guess it didn't live up to how I remembered seeing it in a movie theater.
Millennials… dumbest and most inane generation ever?
Hollywood is hard left. That alone means it s not egalitarian but something between the Kim family rule of North Korea and say the Chinese oligarchy.
That Spielberg lacks the power to openly display his hobby tells you all you need to know.
Power is proved by doing what you want without care of what others think. Hollywood seems a miserable, gay and female run place. Even Spielberg cowers.
“In Chapter Three of Henrik Kruger’s book, we find these same men mentioned there as well. They were all members of Marcel Paul Francisci’s international cartel, consisting of heroin refining labs in France, a distribution network run by the Corsican Mafia, and a money-laundering system of banks to hide the source of funds and make it available for reinvestment.
As Kruger stated:
Most of it [heroin] was sold on the U.S. market, where Italian and Cuban wholesalers entered the scene. In 1971 the Corsican Mafia delivered 80 percent of the heroin on the U.S. market. They deposited their millions in Bahamian, Swiss, and Lebanese banks, reinvesting some of it later in legal enterprise.
The “Italian and Cuban wholesalers” mentioned above were described in greater detail in Chapter 9, where he wrote that Francisci used his connections with French politicians to negotiate an international agreement whereby his cartel could import opium into France and export the refined heroin through Italian mobsters. The distribution network (export) consisted of two air and three sea routes into the United States. As to the sea routes, he wrote:
The shipping lanes… either ended in
Brazil/Paraguay,
Haiti and the French West Indies, or
went directly to the east coast of the United States.”
http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2014/06/financing-ratlines.html
See Cuba is useful to create new ratlines. It just expands and only the names have changed.
“There was a drug bust in New York City in 1961 that nobody heard of until a book came out in 1969, which was developed into “The French Connection,” the movie which swept the Academy Awards in April 1972.
Brahman-bred author Robin Moore dug this story out of the archives just in time for Nixon to begin his war against French heroin refiners. Was that just a fluke, or could Moore, with contacts in Special Forces since the days it was still part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), have known that this story was about to become big news?”
Wealthy Americans were being encouraged to set up secret bank accounts in these islands then being developed as tourist meccas, where money dropped in the casinos could be siphoned off by organized criminals, all in the guise of jet-setters’ fun in the sun. Mitchell WerBell III, for example, was helping promote a group calling itself “Friends of Abaco,” with help from John Patrick Muldoon, Michael “Moses Olitsky” Oliver, and Walter Josef “Walt” Mackem. Abaco was a Bahamian island that wanted to stay under the wing of the British monarchy.
http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2014/02/links-between-assassins-green-berets.html
Beware of Friends of Cuba.
Some say rock music sunk communism.
http://youtu.be/7Zway3F4Fc0
Not left, not right. Just hedonism.
Interesting as always, but I would venture to point out that current trends seem to be in the opposite direction. Between the internet and 500 cable channels, many entertainment industries seem to be moving toward equalization, with a lot more work available but the work not nearly so remunerative. For example, I was sitting here wondering how many of the cast and crew of Justified make more than middle management at a corporation? Will the ethos of Hollywood change to reflect their new economy?
My vague impression is that for actors these days, at least below the Robert Downey Jr.-level, there’s a lot of work but the pay isn’t like it was in the 1990s. I’ll go look up on IMDB some actor I haven’t paid attention to since 2002 and be surprised that he’s gotten 90 credits since then.
kryptocracies–agencies of government which (in contrast to conventional bureaucracies) operate secretly and are not accountable for their actions and procedures, with the power to control US politics through the manipulation of truth. A kryptocracy’s power comes in part from its ability to falsify its own records, without fear of outside correction.
http://quixoticjoust.blogspot.com/2011/08/americas-krypto-history-what-we-dont.html
That’s why leaks are so deadly.
Once the truth is out there the power comes apart and they need to classify more stuff to falsify other stuff. Look at the debt and the need to hire more know nothing bureaucratic accountants to falsify their own records. Instead of a democracy we have a kryptocracy. Drunk driving would be an improvement in Detroit. We’re on the road to ruin.
kryptonomy–the power of the independently wealthy, and of the banks that cater to them; a small group of about 100 people who know each other, and in addition often have connections to both the CIA and to organized crime.
Drain accounts, replace funds, drain those funds and replace again. Blame everything on the Russians or whoever. Make movies before the trials and use propaganda instead of juries to convict saps and get donations from organized crime in Hollywood. Wait for collapse.
parahistory–an account of suppressed events, at odds with the publicly accepted history of this country; reconstructed account of events denied by the public records from which history is normally composed
Charlie operation as an example. Police guarding cartoon office?
BuddyTV (blog)-6 hours ago
There’s a second Charlie, and this one is pure darkness. … In the aftermath, Charlie is fine with not returning to Oz. She offers to help Sam track …
The Wine Press
By Alfred Noyes
(English poet, born 1880)
A MURDERED man, ten miles away,
Will hardly shake your peace,
Like one red stain upon your hand;
And a tortured child in a distant land
Will never check one smile to-day, 5
Or bid one fiddle cease.
