Jon Chait’s peculiar, pointless wander through Hollywood’s liberal bias says a lot, I guess, about a lot– about mainstream liberalism’s passionate self-hatred, about liberal commentators’ refusal to straightforwardly express the superiority of their values (as conservatives have done to incredible political effect), and about what a weird form of toothless cultural liberalism New York Magazine now represents.
I find Chait’s repeated claim that conservatives are no longer fighting the culture war against Hollywood to be self-evidently absurd. We’re living in a world with Big Hollywood and An American Carol and Archbishop Dolan and seemingly hundreds of conservative groups that “monitor” Hollywood and televsion…. Michael Medved, quoted credulously and at length in the piece, enjoys national prominence. The Parents Television Council makes national news just about every month. It’s a bizarre claim, the kind that you can only make if you are living the secluded, myopic life that you think you’re critiquing.
But I’ll leave that fight to others. For my part, I just want to point out the incoherence of trying to talk about bias as an expression of anything other than the preferences of the person making the claim. Chait wants us to take conservative claims of cultural bias in Hollywood seriously. He wants to suggest that bias is somehow illegitimate even if he doesn’t agree with the perspective of those claiming bias. “Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion. You’d probably be angry, too.”
You’ll note that conservatives would never undertake a similar project; you are not going to find a conservative writer concern trolling about the massive conservative bias in our military, or in our corporate world, despite the fact that both of these are vastly more powerful forces than Hollywood. Nor will you hear conservatives worrying aloud about the conservative bias of American Christianity, or sports media, or video games. The reason, of course, is that these biases are not seen as bias at all, but just the way things are. To conservatives and ostensibly liberal worriers like Chait, bias is only and ever liberal. Liberal bias in our African American studies programs is a problem to be solved. Conservative bias in the chambers of commerce? Hey, that’s life.
The truth is that there is no vantage point from which you can observe bias that isn’t your own contingent, ideological perspective. Nor are complaints about bias qua bias ever consistently applied. After all, I too hate Hollywood’s biases. I hate Hollywood’s bias towards capitalism, towards simplistic Manicheanism, towards militarism, towards the notion that all problems can be solved through violence, towards the very idea of righteous violence. I hate that Hollywood acts as if every happy life ends in romantic coupling, or that every happy couple has to maintain sexual monogamy, or that raising children is necessarily the endpoint of the good life. I hate Hollywood’s cultural colonialism, its sexism, its heteronormativity, its treatment of gender confusion as comedic. I hate Hollywood for its empty, useless cultural liberalism that suggests that structural changes are never necessary. I hate its bias towards the establishment.
Now: there’s nothing inherently different between my claims of bias and conservative claims of bias. And yet knowing Jon Chait’s work, I can say with certainty that he would never take my complaints seriously in the same way that he takes conservative complaints seriously. He would not ask you to put yourself in my shoes. In fact, as he is the kind of Very Serious liberal that merely dislikes those to his right but passionately hates those to his left, he would be far more likely to treat my complaints with straightforward contempt– which of course is merely to say that he is, himself, biased, as we all are. That’s the problem with claims of bias: there’s no way to stand outside of yourself. Better just to advocate for what you think of as right. (You know what I call more gay characters on television, more nontraditional families in movies, more anti-big business narratives out there? Moral progress.)
Oh, by the way, since it wouldn’t be a piece of neoliberal big think without some flat factual errors: Chait claims that “In Red Dawn, the paranoid 1984 action film about a Communist invasion of America, the Cuban commander of the occupying Communist forces (don’t ask) ultimately lets rebel leader Patrick Swayze go free, and the story ends with a meditation on the evils of war.”
And here’s IMDB’s transcript of the end of that movie:
Erica: [closing narration] I never saw the Eckert Brothers again. In time, this war – like every other war – ended. But I never forgot. And I come to this place often, when no one else does.
