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Conservative Tastes
We’re All Leninists Now
Everyone’s an intellectual, changing the world and transforming our lives.
ONCE IT COULD HAVE have been said that, like Willie Nelson’s, Hollywood’s heroes have always been cowboys, though they obviously aren’t anymore. Now they are always, or nearly always, brainiacs. Even little Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible franchise triumphs not because of bravery or strength or fortitude or any other of the traditionally heroic or cowboy-like virtues, but because he is smarter than everybody else. It’s called acting. Not that there is any great brainpower involved in pulling out of his magic M:I bag whatever hi-tech gizmo may be necessary to counter the hitech gizmo the bad guys have put in his way. But the wonderful thing about technology in the computer age is that it confers a kind of vicarious intelligence on those who know how to use it, even if they only bought it off the shelf at Radio Shack. The guy who designs the programs is more likely to be the sidekick, like Ving Rhames’s Luther Stickell in M:I. The hero is the boyishly handsome sex symbol who performs in public the music from his score.
Even the bad guys these days make themselves worthy adversaries by virtue of their technical nous and their cool moral nihilism, like Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Often, they are expected to be well up on philosophy or art history as well, like the ones in The Guard or In Bruges by the brothers McDonagh. This reminds us, or at least reminds me, of the ultimate bad-guy brainiacs—those who call themselves intellectuals. They are hucksters for some utopian scheme that’s supposed to take the place of reality. In an age like ours that has been fed a steady diet of fantasy for a generation or more, the alternative realities on offer don’t even have to look like realities anymore, just as the Mission: Impossible heroics don’t have to look like real heroics. They just have to be the product of romantic loners, riding the intellectual range and lassoing with their agile brains those big ideas that promise to transform the lives of all of us for the better—whether or not they actually do so.
Aaron Sorkin has long been a primo romancer of this sort of hero, and there is no doubt in my mind that the election three years ago of the alleged brainiac president Barack Obama in spite of an almost total lack of relevant political or administrative experience owed something to his fictional brainiac predecessor, Mr. Sorkin’s Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) of The West Wing. Since The West Wing went west in 2006, the same gentleman has written the screenplays for three more intellectual romances, Charlie Wilson’s War of 2007, last year’s megahit The Social Network, and, now, Moneyball. Having turned away from brainy presidents — and in this category we must also include Michael Douglas’s President Andrew Shepherd in The American President of 1995 — to brainy outsiders, Mr. Sorkin shows that he is intent on exploring the more romantic side of these romances, and in each case with real people who can claim, along with Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson, that “these things happened. They were glorious, and we changed the world.”
Changing the world, by the way, has been the romantic intellectual’s main desideratum since his prototype, Karl Marx, penned his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, to the effect that “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.” That might sound like a practical task, but at least since Lenin’s day, it has been taken for granted among the world-changers that the revolution must be led by intellectuals. This idea has by now become so far internalized (at least in France) that you get Marxist fantasies like Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog in which the workers and peasants themselves are secret intellectuals, only awaiting the right moment to reveal their extensive libraries and range of cultural reference to their astonished social and economic betters.
In America, of course, changing the world is a task more likely to be left to people like Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) of The Social Network or Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) of Moneyball, as both were and are successful capitalists whose transformations, such as they may prove to have been, were wrought for the sake of enriching themselves and their backers and not to create the workers’ paradise. But that only goes to show that “change” has a mystique all its own and independent of what is being changed into what—as the election of 2008 also showed. As with President Obama, too, there does not even have to be any real change, or any change for the better, just a new idea of change to put a gloss upon the intellectual hero’s romantic image as the agent and thinker-up of change.
The supposed revolution in baseball wrought by the real life Mr. Beane, for example, and recorded by Michael Lewis in his best-selling book (also called Moneyball) of 2003, has since been widely debunked. Mr. Beane’s teams at Oakland haven’t even made the playoffs since 2006. Obviously, this doesn’t matter to Mr. Sorkin, his co-writer Steven Zaillian, or the movie’s director, Bennett Miller. Near the end, they include an anonymous traditionalist in voiceover who says, mockingly, that “nobody reinvents this game,” but this is clearly meant to be just some naysayer’s negative thinking and not a spokesman for the reality of baseball’s non-reinvention. Mr. Beane could not be the film’s hero, as he is undoubtedly meant to be, without our willingness to ignore that reality—and also the conditional mood in Billy’s excited prediction: “If we win with this team, with this budget, we will have changed the game; that’s what I want.” As with other sorts of cinematic fantasy, his wanting it is easy for us to take as earnest of the change itself, whether or not such a thing has happened or ever could happen in real life.