The News
It comes along a little wire,
Sunk in a deep sea;
It thins in the clubs to a little smoke
Between one joke and another joke, 10
For a city in flames is less than the fire
That comforts you and me.
The Diplomats
Each was honest after his way,
Lukewarm in faith, and old;
And blood, to them, was only a word, 15
And the point of a phrase their only sword,
And the cost of war, they reckoned it
In little disks of gold.
They were cleanly groomed. They were not to be bought.
And their cigars were good. 20
But they had pulled so many strings
In the tinselled puppet-show of kings
That, when they talked of war, they thought
Of sawdust, not of blood;
Not of the crimson tempest 25
Where the shattered city falls:
They thought, behind their varnished doors,
Of diplomats, ambassadors,
Budgets, and loans and boundary-lines,
Coercions and re-calls.
http://www.bartleby.com/71/1120.html
The Furred Law-Cats
(From “Pantagruel”)
By François Rabelais
(French satirist of the middle ages, c.1490–1553)
THE FURRED Law-Cats are most terrible and dreadful monsters; they devour little children, and trample over marble stones. Pray tell me, noble topers, do they not deserve to have their snouts slit? The hair of their hides doesn’t lie outward, but inwards, and every mother’s son of them for his device wears a gaping pouch, but not all in the same manner; for some wear it tied to their neck scarfwise, others upon the breech, some on the side, and all for a cause, with reason and mystery. They have claws so very strong, long, and sharp that nothing can get from ’em what is once fast between their clutches. Sometimes they cover their heads with mortar-like caps, at other times with mortified caparisons. 1
Examine well the countenance of these stout props and pillars of this catch-coin law and iniquity; and pray observe, that if you live but six olympiads, and the age of two dogs more, you’ll see these Furred Law-cats lords of all Europe, and in peaceful possession of all the estates and domains belonging to it; unless, by divine providence, what’s got over the devil’s back is spent under his belly, or the goods which they unjustly get perish with their prodigal heirs. Take this from an honest beggar! 2
Among ’em reigns the sixth essence; by the means of which they gripe all, devour all, conskite all, burn all, draw all, hang all, quarter all, behead all, murder all, imprison all, waste all, and ruin all, without the least notice of right and wrong; for among them vice is called virtue; wickedness, piety; treason, loyalty; robbery, justice. Plunder is their motto, and when acted by them is approved by all men, except the heretics; and all this they do because they dare; their authority is sovereign and irrefragable. Should all their villany be once displayed in its true colours and exposed to the people, there never was, is, nor will be any spokesman could save ’em; nor any magistrate so powerful as to hinder their being burnt alive in their coney-burrows without mercy. http://www.bartleby.com/71/1427.html
The Babble Machines
(From “When the Sleeper Wakes”)
By H. G. Wells
BEYOND this place they came into a closed hall, and Graham discovered the cause of the noise that had perplexed him. His attention was arrested by a violent, loud hoot, followed by a vast leathery voice. He stopped and, looking up, beheld a foolish trumpet face. This was the General Intelligence Machine. For a space it seemed to be gathering breath, and a regular throbbing from its cylindrical body was audible. Then it trumpeted “Galloop, Galloop,” and broke out again. 1
“Paris is now pacified. All resistance is over. Galloop! The black police hold every position of importance in the city. They fought with great bravery, singing songs written in praise of their ancestors by the poet Kipling. Once or twice they got out of hand, and tortured and mutilated wounded and captured insurgents, men and women. Moral—don’t go rebelling. Haha! Galloop, Galloop! http://www.bartleby.com/71/1439.html
Democratic Vistas
By Walt Whitman
(America’s most original and creative poet, 1819–1892; printer and journalist, during the war an army nurse, and later a government clerk, discharged for publishing what his superiors considered an “indecent” book)
Dominion strong is the body’s; dominion stronger is the mind’s. What has filled, and fills today our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the standards therein, is yet foreign. The great poems, Shakespeare’s included, are poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life-blood of democracy. The models of our literature, as we get it from other lands, ultramarine, have had their birth in courts, and basked and grown in castle sunshine; all smells of princes’ favors. Of workers of a certain sort, we have, indeed, plenty, contributing after their kind; many elegant, many learned, all complacent. But touched by the national test, or tried by the standards of democratic personality, they wither to ashes. http://www.bartleby.com/71/1502.html
So what you get is: parapolitics–manipulative covert politics; “a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished” along with dignity and pride.
There may be Islamic terror network involvement in the drug trade:
In his revelations, Salazar also implicates the governor of Aragua state, Tarek el Aissami, who also has links with Islamic networks, and José David Cabello, brother of the National Assembly president, who for several years served as director of SENIAT [tax agency] and minister of industry. José David Cabello is allegedly responsible for the finances of the Cartel of the Suns. Salazar mentions that [the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela] PDVSA is a money-laundering machine (sic). PDVSA’s former president from 2004 to 2014, Rafael Ramirez, was appointed in December as Venezuela’s ambassador before the U.N. Security Council.
