Yes, somebody actually painted this. And no, I don’t think it’s satire. You have to sort of love the rooster, though. He’s as free as a bird now.
The question is: where’s Waldo?
You see this is why conservatives are failing when it comes to waging the culture war in the arts, and why they at once turn to political means rather than cultural means to wage that war. It’s also why we see so many conservatives devolve into self-victimization.
Conservatives have a hard time making conservative films or television shows – though occasionally you’ll find a show like 24 which espouses some conservative ideas about war and national security. I think the success of 24 was in weaving some conservative ideals into a show that focuses mostly on the action.
You rarely hear conservative music outside of Nashville. Country is one of the few successes at transposing conservative culture war politics into pop culture.
We do see plenty of sexism and other illiberal views in our mainstream pop culture, of course. See Alyssa Rosenberg’s deconstruction of the Superbowl ads for one example.
But for some reason, conservative attempts at pop culture simply don’t pan out for the most part. So we get complaints about liberal media or liberal Hollywood or whatever. But it’s not liberal Hollywood’s fault that conservatives can’t do art. (Nor is it entirely obvious that Hollywood is liberal, but that’s another story for another time.)
And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.
Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.
And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.
AliceBlue
The “artist’s” name is Jon McNaughton, and there’s an article on Salon about him.
joeyess
What’s with the fucking rooster?
Mike E
@joeyess: Chicks, man.
joeyess
@Mike E: ha ha ha ha…..
E.D. Kain
@joeyess: a symbol of middle America maybe. Or of the dawn of a new day. Maybe I’m overthinking this.
pseudonymous in nc
“Wingnut Kinkade, Painter of Shite”?
And Roy Edroso has been one of the best chroniclers of the conservative movement’s Zhdanovism, where all culture has to be subject to a kind of heavy vetting, after which it is either claimed for the cause or rejected out of hand.
joeyess
Why is Dick Cheney in chains front and center? And why is not in chains in real life?
schrodinger's cat
EDK @top
Why this sudden love for Balloon Juice, what have we done to deserve thy attention.
Bill ORLY
“Yeah, they come to snuff the rooster!”
BGinCHI
That’s the best painting of Sammy Davis Jr. I’ve ever seen.
Bobby
Countdown to the batshit idiot fool Samara Morgan invading and ruining yet another thread. Samara, who is clinically retarded and illiterate, should have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution a long time ago. She should not be indulged and should be ignored, as all incompetents are.
Yutsano
@joeyess: The rooster is the best part of the painting. The rest is pure dreck. This guy has been pumping this shit out ever since THAT ONE took office. Possibly sooner, but I think the Dubya hagiographies would make me ill.
Rawk Chawk
Oh my god, yes. The individual who makes these freak show pictures is a real piece of work. You have to see the one where Jesus is writing the constitution or something, and Hitler is in the crowd…amazing stuff.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@AliceBlue:
he missed his true calling on doing trashy romance novel covers.
You got to love how conservative art is such and utter caricature of humanity.
Bruce S
“Country is one of the few successes, in fact, in transposing conservative culture war politics into pop culture.”
Except most of the best country singers – the ones who aren’t pre-fab pop or cheesy braggadocio – aren’t conservatives in the contemporary GOPer sense. That’s why there’s an “alt-country” explosion that’s inclusive of the best artists who are working with the traditional country genres. Most of these don’t come across as right-wing. Generally, quite the opposite. And even the older generation – Cash, Haggard, Kristofferson, Willie had first-tier artists who either never were with or broke radically with the current iteration of “conservatism.”
One could as easily argue that there’s a strain of rap that exemplifies the most reactionary values as one can make the argument that “country” is across-the-board conservative in the GOPer nutcase sense. Of course, the demographics of Clear Channel pop-country are undoubtedly aligned with the GOP base. But country music as such is extremely diverse and has the same political schisms as the country itself.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
We’ve talked about this in other contexts, but I believe it all boils down to empathy. Today’s Conservative leaders lack any ability to feel what the audience would feel in observing their work, whether it be music, art, movies, or whatever. So there movie doens’t come out as a story to be told to others, but instead a document on their bad images in their mind.
It’s similar to trying to draw and not realizing that you are not drawing a pipe, you are drawing lines on a page that will be interpreted by the brain as a picture of a pipe. Failing to realize this is why most people end up with something completely out of proportion, at the wrong angle, etc.
Malaclypse
You need to go to McNaughton’s website, where you will find that all his pictures have embedded hypertext when you scroll over them.
It is also very very Mormon. Not as iconic within LDS as Friberg, but still very Mormon.
Moik
I’m fairly sure that’s Tim Heideker with the machete in front.
Mike
@joeyess: you know how it is with the wingnuts – obsessed with cock’s.
pseudonymous in nc
I imagine there’s some kind of symbolism or artistic allusion, but dumping a cockerel in a public gathering feels pretty French to me.
Rabble Arouser
What more could you expect? The artist cites W. Cleon Skousen’s “5000-Year Leap” as an inspiration. ‘Nuff said!
Southern Beale
It’s simple. The reason conservatives can’t do pop culture very well is because their ideology is one of the establishment and pop culture is rebellion against the establishment.
This is also why they are always co-opting the pop culture symbols and language of the rebellious left. Because they are culturally irrelevant, they are unable to come up with their own ideas that resonate.
You know, “I want my country back” was a sign we waved at anti-Bush rallies. More to the point: the modern Tea Party was dreamed up 20 years ago by Tim Robbins. Think I’m lying? Rent a copy of Bob Roberts and stand amazed.
Paul in KY
@joeyess: Stealth Alice in Chains fan I guess.
They came to snuff the rooster & that kid freed him! Layne would be happy.
MBunge
You can make propaganda that passes for art or entertainment (Leni Riefenstahl, Ayn Rand). The key to doing it, though, is to eliminate partisanship from the effort as much as possible and focus on themes and ideas. Today’s conservatives are too consumed with attacking their enemies to elevate their work beyond such crap.
Mike
Villago Delenda Est
The rooster is France, perhaps?
West of the Cascades
McNaughton is [in]famous for his painting “One Nation Under God” which has Jesus presenting the Constitution with a whole host of people around — I hate to give this scumbag page clicks, but for an entertaining waste of time you can actually mouse over the image and see the wingnuttiest descriptions of the characters in a painting you’d ever have imagined: http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353 — I especially like the Supreme Court justice hiding his face in shame in that one.
The Civil War soldier hiding his face in “shame” in that painting tells you all you need to know about this foulminded “artist.”
matryoshka
Is this the same artist who painted the dogs playing cards?
The Moar You Know
This is Jon McNaughton, and this is probably the least offensive work of his I’ve seen.
The one of Obama being hauled out of the White House by soldiers, just before the soldiers are going to execute him, should be worthy of a visit from the Secret Service.
joeyess
@Paul in KY: Yaaawwwww…I snuff the rooster…….
AnotherBruce
You know, the conservatives at least not too long ago had political ideas. You can argue with whether or not charter schools or vouchers, for example were good ideas, but they were ideas, alternatives to the prevailing ideas.
But those ideas wore out sometime during the Bush administration, and now it’s all reaction. Hell, “Obamacare” as they like to call it was basically what conservatives proposed as an alternative to “Hillarycare” in the 90’s. Now it’s morphed in their minds into the worst soshalism ever, as if the policy came straight from Lenin himself.
E.D. Kain
@schrodinger’s cat: since I’m basically just doing tech stuff at Forbes I wanted to expand my politics writing again.
KG
As a general rule, if you are writing something with an overt political message, it is going to suck. It’s just the natural order of things. There are occasionally decent movies/shows with “conservative” themes that appear, but they are never overtly “conservative.” Juno, I think is a good example. Basically a “pro-life” movie (if she’d decided to not have the kid, there really wouldn’t have been a story), but it wasn’t preachy. It was a story about people dealing with real issues. When you write with a political message, it becomes preachy – that’s just the way it is.
And I’ll also say, as a fiction writer, my hope is generally that the reader enjoy what I wrote. If they learn something or have confirmation bias because of what I wrote, I don’t care that much. Because,
somemost times, it just shouldn’t be about politics.West of the Cascades
explanation of the rooster at http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=419# + mouseover … it’s basically “WOLVERINES!” for wingnuts …
E.D. Kain
@Bruce S: I love alt-country, past and present, so I totally agree.
Guster
I’m a working novelist, and I think you’re wrong about the right failing in the culture war for the arts–at least about novels–for two reasons. First, there is a hard core of thriller writers who are explicitly wingnut. Joel Rosenwhatever and Vince Flynn and … well, shitloads of them. Even Koontz’s Odd Thomas books has a whackadoo right-wing message.
And second, even more important, I think that many writers of commercial fiction (like myself) who are left-wing still adhere to right-wing narratives. Oh, we put in some cultural diversity and make the hardass SWAT leader gay, but in the end the story is conservative. You hunt down the baddie and shoot him. Or you find Mr. Right and marry him. Or you solve the mystery and set society back to how it was before the disruption of the crimes. Even ostensibly left-wing novels (in commercial genres) are pretty right-wing. The baddie is maybe a Monsanto lookalike, but the good guy is a crusading FBI agent or a soccer mom who wins a legal battle or whatever.
Those conservative narratives and tropes completely rule genre fiction, because they’re easy and satisfying. They don’t demand much thought. They don’t challenge our beliefs. Well, for all the same reasons that they do well in politics …
trollhattan
Wow, there’s a lot of super-subliminal messaging buried in there. Can’t wait for Levenson’s take.
[Painter’s checklist: chains of oppression, check; a great array of white folks in said chains, check; minimum of one non-white joining oppressed white enchained folks, check; smiling, shifty President-Oppressor Negro, check; mammon floatin’ down from ceiling, check; PN’s applauding furrin’ mammon suppliers, check; red, white and blue patriotic bunting, check; chicken, wha?]
Enhanced Voting Techniques
ROFL
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/page/view_collection/Most%20Popular?artpiece=379
A paint of Obama ignoring the comon man while GW Bush looks on sadly.
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/page/view_collection/Most%20Popular?artpiece=319
Viking, Spartans and Samurai bow down and worship Christ
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/page/view_collection/Most%20Popular?artpiece=419
Were North Korea, Putin and Iran are puppet masters of Barrack Obama
Beyond parody
The Moar You Know
@joeyess: Dick Cheney is a fo’ real hero/martyr to the 27 percenters, more so than W, who failed them.
Brian
To me this painting looks an awful lot like SOCIALIST REALISM.
Scott Alloway
I thought it was done in the Soviet Realism style, updated to reflect current Republicanism. You know, they will unchain the workers and all.
Loneoak
Dude has a solid grasp on how to do the invisible universality of whiteness:
Translation from the wingnut: “This painting is about a black man ruining the Constitution and oppressing white men. Therefore it can’t actually be about race.”