[we see “Partisan Rock,” with its memorial plaque, which she reads for us]Erica: “… In the early days of World War 3, guerillas – mostly children – placed the names of their lost upon this rock. They fought here alone and gave up their lives, so that this nation should not perish from the earth.”
Yeah, it’s straight out of Eugene Debs.
The Moar You Know
Most people who espouse the level of hatred towards their own belief systems that Chait does here go on to commit suicide.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, I’ll leave this to guys like Cole, Soonergrunt, Raven, Cassidy, and others who have experienced war up close and personal to inform Chait, fucking civilian slime, as my NCOs used to say with superb contempt, just how actually evil war is, and how Hollywood contributes to delusions about it.
Red Dawn is an excellent example of that delusion, although in places (totally missed by the usual cheerleading from across an ocean morons) breaks through, but the ending is not the place where it does it.
Mnemosyne
Yeah, imagine all those poor white supremacists whose values were demeaned when companies like Disney suppressed some of the racist imagery in their films and made white people feel embarrassed for it having been there in the first place. Why can’t we treat racism as a normal expression of society like it used to be, amirite?
joes527
Having Red Dawn end on a meditation on the evils of war is a fiction, but that movie has an interesting soliloquy by the south american Colonel on the evils of being an occupying army.
In the mid 80’s that was an interesting thing to put in a movie that for the most part was F-Yeahh!! WAR!!
danah gaz (fka gaz)
I don’t see why people are so quick to denigrate bias.
Facts have a bias. Milquetoast balance seeking is not the same as truth seeking.
Most of the time, there are not two sides of any given issue. Usually there’s dozens of “sides” and most of them are wrong. A lot of them are just ignorant or based upon lies.
I’m sick of people criticizing bias. It’s beyond stupid that people do this. Reality is biased.
Villago Delenda Est
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Reality is heavily biased against ideology.
Which is why “movement conservatives” hate is as much as hard core Leninists and Maoists.
The Moar You Know
@danah gaz (fka gaz): As an old school DKos survivor, I shit myself with fear every time the words “reality” and “bias” appear next to each other.
Hopefully nobody here knows what I’m talking about.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
This.
As a general rule, someone accusing you of a ‘bias’ is probably just trying to get you to surrender to their bias, without thinking.
Or, more succinctly: “To breathe is to judge.” (Albert Camus).
Villago Delenda Est
BTW, have you noticed that this site is lousy with ACTUAL COMBAT VETS, far out of proportion to their numbers in society as a whole?
What does this suggest to you?
Redshift
That’s called progress. Not our problem that conservatives are against it.
TheStone
I’ve perceived a recent upswell in Red Dawn nostalgia, particularly among what some would call the hipster set. Kinda tapping the same vein as the “America F*** Yeah” business. Just an observation; too hungover today to consider what, if any, significance it bears re: media political economy.
feckless
Its Republican bias not “conservative”. Republicanism has never ‘conserved’ anything since Teddy Roosevelt
kc
Even the liberal Jonathan Chait …
Nemo_N
But that would sound conservative/fundamentalist!
Moral ambiguity 4life!
Hal
The problem as I see it is that in order for me to be unbiased, I would have to accept concepts such as legitimate rape and invisible rape force shields, that evolution and global warming are lies and tricks by Satan and Al Gore respectively, and that Kirk Cameron is a brilliant philosophical mind. All of those things are of course in direct contradiction with the facts. There is no liberal bias, that’s just called reality.
Pavonis
One component of modern liberal philosophy is anti-conformity. But this often devolves into rebellion for rebellion’s sake. Hey, all the other liberals are spending their time bashing conservatives so I’m going to be different and criticize some of my own team instead! Frankly, this behavior is selfish and unproductive. It’s time to rebel against the need to always be a rebel.
Rereading my post makes me dizzy as it criticizes liberals for criticizing liberals. Oh well.
