by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n I\u00a0have some confessions to make, not because any of you readers are particularly interested in my views; but rather because I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or popular culture? I am not particularly proud of this quietism (many Athenians did it in the early 4th century BC and Romans by the late 3rd AD), but not really ashamed of it either.<\/p>\n Shut up and See a Movie?<\/strong><\/p>\n Take Hollywood protocol \u2014 make a big movie, hype it, show it at the mall multiplex. But I went to one movie the last year. Maybe three in the last four years. There is not much choice here \u2014 car crashes, evil white men killing the innocent, some gay or feminist heroes fending off club-bearing white homophobic Mississippians in pick-ups. Or you can endure the American war-machine kidnapping, torturing, or murdering even more of the helpless abroad \u2014 with Robert Redford, glassed down, tweed in display, or snarly George Clooney sermonizing, like the choruses of Euripides\u2019 tragedies.<\/p>\n The usual themes \u2014 some evil corporation is destroying something (fill in the blanks: the environment, the neighborhood, the small town, etc.), some CIA conspiracy is out to ruin a crusading heroic journalist, or some brave professor or writer is exposing a massive cover-up \u2014 are, well, boring, even with the sex, the blow-em-up explosions, and some nice scenery. (And all this from a corporate Hollywood \u2014 reliant on the security of the American military, crass in its high tastes and destructive in its behavior, and all the while profit and status obsessed! [The world of Halliburton makes the world safe for Botox?])<\/p>\n If it is not all that, we get instead some neurotic suburban psychodrama about a senseless midlife crisis of some aging yuppies, wondering whether their empty lives really have meaning. Then there are always the \u201caction\u201d movies about tomb-robbing, treasure-hunting, or Zombie killing, but even they try to mask emptiness with a politically-correct throw-away line now and then. Can\u2019t they make one movie of the Lewis and Clark expedition or Lepanto, and one less with Tom Hanks as the anguished and caring postmodern man?<\/p>\n Why Not DVDs?<\/strong><\/p>\n If I watch DVDs, they surely are not of recent vintage. I couldn\u2019t tell you a single release in the current most rented 100. I rewatch instead Westerns \u2014 Peckinpaugh, John Ford, the classics like\u00a0Shane<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0High Noon<\/em>, the greats like Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, George C. Scott, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, John Wayne, etc., and, as I wrote a few months ago, almost anything with a brilliant, but now forgotten character actor such as a Jack Palance, Richard Boone (cf. Cicero Grimes in\u00a0Hombre<\/em>), Ben Johnson, or Warren Oates \u2014 if only for their accents, ad-libbed lines, and carriage. Only the greats like DeNiro or Pacino, or a Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and a few others (a Hackman, Eastwood, or Hopkins) approximate the old breed. (A Mickey Rourke, Gary Oldman, or John Malkovich are at least originals and, like real people, look the worse for it). So I find myself replaying something like a\u00a0Das Boot<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Breaker Morant<\/em>, or supposedly corny 1930s and 1940s classics like\u00a0How Green Was My Valley<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0The Best Years of Our Lives<\/em>. \u00a0If I want to watch a film that failed at the box-office, I\u2019ll take\u00a0One-Eyed Jacks<\/em>\u00a0orMajor Dundee<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Pat Garret and Billy the Kid<\/em>; their failures are better than today\u2019s \u201csuccesses\u201d.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s under thirty American male actors sound like they either have sinus congestion, or are trying to convince someone they are not as effeminate as their contrived appearance otherwise suggests. If my life depended on it, I could not identify any of the current leading actresses. The country needs a screen presence of a Burt Lancaster or Frederic March and it gets instead a Ben Affleck or Leonardo DiCaprio.<\/p>\n Musical Time Warp<\/strong><\/p>\n Ditto music. I don\u2019t know the name of a single rapper. Don\u2019t follow rock anymore. Don\u2019t want to. I like a Mark Knopfler or Coldplay, but mostly missed music\u2019s 21st century. I\u2019m so lost that I think a Bob Seeger and Bruce Hornsby are contemporary mega-stars, though I couldn\u2019t identify a recent hit of either. I haven\u2019t seen any of the kids write as well as Springsteen or Van Morrison. One Otis Redding had more talent than the entire hip-hop industry.<\/p>\n Who is Katie Couric?<\/strong><\/p>\n Add in television. I haven\u2019t watched a network newscast in 10 years. If I want to see a 60-Minutes hit piece, I\u2019ll watch a You Tube video where the amateurs are far more interesting and honest about their ambush journalism. Do the CBS hit-men still try to jump in and cross-up some poor official, as he stammers while they hammer on? Is Andy Rooney still around?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know which anchor is where. I bump into them in their re-aired interviews like the Couric\/Palin disaster or Gibson with his eyeglasses on his nose as if were a professor of Romance Languages grilling Sarah the Idaho co-ed, but other than that could care less.<\/p>\n I\u2019d take a paleo-liberal like Eric Sevareid, John Chancellor, or David Brinkley any day over the most conservative on NBC or CNN. The old guys had style, even class; today\u2019s crowd spends more on teeth-whiteners than on books.<\/p>\n Obama is perfect for the age. Like Bush, he had the Ivy-League degrees; unlike Bush he had the pretension that they meant something, even though in his mind the Berlin Airlift, the German language, Auschwitz, World War II, Cordoba, the geography of the U.S., almost anything dealing with history, geography, literature, or well, knowledge in general \u2014 well all that is stuff that others less relevant than he learned in college.<\/p>\n Commercial-free TV?