Rey
Conservative art isn’t so much art, as it’s propaganda. It intent isn’t to persuade people to change their beliefs, but to reinforce the tribe members’ sense of inherent righteous superiority. As I read somewhere on the internet the other day, most “conservative” humor boils down to “Liberals’ cars go beep beep but conservatives cars go BEEP BEEP BEEP!” followed by hoots and haws.
Anya
@Bruce S: Didn’t Wyatt Cenac challenge Jon Steward to tell the difference between rappers and republicans in his “Rappers or Republicans” game. IIRC, he argued that they’re basically the same: they both love money, hate women, and every word that comes out of their mouth is “nigger.”
joeyess
This guy wants $765.00 for this kitschy shit?
I’m surprised he hasn’t already inked a deal with the Walton family and mass produced this bullshit for public consumption.
Villago Delenda Est
@Scott Alloway:
Yeah, it does smack of “Socialist Realism”, the only public art that Stalin approved of.
I might add, Hitler was into “Realism” as well…abstract art was considered “degenerate” by the Nazis.
Mouse Tolliver
@joeyess: The rooster represents our health care system. The good ole days when people paid the doctor with chickens.
Ben Cisco
Only thing missing is Fabio in profile with the wind breezing through his hair…while holding an M-16.
dr. bloor
Was that done on velvet?
joeyess
This guy is a Xtian Nationalist of the highest order.
Not to go Godwining, but I believe he’s the painter that Hitler would turn to for propaganda portraits.
Villago Delenda Est
Ack, I screwed up and used that word with the boner string in it! Someone get me out of moderation limbo, please!
Xjmueller
@Southern Beale:
So true. Of course, some things never change.
joeyess
@Mouse Tolliver: Well, that makes about as much sense as anything. It makes more sense than putting a rooster in the piece, anyway.
Villago Delenda Est
Also, this style of art is the kind loved by Mao and his gang and Kim Il-Sung and his gang.
More “Socia1ist Realism” for you. Pure propaganda for the masses.
This guy probably has no fucking clue whose company he’s keeping.
rlrr
See also An American Carol and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged:_Part_I…
Malaclypse
I’m partial to Dear Emma – “Dear Emma, God told me to tell you that I need to start sleeping with more fourteen-year-old girls, and you need to be cool with that.”
PrairieMan
#34. Trollhattan: I am currently recovering from abdominal surgery, so please be careful, the stitches are tender.
Yes, I know I shouldn’t be reading B-J in this state, but gawd it’s boring otherwise!
Sour Kraut
The Moar You Know,
I’m sure they’ve made house calls for less.
This is just more empirical evidence for my theory that the Birchers have become just like the Communists they despised: the same obsessions with loyalty and ideological purity, the same paranoia about domestic enemies rotting their glorious paradise from within. And like socialism, Conservatism cannot fail, it can only *be* failed by not applying it in its true form.
Any art that doesn’t praise, or advance the goals of, the Party in explicit terms is inherently suspect and may have a secret, enemy agenda or worse. Stalin would be proud.
Paul in KY
@joeyess: RIP Layne.
Someguy
Holy shit, I thought that was a press pool photo from CPAC. Or at least I did until I noticed the black people in it.
And no corpulent, sweaty Eric Erikson.
Mike G
Conservatives are like the Soviets in their leaden, mediocre art where everything must Serve The Cause and be either worshipful or condemnatory.
It’s rare to see good art from people deaf to irony, hateful of ambiguity and consumed with an ideology of force and sledgehammer-subtlety.
Chris
Haven’t read the comments yet, but two things:
And yet, conservatives were arguably the bad guys in three seasons – a Halliburton like oil cartel trying to start a war in the Middle East in Season 2, a Republican president carrying out and covering up a conspiracy in Season 5, a Blackwater like military-industrial cabal turning on the U.S. in Season 7. Not that the show was liberal, there was just no way to come up with a credible liberal counterpart to any of these things.
Hollywood’s not liberal. It’s a business like any other, trying to satisfy its customers. Trouble is, its customer base is global, and the vast majority of it isn’t interested in seeing American Movement Conservative ideology on display when it goes to the theaters. By the Laws of the Market, Rest Of The World > Half Of The United States. That’s all there is to it.
Not the first time the laws of the market do something conservatives don’t like, and they react by screaming bloody murder and Liberal Conspiracy.
E.D. Kain
@Guster:
This is a good point – especially true, I think, when it comes to cop dramas and national security shows. But I suspect the left will continue to adapt.
Punchy
Horrible, horrible example. Alyssa would see sexism in a convent. Christ what a ridiculous premise for most of those videos. I want 5 minutes of my life back. And Alyssa needs to get laid. Fast.
The Moar You Know
@Malaclypse: Very creepy. He annotates every other painting on his site…save for that one. He’ll “email it to you”. Presumably after making sure your name isn’t Chris Hansen.
E.D. Kain
@Chris: yes, those pesky markets. I very much agree. Which is exactly why they’ve taken the political route. Cultural protectionism to thwart cultural supply and demand.
Culture of Truth
In art a rooster is symbol of notification of good news (gospel), or warning – since the rooster crows to announce the coming dawn. Also fidelity, since roosters faithfully crow every morning. Also sometimes Saint Peter, since he denied Jesus three times before the rooster crowed.
HG Hay
The best thing McNaughton ever did was inspire this beauty:
http://acavill.com/2009/10/09/one-nation-under-cthulhu/
Scott
Here’s my fave parody of McNaughton’s style of painting. If you’re going to dedicate your art to worshiping evil, why not go all the way…?
Sly
I love the whole Black Man Makes Slaves of White People motif. It has that old timey anti-Lincoln vibe, circa 1860.
But as with Jesus the Founding Father, this painting needs the Cthulu treatment post-haste.
Someguy
Hey that Friberg dude is amazing. That’s the gayest shit this side of Tom of Finland.
Scott
Crud, HG Hay beat me to it.
canuckistani
I think the rooster represents the artist’s forcibly repressed love of cocks.
pragmatism
@joeyess: it wanted to be in the chickens (or roosters) for checkups program. it will gladly be part of a doctor’s (who does not perform abortions) dinner to save a winger voter.
Loneoak
@Punchy:
If you think that feminists in general or certain feminists in particular are over-sensitive about what they understand to be a pervasive and violent culture of patriarchy, the best way to criticize that will not include suggesting that all they need to be satisfied is some dick.
KG
@Guster: why are any of those story arches necessarily right-wing? Are liberals uninterested in love or justice or the their more base counter parts of lust and revenge?
ETA: I read Flynn’s first four or five books, but it got boring and tedious. Mitch Rapp never bothered to evolve, he was the same fucking person from his first appearance to the last one I started reading and didn’t finish. It’s either a feature of serial novels or laziness. I mean, fuck, even Darth Vader changed over the original trilogy (and over the second trilogy)
becca
My overall critique is that the addition of bodice-ripping would have added some needed pizzazz.
West of the Cascades
@Scott: both of you FTW
Legalize
There’s cash money all over the ground. What’s the fucking problem?
Woodrowfan
FWIW, the crowing rooster was also the symbol of the Democratic Party for many, many years.
Davy Goliath
There’s not much “conservative” fiction, because who wants to root for the boot that’s stomping on a poor woman’s face? Who wants to cheer when Mr. Potter forecloses on a family and throws the kids out on the street? Who wants to laugh along with the sheriff’s racist jokes as he pummels an African-American with a billy club? Who would pump his fist when the strikers get shot?
(Ok, I guess Rush Limbaugh would, but who else?)
beltane
Ah look at the teabagger on the ground in the forefront. In chains and he still can’t help crawling on the ground for the sake of a dollar.
Look at the Arab guy standing behind Obama. That is a nice touch, isn’t it.
taylormattd
It’s because there is no such thing as conservative ideology, so any attempt to portray it on television or in a painting ends up being moronic.
Just look at this painting, it is about how the evil Obama caused all of our problems. That’s all conservatism is: anti-Democratic party. Whatever a democrat proposes or likes, we hate and do the opposite.
Villago Delenda Est
@West of the Cascades:
The notion that the Constitution is a “gift from God” is what causes high pitched whirring sounds to be heard near the graves for the Founding Fathers.
Malaclypse
@Someguy: The best (i.e. gayest) Friberg is The Stripling Warriors. The original, in proof that God loves Irony, is in the LDS Conference Center.
Southern Beale
Well this also explains why Victoria Jackson is incredibly un-funny.
JWL
It’s certainly a well dressed crowd– except for the two hippie chicks.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@joeyess:
It’s from Apocalyptic Christianity/Eschatology, “The Owl and the Rooster”. The Owl and the Rooster both believe that there will be an “End”, but the Owl thinks that the End is far away (or at least at an unknown time), so he just keeps quiet and watches. The Rooster thinks that the End is Nigh, so he crows as loudly as he can to warn everyone.
Old symbols that date back to at least Augustine (who was an Owl), though they do pop up in pop culture (fans of Chris Carter’s late-1990s series Millenium will probably recognize this).
McNaughton probably sees himself as the Rooster.
jibeaux
It’s so…subtle.
Scott
Maybe the chicken is the Evil Chicken from objectivist whackaloon Terry Goodkind’s fantasy books?
beltane
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: Just because the artist sucks cock doesn’t mean he’s a rooster.
GregInMA
Entertainment, writ large, is supposed to entertain. It’s hard to be entertaining when you Must Proclaim To All The World That ARMAGEDDON IS UPON US!!!
rumpole
” I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.”
I have no idea what that means. While there are very few female characters in it, the ones that exist have fairly strong roles. A lot of the second work (The Two Towers) and the beginning of the third are about reclaiming green space (the forest) from a particularly ugly and brutish kind of ‘industrialization.’ Many of the themes in the book have nothing whatsoever to do with the current NRO flavor of conservatism. No doubt either political view can find something they like in that work (and given when it was written, some can find things they don’t like).).
Or, to wit:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
giltay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Wow. The painter has rather mixed views on Lincoln. Apparently the most important thing Lincoln did was talk fear about international bankers.
Kyle
And I thought Thomas Kinkade was scraping the bottom of the barrel for saccharine conservative ‘art’.
28 Percent
So, I know this isn’t what he was going for, but my first reaction looking at that painting was “whoa, the fashion police finally got some teeth”
I mean, look at them. Shapeless suits, pilgrim pumps, mid-calf length denim dirndls… nobody looks good in that crap. And the hair… stuff of nightmares. Wearing the chains they forged in life, made it link by link, one bad outfit at a time…
schrodinger's cat
@E.D. Kain: Welcome back then, and post away about political stuff, and lets agree to disagree.
ellennelle
yegads, what a ghastly painting!
i think you hit the nail on the head in your last couple thoughts there, dude. the republican party has become a shell of itself, having sold its soul half a century ago when they saw they could no longer win on the numbers or the merits (hence the numbers), so they embarked on their journey into the dark realm of picking inflammatory wedge issues to fire up a ‘base’. like the narcissistic who puts all his or her energy into the image until there is just no there there anymore, so the republicans are bereft of anything resembling a soul. god knows they do not possess anything resembling real policy platform anymore.
ya can’t have art without soul. might not be art everyone likes (hence nashville), but even the nutters recognize soullessness.
hence the artless mitt.
