[O]ur culture is the most important front. And the three most important pillars of that culture are Hollywood and pop culture, along with education and the media. Those three are absolutely controlled by the left.
We must recapture or replace the “commanding heights” of the culture.
It is long overdue. The Right-O-Sphere is but a first step.
Otherwise, merely political gains will be built on sand.
Be happy.
Fear God and dread nought.
It can be done.
UPDATE:
Also this:
Family is what motivated Andrew. I know someone must have known him without Susie, but not I. It has always seemed to me like they have been together forever. He dedicated his most recent book to his kids, writing: “Too many people fought to create this country” for us “to squander it in a generation. . . . I cannot stand on the sidelines as you and your generation are being handed the tab.”
From K-Lo at the Corner. RTWT.
In a small way, I’m doing my best with my books. Along about 2004, I started to have this absolute conviction that as Americans, we needed to reclaim our history, our memories of the past, and I began to think that by writing stories abouts that past would help. I am afraid that most people seem to learn history through the medium of popular culture.
I began to believe that if I could make a ripping good yarn out of something like my first book, To Truckee’s Trail, I could remind people that most of our metaphorical ancestor-Americans were good, well-meaning and decent people in challenging times. Perhaps I could make a start at claiming back some ground for us. We have to have some kind of honor to believe in, we have to know what the people who founded and built America stood for, what they valued, why they acted as they did. To not know our history is to live in a kind of cultural sensory-deprivation tank. And it’s even worse to believe that our metaphorical American ancestors were nothing but a bunch of unrelieved no-goodnicks. To believe that is a kind of cultural suicide.
So that is the ground that I am fighting for – our cultural memory.
I did something like that with my history of medicine. We now have a world where the American College of Physicians
has revised the code of ethics to include something called “Parsimonious Care.” That means a quality of care that you wouldn’t want for your family or yourself but it will save money and fit well with Obamacare. The book is still selling well on Amazon 8 years after I self published it. No university press was interested. It couldn’t be less PC and I have frankly been surprised by the people who agreed with me. As an example of my Breitbart-like opinions, I think Freud was a scam on the order of global warming. Maybe I should write another book. I actually have one in manuscript.
I am very sorry for his family. RIP.
– Madhu
Breitbart’s death came as a shock – not because I’d followed him closely, not only because he was only 43, not only because it was clearly so sudden. It came as a shock because he seemed, well, life in motion. Roger Simon’s headline – “A Whirlwind Dies” – that was the feeling. I’d delighted in how he’d played the media in the Acorn scandals, delighted in the energy and apparent humor he took to the ramparts, noticed the way he was maligned and how he triumphed through transparency – and how others feared that clarity. But he seemed to be having fun. And, well, I’d taken him for granted. How often I take for granted the people and insights of those who delight me. And, then, pouf, he was gone.
But the strength of his argument lies in the response – “we are all Breitbarts now.” Sgt Mom’s and Michael Kennedy’s response was to describe action. Theirs was positive action. That is what Breitbart advocated. That is what the Tea Party advocates. Here is Breitbart’s epiphany in Righteous Indignation:
But along with these realizations came another realization. I began to see the fundamental flaw in the left’s scorched-earth tactics – they can only tear down, not build up. And it hit me that the tearing down of The Other wasn’t enough. Every time I did a Fox News hit where I attacked Michael Moore, no matter how valid the attack, no matter how much I had raised my fledgling Q rating, I felt emasculated and cheapened because I was only tearing down, not building. I felt the inherent lack that resides in the right, which was so removed from the cultural process because it had self-removed, abdicated its responsibility to be a steward of the culture, handed over the entire means of representing the United States abroad and teaching Americans about America at home to the hard left.
The Tea Party is abuilding and so are the other projects he touched. It isn’t what we don’t like (and there is plenty of that in the present administration), it is what we do like that will define us, and be an appropriate legacy to a man who did die young.