Cris (without an H)
The thing about Red Dawn is that, for all its flaws, it’s really a pretty well-made movie. John Milius may be a conservative gun nut, but he’s also a filmmaker, and as such he’s more interested in telling stories than in preaching his personal ideology. The latter tends to get in the way of the former.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Someone has been over analyzing Red Dawn 1984 me thinks. It was basically a little boy’s fantasy. Millues came out right and said he based on his childhood games and just changed the Germans to Soviets. It’s escapism, in other words stupid.
But now we have a new Red Dawn, were we are invaded by the North Koreans of all things. They should have gone for broke and made it the Canadians invading (the red dawn being the Mounties)
dm9871
Chiat writes, “Imagine that large chunks of your entertainment mocked your values and even transformed once-uncontroversial beliefs of yours into a kind of bigotry that might be greeted with revulsion. You’d probably be angry, too.””
I’m a liberal and that *is* the world I live in. Popular culture (if not Hollywood per se) mocks my values: America kills hundreds of thousands of brown people in Iraq for no apparent reason, and the news industry segment of popular culture breathlessly glorifies it on tv while deriding people like me as naive hippies. We imprison more than a million of our own citizens for nonviolent drug offenses, while there are countless shows glorifying that process and dehumanizing those in prison etc.
I don’t have to “imagine.”
Mino
You know what I call more gay characters on television, more nontraditional families in movies, more anti-big business narratives out there? Moral progress.
Television and music has done more to advance equality than all the schools and scolds have ever done. Period.
When we began to see African Americans used in ad campaigns and commercials aimed at the entire population, the course was set.
MBunge
“liberal commentators’ refusal to straightforwardly express the superiority of their values”
Actually, plenty of liberal commentators are happy to express the superiority of THEIR values, in a completely personal sense. What they refuse to do is place their values in the context of a broader liberal movement, something conservatives love to do, because too many liberal commentators see that as diminishing their own unique specialness.
Conservatives see life as an army, of which they’re a part.
Liberals see life as a movie, and each of them thinks they’re the star.
Mike
Roger Moore
@Pavonis:
I like to say that there’s no point in questioning authority if you’re unwilling to listen to the answers. Rejecting all authority is letting The Man tell you what to do just as much as accepting all authority.
Hawes
I thought Chait’s point was that conservatives have largely abandoned the culture wars that were at the heart of the early ’90s.
How the fuck does Breitbart’s Big Hollywood Failathon, American Carol and Atlas Shrugged contradict that point? Yes, they have voices howling in the wilderness, but where is the outrage over Modern Family?
If Pat Santorum had won, maybe that would be an issue, but I doubt it.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@The Moar You Know: I’m guessing you are referring to a troll.
I’ve rarely ventured over to the great orange satan, so I’ve been mercifully deprived of it’s ravings.
Alex S.
blah blah blah… bias. In statistics, bias is the deviation of an estimate from reality. So what’s Hollywood’s liberal bias? Does it portray the world as more liberal than it is? I don’t know. How many big-budget Hollywood movies about working class people are there? How many movies show ideal liberal worlds, you know, world peace, equality, everybody gets along, etc… not many, because those movies would be boring. If Hollywood makes more movies about gay jewish abortion doctors adopting black disabled children in Oklahoma, then we can talk about liberal bias.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@MBunge: you’re post is complete nonsense.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@danah gaz (fka gaz): that would be “your” – I was going to say something else, then edited. meh. and now my edit button is dead. FYWP.
Roger Moore
@Mino:
And Sports was way ahead of them.
David Margolies
I saw the trailer for the remake of Red Dawn –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn_(2012_film)
Apparently the Cubans are N. Koreans this time. (Wikipedia says originally Chinese but change to N. Koreans post-production.)
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Alex S.: In shoestring recording on a budget, bias is what you have to do to those cantankerous vacuum tubes on your home-brewed marshal amp knockoff. =)
jeffreyw
@joes527: In the mid 80s the occupying army that was in the news was Soviet.