Someguy
@Malaclypse:
Wow. Stripling Warriors indeed. That thing looks like the cover for a Village People tribute band.
g
The reason why it doesn’t work as art or commentary is that it’s simply an assertion. there’s no rationality behind it.
It’s just “This man is bad” because the artist says he is.
Spaghetti Lee
Whoa, check out all that symbolism! It’s like, white people in chains, because the Soshulist Kenyan took away all their money, and he’s spending it like a drunken sailor, which is why there’s money all over the ground, and they’re going after it. And the conservatives with the protest signs actually aren’t in chains, even though they’ve suffered more than anyone, and, um, yeah. Arabs. Roosters. This all merits deep consideration, I say.
ooparts
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Re: the common man
HAHAHAHA. Clinton and the Roosevelts are applauding!
Culture of Truth
Are there no forced abortions? No mandatory gay marriages? No required worshipping of Mohammed?
I’m disappointed.
Paul in KY
@Scott: Could be related to that giant chicken that keeps getting into fights with Peter Griffen.
Mnemosyne
@rumpole:
Which brings us back to the original post — traditional conservative views have absolutely nothing to do with current movement conservatism. I’m sure there are movement conservatives out there who consider Bambi to be propaganda by the liberal media since it hints that maybe hunting is bad and we shouldn’t burn forests down just for the heck of it, and yet Walt Disney was unquestionably one of the most traditionally conservative figures in Hollywood by almost any measure.
Spaghetti Lee
Personally, I’ve always preferred traditional representational art to abstract or more intellectual art, my favorite book genres are fantasy/sci-fi/action/etc., I like classical music and prog rock that takes cues from classical more than, say, world music. I know the kind of company this puts me in, and it’s always made me very sad.
I think the guy’s technical skill with a paintbrush is not all that bad. The subject matter is so bizarre and stupid that it hardly matters, but still. Kinda like how it’s always annoyed me that perhaps the most artistically skilled political cartoons come from that asshole Michael Ramirez while liberals like Toles and Bagley draw these weird lumpen abstract drawings that are almost a distraction from the cartoon.
pseudonymous in nc
Likewise, Knocked Up, which is otherwise a five-minute comedy sketch. Hollywood is clearly small-c conservative in that regard, which is fine, but that’s not enough for for the Kulturkampf brigade.
harlana
i kinda like the idea of a “money shower” raining down from the heavens all over Obama.
Mnemosyne
@g:
I would argue the problem is that there’s no story behind it. What’s going on? What brought people to this point? What is Obama saying?
I mean, even surrealist art tells a story of some kind.
harlana
rooster = “cocky” (as in “uppity” mebbe?)
g
@Mnemosyne:
You said it better than I did.
Marmot
Isn’t that Edmund Burke distilled to his essence?
“Standing athwart history screaming ‘Stop!” or whatever? I swear, they’re motivated by a crazy conviction that things are going horribly wrong, regardless of how things had been going previously. And that’s it. Oh, and they’re never without a list of suspects to blame.
But I’m a non-fiction guy, and truly can’t do art, which leads me to a question: does conservative non-fiction suck in equal measure, as compared to other non-fiction? (I think their cavalier approach to truth screws it, but I pretty much avoid their non-fiction.)
Chris
@Southern Beale:
This.
I’d add that pop culture is by definition something that grows organically and is constantly changing and evolving. You can’t force it into an ideological straightjacket and expect it to keep hitting the same few notes forever, any more than you can expect that from… well, human society as a whole.
(And you’d think people who’re all about how government regulation doesn’t work would be able to grasp that).
slag
@Punchy: Ha! Please tell me that was self-parody.
Ripley
Isn’t this just a screen capture from the Whitey Tape? That’s not art, that’s tracing!
Jon
Ok that’s Achmadinejad back there with some Arab guy. Is that supposed to be Fidel and Chavez and Kim Jong Il too?
g
Oh – Okay – I just got it. The guy in the foreground is hacksawing his chains off – the woman in the brown top is pointing at him doing it, and the dude in the grey suit is watching. So there is some vestige of a story going on here.
I can’t go to McN’s site from where I am, but the guy sawing is the same guy who was sitting in despair on the bench in a different painting, red-head with jeans and tan coat. wonder if it’s a self-portrait.
parsimon
From the OP:
Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. […] It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.
Forgive me that I haven’t followed E.D. Kain’s thoughts on these matters, and this has probably been noted somewhere along the line, but I assume, E.D., that you’ve encountered Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind?
I haven’t read it; have chiefly read reviews and discussion of it.
Bruce S
“Personally, I’ve always preferred traditional representational art…I think the guy’s technical skill with a paintbrush is not all that bad. The subject matter is so bizarre and stupid that it hardly matters, but still…”
That preference is fine, but forget comparing this with great classical painting. Start by comparing this work just to, say, a skilled illustrator like Norman Rockwell.
This guy doesn’t even rise to mediocre as a painter. (Rockwell, incidentally, was a New Deal liberal who once painted a portrait of Bertrand Russell for the leftist mag Rampart’s cover – he often gets a bad rap because of the sentimentality, but his nostalgia wasn’t reactionary in the political sense. Actually was quite brilliant at what he did and embodied a sort of “traditionalist liberalism” that we could use more of. My guess is that if he were alive today, he’d have painted an endearing and whimsical portrait of a newlywed gay couple, surrounded by loving friends and family.)
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i am guessing the rooster is the chickens come home to roost metaphor.
conservatives do pop culture, as i would consider sports part of pop culture. as to movies, music or tv, i think conservative audiences are why there are so many movies set in period, or about superheroes, or pure fantasy. i don’t think you see many works set in contemporaneous culture that lean conservative, but i think the persistence of classic rock, classic pop, at least when it is presented as wholly contained in its original context, like ac/dc is the baddest band on the planet, and not an amusing oldie, is meant for conservatives who feel the messages contained are safe.
when retro skews what was actually popular once, and splices in a lot of what people should have been paying attention to, or wish they had been paying attention to, but weren’t. i think that is to give conservatives another crack at it. people wistfully singing along with the violent femmes(not that edgy really, even at the time) when back when, they would have turned them off in disgust, or mocked whomever was playing it, in favor of triumph, rush or whatever.
Chris
@Sour Kraut:
For my money, they always were.
Here’s Hofstader’s take on it, from back in the glory days of the Birchers:
“It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations, set up to combat secret organizations, give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.”
Paula
@Spaghetti Lee:
Does it really make you sad? Bad politics comes with “modern” art too — T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, V.S. Naipaul.
Only time will tell whether art lasts, which IMO is one of the few ways to measure whether art is really “good”. The problem with art that begins with polemic — left or right — is that the foregrounding of message doesn’t really leave a lot of room for variation within the work or the viewer’s interpretation of it. Propaganda may be artistic, and art CAN be propaganda. But good art outlasts the politics of its time and survives because it has something to offer new generations in different contexts.
A lot of what you all make fun of here is less conservative than, as you say, reactionary stuff that’s mostly a palliative to the current feeling of victimization among people on the right. In other words, they’re not interested in art, they’re interested in salves for their hurt feelings and are therefore not seeking to communicate or understand anything in the work they produce and/or consume.
Plenty of mainstream art is conservative in its values just because they tend to reflect the long-standing values of capitalist consumerism, heteronormativity, class invisibility, the whitewashing of race. But they are more interested in telling stories and entertaining than “defending” those values.
Culture of Truth
Regarding rebellion – you could argue conservatives are rebelling against the establishment, since Obama is the President, after all.
Except they’re not, of course – they just want to imagine the black guy chained them up by expanding health care.
Jon
@Punchy
She’s hot. Give her my number.
Herb
Let us not forget the embarrassingly bad “Half Hour News Hour” on Fox: http://bit.ly/vZAwC6
Chris
@Marmot:
Well, I’m not entirely sure they grasp the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Plenty of them literally consider “Atlas Shrugged” an economics textbook, and I’m not just talking about rubes.
John S.
Oh really? I’m extremely curious as to what gave you that impression. I’ve often seen conservatives make this claim, but I just don’t see it. Especially given what conservatism currently represents. I think Tolkien would find the Republican party and modern conservative movement abhorrent, because if anything, he was an anarchist.
Guster
@KG: No, but a liberal take on justice isn’t ‘badness resides in the individual, and the problem is solved when he’s killed.’ A liberal take on justice is something more like, ‘injustice occurs either when two legitimate beliefs clash, or when there’s a systemic failure of some sort, and the problem is solved when those beliefs find a place of mutually-acceptable compromise, or when the system is fixed … or at least identified as the problem.’
I’m not sure what the best description is for it, but right-wing narratives are individual and essentialist. That is, the baddies are evil. The goodies are good. There is no system, unless, sometimes, it’s the system that keeps tough-guy individuals from doing the right thing. Challenges to the status quo are bad.
Try to write a genre novel in which the problem is systemic and the solution communal.
Scott P.
WOMAN: Why does this dummy have a bucket on its head?
KRAMER: Because we’re blind to their tyranny.
WOMAN: Then shouldn’t you be wearing the bucket?
KRAMER: Yeah. Move along, Betty.
Jesse Ewiak
I don’t think Juno or Knocked Up were “pro-life” movies. If either woman had an abortion in those movies, the movie would be over in about 45 minutes.
PTirebiter
I agree. I also think, especially in satire, it requires some sympathy for the target. If you can’t recognize the humanity and humor in your own foibles, you can’t recognize them in anyone else.
Steve M.
Yup, and country sucks when it’s not about cheating, whiskey-drinking, and killing people. Oh, and occasionally about the death of beloved relatives. Modern political country music sucks.
Chris
@John S.:
I agree with this.
But, you know, if conservatives could claim the Bible and specifically the New Testament to be their guiding light without no intention of irony at all, they can really claim pretty much anything.
Xecky Gilchrist
And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced.
Or maybe it is.
joeyess
@Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor: Thank you. Yes. That’s the symbolism. Now that you’ve shaken my cobwebs loose, I’ve heard this from Xtian relatives.
Xecky Gilchrist
@John S.: I’ve often seen conservatives make this claim, but I just don’t see it.
Yeah, it’s like the “Firefly is libertarian” trope about a show in which the good guys are basically on the run from a giant corporation.
IM
@ooparts:
So TR is officially a liberal now.