There is also Cuban involvement:
In his revelations, Salazar also implicates the governor of Aragua state, Tarek el Aissami, who also has links with Islamic networks, and José David Cabello, brother of the National Assembly president, who for several years served as director of SENIAT [tax agency] and minister of industry. José David Cabello is allegedly responsible for the finances of the Cartel of the Suns. Salazar mentions that [the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela] PDVSA is a money-laundering machine (sic). PDVSA’s former president from 2004 to 2014, Rafael Ramirez, was appointed in December as Venezuela’s ambassador before the U.N. Security Council.
A post shared on Twitter by Ramón Pérez-Maura, an ABC journalist covering the case, stated that Salazar’s testimony had also linked Cuba with the country’s narcotrafficking trade, “offering protection to certain routes along which drugs were brought to Venezuela from the United States.”
Pérez-Maura‘s colleague in New York Emili J. Blasco added further details that Cabello gave direct orders for the distribution of illicit substances, and that Salazar knew of locations where the accused “keeps mountains of dollar bills.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2015/01/highranking_defector_from_venezuela_accuses_regime_of_narcotics_trafficking_.html
Everybody on the take in now failed oil rich Venezuela. They need new ratlines. They are out of lifelines.
“My vague impression is that for actors these days, at least below the Robert Downey Jr.-level, there’s a lot of work but the pay isn’t like it was in the 1990s. I’ll go look up on IMDB some actor I haven’t paid attention to since 2002 and be surprised that he’s gotten 90 credits since then.”
A lot of actors in Hollywood now do mostly straight for TV Lifetime films like Rob Lowe for example or mostly straight to DVD films like Steven Seagal.
Funny, I find much of what was produced in the 60s and early 70s unwatchable. I recently watched Easy Rider, for 10 minutes. That was all I could stand.
I guess it didn’t live up to how I remembered seeing it in a movie theater.
The cults of Lenin, Stalin & Mao did not make them rightists. The fact that Lenin & Stalin both shared a passion for hunting live game with rifles did not make them 2nd amendment supporters (Americans have such a provincial & narrow view of politics as if it all revolves around their tribal concerns). Bolsheviks went strapped (even to the dinner table). Bolshevik women had explosives in their knickers (like Jihadi molls today). Stalin’s wife Nadya committed suicide using a pistol given to her by her brother as a gift:
— The court of the Red Tzar, Simon Sebag Montefiore
All of this goes double for the Zionist terrorist gangs of the 20s, 30s & 40s who helped create Israel (Menachem Begin & Irgun; Abraham Stern’s outfit)
Hollywood big-shots are right wing to the extent that they support Netanyahu, Likud, Israel’s Middle East war-making and aggressive prosecution of its interest (such as deporting illegal intruders and bulldozing Arab homes with people still inside). Not for domestic consumption. Kevin MacDonald noted (from personal encounters he had at the time) that the leaders of the anti-Vietnam war movement at Madison U sat down after a hard day’s screaming about American war atrocities and cheered Israel’s tanks and jets making mincemeat of the Egyptians on TV during the Six Day War of 1967. Israel and its supporters demand (and bring about) hard line enforcement of the Non-proliferation treaty (it unilaterally bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq, June 1981, at Begin’s command, in order to prevent an alleged nuclear weapons program) while the little state has a nuclear arsenal believed to be somewhere north of 200 warheads.
It surprises me little that these men had no problem funding a film that shows hundreds of Arab men, women & children getting their brain cases perforated even if it required making a hero out of a Texan good ol’ boy from Bible country whom they otherwise despise (as a bonus it has a Hollywood happy ending: he was murdered by a veteran pal at a firing range!)
Doesn’t Goodman specifically deny this in the Milius documentary? I’m pretty sure he does.
From what I understand, live amplification was still generally pretty poor in the late 60’s. The Grateful Dead carried their own PA from show to show since the halls they typically played at were seen as ill-equipped. I believe things moved quickly, though, and by the mid-70’s the Arena Rock era arrived with Frampton, Kiss, and the louder hard rock bands of the time. (“No, I don’t have any Blue Oyster Cult. I ate 34 pairs last time around…”)
The victory anthem of Woodstock was Richie Havens' "Freedom."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5aPBU34Fyk
Freedom from what? It was freedom from any restrictions imposed by traditional morality, conservatives, racists, and/or the 1955 people. Those people had been defeated and the Woodstock audience knew it. "Clap your hands!"
They were right to celebrate. They knew they were winning. Americans have been ruled by the Woodstock audience and people like them from the 1970's to the present day.Replies: @Auntie Analogue, @Reg Cæsar
Are you kidding me? Is there a single note on the soundtrack that isn’t in one Southern genre or other?
Woodstock was the musical sack dance for Dixie. Andy Williams, Perry Como, Sammy Davis, Jr, Hugo Montenegro and Paul Mauriat all were, or had recently been, in the Top 20. Nothing like that ever happened again.