Mark S.
North Korea invading and occupying the United States? The only way it could be less realistic is if it were Luxembourg.
Jewish Steel
@Alex S.:
Have you cast this film yet? Because I’d like to read for the producers…
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Alex S.: And in journalism (or what passes for it these days), bias is the bogeyman that a proud stenographer assiduously avoids the appearance of by ignoring the fact that one of the people they are reporting on is clearly making shit up.
David Margolies
@32 Perhaps it is actually a remake of The Mouse That Roared — http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053084/
Marc
Chait is repeating that key conservative argument that bias–the suspension of moral or factual judgment–is equivalent to having a point of view. As Freddie says, we all have our own contingent viewpoints, but that doesn’t always equate to bias. To imply that it does is to perpetuate one of the bedrock conservative talking points.
SatanicPanic
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Probably if I had seen that movie when I was 14 I would have loved it. Same goes with reading Ayn Rand. I’m sensing a pattern to wingnut thought here.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@MBunge: I love when people put their name at the end of a post.
You remind me of William Shatner’s character “Denny Krane” in that old “Boston Legal” show.
Zifnab
@Hawes:
Well, firstly, you only need to get in the mile long line at Chick-Fil-A to realize the culture wars are far from over. Now, in many places, the conservative movement has lost ground in the culture wars. You see a lot more kids abandoning the various churches, for instance. “Jesus For Kids” is a niche market, where as back in the 80s you’d get a face full of Americanized Christianity on network TV as often as Captain Planet or Ninja Turtles.
Big Hollywood wasn’t a failure until after Brietbart kicked it, and the site wasn’t part of the insider media circle. American Carol flopped because it had a weak advertising budget and because the movie market is a tough business even for good movies. Atlas Shrugged sank for the same reasons. If these two movies had the promotion that “Dark Shadows” received, I imagine they’d have done substantially better at the box office.
And as to the lack of outrage over Modern Family… One Million Moms staged a boycott against advertisers of the show, along with Ellen and Glee. But Sophia Vergara has a sweet rack, and that captures eyeballs, so it was something of a flop.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Hawes, @Zifnab: Chick-Fil-A, Todd Akin, Kirk Cameron, The Catholic Bishops, AFA, NOM, etc.
Nothing to see here. Move along folks.
? Martin
It’s true, however, that the entertainment industry is no longer a front line battle for the right. All the stuff you’re talking about is basically invisible to anyone who doesn’t regularly follow politics. That’s a big change from 20-30 years ago when the right was actively campaigning against these things – when you’d hear that from presidential candidates and even from Democrats.
Personally, I think Matt and Trey just wore them out.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Can’t say that I’ve ever been able to grasp the concept, but I do know that cathode bias is a wonderful thing.
Davis X. Machina
@Pavonis: In the 7th grade my daughter was taken aside quietly by the other square pegs and informed that she was being non-conformist in the wrong way, and making them look bad.
jlow
@The Moar You Know: Ha ha ha ha! Always reminds me of a dirtyish joke I heard as a kid about a doctor that performed circumcisions. For years he saved the clippings and when he retired his hobby was making wallets. Rub them and they turn into a suitcase.
? Martin
@Zifnab:
They sank because they sucked. And nobody wants to go to the movies to be preached to. That’s what sunday morning is for. They didn’t get big advertising budgets because the execs handing that money out knew that they sucked.
burnspbesq
Say what, now? Are you denying the possibility of just war?
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The wingnuts find bias even in cartoons so its stupid to even discuss this.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Uncle Ebeneezer: My friend and I have a couple of lovely heads we built that sound like that. One of them has 14 tubes that can be switched with a big rotary dial, so you can make it sound like several different vintage amps, all in one box. Every circuit is built to original specs as much as possible, even going so far as to get old school oil and paper caps, and carbon block resisters, and all that good stuff. We don’t sell them, because we’re selfish and they take a long time to build.