I wonder why he had kept Lincoln.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
All I can think of is this.
EDITED FOR GRAMMER
WJS
Kinda looks like one of those Rush album covers from the mid-1980s.
Bruce S
“Yup, and country sucks when it’s not about cheating, whiskey-drinking, and killing people.”
Oh, I don’t know. There are some damned good country songs that delve into the circumstances of poor folks…
Here’s a couple in that vein by Haggard and (half-black, half-native American) Stoney Edwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1yb4UtwJgE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkATTkgBVuk
Chris
@Steve M.:
I thought the “politics” in country music more or less boiled down to “everything’s just so much BETTER in The Country” with a heavy helping of “I’m not like these OTHER people and I’m HAPPY that way, HAPPY, you hear?” Which sounds obnoxious if you listen to it too much, until you realize that they’re not trying to piss you off so much as convince themselves.
existential fish
As if on cue, today Pat Robertson said watching Twiight opens the door to being possessed by a demon.
Paula
@Jesse Ewiak:
Well, yes.
But the subtext of the action in Knocked Up, at least, was that these two people were living stunted non-adult lives and that a child and a family are “positive” elements that help you grow up and face your responsibilities and overall make you a better person.
I have argued that it was less about the “choice” than about the usual Apatovian trope of forcing boys (and girl) to grow up in the face of some life-altering event. But it’s also fair to say that in these movies, each woman made a CHOICE and the rest of the movie was about how that affected her.
There have also been a few movies about adoption or abortion, and those are also dramatic. It seems like the people who accused Knocked Up or Juno of being pro-life want movies where women have abortions and nothing else happens — as if the most important message is: look, abortions are ok! While the message is OK for family planning or sex ed or the doctor’s office, it’s not exactly great drama.
Scott P.
I wonder if the best way to end this nonsense is to start spreading around the idea that denying birth control in health plans is an article of Sharia law (don’t think that it is, but no matter). Vote against the establishment of Sharia law in the U.S.!
NobodySpecial
I also love the guy with the hacksaw. He looks like a Kacynzki in training, don’t he?
Chris
@Xecky Gilchrist:
I’ll disagree and say I thought it was pretty libertarian, actually. The line “governments are for getting in a man’s way,” the thing about having fought for (basically) states’ rights, the theme in the movie about how the government tried to make things better but ultimately made them worse.
But it’s actually all-around libertarian, meaning it takes a swing at secret intelligence bureaus and religious fanatics too. Not too many “libertarians” like that in U.S. politics.
(And I also am sorry we never got to see them develop the Giant Corporation angle with Blue Sun).
Joel
It’s a McNaughton!
Culture of Truth
No one in this painting looks terribly upset. Even the guy with the hacksaw.
My guess is the idea is that Obama is showing the populace with money but they are unaware they being metaphorically chained.
That makes it more subtle and more clever, so I give it points for that, but also too confusing, so I subtract on that basis. Also the point is incredibly stupid, so there’s that.
shirleyujest
I agree that the rooster is awesome.
Fifth woman from the left — isn’t that Sarah Palin cheering the Kenyan?
Also, those chains look awfully easy to slip out of. No hacksaw needed.
Brian S
@Paula:
I thought there was only one of the two who needed to grow up in that movie. The woman, as I recall, had a good job and was moving up in her life. It was the dude who needed to grow up, and the baby saved him (which is a big part of the reason why, even though I liked the crude humor, I thought the movie basically blew).
fasteddie9318
@Chris: “Firefly” being essentially a western, doesn’t it basically have to be libertarian in outlook? How many great westerns are about the joys of living in a stable, law-abiding society?
I would dispute this notion that Hollywood doesn’t do conservative movies. Military fantasy, rugged (white, mostly) individualist porn, and traditional family values bullshit bursts forth from nearly every major Hollywood blockbuster. And I don’t say that as some “oh no, I never watch television and only see foreign films because otherwise my sensibilities are offended” liberal; I happily lap all that shit up. But let’s not swallow the right-wing horse-shit that all Hollywood is churning out is a bunch of sharia-oriented gay porn and “fuck America!” screeds.
shirleyujest
@Culture of Truth:
That makes it more subtle and more clever, so I give it points for that, but also too confusing, so I subtract on that basis.
Bruce S
“Yeah, it does smack of “Socialist Realism”, the only public art that Stalin approved of.”
Bingo!
Wag
Welcome back, ED!
fasteddie9318
@Brian S:
Yeah, but the woman, since she’s career-oriented and hasn’t already submitted to a man and made a bunch of babies, is portrayed as a humorless, emotionless bitch who can’t get a man because she won’t loosen up. Admittedly, that’s the only kind of character Heigl can play, apparently, but it’s still fundamentally a conservative view of working single women.
mullaney
Walter Benjamin: fascism applies an artistic lens to politics; socialism applies a political lens to art.
In other words, the right’s “art” is dressing up politics in artistic ritual, hence flag pin/pledge/etc. related freakouts.
The left takes politics and integrates them into art as ED stated.
This has been your unsourced highbrow comment of the day.
KG
@Guster: My writing tends to be character driven. Which I think most good writing is. It’s tough to do what you ask for because it makes the story difficult (or impossible) to tell if readers can’t connect with the characters. I don’t necessarily think that’s a liberal/conservative thing, I think it’s more a human nature thing… You know, survival of the self, survival of the clan, survival of th species.
PurpleGirl
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Half of the fun of these paintings are rolling the mouse over them and getting that text. I wonder if purchasers of an actual painting feel cheated because the only get to read a sheet of paper with text, no rolling a mouse over the picture to get the text… or are they told to go back on-line to use a mouse.
chopper
@pseudonymous in nc:
sounds like something walnuts dreamed of doing to sarah palin back in ’08.
The Dude Abides
Yeah, it’s hard for me to see Lord of the Rings as basically conservative when the bad guys are the ones cutting down forests, the good guys think that cutting down forests is evil, and the two central themes are (1) people of different races (elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits) working together to accomplish a goal, and (2) you can’t ever really go home again after a brutal war.
handsmile
@Paula: (#121)
I must say I was surprised and much delighted to encounter your precis of the Frankfurt School critique of American mass cultural production.
I would go a little further than your final paragraph and state that ALL mainstream art is conservative in its essential replication and reification of status quo values. Also, we might disagree on the role of “Time” in the evaluation of creative art. Estimations of an artwork’s intrinsic value are constantly in flux and dependent on a host of factors and fashions, e.g, elite academic discourse, patronage, social upheaval, crude luck of survival/discovery. All of which I trust you are well acquainted with.
As repellent as his sexual politics are and as heterodox colonialist in his geopolitics, I don’t consider Naipaul to be a modernist, at least not as paired with Pound and Eliot.
All to say, I enjoyed and found much to consider in your comment. And one last thing, are you the Paula with whom I exchanged comments last year on the World Cup and other matters related to the “beautiful game”?
daveNYC
@Chris: I think the limited number of episodes makes Firefly look more libertarian that it actually was. There was the theme of the plucky independents running from the big bad central government, but the flip side was that the core worlds were pretty nice places with good health care, while the outer worlds had weak government and lots of rampaging sociopath gangsters running things.
scarshapedstar
Could we get an example of good conservative art, just for context? Saying that LotR is conservative because it’s all good versus evil whereas liberals are more about nuance and guilt is getting pretty hoary at this point. It also leads to nonsensical results like various Shakespeare plays being liberal or conservative.
Come to think of it, the only conservative art movement I’m aware of is the effort to brand decades/centuries-old works as Fundamentally Conservative, rather akin to the Mormon Posthumous Baptism. For example, the original Star Wars trilogy was conservative and the new trilogy is liberal, and the new one also sucks ass, so conservatives win another battle in the Culture War!
Is there anything produced within EDK’s lifetime that qualifies as both conservative and good?
cintibud
I would have to say that LOTR does present a conservative viewpoint, but not one that today’s conservatives would recognize. JRRT is not a hippy environmentalist, but part old time resistance to change, things were better in the old days as the pastoral country side is despoiled by “progress” and part Teddy Roosevelt conservationist.
The ring of power must not be used by mere mortals and only the most humble and simple beings – the hobbits – could even chance to bear it. The idea is based on Catholic theology that rejects the occult as it is a way one can lose ones soul.
There is a lot of how “nobility” is passed on from father to son and how people should be ruled by a true king. There is also a lot of causal racism – “lesser races” – that I attribute to the general ignorance of the time he lived. Of course the movie downplayed that aspect – the bad humans weren’t “swarthy” IIRC.
TheF79
I’ve heard the argument from both the left and the right that LOTR is a small-c conservative book. My understanding is that it comes from the fact that the Shire was supposed to represent a lost idyllic rural England, and the Scouring of the Shire chapter represented the destruction of that agrarian society by the noisy and polluting forces of industrial progress. So instead of “Standing Athwart History and Yelling: Stop!” at giving minorites and women basic civil rights and basic equality of opportunity, Tolkein was “Standing Athwart History and Yelling: Stop!” at the loss of pre-industrial revolution agrarian England. This jives with a number of his notes and letters that I’ve seen. Of course, the fact that environmental groups and the counterculture adopted LOTR en masse in the 60’s and 70’s (Frodo Lives!) tells you how important historical context and reference points matter in talking about the politics of art.
Stooleo
All that this artist is doing is taking the perceived victimization that they feel and putting it in picture form. Obama is destroying the constitution. Obama is enslaving us. Obama is in league with the terrorists. All these pictures are, is whining in picture form. That is all.
cintibud
@TheF79: Thanks – you said it better than I did.
Tony J
@John S.:
I think you’re missing the central distinction Kain is making. Yes, Tolkien would consider modern conservatives and their ideology abhorrent, but that’s not because Tolkien wasn’t conservative himself – he was, and LOTR is a loving paean to exactly that kind of conservatism – but rather that Modern American Conservatism isn’t actually conservative at all in the sense Tolkien understood it. They’re a reactionary movement fed on comforting lies and led by ambitious radicals, and he hated all that stuff.
To paraphrase another great work of art, “Conservatives do read Lord of the Rings, they just don’t understand it.”
JustMe
An aside comment: Obama never wears suits cut like that– it buttons up much higher than his suits usually do (and the suit portrayed is much different than Washington, DC suit standards). Either the artist is trying to “send a message” about something (I don’t know what) or he simply isn’t very observant about how Obama and his fellow Washington politicians dress.
GregB
His best work was when he was in an American Werefolf in London. Not a fan of his painting.
Paula
@handsmile:
I am that Paula, indeedy. :)
No, Naipaul is not a modernist, but I mostly meant it in the “20th century author of literary fiction” sense rather than in the strict Modernist sense. Although I may have muddled my point by grouping him w/ the other two. But all three have expressed reactionary opinions in regards to art that have caused a lot of controversy.