THE REAL CHANGE, of course, lies in the cultural currency of such fantasy, both in general and in this particular form as the fantasy genius who changes everything merely by being, like another fantastical Straw Man, an honorary doctor of thinkology. The point is underlined for us in Moneyball by the presence there of the very guy who, if the movie had been made from the 1930s to the 1950s, would have been its natural hero—the grizzled old scout (Ken Medlock) whose knowledge of the game and how to put together a winning team, painfully acquired over years of hardship and loss, ultimately puts to shame that of some upstart Ivy League knowit-all who threatens to supersede him. Here, however, the upstart Ivy League know-it-all (Jonah Hill) really does know it all, really does supersede him and is made almost a co-equal hero with Billy Beane—the Luther to his Ethan, the Robin to his Batman, the Biden to his Obama. Character counts, they used to think, both in Hollywood and in the culture at large. No more. Now it’s only brains that count.
Even when the change is real, even when it has been brought about by character and courage rather than brainpower, we look for ways to cast its heroes into the current romantic mold. Just look at The Help by Tate Taylor, based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, which manages to make the fictional “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), a slip of a girl fresh out of Ole Miss and working in her first journalistic job as Miss Myrna, the cleaning advice columnist for the women’s pages of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in 1963, the real hero of the civil rights revolution in Mississippi. She is called to such an exalted moral position in this wish-fulfillment fantasy not because she’s white or a woman—or not just because she is white and a woman. Rather, it’s because she’s the writer and intellectual without whose leadership we can hardly imagine any genuinely transformative revolution taking place anymore.
Here’s how it happens. The black maids of Jackson all turn to her to write up their grievances against their white employers in an article for a New York magazine and, later, a book. “We gon’ help you with your stories,” they say—and do. Later, one says to Skeeter: “No one had ever axed me what it was like to be me.” Once she got that off her chest, she knew what it was to be free. That so few of the multitude who have flocked to see this feel-good film have apparently been able to see how appallingly patronizing is its version of history suggests that we are all Leninists now, prepared to believe implicitly not only in the revolution that will change the world but also in the necessity for intellectuals and theorists to lead it. And how else, when you think about it, are we to explain not only President Obama, allegedly the brainiest president ever, but the desperation in the media at the multiple failures of his administration which we antiintellectuals were the first to predict? Which is not to say that the inveterate fantasists of Hollywood won’t continue to regard him as their hero.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
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Jack in Wi| 12.2.11 @ 6:16AM
I agree: we are all Leninists now. TheRepublicans with their Neocon gang represent the Trotskyite branch of the movement. The Democrats have been with the Stalinist branch for many decades. Most of us are caught in the middle of their idealogical warfare.This country is headed down just like every other Marxist hell hole.
Lew Claire| 12.2.11 @ 8:58AM
Go cut a big hole in the ice of Totagatic Lake and soak your swelled head.
Alan Brooks| 12.2.11 @ 1:23PM
You are all wrong, scientists and engineers are changing the world, they are the real movers and shakers.
Stan Redmond| 12.3.11 @ 2:21PM
Wrong. Gov't idiocy stands in the way of engineers and scientist everyday. And when results aren't what gov't officials want they invent new science and engineering with massive funding to wipe out honest engineering and scientific endevors. Hello global warming industry.
It is true phony scientists can influence gov't (DDT ban, light bulb ban) but those schemes work hand in hand with a gov't agency.
race_to_the_bottom| 12.5.11 @ 12:30AM
Right. Like corporate lobbyists running every department of government during the reign of Bush the younger, aka, Dumbo, rewriting the papers of scientists and engineers. Re: the light bulb ban. Maybe the Koch Bros. could get their guys on the Supreme Court to overturn that based on corporate free speech or the second amendment. Worth a try.
old white guy| 12.2.11 @ 2:01PM
neo as in new ,con as in conservative. what the f--k are you trying to say. all commies should be shot. get right to the point.
Mike D.| 12.2.11 @ 3:46PM
What jackboot is trying to say is that Jews are the problem, they control everything! There everywhere!
Mike D.| 12.2.11 @ 4:46PM
jackboot is so important and such a lethal threat to the Isrealis that the Isrealis have targeted him by the propaganda ministry in Isreal(I'm dead serious here) to disparage his important words and messages to humanity. I myself have heard through the grapevine that his case was recently turned over to the Mossad for "disposition" as they say in the business. Thats why he's using Jackspeak code words to get his message accross to his followers.
