House of Eratosthenes

Liberals, as Thomas Sowell pointed out twenty years ago, dominate comedy, fiction and drama. Why they don’t dominate something else is obvious. Their required attachment to reality isn’t there. They think gender is a matter of opinion, ObamaCare was awesome, and the Clintons have a wonderful marriage.

The mystery, to me, is why they “dominate” even what they dominate. They think a reference to Chris Christie being overweight is a great punchline.

They don’t even try for drama. Haven’t you noticed? You’d think a one-trick pony would at least know the trick, but liberal drama is heavy on effort and light on achievement. All liberal drama breaks down into “A is a victim because B victimized A. C is completely oblivious to this but D is sufficiently enlightened to notice A’s victim-status, and this makes D a GOOD PERSON. The end.” Go on, think of something liberals put together that falls outside of this. Better yet, think of something they put together that doesn’t…and, somehow, scored Oscar gold. With you being left wondering why, thinking you’re the only one. See how we’ve been rooked? Damn you, Dickens.

Oh sure, the rest of us keep lapping it up and demanding seconds, because, through over-exposure all these years, we’ve lost our sense of perspective. We’re like some weird other-culture, maybe like the future world in Demolition Man, where all the gourmet Mexican restaurants are Taco Bell because no one can remember ever having had anything better.

This was not an overnight thing. No publisher accepted a manuscript from Charles Dickens and decreed “That’s it, from this day forward this is what drama is, burn everything else.” In my lifetime, we had Westerns, tales of good rising up to confront evil. In fact, even the Westerns were rehashes. Pale Rider is the same story as Shane, and so is Steel Dawn. These are all stories about oppressors and victims, but they also had battle-climaxes near the end where the hero would mete out justice against the villains. These days some “action” movies still have battle-climaxes near the end, but you can see this staple is living on borrowed time. The other vital piece, “So-and-so has been victimized, nobody can see it except these sensitive, intelligent, enlightened people over here” is going strong. Well of course it is; it’s still in the prime of life. The “Shane” story-line doesn’t include enshrinement of some noble Olympus-inhabiting class of elite demigods uniquely endowed with the ability to see injustice; the injustice was a matter of fact.

This is why I say, I can’t understand why liberals dominate drama. In real drama, you have to have a meaningful event or two happening. “A is a victim, B is the oppressor, C is the ignoramus and D is uniquely enlightened sage who can see what’s wrong” — if it is true at the end, it will all have to be true at the beginning. Right? If everything that’s true and that matters at the beginning, is still true at the end, there’s no place to put any kind of a story. You can’t have a plot. And, indeed, when I look at this depressing wilderness of movies made by liberals, I see they tend to strain under this problem. There is no plot, because nothing is happening, and nothing is happening because there’s no shift in these roles. The victim is still a victim. The ignoramus is still an ignoramus and the enlightened empathy-authority is still an enlightened empathy-authority. Maybe the oppressor stops oppressing, but that’s all you get.

The teevee shows are even worse. Episode after episode, season after season; the cast-core is D. Oh look how enlightened and sensitive we are…everyone else is a bunch of ignoramuses, but we can see what sort of victimizing took place. Maybe we’ll even do something about it. Maybe. But the important thing is we’re sensitive to it and we acknowledge it. And so-and-so is a victim.

I’m afraid what’s getting jettisoned here is something bigger than all of this. Like…the concept of time. A future. A situation getting meaningfully improved. People enjoying freedom, at the end of a story, that they didn’t have at the beginning. Moses did something — because, with his people liberated from Egypt, a Jewish state became possible. And then Sampson did something, and then David did something, and then Christ did something. No wonder liberals hate the Bible. It upstages them.

Their drama is boring, because the doing-of-something is decidedly secondary. The primary is “Lookit me, I have empathy and I can see.”

I don’t know why liberals dominate drama. I really don’t.

The Demolition-Man Taco Bell analogy is apt. It’s on the rest of us. We’ve settled because we don’t know any better.

My take is slightly different: In a world where people fear change, “drama” is stagnant. It, not religion, is the opium of the people. In a world where people are comfortable with change, drama – no quotation marks — is vigorous.

Look at turns of centuries. Lots of epochal change at the end of the 18th century — American and French Revolutions, Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution, etc. But, people were comfortable with it (if that’s the right word) because it was clear which way the wind was blowing. There were real injustices, being meted out by real villains. Now look at the art: Mozart, Beethoven, William Blake, Wordsworth. Radical, innovative… and hopeful. Think of Frankenstein, the era’s defining novel — whether you see it as an allegory of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, whatever, you’ve got man literally playing God. We shouldn’t, the novel says, but we can (or soon will be able to).

Then the end of the 19th century — Decadence, Modernism, “art for art’s sake.” We think of it as innovative, radical, and it was… but innovative and radical for the sake of being innovative and radical, nothing more. (When both Hitler and Virginia Woolf say the modern world started in 1911, you know there’s some big problems with art around that time). People feared change and were stressed about it, so you get Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism. But think of a pop novel from the time everyone has read: Dracula. Sure, he’s evil, and technically his plan is to vampirize the British Empire, but when you look at what he actually does, he just molests white women… an unnaturally pale foreigner, using our own technology against us. Van Helsing isn’t a heroic scientist who saves the day — again, when you look at what he actually does, he’s a mystical kook.

Artists back then (1898) wrote for other artists; this was the height of the “mandarin” style. They were virtue-signalling to each other that they were “real artistes.” There’s no art scene to speak of in 21st century America, so those who consider themselves artistes have to virtue-signal the only way they can, by making dreary “message” “dramas” that are all the same at bottom.
- Severian | 10/08/2017 @ 05:10
[…] All liberal drama breaks down into “A is a victim because B victimized A. C is completely oblivious to this but D is sufficiently enlightened to notice A’s victim-status, and this makes D a GOOD PERSON. The end.” House of Eratosthenes […]
- Lapdances in the Labyrinth - American Digest | 10/09/2017 @ 11:04

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