Woodstock was just two Jewish boys from Brooklyn trying to making a buck from the bad taste of Americans. Worked like a charm.
Oh, and the real Village of Woodstock turned them down.
The best music… WABC!Replies: @Kylie
Those “exceptions” in popular entertainment prove there’s a huge market for conservative-friendly stories that the self-appointed guardians of popular culture want to suppress. If they can’t suppress them, they’ll do their best to ignore them.
Woodstock was the musical sack dance for Dixie. Andy Williams, Perry Como, Sammy Davis, Jr, Hugo Montenegro and Paul Mauriat all were, or had recently been, in the Top 20. Nothing like that ever happened again.
Woodstock was just two Jewish boys from Brooklyn trying to making a buck from the bad taste of Americans. Worked like a charm.
Oh, and the real Village of Woodstock turned them down.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
And Percy Faith charted in the spring before Woodstock. Imagine that.
The best music… WABC!
"And Percy Faith charted in the spring before Woodstock. Imagine that.
The best music… WABC!"
Theme by the great Max Steiner, one of the pioneers of film composing. Very old school.
Several of the "A Summer Place" videos on YT have +1 million views.
N.Y. Times' Charles Blow said nothing about cop who arrested his son being blackReplies: @candid_observer
Here’s a comment I had submitted to the Blow column in the NY Times regarding this incident. The comment was not published. Perhaps someone else might detect why it violated the NY Times’ policies on comments, because I sure can’t.
All the news that fits the Narrative.
Meahwhile, Charles Blow(hard) forgets to mention the race of the police officer who detained his son at Yale.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n.y.-times-charles-blow-said-nothing-about-cop-who-arrested-his-son-being-black/article/2559374
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/american-sniper-everybodys-iraq-war-film/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAjWYFBSFNsReplies: @syonredux, @Ivy, @J1234
I’m assuming that you missed the part where Southern Rednecks kill the cocaine-transporting heroes of the film?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqNMjZpSbnU
For you Steve, especially :45 to :55, Lol!
http://youtu.be/Hf0Dm-OaTNk
The best music… WABC!Replies: @Kylie
@ Reg Caesar
“And Percy Faith charted in the spring before Woodstock. Imagine that.
The best music… WABC!”
Theme by the great Max Steiner, one of the pioneers of film composing. Very old school.
Several of the “A Summer Place” videos on YT have +1 million views.
I see what you did there.
Your comments about the arts and artists are absolutely correct, and the mention of Ozymandias is extremely perceptive.
The greatest, most enduring artists of all time worked for the greatest dictators of their times: I’m talking about those who built and decorated the pyramids, the mammoth cities like Babylon, the intricate temples in South America. When Alexander rode through town, local artists stood on line to build the greatest monument to their conqueror. Even the Renaissance artists made their livings by obsequiously seeking the patronage of one Italian overlord or another. And of course artists had no trouble cozying up to the likes of Hitler and the Soviets.
That’s not the whole story of the arts, obviously. But the easy alliance of the arts and dictatorship–the artist’s historic willingness to be an agent of the tyrant–is a part of the story that’s routinely ignored; and as you say, even our contemporary practitioners manage to block out the historic reality, and their own submission to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAjWYFBSFNsReplies: @syonredux, @Ivy, @J1234
Southern rock also helped introduce the region to the nation. Between the Vietnam troop mixing and the wider reach of music, people learned more about their country.
It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that Carter benefited somewhat from the Allman Brothers, Charlie Daniels Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, honorary southerners Creedence Clearwater Revival and others.
“I’m assuming that you missed the part where Southern Rednecks kill the cocaine-transporting heroes of the film?”
Get a grip, syon, you bought it hook, line and sinker. It was a movie.
Steve,
What’s up with this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2905392/Hollywood-screenwriter-mysteriously-killed-20-years-ago-working-CIA-hands-sent-autopsy-200-years-old.html
Is this for real?
Except for the fact that they wrecked a beautiful motorcycle I thought killing the hippies made them the heroes , just like in “Deliverance” the rednecks were ahead of their time in celebrating the gay life style.
To commemorate this event I would like to erect a gargantuan statue of myself. However, I’m having a bit of a cash flow problem at the moment, so let’s scratch the name off of someone else’s statue and affix the royal cartouche.
Well, yes, dear fellow, that’s the point.Easy Rider was a movie where the face of evil incarnate was a Southern Redneck:
It’s a profoundly anti-Southern film
OT:
I was listening to a podcast from France that was on the topic of Charlie Hebdo and all that. One of the guys said he knows quite a few schoolteachers and every one of them had at least three or four students who refused to stand for the moment of silence for those killed. Apparently even the teacher at a school for the deaf had students who refused to stand for the moment of silence. I shouldn’t find that funny but I do.
Dear God, yes. That liberals can’t admit that the MLK Memorial is a truly awful piece of public art speaks volumes about the supremacy of ideology over aesthetics.