You give me too much credit w/ the Frankfurt School reference, although, yes, I am familiar with their work. I’m a crude Marxist, mostly. So a lot of this stuff I tend to view in a materialist way.
@fasteddie9318:
Where are you getting this “emotionless, careerist bitch” from? When the movie starts she lives in her sister’s poolhouse and has a minor production job on E! None of which indicates that she was financially or emotionally ready for a child or to raise it on her own. Which is not a function of patriarchy but of economics.
No seriously, do you think the demands she made on the guy were unreasonable? Because I thought the whole damn point of the movie was that she was trying to do everything right but that the guy was too stuck in his man-child world to help her out.
Mnemosyne
@fasteddie9318:
Most of them, actually. Most of the classic US Western films have a fascinating duality where you have a hero who is willing to fight for a stable, law-abiding society even though he himself in incapable of living in it once it’s created.
That’s why John Wayne’s character is unable to enter the house at the end of The Searchers: he has rescued Debbie and returned her to society, but he can never join her there. So instead he walks away until he’s a tiny dot on the horizon.
Or John Wayne again in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence — his character kills Liberty Valence so Jimmy Stewart’s character can stay within society and eventually become a powerful politician.
That subtheme got played with and subverted in the spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s (and even some of the Budd Boetticher and Nicholas Ray Westerns of the 1950s), but it’s all there in the classic Western.
(Ahem. Sorry, film school geekery rearing its head again.)
Dream On
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/09/the_rights_shepard_fairey/singleton/
Article about this master painter, master painting for all to see.
Here is Rachel Maddow’s take on one of his edgy pictures.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/02/10302216-caption-contest
Mike in NC
Hey, how come none of the signs the protesters are waving in that painting are misspelled?
No matter. I can see these murals decorating the mansions of Glenn Beck or David Koch.
Bruce S
“Could we get an example of good conservative art, just for context?”
I think it’s problematic to brand “good art” in this manner, although it can be done roughly and with broad strokes.
As example, I’d say that both John Ford and Clint Eastwood are good-to-great American artists who worked from a “conservative” frame of political mind. But Ford’s work includes the ostensibly “liberal” Grapes of Wrath and what was perhaps the grandaddy of “revisionist” Westerns, The Searchers – which portrayed John Wayne brilliantly as something of a racist psychopath. Ditto Eastwood, who graduated from frontier nihilism, to “law ‘n order” icon, to the more complex storyteller of recent decades. But if I had to put a political tag on them, I’d have to say that they’re conservatives, albeit thinking men who don’t fit contemporary conservative pattern. This is actually more about the devolution of conservatism into pitiful reactionary know-nothingism than anything else.
Samara Morgan
@E.D. Kain: New blog not working out, you little creep?
You are not gunna make a living as blogger.
should have kept your day job.
Only conservatives can sell books…to wingnuts…
So have you changed your mind about the “freed” market yet you twofaced glibertarian grifter?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@daveNYC:
The series writer is a hard core libertarian and in the DvD extra’s makes it clear he thinks the Confederates were the heroes. Pretty much he thinks the outer worlds with their corporate overlords and it’s roving gang of cannibal rapists is utopia.
handsmile
@scarshapedstar:
Stipulating that I don’t know EDK’s age and, more importantly, that the term “conservative” in describing an artwork is slippery and imprecise (do you mean style? content? producer?), here’s a few, very much off the top of my head:
Visual Art: the entire corpus of Norman Rockwell (died 1978)
Literature: The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy
Film: Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara
Music: Lyle Lovett
Groucho48
My takeaway from the painting is that only gingers can free us from our shackles.
Cris (without an H)
I completely disagree. Rebellion does express itself well through pop culture, but most of pop culture is normalizing. By definition, it is a common thing that binds the members of the culture together. Look at television sitcoms: the typical family comedy reinforces acceptable, “traditional” family roles, even as it pokes fun of them.
Pop culture is comfort food and comfort food must not upset your digestion or interrupt your sleep.
Samara Morgan
Are you dumb juicers relly gunna fall for Kain’s latest reinvention of himself?
jaysus, i say get the tar and feathers and ride him out of Juice Town on a rail.
hes only here to farm pageclicks.
he’s a liberatarian, a ronpaul/garyjohnson fanboy and a free market fucktard.
Cris (without an H)
More like Randy Travis rite
handsmile
@Paula: (#170)
A true pleasure to be reacquainted! I had no idea of your cultural politics, but then again, how could I? I don’t see your “nym” very often on these threads or perhaps we’re simply on different spools.
It’s a sadness that football maven Randinho has long been MIA hereabouts. Perhaps the Champions League playoffs or this summer’s European Championship will conjure his reappearance.
Best wishes!
Bruce S
177 – handsmile: the complexity of using “conservative” to describe the work of a political liberal in his time like Norman Rockwell (Thomas Hart Benton would also qualify in this vein) is why I consider modern political liberalism more “conservative” in the quasi-populist, non-aristocratic sense than the modern right wing. That is, liberalism is more sustaining of family, community, work opportunity, educational attainment and economic mobility than the crank agenda of modern “conservatism”, which is a formula for breeding plutocracy. Granted, there are different brands of conservatism, but in the sense of offering support for the oft-articulated traditional values of social stability, liberalism is more coherent than preaching the virtues of “creative destruction” or theological idealism masquerading as pragmatic social policy to address the problems of people who are struggling in the modern economy.
Samara Morgan
@E.D. Kain:
this is not conservative art, this is mormon art.
very different things.
btw…..haha, did you see TAS is dead?
i helped kill it.
the last decarian math of conservatism has fallen to the execrable tastes of the slines and lack of page clicks.
sic semper glibertarians.
Samara Morgan
@Bruce S: that is not “conservative” art.
It is MORMON art.
twiffer
@rumpole: LOTR is conservative. just not in any american political sense. instead, is it a peculiarly british social conservatism. tolkien is pining for the return of the simpler days, holding the good english yeoman up as the ideal. he’s calling to an end of progress for the sake of progress and heading back to the country’s rustic roots. don’t forget the whole divine right to kingship theme as well.
sure, it’s not conservatism as defined in the modern american political landscape. that term has become corrupted by reactionaries who seek not only to hamper social progress, but to undo what progress has been made. it’s (as i’m sure others have noted) a brilliantly evil co-opting of the term: most people will identify with being conservative, as it used to just mean keeping the status quo, with maybe some baby steps forward. not actively seeking to roll back changes that society has come to accept.
Samara Morgan
@Cris (without an H): is hiphop pop culture?
Cargo
I confess I can’t really parse this picture. Obama has his audience in chains, and is giving them money, and one guy’s cutting the chains to presumably.. I dunno.. join the Teabaggers? But aren’t they chained too? It looks like it.
Samara Morgan
@E.D. Kain: nah, you’re trying on a new skin for pageclicks.
what about the League? that is a political blog.
may i remind you of this political post?
Beyond Unions
tch tch.
and you were such a big union man here.
you even fooled Kay.
Samara Morgan
@Cargo: here is an easier one to parse.
McNaughton is a MORMON.
Mormons believe Jesus wrote the constitution.
Kain is full of shit. that is not conservative art. i dont think conservatives believe Jesus wrote the constitution.
That is a mormon thing.
Samara Morgan
@Cargo: here is an easier one to parse.
McNaughton is a MORMON.
Mormons believe Jesus wrote the constitution.
Kain is full of shit. that is not conservative art. i dont think conservatives believe Jesus wrote the constitution. Conservatives constantly cite the Founders and Framers.
That is a mormon thing.
Kain is just being his usual sloppy lazy self, looking for
lovepageclicks in all the wrong places.Why not have Sully and Douthat frontpage here?
its just the same.
McWaffle
I always thought the conservative aspect of LOTR was caught up in the whole, “I bid you stand, Men of the West!” speech and how the bad guy humans were from the East and had elephants and such. Maybe that’s reading too much into it.
fasteddie9318
@Paula:
No, my whole point is that Apatow has a habit of writing unfair portrayals of women even as he’s ostensibly beating up on these flawed man-child creations of his. The “woman who can’t land a man because she doesn’t know how to loosen up and have fun” is a staple Apatow character, or was at least; he insists he’s trying to write more dimensioned female characters now.
Samara Morgan
@Kain say Erik…..did you know George R R Martin is a LIBERAL?
hahahaha
Chris
@TheF79:
This.
European conservatism draws on a much older tradition than the American kind, and Tolkein was writing at a time when capitalism, industrialism and these things were still fairly new and alien and upsetting to old, traditional, agrarian conservatives. Closest thing I can think of in the U.S. would be William Jennings Bryan’s shtick – not liberal exactly but lots in common with liberalism.
Dream On
Is it just me, or did the comments section basically get turned off, with about 80 comments swiped from existence. Just sayin’. Yawn.
McJulie
Here’s why Conservative art sucks: good art tells the truth about human behavior, and truth has a well-known liberal bias.
Karounie
When I saw the rooster, I was reminded of Sharon Angle. One of the crowd should scoop him up and trade him for an appendectomy – maybe even cut out the professional middleman and go to right the red haired guy with the hacksaw.
Samara Morgan
@McJulie: that is not “conservative” art. that is mormon art. Kain is just a lazy fucker and cant tell the difference.
Interrobang
@Bruce S: Holy cow, I think my heart just grew three sizes imagining that Rockwell painting. I love Rockwell, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. His paintings of the Apollo astronauts blow my mind.
Cargo
Samara Morgan – decenarian math? Slines? Sounds like someone’s an Anathem fan! :D
handsmile
@Bruce S: (#177)
Thanks for your reply. My off-line life beckons, but I wished to respond, briefly and perhaps inadequately, to your comment.
As a card-carrying art historian, I am reluctant to apply the term “conservative” to the evaluation of any work of art without significantly more elaboration in order to address the factors we both sketched out. Your citation of Thomas Hart Benton was an excellent example of this dilemma.
Political conservatism is predicated on maintaining status quo relationships of power and privilege in the home, workplace, and political arena. Political liberalism seeks to emancipate subordinate classes and expand their opportunities for more equitable participation in those domains.
Samara Morgan
@Cargo: its mormon art. not conservative art.
mormon art is much weirder subset of conservative art.
Kain’s post makes no sense, as usual.
Davis X. Machina
@JustMe: It’s clearly from the Kim Il Sung menswear collection….
IM
Of course there were and in some cases are a lot of conservative artists. Tolkien and perhaps more openly C. S. Lewis. Chesterton. Almost all the great russian novelists. A lot of the german and french romantics. I would also count Faulkner as a conservative.
Heinlein and Herbert in SF. a living crime example: P. D. James.
Koestler. Solchenizyn, quite the reactionary.