Admittedly, I don’t even play guitar – but a lot of people we know love our gear – and my cohort does play them.
I’m just the nerdy MacGyver – there for circuit modding and moral support – and I play some keyboard, and can wire up a midi setup in a zillion different ways.
schrodinger's cat
Why do we care what Chait thinks? I fell asleep half way through the post, I think you can make your point in a more concise fashion.
ETA: I don’t mind long posts when you have something to say, like Kay’s posts, they are full of useful information not the same old points, reiterated for the umpteenth time.
Zifnab
@? Martin:
How many trailers did you see for either of these movies? The only reason I even knew they came out was because of the snark on forums like this.
John Carter of Mars flopped. American Carol and – even more so – Atlas Shrugged could only aspire to flopping, because no one even knew they were in theaters.
Someguy
That liberals don’t trumpet their own superiority over conservatives is shocking to me. Perhaps that is the key to liberal failures at the polls – we don’t think we’re desirable therefore we aren’t desired as much by the voters.
WereBear
It is my opinion they never complete the brain maturation process and remain stuck in their defensive, black-and-white, over-reactive, poor-control-over-emotions, stage. Like teens, only worse.
Dunno why I think that, certain behaviors I guess :)
MBunge
@danah gaz (fka gaz): “you’re post is complete nonsense.”
COMPLETE nonsense? You haven’t spent much time reading liberal blogs and commentators, have you?
Mike
Uncle Ebeneezer
@danah gaz (fka gaz): That’s cool man. I am the opposite (not much skill in electronics) so I usually prefer simple amps with Volume, Tone and nothing more. But that sounds like a real beast of a head that you guys created. Too bad they are so labor-intensive, because that sorta thing would have a good market for it. Most amps that try to model multiple sounds, don’t do any of them particularly well. I could see people paying big $ for one that actually delivers.
Mnemosyne
@Zifnab:
They also flopped because they sucked and no one wanted to see them. The Blair Witch Project had a miniscule advertising budget compared to Dark Shadows, and yet it made huge amounts of money, in part because they used their tiny advertising budget very cleverly and made the film into a phenomenon. Same with the Paranomal Activity films.
You can make a successful low-budget film even with a tiny advertising budget if that film is something that people actually want to see.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Yeah, the problem is they use digital circuits with acoustic modelling – ours is different in that it has knockoffs of each original amp circuit in it – analog, and tube based. Eventually, when we scrape some money together, we’re going to retrofit all of our gear with midi-controllable circuitry – but retain the analog guts – just make it so you can tweak the knobs from a central console, and record your knob tweaks. It should make the workflow of mastering a lot more efficient, and improve the quality + cut down on retake time. Unfortunately it will cost about $3k to do, plus labor, and that’s not including the console itself (another $2k at least). One of these days though…
and btw, the head isn’t too hard to use. =) The rotary is labeled with the different amps like Mesa Boogie, etc, so you just switch the rotary to the amp u like, much like you do with those digital shitboxes you can find at guitar center.
Spatula
@Villago Delenda Est:
Bingo.
Gosh, I don’t know, perhaps a pro-military bias?
Roger Moore
@Zifnab:
That’s not at all clear. A promotional budget can’t make a silk purse of a sow’s ear, and smart promotion and good word of mouth can promote a movie that doesn’t have big studio backing. Consider John Carter as evidence of the first, and Tyler Perry as evidence of the second. There’s no particular reason to think American Carol and Atlas Shrugged would have done any better financially if some studio had decided to promote them heavily; it’s far more likely that it would only have increased their losses.
SatanicPanic
@Uncle Ebeneezer:
I want one!
Chris
@dm9871:
This.