Of course, the fact that the MLK Memorial shares space on the Mall with the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, two fine pieces of public art, just drives home how far we have fallen.
Rock and roll of the ’60s era took a lot of it’s cues from older genres which were principally rural and Southern: blues, jazz, and of course Country, itself a weird hybrid of Tin Pan Alley pop-hits mixed with old-timey tunes, blues, dixieland, etc. Jimmie Rogers did the whole white-guy-singing-like-a-black-guy thirty years before Elvis.
The irony is that as rock soared in popularity, Southern whites became the new folk devil. Red neck killers in fiction got a boost from cheap exploitation films, and the general zeitgiest of opposition to traditional America. Bull Conor and Lester maddox probably didn’t help matters. It took Randy Newman to say a good thing about Gov. Maddox in a pop tune.
I won’t say the ’60s were a total waste when it comes to film. For crying out loud, you had Sam Peckinpah making movies like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. Could you ask for more?
Speaking of Spielberg and Milius:
One of the truly great scenes of ’70s cinema
“Speaking of Spielberg and Milius:
One of the truly great scenes of ’70s cinema”
Are you on crack ? The 1970s produced a lot of great cinema.
The irony is that as rock soared in popularity, Southern whites became the new folk devil. Red neck killers in fiction got a boost from cheap exploitation films, and the general zeitgiest of opposition to traditional America. Bull Conor and Lester maddox probably didn't help matters. It took Randy Newman to say a good thing about Gov. Maddox in a pop tune.
I won't say the '60s were a total waste when it comes to film. For crying out loud, you had Sam Peckinpah making movies like Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. Could you ask for more?Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Greil Marcus said that rock differed from its Southern sisters, country and blues, in that the sin was still there, but the consequences were suddenly gone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnS9M03F-fA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAjWYFBSFNsReplies: @syonredux, @Ivy, @J1234
Joan Baez was most certainly anti-South. She just knew a hit record when she heard it. The Band did the original version.
When the Martin guitar company in Nazareth, PA repaired that little guitar you see Joan playing (this was back in the late ’60’s or early ’70’s), the repairmen wrote, on the inside of the guitar (where she couldn’t see it) “Too bad you’re a communist!” A pretty apt sentiment. Like most rich celebrity communists of the time, she had little use for people who weren’t like her, including southerners.
My personal drug of choice was ALWAYS more . Was that wrong ?
I do not think it is a calculated stance to draw attention away from their own inequality. Artistic types deal with emotions. Logical, rational and scientific endeavors are not artistic by definition. People might call a scientific discovery or a mathematical proof “artistic” by way of metaphor, but all true art deals with emotions.
As Ayn Rand said, “Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.”
Who cannot “feel” better about Bob Cratchit than about Scrooge? One could easily make a rational argument that Scrooge benefited his fellow men more before his conversion than after. During the industrial age, a financier who was scrupulous in preserving capital (collecting debts and economizing expenses) may have rationally benefited his city and country more than a person who dissipated capital in a misguided attempt to end want. Emotions favor the collective and the communal society. Capitalism, rationality and science favor individual values. In science the entire community may believe and want to believe for good social reasons that the sun circles the earth, but in science one repeatable experiment can wash away consensus.
When the Martin guitar company in Nazareth, PA repaired that little guitar you see Joan playing (this was back in the late '60's or early '70's), the repairmen wrote, on the inside of the guitar (where she couldn't see it) "Too bad you're a communist!" A pretty apt sentiment. Like most rich celebrity communists of the time, she had little use for people who weren't like her, including southerners.Replies: @donut
” Steve is correct. It seems American thinking has always had a peculiar flaw – we believe that if a little bit of something is beneficial (or non-harmful), then a whole lot of it must be VERY beneficial. This kind of thinking has lead to gigantic houses, gigantic cars, gigantic addiction problems, gigantic billboards or ad campaigns and gigantic displays of self immolating moral superiority (both personally and culturally.”
My personal drug of choice was ALWAYS more . Was that wrong ?
Does anybody remember this great Tex–Mex singer from the 70’s ?
” He died in 2006 at the age of 69 of lung cancer at his home in Corpus Christi, Texas, with his family at his bedside. He was buried in his hometown of San Benito”
We should all be so lucky . Most people die on the factory floor (a hospital) with their pride and dignity long gone.And often alone.
I found Intolerance surprisingly watchable for a century-old film. I actually liked it more than Birth of a Nation. The last bit is incredibly tense.
Jesus met the woman at the well:
“While Jesus was alone, a woman came to the well for water. It was not the usual time to go for water. She probably came then because she did not want to meet people. Later in the story we read that she had lived a bad life. She had been married to several men. Now she lived with a man who was not her husband. Perhaps nobody would talk to her. Jesus spoke to her. He asked the woman for a drink. It surprises us that she did not refuse him. It surprised her that a Jew would ask this. She told Jesus that she did not expect his request. Then, Jesus replied:
John 4:10: Jesus answered her, ‘You do not know the gift of God. You do not know who asks you for water. If you did, you could ask me. I would give you living water’.”