Quartermaster| 12.2.11 @ 6:35PM
OWG & MikeD, you are both acting like 15 year olds. Time to grow up. If you disagree with the man refute him, other wise shut up!
Sorry Brooks, the left is holding teh Engineers back from really changing the world. You Leninists are the people doing the changing, just as your daddy Stalin did.
Mike D.| 12.2.11 @ 8:30PM
Done did that Quarterbrain, as far as shut up? Its a message board dipshit, don't like the reply, don't read it. What are you? The debate police or jack...er jack's Big brother?
"just as your daddy Stalin did." Yeah quarterbrain, thats real refuting , boy, yeah thats really mature non-15 year old stuff there buddy. Thanks for the debating-refuting lesson.
Margie| 12.3.11 @ 7:38PM
He's a Libertarian and they don't like Conservatives.
Notice how the Libertarians insult, demean and accuse Conservatives here as being Trolls, and deserving of the same Hellish fate as the despicable Jack & Clint?
Poke a Libertarian and you will find a hater of the truth. The same thing that happens when you poke a Liberal.
The Leftist mindset is the same. It's the same hatred that Liberal so-called Christians have toward Bible believing Christians, whom they often refer to as "Bible Idolators."
Why? because so-called Liberal Christians allow for other teachings outside of Scripture to rule in their lives, so they have to mock us for standing firm.
Jack in Wi| 12.3.11 @ 11:54PM
Margie old girl. I have voted for the Republican candidate for President for 12 straight elections. You my dear, would not know a real conservative if he walked right in front of you. I learned something in those last 45 years. The Republicans have sold us down the river so many times that it is almost uncountable. The only consevative who is running is Ron Paul. He has consistantly held to the old principles that this country was founded on. He is the only guy running who uses the Constitution as his guide, not the special intrests.
Margie| 12.4.11 @ 6:32PM
Jack you old lying fart. If you've voted for the Republican candidate for President for 12 straight elections, then shut up and do it again.
Ya know~ shut up and vote.
Keep you cult leader as your idol, I don't care, as long as you vote Republican.
It's the least any of us can do, and the only way we have to defeat the Leftist Socialist Communists.
As to your stupid comment about how I wouldn't know a conservative if he walked right in front of me~ yeah, sure Jack you old fart.
That's why the people I admire that are living today are Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Thomas Sowell, David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin just to name a few.
You Paul-bots trash all of them, proving what you are every day~ Leftists in Republican clothing.
Occam's Tool| 12.5.11 @ 2:18AM
Glad to hear that, Jack. The one you would want if you were Conservative would not be a pot-enthusiast who supports Gay marriage.
No, you are a Jew hating asshole, who mistakes that for Conservatism.
Zak Klemmer| 12.3.11 @ 4:32PM
Jack: Oh! your are quick, so therefore you must be an intellectual yourself. I'm just and Old-rightist heretic and somehow I have escaped being burned at the stake by Senator McCain.
WRTolkas| 12.2.11 @ 8:19AM
"We are all Leninists now" I think not. I don't give a farthing about movies. Actors are entertaining but hucksters all the same. My world is the real world of work, planning, saving, and providing for my family's current and future needs. The day when I heed a direction from a Hollywood type is the day my son or daughter needs to hand to me a revolver with a single bullet and just leave the room for a few minutes.
Peppermint Tea| 12.2.11 @ 9:15AM
It is easy to show how movies don't make any sense in the real world; and Moneyball, Mission Impossible, and the others continue the tradition.
My question: was Lenin an intellectual? Or was he like the Occupy idiots--just a slogan?
Maddox| 12.2.11 @ 10:26AM
Pseudo because he had a propaganda arm, just like OWS and Barack Obama.
old white guy| 12.2.11 @ 2:02PM
lenin had military might.
Quartermaster| 12.2.11 @ 6:37PM
He got it only after the Bolsheviks were able to purge the Mensheviks. Trotsky was then able to found the Red Army.
Wayne| 12.4.11 @ 2:43PM
True, the Bolsheviks "occupied" the red square and took over a country lead by Kerensky. Russia had 6 brief months of democracy. Not a shot was fired. Although Kerensky did manage to outlive Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
tdiinva| 12.2.11 @ 9:19AM
Mr Bowman needs to heal himself. He is as much an intelliectual as the people he sneers at. Billy Beane did change the game and showed small market teams how to succeed for a short period of time. The money ball concept was picked up by big market teams who cold bring more money to the problem and buy up the right players. You go farther in baseball with sabrmetrics and deep pockets then with sabrmetrics alone.