I know I’ve commented on this before and other people have agreed with me, but comparing today’s action/crime/spy shows to those of the sixties or even the eighties, there’s no question in my mind that the genre has gotten way more conservative. There’s no equivalent to “24” in the shows from the good old days, and even the shows that aren’t that hardcore have pretty much all bought into the “security state = good” ideology. Even when they do go after some of America’s demons (e.g. conspiracies from oil cartels or military contractors or Republican presidents in “24”), the solution will always be giving Jack Bauer a free hand to torture, beat and kill his way through the pile of bad guys.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@SatanicPanic: You can get the parts online, and you have to fabricate your PCB boards which requires access to a laser printer (we use office depot) and some acid. (Not LSD though that may help). Beyond that, you need a soldering iron, a lot of patience, and preferably some circuit modelling software to make prototyping much easier.
Dave
I tried to read that Chait piece the other day. It sucked. Lost me in the second paragraph.
Point is, I’m a much happier person when I’m not paying attention to establishmentarians. If you think there’s an objective good to be got from pummeling Chait, then have at it. If you’re doing it for yourself, you should just find cooler people to read.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@MBunge: I either spend more time than you on them, or my reading comprehension is much better than yours.
Signing your posts doesn’t make them more persuasive. It just makes you look like a douche-canoe. That little piece of net etiquette provided by an old hand, free of charge.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Also, too, you know what the Hollywood bias is towards? Money. Making lots and lots of money. If the studios thought that An American Carol was going to be able to make millions of dollars for them, they would have bought it and promoted the hell out of it. Because more than promoting liberalism, the studios want to make money.
American movies and TV have soft liberalism in them because that’s what audiences like and will go to see. Period.
Roger Moore
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
I think you’re assuming more skill in assembly than is necessarily justified. There are plenty of people, even people who are technically literate, who you could give all the parts and a soldering iron, and all they’d wind up with is a pile of junk and a bunch of burns.
taylormattd
I find it deeply ironic that you wrote this sentence:
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Roger Moore: Probably, but it’s the best I can offer. Unless somebody wants to bubble-wrap some children and ship them to us from the Zhejiang province, we won’t be selling them ourselves. It’s too much work, so it’d be a serious loss for us. The best alternative I can offer is either DIY, or come to our crappy studio. Maybe one day, we’ll be major league – but we’re not going for that. Right now, it’s strictly a local affair. =/
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
This, this, this.
And because Hollywood’s audience is the world, not the American Conservative Demographic (of which most of their audience is not a part), it’s inevitable that their main interest isn’t going to be preaching Gooper ideology.
That would be instance 3,720 in which Market Forces make a decision that American Conservatives don’t like, and American Conservatives react by screaming and crying that there’s some kind of big conspiracy to hurt their widdle fee-fees. (Because, you know, the One-Worlder Socialist Cartel Bent On Taking Over The World really has nothing better to do with its time than hurting their fee-fees).
RaflW
@The Moar You Know says:
Most people who espouse the level of hatred towards their own belief systems that Chait does here go on to commit suicide.”
Chait’s going for murder-suicide. He wants to kill liberalism through his profligate waffling, doubting and anomie before he self-immolates.
He’s been off my daily reading rotation since moving to NYMag, and was teetering even before that.
SatanicPanic
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Sounds like a fun project. Having the guitar I glued back together NOT come apart has increased my confidence in DIY instrument stuff.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@SatanicPanic: Good on you! – overcoming the fear and replacing it with some confidence is job one. I also suggest you start by building guitar pedals. Preferably simple stompers like an Ibanez Tube Screamer (no actual tubes needed, heh) and work your way to more complicated things. If you happen to be unemployed, it’s a great time to pick up the hobby, because like model ship building and the like, it requires patience and practice.
Corner Stone
@RaflW:
I think DMX’s daughter had that recently. Fluid in the lungs is never a good thing. I’m praying they both get better soon.
MonkeyBoy
You all are missing the dog whistle of “Hollywood” which is a code word for “Hollywood liberal” which is code for “Jew”.