Speaking of Hollywood, check out this Italian guy from Long Island, New York who is Peter Griffin’s doppelganger.
Here’s an anti-egalitarian movie poster for Dr. Strangelove:
It’s just fan art but it made me laugh.
I didn’t get to say Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to every one , I may have been drunk but anyway a belated all that to everyone .
and this too:
Regarding Hollywood’s “egalitarianism”: Very few who profess egalitarian political convictions actually want a general leveling of conditions. Egalitarianism is a means used by an ascendant faction to attack an established elite (cf. Pareto). It has less to do with idealistic dreams of making all people equal than with the envy of those in the second rank for those in the first. The ascendant faction believes itself worthier of wealth and power than the older and more established one, which it despises and wishes to see cast down and degraded. Though one cannot imagine such people singing the Magnificat with any conviction, the one verse they take to heart is “Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles” – of course imagining themselves in the latter role.
There is an element in Hollywood politics of Jewish envy of and antipathy toward the old WASP elite, as Steve has elsewhere pointed out in his discussion of country clubs. For the same reasons, even now, villains in the typical Hollywood production are so often portrayed either as rich WASPs speaking with Locust Valley lockjaw accents, or even better, as upper-class Englishmen. Although such types have not been representative of the real elite for decades, the stereotype is perpetuated, with the aim of signaling to the masses that this imaginary elite is the proper object of their detestation, and not the elite we actually have.
There is also an element of resentment that stems from the traditional attitude that “show people” were a rather louche and raffish bunch, of dubious morality, and on the fringes of society. Hollywood’s payback is shown in its disdain for the solid and respectable middle class, for suburban living, for small towns, for the vast flyover country between New York and Los Angeles. None of these are ever shown as honest or innocent. The good family man always turns out to have a secret vice; the prosperous suburb or picturesque village harbors an evil conspiracy; Southerners are always racists, and unspeakable crimes are hidden in the neatly maintained farmhouses and barns of the rural Midwest. The protagonist who rights these wrongs is inevitably from some background marginalized by “bourgeois morality,” which in the end is always depicted as shallow and hypocritical.
“We men are wretched things.” So says the Blind Bard .
OK gotta go. I’ll leave you with this :
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 – 1822
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Rip Torn once got so drunk he broke into a local branch bank thinking it was his home.
You’re being a dummy. It’s a film consistent w/ the vision of Dennis Hopper, who was anti-everything
There is an element in Hollywood politics of Jewish envy of and antipathy toward the old WASP elite, as Steve has elsewhere pointed out in his discussion of country clubs. For the same reasons, even now, villains in the typical Hollywood production are so often portrayed either as rich WASPs speaking with Locust Valley lockjaw accents, or even better, as upper-class Englishmen. Although such types have not been representative of the real elite for decades, the stereotype is perpetuated, with the aim of signaling to the masses that this imaginary elite is the proper object of their detestation, and not the elite we actually have.
There is also an element of resentment that stems from the traditional attitude that "show people" were a rather louche and raffish bunch, of dubious morality, and on the fringes of society. Hollywood's payback is shown in its disdain for the solid and respectable middle class, for suburban living, for small towns, for the vast flyover country between New York and Los Angeles. None of these are ever shown as honest or innocent. The good family man always turns out to have a secret vice; the prosperous suburb or picturesque village harbors an evil conspiracy; Southerners are always racists, and unspeakable crimes are hidden in the neatly maintained farmhouses and barns of the rural Midwest. The protagonist who rights these wrongs is inevitably from some background marginalized by "bourgeois morality," which in the end is always depicted as shallow and hypocritical.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Scotty G. Vito, @Twinkie
That explains what, on the surface, appears to be weird political behavior on the part of Southerners in the 20th century: championing the income tax, only later to champion its repeal, and vigorously supporting egalitarian presidential candidates 1932-44 and 1952-60, while rejecting them soundly in 1948 and 1964.
The paradox from the standpoint of modern political stereotypes revolves around racial issues. Often, the populists, who leaned left on many economic issues, were far more strident race-baiters than the Bourbons. Thus we find LeRoy Percy resisting the Ku Klux Klan, while Theodore Bilbo, Vardaman's protege, was one of the most adamantly anti-black politicians of the twentieth century. Yet Bilbo was enthusiastic in support of the New Deal, and became the first Democrat in the U.S. Senate to endorse Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 for an unprecedented third term. Chester Morgan entitled his biography of Bilbo "Redneck Liberal," which seems an apt characterization.