<\/strong><\/p>\n I like C-Span and have always admired Brian Lamb. I used to be a big fan of PBS and NPR, but no more. The laudable shows are far outweighed by the race\/class\/gender agendas, usually someone in a soft drone, talking scarcely above a whisper, about some new heretofore unnoticed pathology of the U.S. military, corporation, or government (pre-Obama) that a particularly angry but heroic professor or investigative reporter is going to enlighten us about.<\/p>\n Well, There\u2019s Always Sports<\/strong><\/p>\n Next confession: I have not watched a single NFL game \u2014 including the Super bowl \u2014 for more than 10 minutes during the last decade. In the 1980s, I was a big fan. I could not be pried loose from the 49ers and Bill Walsh or Jim Plunkett\u2019s numerous Raider come-backs. Out here Deacon Jones, Dick Bass, and John Brodie were sorta football greats. Not now such heroes. Somewhere around 1990-5 everything went wrong with the big money, big hype, and big egos.<\/p>\n Maybe it is the airs of the sportscasters, and the pseudo-intellectual exegesis of the \u201canalysts.\u201d (I\u2019ll take a Russ Hodges or Dizzy Dean any day, or, god help me, a young Howard Cosell before his decline in the Clay\/Ali days). The constant criminality of the players and the egocentric outbursts didn\u2019t help. Then there\u2019s the pretensions of the buccaneer owners, and the extravaganza of the spectacle of the Roman arena, all that turned me off it \u2014 despite the courage and drama involved in football, and the science and tension of baseball. But one can find that watching high school or college sports.<\/p>\n Ditto the NBA. I have not watched a complete game in 15 years. Here too I could not name 5 current NBA players. I quit with the old Lakers\/Celtics rivalries of the late 1970s and 1980s. (But then I have never played a video game either, and the two now seem to the distant ignorant bystander as about the same thing).<\/p>\n I watched 2 baseball games on television the last 3 years. Again, the melodrama of the sportscasters and writers (a slick Bob Costas as would-be Aristotle in his analyses and Sophocles in the supposed serious tragedy of his modulating voice) assumes the players are Olympians when of course they more or less resemble ego-centric multimillionaires.<\/p>\n Just a dozen selfless players, who keep quiet when they score, give credit to others when they pitch a shut-out, or pass rather than shoot could help things. I don\u2019t mind the constant therapy of the coverage \u2014 the personal interest story of the athlete who lost his mother during training, who conquered polio as a child, or who saved a little boy from a surging stream \u2014 but it does not make up for the absence of manners and sportsmanship.<\/p>\n Print<\/strong><\/p>\n Like most of America I do not read the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 maybe once at an airport this year, but not more. (The only\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0headlines I see are in history books, and pre-1970 they were quite good). It\u2019s not just that I get most of my news on the Internet, but rather that there is no there at the\u00a0Times<\/em>. A void. The front-page stories are thinly disguised op-eds and poorly written and sourced, and the op-eds are undisguised first-person rants by Dowd, Krugman, Herbert, Rich, etc. \u2014 largely embarrassing confessions from a group of well-off, well-connected, status-obsessed elites lecturing the nation outside New York and Los Angeles on its various sorts of illiberality. Life is too short for ground-hog day reads, the same angst over and over.<\/p>\n International Awards<\/strong><\/p>\n Nobel Prizes I stopped noticing a while back. Literature and Peace Prizes are awarded mostly on either race\/class\/gender considerations or utopian pacifism; that a Toni Morison won and a John Updike or Philip Roth (neither of whom I was all that fond of) never did, says all you need to know.<\/p>\n Petraeus is a true peace-maker and saved thousands of lives; Carter was not, and his timidity gave the green light to the Soviets who killed over a million in Afghanistan. If Al Gore had found a way to allow the world\u2019s poor to survive malaria epidemics through DDT spraying, or invented a miracle strain of rice, or a new long-life battery, then one could justify the peace prize for world ecological achievement, but not for screaming about global warming climate change while making $100 million in medieval offset penances as the climate cools down the last decade.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s left of the life of American culture? I try to read novels, the older the better \u2014 Knut Hamsun, Conrad, James Jones. Historians like a Gibbon, Prescott, or Churchill, they could write. I read everything John Keegan writes. Martin Gilbert is excellent. Andrew Roberts is as well. I\u2019ve reread Weinberg\u2019sA World at Arms<\/em>\u00a0twice this year. The memoirists like E.B. Sledge are riveting. I review a lot of books on classics \u2014 the best are not written by academic classists. One does what one can.<\/p>\n The Thin Veneer<\/strong><\/p>\n A final, odd observation. As I have dropped out of contemporary American culture and retreated inside some sort of 1950s time-warp, in a strange fashion of compensation for non-participation, I have tried to remain more engaged than ever in the country\u2019s political and military crises, which are acute and growing. One\u2019s distancing from the popular culture of movies, television, newspapers, and establishment culture makes one perhaps wish to overcompensate in other directions, from the trivial to the important.<\/p>\n Lately more than ever I try to obey the speed limit, overpay my taxes, pay more estimates and withholding than I need, pay all the property taxes at once, pick up trash I see on the sidewalk, try to be overly polite to strangers in line, always stop on the freeway when I see an elderly person or single woman with a flat, leave 20% tips, let cars cut me off in the parking lot (not in my youth, not for a second), and patronize as many of Selma\u2019s small businesses as I can (from the hardware store to insurance to cars). I don\u2019t necessarily do that out of any sense of personal ethics, but rather because in these increasingly crass and lawless times, we all have to try something, even symbolically, to restore some common thread to the frayed veneer of American civilization, to balance the rips from a Letterman attack on Palin\u2019s 14-year-old daughter or a Serena Williams\u2019s threat to a line judge, or the President\u2019s communication director\u2019s praise of Mao, civilization\u2019s most lethal mass murderer, or all of what I described above.