While Barbra Streisand is a liberal, she hardly a liberal that people look to for marching orders. However the right has elevated her to that position because she is a very Jewish looking Jew. Just Google “streisand hollywood liberal“. About 16,400,000 results of Streisans/Jew hate for someone that is a minor player but a symbolic lightning rod.
pseudonymous in nc
As Roy Edroso and others who cover the kulturkampf note, Hollywood is biased in favour of products that make money.
I’ll just note in passing that even among the latest wave of Clan Apatow films, you can count the number of plots in which a female character has an abortion and gets on with her life on all the fingers of one foot. Why? Because you generally can’t make a plot out of that, just as you can’t generate a plot from “sanctimonious Christians live happy, isolated, ignorant lives”.
If anything, the American film and TV industry is more small-c conservative these days than it was in the 1970s.
Spatula
@schrodinger’s cat:
Simply do with Freddie’s posts what I do with Kay’s Democratic Machine/Corrupt System Propaganda: Scroll on past.
Roger Moore
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
You could think about something intermediate, like selling people blueprints or even a kit. You’ve already put in the hard effort of designing the thing and chasing down suppliers. Other people who have the skill to assemble the thing (or the money to pay a competent person to assemble it for them) may still not be willing to do the design and find the parts. A kit lets you sell them your expertise for less than what it would cost them to do it themselves. And if your equipment is good and people know about it, don’t discount the possibility of a well off hobbyist or two waving a stack of money under your nose.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Roger Moore: Not a bad idea. It’d take some work to make it kit-like but if I can figure it out, we may do it. =)
We’ve considered selling some of the guitar pedals we’ve built, because those are quite a bit easier to build and we can keep them well under $100. The amps would clear $1000 easy, even for the kits, unless they were super simple ones. =/
Culture of Truth
Red Dawn represents the American id, at a time of Reagan-era nationalism and nostalgia, a pseudo-Jungian, post-FreudianOMG WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Phil Perspective
@Zifnab: Atlas Shrugged flopped because it was a turgid mess. Besides, they thought they had the right marketing campaign for that mess. Promote it at the think tanks, among other RWNJ’s deemed favorable, and have them help spread the word. So yes, it sucked.
Southern Beale
Oh God it’s so much bigger than that. Did you know that RWer Dinesh D’Souza has a movie out called 2016: Obama’s America? A couple months ago I wrote about local RW blowhard Phil Valentine’s anti-climate change movie.
This is the new plank in the wingnut welfare gravy train, the latest way to fleece the idiot masses and the latest cog in the wingnut wurlitzer. Take a RW talking point, get a conservative “personality” to do a “documentary” on it, get the “filmaker” booked on all the Fox shows, Hannity’s radio show, Limbaugh, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Oh hell no they aren’t giving up on Hollywood, they’ve just created their own “conservative” version of it, like they ALWAYS do. They live in an alternate reality, and they don’t understand why there’s a divide in America? When they’ve sequestered themsevelves away in this crackpot ideological ghetto?
Phil Perspective
@MonkeyBoy: The same goes for that other RWNJ lightning rod, George Soros. I’m sure there are others I’ve forgotten. I wonder how many non-WSJ readers, or political junkies, even know who Soros is.
Corner Stone
@SatanicPanic:
Red Dawn is an American classic. This can not be denied. From the football jock QB leading the rebels to the insane blood drinking C. Thomas Howell who went nutso psycho revenge thrill killer, to the philosophically thoughtful Cuban (Ha! fucking Cubans!) soldier not killing the boys by the train tracks as some sort of redemption. Admit it coastal libs, this movie was a tour de force. Or some other powerful term that’s not French or gay.
LanceThruster
@Villago Delenda Est:
Incoming?!?
Corner Stone
And the real conspiracy of Red Dawn is that they never actually show C. Thomas Howell’s character die! Yeah, that Hind sprays the unholy shit out of an area where he’s supposed to be, but they never show the body! Just a couple rocks and a cloud of dust.
