NOTE: I don’t normally use language like “liberal” and “conservative” because I think there are some substantial problems with it, which I will explain briefly later. But for the moment, let’s just pretend that I have no beef with the terms as I begin the tongue-in-cheek discussion below.
Everybody knows that Hollywood is a bastion for Liberals. If you search [“Liberal Hollywood”] in quotation marks at Google, you get 353,000 returns. (OK, now that I’ve posted this article, it’ll be 353,001, but let’s not get distracted.) And if you remove the quotation marks, you get 47,200,000 returns! So, like I said, everybody knows that Hollywood is liberal. (It makes me cringe to write sentences like that, but remember that this is a tongue-in-cheek article!)
We can prove this assertion (and many do!) by noting how many movies and TV shows Hollywood produces that tick off Conservatives. Liberal Hollywood, they will assure us, attacks family values, religion (Christianity, to be specific), capitalism, and patriotism. These evil folks will stop at nothing until our entire country is destroyed! (Did I capture the sentiment well?)
Now hold your finger there while I make one more riveting point, and then I’ll get back to the main discussion.
Everybody knows that Conservatives are the ones who understand how crucial it is for our country to have a strong defense and a strong police force to protect us from evil people across the world and within our own borders. The Liberals don’t understand this, of course, and we can see that they’re the ones who are always pushing to cut defense spending and whining about the “police state”, as if they have something to hide. (How am I doing? Did I express this well?)
(Tongue-in-cheek is turned off from here forward.)
So, given all these facts, how is it that Liberal Hollywood continues to crank out show after show bolstering war and police? Isn’t this against their true paradigms? Indeed, why push for cuts in military spending and then produce a new season of military shows and a new rash of military movies? Why would the Liberals push for yet more legislation to take away guns from the citizens, and then produce a veritable cornucopia of shows on History and Discovery about guns and our American love affair with them? Something doesn’t add up here.
Could it be that there’s a problem with the Left/Right paradigm? Could it be that things are not truly as they seem?
Well, of course that’s the case! Just don’t tell the Americans!
When I watched the hit series “24”, I witnessed a multitude of arguments for torture and warrantless searches, and so forth. When I watch NCIS, I get loads of the wink-wink, nod-nod that says it’s quite acceptable for government to break those archaic rules about search warrants and the right to privacy and such because, hey, it’s all for a good purpose.
It seems to me that perhaps the overall message that “Liberal Hollywood” is presenting here might be best summed up by the defiant rant of A Few Good Men‘s Col. Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson). While being questioned in a Court Martial as to whether he exceeded the powers of his office, Jessup defended his actions thus:
And perhaps the message we’re supposed to take away is that Col. Jessup was a victim of a “technicality”. Indeed, a great many people seem to enjoy believing that we actually do need him “on that wall”, without ever even learning what that “wall” is all about.
And so it goes even with a great many of our military and law enforcement personnel. They vow to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they don’t even read the document. And when called to action, far too many default to “following orders” rather than to the oath they took. Meanwhile, it appears that we citizens aren’t supposed to question these things, either. It is “unpatriotic” and “un-American”. We are supposed to let the ship of state sail on unquestioned. We are even told to “love it or leave it”, the consummate, cultic “thought-stopper” that that is!
We learn a lot from the screen. ….More than we believing we are learning. We learn to be lawless, irrational, inconsistent, biased, and hypocritical. And we learn to hate. If the show disagrees with us, we are programed to hate “those damnable Hollywood Liberals”, or either to wonder, “How did this stupid Conservative garbage ever get on the air”.
Did you ever stop to wonder, though, just how beneficial it might be to an evil wizard behind the curtain if all the citizens were busy hating and accusing one another?
What dupes, we.