That said, the modern conservative movement doesn’t demand conservative art, but rather art repeating the current talking points and shibboleths of the movement and/or the GOP. And that doesn’t tend do end well.
fasteddie9318
@Mnemosyne:
Which is basically the entire subtext of 24, but I don’t get a whole lot of liberal, “society good” vibe out of that show either.
If the theme is “society is good for the little people, but only the libertarian/individualist Übermensch can save them from themselves,” I still find that to be a libertarian message. There are other epic westerns where the libertarianism is more explicit (Unforgiven, Lonesome Dove, even something like Open Range where the heroes and villains are both representing some libertarian elements but what everyone can agree on is that government law enforcement is shit).
On the other hand there’s this.
LOL
IM
Graham Greene, too.
Samara Morgan
@Cargo: yup.
Culture 11 and TAS were both maths designed to preserve intellectual conservatism while the rest of the GOP burned down around them.
Unfortunately, intellectual conservatism garners no page clicks.
which is why Kain is attempting to switch horses now.
Delia
@McWaffle:
Tolkien gives you all you need to know about the LOTR’s relation to reality in his preface to the book. It was influenced by his experiences as a soldier in WWI, and the devastation and loss he experienced there. He also comments on some people who had interpreted the story as an allegory on WWII and the Ring of Power as the atomic bomb. He said if that had been the case, the Lords of the West would have seized the Ring and made an alliance with Saruman against Sauron and the Hobbits would have been mere pawns to be destroyed.
Tolkien was writing in age that already does not correspond with our own labels.
Samara Morgan
@handsmile: a painting by McNaughton is not conservative art– it is MORMON art.
a far, far stranger genre.
are you familiar with this work?
One Nation Under God
its pretty disengenuous of Kain to present McNaughton as representative of “conservative” art. I dont know any conservatives that actually believe Jesus wrote the constitution.
les
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Well, that’s not really the point of conservative art; it’s not about what the audience would feel, it’s what the audience should feel. Conservative art doesn’t elicit audience feeling, it attempts to direct it.
Paula
@fasteddie9318:
OK, well, from my POV, I agree Apatow not adept at writing multi-dimensional female characters the way he writes his male characters. BUT that his examination of gender roles and relationships (in 4-YO-Virgin and Knocked Up, which is the two where he explicitly deals w/ this stuff as a writer/director) is actually fairly progressive for a mainstream purveyor of box office bait for the the 18-35 male demographic.
It seems like when women in those two movies act like “bitches”, they’re responding to some pretty asshole behavior on the part of their male partners. Also, because “society” (clearly marked by Apatow as consumer culture’s obsessions with youthfulness, gratuitous sexuality, instant gratification) is telling them to be something unrealistic. In other words, he blames the men a lot for just being stunted (and also that society blatantly approves of men acting like children). However, it seems like Apatow’s judgment call on where women’s “neurotic” behavior comes from falls squarely on other people’s (unrealistic) demands.
Of course, this argument is moot if you think the substance of being fair/unfair to a female character means never having to see her be irritable onscreen. But then again, Apatow is probably one of my go-to examples of how people on the left are blindsided by their own polemics and end up mirroring the reactionary right in wanting art to reflect their politics in predictable ways without too much questioning.
Joel
@Jesse Ewiak: Some people just thunk too hard.
Villago Delenda Est
@Samara Morgan:
It might be Mormon art, but it’s also movement “conservative” art at the same time. There are plenty of non-Mormons who believe that the Constitution was divinely inspired. This happens to be a point where Fundigelicals and Mormons have common ground. Not that they’ll ever concede such a thing, of course.
El Cid
What this country has been lacking has been a painter combining skillful photo-realistic style with the wit and insight of Mallard Fillmore.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Ben Cisco:
It just needed a small tweak to bring it into winger surreality.
Cassidy
I think it’s simple: conservatives are 1)not a very smart group of people and 2) not very creative.
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: sure mormon art is a weird subset of conservative art. but to use a McNaughton piece to explain conservative art is stupid and lazy. Mormons believe Jesus LITERALLY wrote the constitution. conservatives in general might believe that the founders and framers were divinely inspired, but they do not believe Jeebus wrote the constitution.
WTF does that ONE SINGLE MCNAUGHTON painting have to do with conservatism being disenfranchised from pop culture?
A better explanation for the strangeness of that SINGLE painting is that mormons are only 2% of americans, and mormon symbolism is unintelligible to most americans.
qwerty42
re: Jon McNaughton …
This was a big topic over on Wonkette a few years back. It started with Jim Newell showing the picture and commentary. Hilarity ensued. A few days later, a commenter provided a variant.
Then there was the off the wall variation
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: c’mon VDE.
its just crappy lazy writing.
Standard EDK.
Villago Delenda Est
@Samara Morgan:
The point, if a miracle took place and you actually bothered to read what the Kain Monster is saying, is that these people don’t do popular art very well, because they’re so busy trying to be ideological with it. Therefore it appeals to a much narrower group than popular art seeks to reach.
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: he is saying a lot of other bulshytt too.
WTF?
what is wrong with you VDE? This guy is a terrible crappy writer.
he come here and writes shit he thinks you clowns will agree with, so he can get pageclicks for his new failblog.
Villago Delenda Est
@Samara Morgan:
And yet, here you are, giving him page clicks.
Bruce S
202 – handsmile
Thanks for those comments. I guess my only point about the real-world ambiguities of political conservatism vs. political liberalism, is that the “status quo” defense should entail bringing some modicum stability into the lives of real families and real communities. Capitalism unbridled – which conservatives proffer – doesn’t do a very good job in that regard. Which is why I believe that “conservatism” is often in tension with the “traditional” values that they claim to espouse and defend.
Samara Morgan
VDE, would you say Norman Rockwell is an example of “good” conservative art?
Delia
@Samara Morgan:
I’m afraid you’re wrong here, dear. I grew up in a Mormon household in Utah. While I was taught in various church meetings that the Constitution was divinely inspired, no one ever said that it was written by Jesus. That would have been a little bit difficult, since there’s ample historical evidence that it was hashed out in long and difficult meetings in Philadelphia. You may be confusing this with claims the LDS make that Jesus appeared to his followers in the Americas after his resurrection. This is written down in the Book of Mormon, whose authenticity is regarded with skepticism by everybody except the most devout of Mormons. (And believe me, there are quite a few of those who quietly have their doubts but go along with things to keep their families happy.)
Samara Morgan
@Delia: a mormon boi told me so.
why should i believe you over him?
He said the constitution is divinely AUTHORED not divinely INSPIRED.
And say, he also told me that mormons do not believe in the separation of church and state, and that American Indians are the Lost Tribes of Israel, and that dead jews can be baptised into the mormon faith.
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: nah, im not going to his new failblog.
im givin John pageclicks.
;)
Villago Delenda Est
@Samara Morgan:
Norman Rockwell was a New Deal Democrat.
Try again, youngling (you’re not far enough along to be called a padawan yet).
Chris
@Samara Morgan:
Link it or it didn’t happen.
If Mormons actually believe that the constitution was literally written by Jesus and you can prove it, then I’m happy to accept that. But you’ve already shown a pretty shitty understanding of religious matters, including your own proclaimed religion, as well as a tendency to stomp your foot and insist that something’s a fact without having checked, so you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.
Chris
@fasteddie9318:
Also
this. It’s a common conceit among conservatives that wonderful nice polite societies need to be protected by Rugged Manly Men like themselves, for their own good. It’s good for their ego, lets them think they’re better than all the little people they’re protecting and makes them feel like misunderstood warriors martyring themselves selflessly for the good of the ungrateful mob.
If anyone doesn’t mind giving PJMedia pageclicks and/or is willing to read through a fairly long and shittastic essay, here’s an oldie from Bill Whittle that’s basically the long version of how they view themselves that way: http://pjmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2009/10/07/tribes-2/
Comrade Dread
I’m late to the party, but I think the reason conservative art isn’t very good is simply because it sets out to be conservative art, instead of just art that happens to be conservative.
When you set out to be preachy in your fiction or songs or art, the art portion suffers.
Your belief system will creep into the work as your building it, blending into the world and background. What you don’t want to do is take what should be the background of your art, drag it kicking and screaming front and center where you shine a spotlight on it and scream, “LOOK AT ME!” like a loon.
And I’m not sure the current crop of vocal’conservatives’ can do subtle.
Catsy
@Guster:
I think you have inadvertently made your own point, but not quite in the way you intended.
Why are these “conservative” narratives? Hunting down evildoers, even though they sometimes need to be put down? Finding Mr. Right? Solving a problem that had negatively disrupted society and getting things back to normal?
I wouldn’t even go so far as to say these are American narratives. These are basic, decent human narratives. Calling them “conservative” wrongfully cedes the grounds of patriotism, law enforcement, family values and good social order to the right–when they are unpatriotic, think laws don’t apply to them, want to destroy families that don’t conform to their narrow flavor of medievalism and are all in favor of disrupting the order of society for their own ends.
I think you’re right about how much wingnuttery there is in fiction novels–people underestimate how much nutjob glibertarianism there is in sci-fi, for example–but I think you’re overestimating how much that transfers over to pop culture in general. Like talk radio, it’s the exception to the rule.
Catsy
@Samara Morgan: A “boi” told you, so it must be true?
I despair at the thought of you ever becoming sexually active.
Mnemosyne
@fasteddie9318:
Given that the traditional Western hero is expelled from that society, I’m not sure how you get a “libertarianism good!” message from it. Maybe “libertarianism is temporarily useful to get rid of pests, but then has to move along so people can get on with the real work of living.”
Okay, now you’re comparing apples and oranges. You’re pointing to movies that were made after Reagan and after libertarianism was made respectable and claiming that they somehow make the prior films “libertarian.”
You’re taking your perspective of today and imposing it on films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence that were made long before the political movements that you’re seeing in them even existed. Because if TMWSLV is so “libertarian,” why does it need a libertarian remake? Shouldn’t it fit those paradigms perfectly already?
Mnemosyne
@Paula:
There were people out there writing about The Incredibles who complained because Violet had a character arc that took her from being a shy, “shrinking violet” to being an awesome superhero. Why couldn’t she be an awesome superhero from the beginning?!
And, of course, the answer for anyone who’s seen more than two movies is that doing that means either (A) you have a static, boring character who never does anything because she doesn’t grow or change or (B) her character arc moves her from being an awesome superhero to not being a superhero (or being a damaged one). But that would somehow be more “feminist”? I haz a confused.
Samara Morgan
@Villago Delenda Est: but isnt his art “conservative” in nature?
reproducing faithfully conservative values?
what is conservative art anyways?
@Catsy: Yeah, my childhood friend Young Brigham. His dad was an elder in the mormon church.
@Chris: Delia has to link first.
she asserted first.
;)
I understand my religion very well.
Catsy
@Samara Morgan:
Which of course–even if we stipulate that you are telling the truth–of course gives you magical insight into What Mormons Believe(tm).