I am also surprised he places Charlie Wilson's War in this category. All I can say is that I know Mike Vickers, Mike Vickers is my boss and you Mr. Bowman are no Mike Vickers.
Tiger Town| 12.2.11 @ 10:34AM
Thanks for your rejoinder on this, tdiinva. While I agree with the essence of Bowman's column (c.f. Sowell's book, "Intellectuals and Society"), he is dead wrong and you are dead right on the impact of Sabremetrics/Bill James on baseball. Beane/Oakland had the innovator/early adaptor advantage, and then the "big boys" caught up. Anyone who knows the inside story of Boston's ascension to two World Series championships knows how critical Sabremetrics and Bill James (who they have under exclusive contract) were to that success. I am sick of seeing casual comments from the uninformed on this specific issue (like Bowman) blithely assert the "bebunking" of the central theme of Moneyball. Without questions, the augmentation of player assessment and talent management enabled by Sabremetrics is a key part of virtually every MLB organization now, and those who don't use it are unlikely to be able to keep up.
martin j smith| 12.2.11 @ 9:33AM
So small businesses will give up the wages for welfare. Private doctors will remain in practice for pennies on the dollar,entrepreneurs will take whatever "deal" they can get and produce new inventions or medical treatments, Children will to the beggars of tomorrow. But, the elite will live like kings as they did in the USSof R.
PolishKnight| 12.2.11 @ 10:31AM
Sadly, we're living in this today as our Republican "free market" advocates send off high paying technology jobs overseas or bring them in as H1B's claiming they can't find an American to do the job. Then when the projects down down the hole, they demand a subsidy. Then they remind us that we need to avoid raising their taxes because they're doing so much good for us peasants.
But don't worry folks! Our party has their priorities straight: Slowing down gay marriage as much as possible and limiting federal funding for abortion. THAT'LL fix EVERYTHING!
Sigh.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 9:01AM
Have you personally lived in the USSR that you now have the audacity to compare it to a country so radically different? You simply lack both knowledge and experience to form a perspective with even slight degree of accuracy. What you should think about is this country. Small businesses have been getting screwed by corporations for a long time here. Who do you think suffered during and after the oil spill in the gulf?!!!! but why stop companies from drilling, and who cares if the safety rules are in place? Right? Let those small businesses suffer and precious wetlands disappear already! That's the spirit !! Support one elite while worrying about another nonexistent one! How logical!
Timothy L. Pennell| 12.2.11 @ 9:38AM
When will you people come to grips with the FACT, that Obama's rise, has been Foretold? That he is the Fulfillment of PROPHACY?
You need to THINK.
How did he get here? If you just look at things, with even the tiniest amount of Logic, you realize that PRESIDENT Barack Hussein Obama, is an IMPOSSIBILITY.
He is the product of the union between an Atheist/Communist Mother and a Muslim/Marxist Father. His Maternal Grandparents were Communists. He was raised, for the first 11 Years of his life, in the Muslim Schools and Mosques, of Indonesia, where he was TAUGHT to Hate the Jew, and Hate the Infidel. He LEARNED at the Mosque: Death to America". "Death to the JEWS." He knelt on his Prayer Rug, facing Mecca, and prayed to his God of MURDER 5 times a day.
He cut his teeth, on the Streets of Chicago. Smoking Dope and Snorting Cocaine. He taught the philosophies, that he learned in a book, partially dedicated to LUCIFER. He took on two Mentors, to guide him on his path. One: Frank Marshall Davis, was an Atheist/Communist. The other: Jeremiah Wright, was an Ex-Muslim/Marxist. (Sound Familiar?)
He surrounded himself with Radicals, Anarchists, Communists, Marxists, and Maoists. He began his Political Career in the living room of Cop Killing, Bomb Throwing Terrorists. He has been financed, from the beginning, by a Jew, who spent his teens, helping the NAZIS, in their attempt to Exterminate his fellow Jews.
How is the World, since he has come to Power?
The Christian West is in Free Fall. The Godless Communists, are on the Rise. And Militant Islam, seems to be On The March, as one by one, the Old Order is taken down, in the Arab Countries. Israel's position becomes more tenuous by the day. She will soon find herself SURROUNDED, by an Army, as large as the one PROPHASIZED in Revelation.
Back home, a Muslim Boy sits on the Throne of the Most Powerful Christian Nation, the world has ever known, and the ONLY Friend that Israel has. While, in the Terrorist Encampments of HAMAS, they believe that Obama has been "SENT" by Allah, to be their DELIVERER. They believe that HIS Coming, will facilitate the End of the Jews, and the return of Jerusalem, to Muslim hands. They have even given him the name: ABU HUSSAIN. "Son of the Father". And, now he tells us that he needs "Four more years, to get the job done".