The 'weird political behavior' you note is in many cases a reflection of which faction prevailed in internal Southern Democratic politics. However, one common objective of all Southern Democrats, Bourbon or populist, was always bringing Federal money into the South. Once the national Democratic party abandoned its historical Southern affiliates on racial issues, the loss of support from white Southerners was inevitable.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
I wonder what Sailer would make of the French techno act Justice which is awash in elitist, haute-Euro imagery. One of their records features an intricate illustration of a seemingly 100-ft-tall pipe organ, for example. Their melodic style could be described as “pound the listener into submission” and their public image is sort of a heavily mannered take on 1970s decadent macho pop icons, crossed with a Bowie-like i.e. somewhat gay genteelness (petting cats, drinking fine wine under candelabras, etc.) About the only common/egalitarian element in their repertoire is they use a freakin’ cross as their logo, as in Christianity — and even that is probably an implicit evangelistic-overlord symbol of menace directed at the masses. Bonus points, they got in trouble for one of their videos showing a bunch of beurettes going out for an afternoon on the banlieue:
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1807724,00.html
There is an element in Hollywood politics of Jewish envy of and antipathy toward the old WASP elite, as Steve has elsewhere pointed out in his discussion of country clubs. For the same reasons, even now, villains in the typical Hollywood production are so often portrayed either as rich WASPs speaking with Locust Valley lockjaw accents, or even better, as upper-class Englishmen. Although such types have not been representative of the real elite for decades, the stereotype is perpetuated, with the aim of signaling to the masses that this imaginary elite is the proper object of their detestation, and not the elite we actually have.
There is also an element of resentment that stems from the traditional attitude that "show people" were a rather louche and raffish bunch, of dubious morality, and on the fringes of society. Hollywood's payback is shown in its disdain for the solid and respectable middle class, for suburban living, for small towns, for the vast flyover country between New York and Los Angeles. None of these are ever shown as honest or innocent. The good family man always turns out to have a secret vice; the prosperous suburb or picturesque village harbors an evil conspiracy; Southerners are always racists, and unspeakable crimes are hidden in the neatly maintained farmhouses and barns of the rural Midwest. The protagonist who rights these wrongs is inevitably from some background marginalized by "bourgeois morality," which in the end is always depicted as shallow and hypocritical.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Scotty G. Vito, @Twinkie
Similar thesis to Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer.” When the lower rump of the 98th percentile needs numbers in its war against the 99.99th percentile, cheap egalitarianism can be turned on or off like a faucet.
If you listen to “Song of the South” by the group Alabama, you could be forgiven for thinking the band are liberal Democrats, like 90% of rock musicians. In fact, they’re conservative Republicans, like 90% of white Alabamans.
Goodman appears for about 15 seconds at the end to deny that he imitated Milius for the performance. The meme about Sobchak’s original goes back to the 90s before the cult had grown around it. Even though the Coens’ older films like Barton Fink or Miller’s Crossing had tons of composite characters I don’t know if they even bother to address it. Used to be you’d hear about claims that this or that character in a Robert Altman film was based on whomever; and the various guys saying Kramer was really them; and so forth. It’s getting rare to see a straight-up dramatic incorporation like Charles Foster Kane, J.J. Hunsecker, Hyman Roth, or Ari Gold, for both creative and commercial reasons of course
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1807724,00.htmlReplies: @snorlax
Ooh, Justice is one of my favorite acts!
Minor point of order; I have to correct you on your Americanism of using “techno” to refer to all electronic music. Justice’s genre is house, which is basically the same thing as disco, but heavier on the bass and lighter on the lyrics. Techno is a more minor, somewhat impenetrable genre that’s nearly non-melodic and is best enjoyed if you’re a German ecstasy enthusiast in a darkened nightclub. This is as radio-friendly as techno gets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnTS35hovCE
(not sure why that’s in allcaps)
There is an element in Hollywood politics of Jewish envy of and antipathy toward the old WASP elite, as Steve has elsewhere pointed out in his discussion of country clubs. For the same reasons, even now, villains in the typical Hollywood production are so often portrayed either as rich WASPs speaking with Locust Valley lockjaw accents, or even better, as upper-class Englishmen. Although such types have not been representative of the real elite for decades, the stereotype is perpetuated, with the aim of signaling to the masses that this imaginary elite is the proper object of their detestation, and not the elite we actually have.
There is also an element of resentment that stems from the traditional attitude that "show people" were a rather louche and raffish bunch, of dubious morality, and on the fringes of society. Hollywood's payback is shown in its disdain for the solid and respectable middle class, for suburban living, for small towns, for the vast flyover country between New York and Los Angeles. None of these are ever shown as honest or innocent. The good family man always turns out to have a secret vice; the prosperous suburb or picturesque village harbors an evil conspiracy; Southerners are always racists, and unspeakable crimes are hidden in the neatly maintained farmhouses and barns of the rural Midwest. The protagonist who rights these wrongs is inevitably from some background marginalized by "bourgeois morality," which in the end is always depicted as shallow and hypocritical.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @Scotty G. Vito, @Twinkie
Well, there is the hatred of the rivals of the past (old WASP elite) and resentment toward and alarm over future competitors (Asians?).
I often see Hollywood villains who are rich fair-haired snobs (WASP!) or (surprisingly frequently, given their low population numbers) East Asian men (or alternatively, instead of villains, Asian men play pathetic, unmanly losers).
This is very irritating to me as a parent of Anglo-Teutonic and East Asian hybrid children.