Just like the Mormon girl that I used to sleep with gives me a magical insight into their minds.
Now you are no longer simply wrong: you are lying.
At #218 you made this assertion: “Mormons believe Jesus LITERALLY wrote the constitution.”
At #226 Delia disputed your assertion. Other than a comment earlier about Tolkien, that was her first comment in this thread.
Which you know full well.
You made an assertion. Someone challenged it. The burden is on YOU to prove your assertion. That’s how it works. You don’t get to pretend that the person challenging your assertion is now making a new assertion of their own that they have to prove before you do.
Learn how to play with grownups, or stop wasting our time.
Mnemosyne
@Samara Morgan:
Only if you’re an idiot who thinks Rockwell was saying it was a good thing that white adults were throwing tomatoes at Ruby Bridges as she walked to school.
Delia
@Samara Morgan:
Well, you can believe anything you want. Here’s the thing about Mormonism. It’s a tradition based on a “prophet” who makes stuff up as he goes along. The book of scripture that they don’t talk so much about in the missionary lessons is the Doctrine & Covenants, which started out as Joseph Smith’s letters to his friends and family trying to coerce them into going along with anything he claimed was the word of God. But it’s constantly getting revised as subsequent presidents of the church have “revelations.”
What this means is that ordinary people in the church also make up doctrines to explain things they don’t understand, or transform divinely inspired into divinely authored. Or maybe Glen Beck said it, and it’s become a little subcult in the church.
It is taught that American Indians are part of the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel. There was a lot of speculation along those lines in Smith’s day and he picked up on it. In recent times all the archaelogical and anthropological evidence has disproved it and it’s been quite embarrassing for Mormons who want to take it all literally, because, well they can’t.
The last point: The church teaches that everybody has to have baptism done in this life in order to get into heaven, even if they’re already dead. That’s why Mormons are so big on genealogy. They collect the names and dates of dead ancestors and have proxy Mormon baptisms done for them in their temples. A while ago someone or other started collecting the names and dates of Jews who had died in the Holocaust from various memorial sites and started having proxy Mormon baptisms done for them. News leaked out and there was a big outrage about it, so the church had to put a stop to it. But they collect names and dates of dead people from wherever they can find them to do baptisms for them. If they were married they do Mormon temple weddings for them, too with retired people who volunteer their time standing in for the dead couple.
But as far as anyone knows, they had to stop doing the Jews.
Forgot church and state: they don’t believe in it Utah because they pretty much control the state government except in Salt Lake City. Everywhere else, they do believe in it, because they’re a minority and would be hurt by a theocratic state that wasn’t of their particular flavor.
Mnemosyne
So, just to keep track:
Samara is an expert in Catholicism because she was raised a Catholic.
She’s an expert in Islam because she converted to Islam.
Now she’s an expert in Mormonism because she knew a Mormon guy once.
I notice that the standards for expertise just keep getting lower and lower where Samara is concerned.
Mnemosyne
In Samara-land, Norman Rockwell painted Murder in Mississippi (Southern Justice) to say that Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman totally had it coming.
Catsy
@Mnemosyne:
Fix’t.
Relatedly, it has been a bit tiresome to see a few people buying into the whole “Samara was right” fallacy recently with regard to Mitt Romney. The reality is that no one ever disputed that Romney’s Mormonism would cause him problems in the GOP. What I and others objected to were Samara’s repeated suggestions that we should indulge in anti-Mormon bigotry in order to ratfuck the Republicans, on the theory that they’d do it to us.” Particularly mind-blowing was her attempt at a Firefly analogy, claiming that the GOP are Reavers and that we need to become like them to beat them. Which only proved that she understood Firefly about as well as she seems to understand any other subject on which this idiot child is a self-professed expert. I am all in favor of playing hardball with the GOP. I am not in favor of doing so in a way that validates and strengthens their bigotry and makes us more like them.
But because Samara has selective reading comprehension skills and a near-nonexistent ability to make cogent arguments, she kept willfully misinterpreting this as disagreement with her pedestrian theories about Romney’s “Mormon problem” with Republicans. Despite having it explained to her in excruciating detail multiple times over several different threads and a period of months. It boggles my mind why she persists in lying about or misrepresenting conversations that anyone can look and see for themselves.
People who watch arguments with Samara over time (and especially those who remember her matoko_chan days) will notice that crap like this is her MO.
Samara Morgan
@Catsy: hahaha
froth much?
Again, my point is Kain is a crappy lazy writer, who is trying to use a single mormon painting as an exemplar of “conservative” art.
im also amazed that he thinks
that is a flaming mothafuckin’ lie, or else evidence of such an impoverished existence that it hurrts my brain.
You doan liek me, tant pis. I dont liek you because you are apparently stupid enough to get scammed by Kain again, he is a Paultard, he was Jenn Rubin on Utoya, and hes a free market fucktard that has never recanted.
he wants to switch horses now because the GOP is going to LOSE.
and you dumb cudlips are gunna lap it right up.
THE
@Samara Morgan:
There is some stuff here about the unusual ideas concerning the origins of the US constitution, that originate from the National Center for Constitutional Studies, originally founded by Cleon Skousen. The money quote:
I suspect that’s what you may be thinking of.
This isn’t necessarily representative of all Mormons though. I don’t know enough about them to say.
priscianusjr
Hey … I’m no fan of avant-garde painting … and I actually like academic art … but this stuff is really, really bad. Bad in execution and even worse in conception. It’s Glenn Beck on canvas. It makes me feel ill. And this is one of his better ones.
Reminds me a little of these, except not as good …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bGyCpRHaZ4
Now here’s some more McNaughton:
http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/
Samara Morgan
@Catsy: haha, i AM RIGHT.
the reason willard cant be elected is he cant get 65% of the white vote.
and ONE reason he cant get 65% of the white is because he is a MORMON.
look at colorado.
santorum just kicked his ass.
tolejasotolejasotolejaso.
;)
Samara Morgan
@THE: its representative of MY SAMPLE.
Delia says its not representative of HER SAMPLE.
Young Brigham said AUTHORED, not inspired.
His dad is a mormon elder elder. why wouldn’t i believe him?
Samara Morgan
@THE: its representative of MY SAMPLE.
Delia says its not representative of HER SAMPLE.
Young Brigham said AUTHORED, not inspired.
His dad is a mormon elder. why wouldn’t i believe him?
Samara Morgan
@Catsy:
isnt that what Obama is doing with his super-pac?
fight fire with fire.
;)
Delia
@THE:
If Cleon Skousen is behind this line of thought it explains a lot. He’s been around since forever and there is one of those subcults around him in the LDS church I was talking about in my last post. It’s unfortunate but all too predictable that Glenn Beck has brought him into the winger mainstream. I was forced to read a book by Skousen in a religion class when I was in junior high, back in the mid-sixties. Even then I could tell he was wacked out.
The only member of my family who’s still an active Mormon is my brother who is a moderate Democrat in his politics. He has nothing to do with this sort of stuff.
THE
@Samara Morgan: I also noticed that TAS seemed to have departed this mortal cybersphere and moved on to that great Internet Archive in the sky.
But I see PEG is still occasionally posting there.
Catsy
@Samara Morgan: I notice that nowhere in your response do you acknowledge that you made an unsupported assertion, were challenged on it, and lied about who had the burden of proof.
This is your typical MO: when someone manages to pin your down on some bullshit you’ve written, you either ignore what they said completely and talk about something else or:
…or, you ignore what they said almost completely and double down on your unwavering conviction that you’re right.
Because this has to have been at least the sixth or seventh time over a period of months that I have pointed out to you–almost literally ad nauseam–that none of us disagreed with your assertion that Romney has problems with Republicans because of his Mormonism.
Nobody.
Not one single person.
Ever.
Burn that fact into your skull with a soldering iron if you have to.
What you were challenged on was–as I just wrote in the comment that you completely ignored while replying to it–your idea that liberals should engage in anti-Mormon bigotry in order to ratfuck the Republicans.
A disgusting idea which you have never walked back, and never since acknowledged–preferring instead to pretend that everyone is disagreeing with you about a point that is completely fucking obvious and revel in being “right” about a complete no-brainer statistic that no one ever disagreed with.
You are a really fucked-up piece of work. Seriously. As in, whatever meds you’re on for your Asperger’s do not seem to be working, as in you should no-joke have yourself examined for head trauma or something beyond an admitted inability to relate to other human beings socially.
Get help. You obviously need it. I can empathize with that. Just stop wasting our time treating B-J as your personal therapy group.
THE
@Delia: Thanks. I am not from USA and the Mormon religion is still a little exotic to me. I have read The Book of Mormon though. Many years ago.
Samara Morgan
Now, you have all heard my story about Young Brigham Turning A Heifer and Young Brigham’s Horse in the Cowboy Bar, but ima share more of Young Brighams Traildrive Talk.
So, there we were, driving 200 cow/calf units from the BLM forest permit to Daniels. It was a two-sleep drive and we had the chuck wagon (except it was a Ford F-250 diesel) and bedrolls an’ shit. The real cowboys all made fun of my PJ (Pierre Jolicoeur, a kind of jumping saddle) but Young Brigham stuck up for me like usual.
I had wretched saddle sores on both knees from the seam on my levis and they hurrt so bad i cried.
But Young Brigham tole me a secret. All the real cowboys wear panty hose under their jeans.
and he pulled down his wranglers to show me the top of his pantyhose waistband.
wetcasements
When a hatched-faced cretin like Greg Gutfeld is your “funny” guy, well, you should give up.
Catsy
@Samara Morgan:
No. It is not.
As I said–and as you ought to remember, since you wrote the words–your suggestion was that we need to engage in anti-Mormon bigotry, to ratfuck them by exploiting Republican bigotry. In the process, empowering and validating that bigotry and granting it bipartisan cover.
I would hope that even you can tell the difference between “let’s be bigots in order to ratfuck the GOP” and “if the GOP is going to use SuperPACs, we can’t disarm ourselves by refusing to do so”.
You can make all sorts of arguments both for and against SuperPACs and Obama’s decision to use them. But comparing it to becoming bigots in order to exacerbate and exploit the bigotry of Republicans is just… lunacy is too kind a word.
So I’ll ask you pointedly: do you still think that liberals should engage in anti-Mormon bigotry in order to instigate more of the same within the Republican Party?
Own your words or walk them back. But you wrote them. And it’s long past time you stopped pretending that anyone disagreed with you about Romney’s “Mormon problem” with Republicans rather than about this.
Good grief.
Omnes Omnibus
@Catsy: Don’t waste your time. I should know. I am working on a new technique that spares me a large amount of head-desk when dealing with toko. Simply point out the error(s) of fact of logic in her comment. Then stop interacting with her. In this way, the problems in her comments are pointed out, she doesn’t persuade someone due to being unrefuted, and you don’t have large, difficult-to-explain forehead bruises.
