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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Lileks: brave artists bravely confront the stifling conformity of Amerikkka |
| 2006-08-21 |
| Today's "Bleat:" Via Cartoon Brew, a summary of an off-Broadway play performed by the SpankinYanks: A searing look into friendship, national identity and the politics of paranoia, the Happiest Place on Earth will never be the same. It’s now playing at a Scottish festival. Book your flight soon; no telling how long it’ll last before the animatronic Abe Lincoln Brigade telepathically controlled by Walt’s frozen head hunts down the actors and brings them to justice. Ice-Walt’s touchy about these things. I’m not going to defend McCarthy, because he was a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades. To say that he was sorta right, in the sense that there were Commies about, is like saying that J. Robert Oppenheimer had a salutory effect on Japanese urban renewal. I’m not interested in those debates right now. I’d just like to point out that it’s a little late in the game to trot out a play about the mean old witch-hunts. The bravery of the scrappy idealists! The piggish philistinism of the anti-commie brutes! The smothering wet quilt of Conformity that held America motionless until it was thrown off by the undulating hips of Elvis! (Did you know they didn’t show him below the waist on TV, at first! True! It was horrible, the Fifties; no one had sex without weeping in shame afterwards. Sometimes during.) It's just interesting how Westerners think that that Red Scare was a historical event of such towering proportions it trumps the tales of the Soviet Union in the same period. US version: communist sympathizers frozen out of screenwriting jobs, justly or unjustly. USSR version: actual communists killed in ghastly numbers by a parody of a legal system underwritten by brute force and an industrialized penal system built on slave labor. Why is the latter ignored, and the former celebrated? Because a herd of frozen zeks dying in the snows of Wherdifugistan doesn’t really connect, you know? Whereas six guys sitting around the Carnegie Deli bitching about cowardly sponsors, that strikes a chord. . . . Some day someone may pen a biting satirical look at a government so nervous about sex and the irresistible lies of Mad Ave they banned Barbie, Western Pop music and American ads themselves. If such a play’s performed, it won’t be in by expats in Scotland; it’ll run in Tehran after the Mullahs fall. Among the wise and brave in the west, the Red Scare and the Eisenhower Golfocracy will remain the go-to era for the modern Dark Ages, a time when talented, witty people couldn’t glibly support a collectivist blood-soaked totalitarian system without fear their boss might get the wrong idea. You can see why the “Mouse is Dead” premise, however historically flawed, was catnip for the playwrights. Disney = Mickey, and everyone loved Mickey Mouse. He was cheerful, brave, industrious, ingenious, faithful, fair, scrappy and true. He was everything the grownups said we should be. God how we hate him. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #7 neotony means retention of juvenile characteristics How cool is that! Not only am I monotonous, I'm neotonous, too! It's all about me, donchano!? |
| Posted by: Almost Anonymous5839 2006-08-21 16:31 |
| #6 So they are flogging the skeletal dead horse of McCarthyism, one more time? Well, everyone needs a hobby, I suppose. I have always suspected that McCarthy and the whole HUAC thing has been vastly overblown, by the so-called victims of it, in order to make their own "heroism" in defying it look even more impressive. My parents were young adults, and in college in the early 1950ies, and from what they recall, just about every ordinary person with a lick of common sense knew that he was, in Mr. Lilek's words " a brute and boor and a butter-eating drunk who set back the anti-Communist cause four decades", besides being a glory-hunting and unscrupulous politician looking for the limelight. He only frightened the guilty who had something to hide, everyone else just made some popcorn and sat back to watch the show. I think speed with which McCarthyism collapsed like an over-inflated balloon pricked by a pin after the the Army-McCarthy hearings would argue for that reading. But everyone who ran scared of him has ever since had to build him up into this horrible, dreadful omigawd-we're-all-gonna-die or-get-sacked-from-our-cushy-jobs-and-have-to move-to-France-or-something-plague-upon-the earth-and-weren't-we-brave-when-we-stood-alone, etc, etc, etc. |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2006-08-21 13:14 |
| #5 I, for one, am proud they are bravely taking on the stultifying conformity of a time fifty years ago, when I'll bet none of the writers were yet born, and which they only know through history books and yellowed newspaper clippings. (Maybe from some old coot's ramblings, too.) It's even more courageous than when George Clooney did the same in that movie....whatever it was called....last year. The cojones it takes to stage this piece of Art is a searing wakeup call that is five decades overdue. Bravo! /sarcasm off |
| Posted by: Swamp Blondie 2006-08-21 12:44 |
| #4 I thought the neotonys were former leftists who became fans of Tony Danza. (ducks) |
| Posted by: Mike 2006-08-21 10:40 |
| #3 philb, neoteny. Neotony would be when you stretch and feel like brand new. ;-) |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2006-08-21 10:17 |
| #2 Psychogical (and emotional) neotony. Yep, that sums up the Left. And BTW it's a big insight. Neotony is (one of)evolution's way of experimenting with new ways of doing things - 99% of which fail. The point being, experimentation is good, as long as it doesn't take down what we have and will achieve. The Left should realize that they are the experiment (neotony means retention of juvenile characteristics) and like all experiments will be flushed away, when we understand the result. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-08-21 09:34 |
| #1 Best piece yet by a guy who has written a lot of great ones. The Santa Claus reference is perfect - just this weekend I had to deal with a lefty boor who went off on - of all things - the Santa Claus myth as some giant evil confronting America. Lileks nails the psychological neoteny aspect of the left dead on. For the bulk of the postmodern left it's about avenging that time daddy didn't allow the use of the car, or about how the captain of the football team got the pretty girl. (See Ted Rall.) Writ large, it's about how "unfair" it is that "someone" won't fund every human on the planet to just endlessly pursue pleasure, and remove all of the unpleasantries of the human condition that make us feel sad. This behavior is probably inherent in all 14 year olds, but grownups move beyond it. There are better ways to make yourself and the world better than emotional snide destructive rebellion. Throughout history, decent societies recognized that adolescence was the most malignant and destructive phase of human development, and sought to minimize the length of time their members spent in the adolescent mindset. Rites of passage were always designed to induce young people to shuck off objectionable adolescent lifestyle and approaches and become young adults, with different strictures for behavior, and different expectations of attitude. Saner individuals have always recognized that this is for the good of the individual AND the tribe. To be a leftist and a postmodernist, you MUST be a perpetual adolescent. No other stage of the human mind could tolerate the meme set. It's a sign of the fact that sicker elements of our society prevail in the areas that steer culture when we celebrate adolescent mindsets rather than deride them. |
| Posted by: no mo uro 2006-08-21 08:04 |