Frankly, the kerfuffle regarding Roy Moore’s alleged dalliances with just barely legal teenage girls four decades ago smacks to this observer as a put-up job by out of-state media and out-of-state politicians of both parties who apparently regard his candidacy for national office as an affront to the Ruling Class. Suspect scribbles in an old school annual and Gloria Allred in full-throated accusatory mode are, as in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan’s character Pooh-Bah, “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
harvey weinstein
Preference Cascade
(Sorry for the lack of posting – I am trying to finalize A Fifth of Luna City, and Lone Star Glory — the follow-up to Lone Star Sons, and the days are just all too short. Herewith a rant about certain recent developments in pop culture for your weekend edification.)
Just to make it clear, I do not think that the NFL, or the So-Cal based movie-TV-media production industry usually described by the simple designation of ‘Hollywood’ are going to wither up and disappear in a puff of smoke and a puddle of goo like the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. No, likely the first will be diminished to relative insignificance over the insistence of many players to ‘take a knee’ during the national anthem, after a long train of other actions which increasingly put the well-reimbursed celebrity athletes of the NFL at loggerheads with the audiences in Flyoverlandia who watched games from the stand, or on TV, purchased season tickets, merchandise and premium cable service with the big daddy sports channel, ESPN.
Hollywood Babylon 2.1
Accustomed as I am to contemplating matters more serious than the doings of the denizens of Hollywood, I can’t keep away from the current spectacle regarding the casting out of Harvey “Jabba the Hutt” Weinstein from all polite (hah!) Hollywood and Democrat political society, where once he strode like an unstoppable behemoth. (How seriously can you take a guy who cannot either grow a decent and serious beard, or learn to use a razor. Really.) It’s like one of those horrific multi-vehicle pile-ups on the internet super-highway, which leave vehicles teetering, smoking and crunched together in improbable formations and all us normals out in Flyoverlandia left thinking thoughts along the lines of “what brought all that on?” and “he did what … in a potted plant?” or meditating upon the ghastly nature of the mass entertainment business, especially when it climbs into the sack with politicians, and begins the calculated roughing up of the establishment news media.
Hollywood and Flyover America
I must have been in college (or possibly even just high school), when I read a thoughtful essay in TV Guide, of all places, to the effect that people all over the world who had never met an American, or been to the United States, almost always formed their impressions of us based on what they saw in the movies, or in television shows. As one of our AFRTS public service announcement tag-lines had it foreigners don’t know America, they just know Americans and the Americans which the overseas movie and television audience saw was usually not a very favorable one. This essay must have been put out in the early 1970s, so I imagine the general picture is even less favorable now. Just think of current popular TV shows with an American setting and consider how America would look to you if that was all you saw, and all you knew was Breaking Bad, a dozen cop shows set in big cities, and half a dozen sit-coms where the characters spend most of their time in suspiciously well-decorated living rooms.