My personal favorite is “Akeelah and the Bee,” in which the protagonist, a black girl, aided by a black intellectual and a harmless, friendly Hispanic boy triumphs over her nemesis of a white-Asian mixed boy who is a cheater, with an overbearing father on top (he is so despised, even another Asian rejects him). At the end, she is so noble that she is able to “convert” the bad guy into being a good guy. Hits all the right notes.
Racial propaganda at its highest form. Enjoy:
“Song of the South” is from the 80s and is a sincere portrayal of the feelings of most Southerners at the time. The ascendancy of Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich (as well as the New Left) is the story of the ascendancy of the late Silents and Boomers and their priorities.
So Hollywood liberals aren’t really egalitarian because they look for and promote talent and also, some of them have big egos? That’s a pretty weak argument, maybe you’re joking.
1916’s Intolerance was a massive box office flop. This was around the time when D.W. Griffith’s total dominance over US filmmaking started to be eclipsed by others, including a young Cecil B. DeMille, who was the first major filmmaker to put Hollywood on the map as the premiere center of moviemaking in the US.
There’s something to what you say. Bear in mind, though, that as a consequence of Reconstruction, Republicans were anathema in the Redemption-era South, so all political factions that had any chance of success existed within the Democratic party. There were “Bourbon Democrats,” whose support came from the old planter class and from moneyed interests, examples including Wade Hampton of South Carolina and LeRoy Percy of Mississippi. Opposed to them were populists such as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina and James K. Vardaman of Mississippi.
The paradox from the standpoint of modern political stereotypes revolves around racial issues. Often, the populists, who leaned left on many economic issues, were far more strident race-baiters than the Bourbons. Thus we find LeRoy Percy resisting the Ku Klux Klan, while Theodore Bilbo, Vardaman’s protege, was one of the most adamantly anti-black politicians of the twentieth century. Yet Bilbo was enthusiastic in support of the New Deal, and became the first Democrat in the U.S. Senate to endorse Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 for an unprecedented third term. Chester Morgan entitled his biography of Bilbo “Redneck Liberal,” which seems an apt characterization.
The ‘weird political behavior’ you note is in many cases a reflection of which faction prevailed in internal Southern Democratic politics. However, one common objective of all Southern Democrats, Bourbon or populist, was always bringing Federal money into the South. Once the national Democratic party abandoned its historical Southern affiliates on racial issues, the loss of support from white Southerners was inevitable.
The paradox from the standpoint of modern political stereotypes revolves around racial issues. Often, the populists, who leaned left on many economic issues, were far more strident race-baiters than the Bourbons. Thus we find LeRoy Percy resisting the Ku Klux Klan, while Theodore Bilbo, Vardaman's protege, was one of the most adamantly anti-black politicians of the twentieth century. Yet Bilbo was enthusiastic in support of the New Deal, and became the first Democrat in the U.S. Senate to endorse Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 for an unprecedented third term. Chester Morgan entitled his biography of Bilbo "Redneck Liberal," which seems an apt characterization.
The 'weird political behavior' you note is in many cases a reflection of which faction prevailed in internal Southern Democratic politics. However, one common objective of all Southern Democrats, Bourbon or populist, was always bringing Federal money into the South. Once the national Democratic party abandoned its historical Southern affiliates on racial issues, the loss of support from white Southerners was inevitable.Replies: @Yojimbo/Zatoichi
This post was quite informative. One question would be, where would two of the South’s mid 20th century’s most famous politicians (from a national perspective) lie on the Bourbon/Populist scale: Huey Long, and George Wallace? I would assume that Huey Long was a populist (although his racial attitudes aren’t as well known in the history books) and George Wallace would be a populist as well? Or would Wallace be considered to be in the Bourbon camp?
I’d put Long definitely in the populist camp. His assassin, Dr. Carl Weiss, was the son-in-law of Judge Benjamin Pavy, a Bourbon Democrat and political enemy of Long. Long had introduced a bill into the Louisiana legislature that gerrymandered Pavy out of office.
Wallace, too, belongs to the populists, though by his time the Bourbon/populist rivalry was diminishing in importance as the preponderant issue in Southern politics became racial. It should be understood that both Bourbon and populist Southern Democrats agreed on the desirability of Jim Crow laws; however, the Bourbons principally viewed blacks as an agricultural labor force that was useful as long as it was kept docile, while the populists viewed blacks as an abhorrent threat to their constituency.
They were both a threat economically, as offering potential competition to unskilled white laborers, and a threat socially, since in many cases the only advantage poor whites had over blacks was that they were white. Populists like Theodore Bilbo, for example, wanted government benefits for poor whites, such as expanded public education, but did not want the limited funds available for the purpose to be reduced by allocating some of them to blacks. The antipathy of poor Southern whites towards blacks was akin to that of the populations in many states of the antebellum North, which not only forbade slavery in their constitutions, but also had “whites only” constitutional or statutory provisions.
If you want an example of a Bourbon Democrat whose career continued into the post-WWII/desegregation era, Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (D-VA), fits the bill.