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t fathom the attraction of a Kanye West (I know that name after his outburst), a David Letterman, Van Jones, Michael Moore (all parasitic on the very culture they mock), or the\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0People Magazine<\/em>\u00a0(they seem about the same in their world view). So goodbye to all that.<\/p>\n Horace called this reactionary nostalgia the delusion of a\u00a0laudator temporis acti<\/em>, the grouchy praiser of times past for the sake of being past. Perhaps. But I see the trend of many ignoring the old touchstones of popular entertainment and life as a rejection of establishment culture \u2014 a disbelief in, or utter unconcern with, what elites now offer as valuable on criteria that have nothing to do with merit or value. I was supposed to listen to Dan Rather because Murrow once worked for CBS? I am to go to the Cinema 16 because Hollywood once made\u00a0Gone With the Wind<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0On the Waterfront<\/em>?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t particularly like the idea that I want little to do with contemporary culture. But I feel it nonetheless \u2014 and sense many of you do as well.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I\u00a0have some confessions to make, not because any of you readers are particularly interested in my views; but rather because I think some of you are in the same boat: Have you stopped reading, listening, watching, and paying attention to most of what now passes for establishment public or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[651],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-zD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/libyan-intelligence-muslim-brotherhood-morsi-involved-in-u-s-consulate-attack\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":0},"title":"Libyan Intelligence: Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi Involved in U.S. Consulate Attack","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 27, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim RaymondIbrahim.com According to a Libyan intelligence document, the Muslim Brotherhood, including Egyptian President Morsi, were involved in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, where several Americans, including U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, were killed. On Wednesday, June 26, several Arabic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Muslim Brotherhood"","block_context":{"text":"Muslim Brotherhood","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/muslim-brotherhood\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/muslim-brotherhood-confessions-ex-member-exposes-subversive-tactics\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":1},"title":"Muslim Brotherhood Confessions: Ex-Member Exposes Subversive Tactics","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 8, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Hudson New York The online version of the long-running Arabic journal\u00a0Ruz al-Yusif\u00a0carries anexclusive interview\u00a0with Sheikh Osama al-Qusi entitled, \"Former Salafi: Salafis Have Distorted Islam.\" In the interview, Qusi discusses the \"true thoughts\" of the various Islamic groups, which \"they conceal under a political mask\"; he insists they\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Muslim Brotherhood"","block_context":{"text":"Muslim Brotherhood","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/muslim-brotherhood\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5453,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/american-culture-the-truth-about-40-years-in-the-movies\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":2},"title":"American Culture: The Truth About 40 Years in the Movies","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers As\u00a0New York Times\u00a0critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered. Anybody old enough to remember films before\u00a0Bonnie and Clyde\u00a0can testify to the jolting power of Arthur Penn\u2019s kinetic blend of blue-grass slapstick, Depression-era nostalgia, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11016,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/rethinking-watergate\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":3},"title":"Rethinking Watergate","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 22, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Hoover Institution The Watergate break-in is now 45 years old. The scandal is as distant from our own time as it was once from 1928. The median age of Americans is about 38 years old. Half of all Americans were likely born after the break-in. But\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2814,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/confessions-of-a-contrarian\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":4},"title":"Confessions of a Contrarian","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 1, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media I. I am not on the Obama bus I followed the Obama senatorial campaign and even his early career in Chicago, and confess I was not impressed. I think on any occasion he announces a moral standard it is reactive \u2014 not proactive \u2014\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6931,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-eternal-darkness-of-the-progressive-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":2209,"position":5},"title":"The Eternal Darkness of the Progressive Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 The attacks on\u00a0Lone Survivor, the movie about 4 Navy Seals caught in an operation gone lethally wrong in Afghanistan, illustrate once again the fossilized orthodoxy of the left. The L.A. 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