Bobby
Samara, riffing off of Cole’s post at the top of the site, why don’t we focus on the heinous religion that is Islam. Let’s focus on its disgusting tenets and the grotesque things that it licenses. Let’s bear scrutiny on the poisonous manner in which it infects societies in which it is regnant. Let’s talk about the child-raping founder of your religion (Peace Not Be Upon Him). Once we’ve finished that discussion, then let’s talk about EDK and the Mormon portrait.
E.D. Kain
@parsimon: Corey Robin is great, and his book is also great.
E.D. Kain
@rumpole: Tolkien was a deeply conservative traditionalist and his books were about the corruption of man by the promise of power. More broadly it was the threat of industrialism and totalitarianism that frightened him, and the little platoons of Burke’s imagination that delighted him – small things, small, ordinary people – the Shire. It’s a very conservative text, just not at all conservative in the modern sense.
E.D. Kain
@Wag: Thanks!
Tehanu
@Catsy:
THIS, THIS, THIS! Yes! I’m so sick and tired of so-called “conservatives” screeching about how THEY are the only people who are “good” or “patriotic” and anybody who disagrees with them about anything is Satan. Screw that BS!
Snarky McSnarksnark
@The Dude Abides:
Perhaps that’s because you’re confusing “conservative” (which is a political tradition that is skeptical about imposing radical change on the political culture or environment), with right-wing, which is precisely the opposite.
The current “movement conservatives” in America are not conservative. They’re radical. They’re right-wing. But they’re not conservative.
Chet
@Mnemosyne: What, no love for Anthony Mann?
Ralph Dosser
Yes, when sawing metal or any hard material, always cut *towards* your groin.
Samara Morgan
@Catsy: having spent extensive time with with mormons i am prejudiced against them. Sensible humans are.
Mormons want to tell other humans what to do, and they have no scruples about taling over local governments in order to do so.
Im sick of your “we are better than that” bulshytt.
we arent.
@Bobby: /yawn another JAFI. you might have a point if muslims were invading and occupying America, but alas, you dont. Because we went there to try to force missionary democracy down muslim throats.
haha, how did that work out for America?
14 trillion dollahs latah Iraq planted a boot in America’s fat white judeo-xian ass.
Samara Morgan
Here is the 2009 version of EDK slobbering over a Conor Friedersdorf post at TAS..
he is here pandering to you dumb cudlips.
just lap up the drench Catsy.
mooo mooo
Samara Morgan
Here is the 2009 version of EDK slobbering over a Conor Friedersdorf post at TAS..
he is here pandering to you dimbos for pageclicks for his new failblog.
next week he will write a post on conservative values in fantasy literature and Sully will link it.
.
just lap up the drench Catsy.
mooo mooo
Samara Morgan
also too.
I am rellay offended by this.
that just is not true. C&W is played all over the world, and blankets the airwaves of rural america.
Kain completely doesnt get pop culture. I suspect this because he lacks sufficient grey matter in the ACC and has innate conservative tendency. Nearly all libertarians do.
Sith Lord cw even pointed this out to Kain years ago.
Art is a reflection of pop culture.
McNaughton’s paintings are a snapshot of a minority culture (mormonism) that is disenfranchised from the mainstream.
Its stupid and lazy of Kain to try to use those paintings as an example of why “conservatives cant do pop culture”.
Samara Morgan
@Chet: hai chet.
miss TAS yet?
i guess i wont have Jim Manzi to
kick aroundargue with anymore.im banned at NRO.
How sad is that? Once upon a time they frontpaged me.
;)
Samara Morgan
@Catsy:
to me, these two things are the same.
like i said, mormons are seriously weird, and the mormon church is part of the axis of religio-political evil that has corrupted our country’s system of government. Look at the millions the mormons and catholics poured into Prop 8. the catholic church has been suborned by evil too.
im not above ratfucking. glad you are so noble, but nobility is gunna lose to ratfucking evertime..
;)
Samara Morgan
And again, fools.
Kain is just here pandering for pageclicks and because he wants to switch horses as it becomes more and more obvious that Obama is going to win.
Samara Morgan
Fool me once, shame on you (Kain).
Fool me twice, shame on Balloon Juice.
;)
Samara Morgan
@Chet: that would be an interesting post, non?
Why Culture 11 and TAS both failed?
I just think there is no market with the conservative base for intellectual argument.
I blame red/blue genetics.
;)
Samara Morgan
@Chet: i miss cw.
i miss the old Dr. Manzi, and the old Razib Khan.
wha’ happened?
im just bewildered and benighted.
is modern politics like some sort of memetic centrifuge?
Moik
Samara Morgan : ED Kain :: ABL : Glenn Greenwald
Samara Morgan
@Moik: nah.
EDK: libertarian
GG: libertarian.
get a clue, cudlip.
EDK is pimping a new failblog where he is trying to rebrand himself for public consumption as a neo-liberal or some other fuckwit buzzword.
Greenwald is an expat brazilian glibertarian who is actually making a living blogging.
Kain is just a GG wannabe.
mooooo mooooo
John S.
This is a bunch of bulkshit. Since EDK didn’t seem to actually respond to my questioning of why LOTR is deemed conservative, I guess we’ll go by his former explanation.
Several commenters chimed in to explain that Tolkien doesn’t conform to modern constructs of conservatism, that politics in his time (and in Europe) were defined very differently, and that his fondness for a simpler time ate evidence of his conservative bona fides. And while these are all valid observations, it completely misses the game that EDK is playing.
When someone advances the argument in the manner EDK is with regards to LOTR being conservative, it has nothing to do with any of the nuances mentioned above. What it’s about is attributing an entire set of ideals that many would consider noble – loyalty, honor, moral fiber – as somehow being exclusively the domain of conservatives. This is utter nonsense, and it doesn’t matter what brand of conservatism used to exist 75 years ago or the roots from which it spawned. That doesn’t seem to be the context in which EDK is making his declarative statement about LOTR.
It’s about propping up and lauding a failed ideology in the present tense by attempting to co-opt an entire realm of values and claim them as the exclusive domain of some fictional notion of “conservative”.
THE
@Samara Morgan: In all honesty Samara, I think you’ve changed more than they have.
brantl
The Lord of the Rings is about people sacrificing everything to save the people and civilization that they care about from an over-arching greed for power and domination. It’s as liberal as you can get, you numbnuts. ED Kain, still full of shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@brantl: Wow, hoocoodanode that multi-volume epic story might be open to multiple interpretations?
Paul in KY
@cintibud: I agree mostly. Only quibble would be that the Ring cannot be used as intended by mortals. If you are too weak to use it, it gives you the default setting of invisibility. Those who can use it as intended, when they put it on, it does not turn them invisible.
Even Isildur is turned invisible when he puts it on.
Paul in KY
@Samara Morgan: I think any male dweeb who is tithing & not in jail & goes to the services is an ‘elder’.
IMO, a real Mormon bigwig is called a ‘bishop’.
Hell, I think that weirdo that kidnapped that Mormon girl a few years ago was an ‘elder’.
Samara Morgan
@John S.: look. that slimey little creep was saying the same thing in 2009.
he just repackaged his argument with a McNaughton wrapping to pander to the juicitairat.
read Sith Lord cw’s elegant takedown of Kain’s core meme again.
— cw · Feb 27, 12:00 PM · #
Samara Morgan
@Paul in KY: well, it true that Young Brighams father was also a “jack” mormon. He rode his horse into the Cowboy Bar in Jackson Hole under the influence and gave beers to his hay crew of mormon boys.
;)
my sample is not the same as Delia’s sample. i grew up with mormons, she WAS a mormon.
did you know some mormons are instructed to “cloak” their weirder beliefs around the “gentiles”?
mormon taqiyya.
Samara Morgan
@Omnes Omnibus:
do you agree that is pure unadulterated bulshytt?
Samara Morgan
@THE: No. I learned the ugly truth about conservatives and libertarians.
Kain learned nothing from the Fall of Culture 11.
All he is interested in is pandering to enough constituencies to make a living blogging.
He just isnt that good a writer.
THE
@Samara Morgan: Perhaps it doesn’t bother me so much because I am pretty apolitical and indifferent on the left-right econo-spectrum. I think econotheory can handle whatever.
The US right has lost me most because of the religion and the antiscience. Also the extreme militarism of the neocons is fantasy politics. The Dems are just more sensible. Adult.
Edit: The current bunch of Republicans are flakes.
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
she’s also an expert in neurolinguistics and cognitive science because she read some really interesting sci-fi books.
chopper
@Samara Morgan:
you clearly don’t get pop culture if you think the reference to ‘nashville’ meant ‘only the city limits of nashville’. in american music, ‘nashville’ is a metaphor for the country music world. in the same manner as ‘hollywood’ refers to the film industry. it’s called a ‘metonym’.
Bobby
Samara, Islam is a religion and not an ethnicity. There are no “Islamic countries” — just countries with Islamic adherents within them. A country can not be Islamic when there is one person within them that is not Islamic. You have no right to conscript non-Muslim citizens of Muslim-majority countries into your misbegotten agenda. Islam is a disgusting, backward, inhumane religion. It was founded by an illiterate child-raping businessman whom adherents idiotically believe to be a prophet. Any one who believes that the Quran is the final, unalterable word of God is a fucking idiot — just like Mormons — and they should be called out as such. You don’t get to hide behind the fact that it is more fashionable in this forum to criticize organized Christian denominations. Your religion is also man-made and fucking idiotic. It also accounts for widespread butchery and oppression. Nothing about the iniquitous conduct of the American government changes that.
Moik
@Samara Morgan:
Analogy fail. Wasn’t comparing or endorsing GG and EDK – your single-minded obsession with ED reminds me of ABL’s constant jihad against GG.
Paul in KY
@Samara Morgan: I figured they would keep the Kolob & white salamander stuff under wraps.
I would too if I were in their shoes.
Samara Morgan
@Moik: you knoes….i knew EDK before.
At Culture 11 and TAS.
i think i know him bettah tnan you do.
Samara Morgan
@chopper: dude.
nashville means nashville as far as im concerned.
words have meanings.
@Bobby: you are an idiot. in islamic culture proselytization is forbidden by shariah law, by the Rule of Law.
that is why 10 years, trillions of american taxpayer dollahs , an’ thousands of Murrican dead and damaged american soljahs later, Iraq is still 97% muslim and A-stan is still 99% muslim.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“Cash, Haggard, Kristofferson, Willie had first-tier artists who either never were with or broke radically with the current iteration of “conservatism.”’
Also, Bonnie Raitt, Charley Pride.
Samara Morgan
And right on cue, Sully approvingly links Kain’s new failblog.
if i could be a frontpager for one post, I’d frontpage cw’s excellent takedown of Kains moronic meanderings.
;)