Long live that guy!
Corner Stone
@Villago Delenda Est: I also was wondering this. In that, what metric are you using to calculate population of combat vets : total population? Because I think there’s like 5 of them.
McJulie
Lies and the Lying Liars goes into this at great length and with facts and stuff, but I like to reiterate something — there is a liberal bias in some areas in the media, but it’s effed up because it’s a bias *toward liberal ideas in general* and also *toward conservative politicians and policies.*
It’s so disconnected it approaches full-blown psychosis. One article in your daily newspaper will lament a lack of funding for education, scientific inquiry, or the arts — without any acknowledgement that this money has to come from somewhere, such as, for example, taxes — and another article in that very same newspaper will praise the Ryan budget as “serious” and get very solemn about the deficit. Or articles will shake their heads over gridlock in Congress, without ever, even a little bit, daring to point the finger at the party responsible for that gridlock.
Hollywood will make profitable movies that celebrate labor leaders or environmental crusaders, but the same news outlet that posts a positive review of that movie will turn around and endorse Republican politicians who hate everything those movies supposedly stand for.
Jonny Scrum-half
The point about conservative bias in a number of institutions being “just the way things are” is a really good one. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t thought of it that way before, and I’m really glad to be able to learn something from this post today.
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone:
Five that I can think of right off the top of my head compared to how many posters total?
It seems to me that combat vets have a greater exposure here than in society in general, where they are essentially invisible as far as the MSM and mass consciousness goes.
The country is “at war” in a sense that few ever experience, from 2001 when the Afghan intervention started to the present.
LanceThruster
Don’t forget that the rugged individualists within Hollywood’s liberal cesspool just cant buy a break.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@danah gaz (fka gaz): Very cool. Are there any videos of somebody using your amp? And which amp tones did you include?
Yeah, I guess there wouldn’t be a HUGE market for something like that, but more likely a small market of people willing to pay a lot of $. Kinda like Dumble amps. Not really feasible for a business model unless you’re friends with alot of big name guitarists.
The closest thing I can think of that sorta does what you guys do in the boutique amp world is the Dr. Z Maz Jr which gets tone from Marshall to Vox to Fender, but does so just through a simple circuit and excellent interaction between the pre, power tubes, & cut knob.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Uncle Ebeneezer: We don’t have videos. There’s some local guitarists that use our gear, but where we are located there’s not really anyone that’s interested in filming recording sessions. I suppose if we ever get serious about it we’ll at least post photos and a website, but it’s a cozy hobbyist gig right now. Chris Hoke has used our setup, but he’s mostly acoustic. (ETA: he’s recorded “Jumper cables” with electric pickups through our gear, the rest we just mic’d acoustic cuz that’s how he rolls) The rest are mostly twenty something metalheads that play at bars. =)
Honestly, I’m not an amp aficionado myself so I’d have to look at the dial (in the studio across town) to be able to list the amps it emulates. I mainly just deal in the circuitry, my buddy is the go to guy for the actual vintage knowledge. There’s a couple I can remember sort of – one I won’t forget is the Mesa Boogie which I listed, as it was a signature Hendrix amp =). The other is a knockoff of a 1984 marshal that was discontinued, due to it being a knockoff of some other amp – they got sued or something. The rest, well, I’d have to look again.
Arundel
Freddie: Just want to say I really enjoy reading your thoughtful posts, always. Thanks. I am hoping you’ll revive L’Hote in the fall, but if not, I’m always happy reading you here. Best to you.
Tehanu
@dm9871:
@Mino:
thanks guys, you said it for me better than I could.
paul
You all haven’t read enough Jonathan Chait. The whole point of this article is to twist the knife on the conservatives who lost this war a long time ago. He’s basically saying “we won, we’re imposing our morality on you, ha ha ha. Eat it”