You gotta admit. That sounds like one Helluva Movie. Too bad IT'S REAL. And, I think that it's high time we started treating it that way.
Petronius| 12.2.11 @ 10:17AM
If only we could just walk out on it.
Maddox| 12.2.11 @ 10:28AM
This may be the best writing you have done. Well said sir.
CrackerHound| 12.2.11 @ 10:40AM
Obama is not loved enough to be the anti-christ. His own constituents are beginning to loath him. Obama is sliding not rising.....other than that disqualifying fact, he is one scary dude to be sitting in the WH.
Jack von Bauer| 12.2.11 @ 1:26PM
That sounds like one Helluva Movie.
I presume the title is SPEEDBALL?
Quartermaster| 12.2.11 @ 6:40PM
You hit the nail on the head! Obama is judgment against a country that forgot God and has tried to establish, as one wag said, "the Kingdom of God, hold the God." many have tried, and the graveyards were filled with the refuse.
Margie| 12.2.11 @ 8:43PM
The Bible says the Anti-Christ will be revealed.. and it also says he will have a deadly wound that seemed to have been healed. It also says that he will perform "pretended signs and wonders."
We haven't seen these things as of yet.
For more, read 2 Thess. 2.
Timothy L. Pennell| 12.3.11 @ 7:11AM
Who said anything about the Anti-Christ?
"And I saw the BEAST rise from the Sea. And he was given a MOUTH, to speak Haughty and Blasphemous words. And he was allowed to exercise authority, for forty two months." Revelation 13-5.
Capiche?
Margie| 12.3.11 @ 6:53PM
That's right. There's the Beast, the Image of the Beast, then there's the false Prophet as well. Then there's the Dragon, who is the Serpent which is Satan.
It says the Beast has the number of a man, 666. Am I wrong in thinking that's the Anti-Christ? Sorry, it's been awhile since I've studied this, but if the Beast isn't him, then what is?
As to Obama's medical records and relating it to the wound that had been healed~ it seems to me that that is something that God makes clear, something we will know about, so I don't see how it applies either.
Capiche?
Timothy L. Pennell| 12.3.11 @ 7:14AM
When you talk about "a deadly wound that seemed to have healed", let's not forget. Nobody is allowed to see his MEDICAL RECORDS. They're sealed on an Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
race_to_the_bottom| 12.5.11 @ 12:51AM
You're joking. It sounds like the ravings of a lunatic and you say, "Well said sir"?!
Brother!
race_to_the_bottom| 12.5.11 @ 12:56AM
Obama, his father, mother, step father and grandparents are all CIA.
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2.....-part-iii/
He ain't no Marxist and he ain't no Muslim either. He is Wall Street's guy. Don't you get it?
Occam's Tool| 12.5.11 @ 2:20AM
Magnificent again, Timothy.
BackToBasics| 12.2.11 @ 9:43AM
It's sort of similar to our public school system, K-12, that most generally promote the idea in the classromms that, "Everyone's a genius," that is except for the white boys or the founding fathers. The founding fathers are rarely even mentioned in schools in poorer areas and if they are it is not positive especially since they were "ALL" evil slaveholders.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:38AM
Maybe you should have paid attention in your American History classes! Are you an expert on poorer schools? Why don't you do something about if instead of accusing teachers of withholding information that they actually do impart?
oldfart| 12.2.11 @ 10:32AM
The intellectual of today is yesterdays Emperor, Czar, King, Prince, Supreme Ruler, Chairman or petty overlord. Basically, someone who through their own perceived special talent, birthright, acclamation or circumstance (including outright butchery) have determined that they are the entitled to rule over others. One thing they all have in common is that they succeed on other people’s labor. The result is the same, just the title is different. Was Lenin any different than the Czar?
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:33AM
Yes he very much was!!!! I'm shocked at how much people pretend to know about history of a foreign country when they are uniformed about their own.
Tiger Town| 12.2.11 @ 11:04AM
Mr. Bowman, please see tdiinva's comment above. You have a great point to make with your core idea, and you undermine it completely by your ignorance about baseball, and your ill-advised use of Moneyball as a key example. Are you actually unaware that, for example, the Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox quickly became dedicated and intense users of the techniques Beane first introduced into MLB's operational approach? You did a disservice to the very important theme you were presenting by using an example that is flat out wrong. One could hardly come up with a more valid example of brains and reasoned analysis overcoming faulty "common sense, experience, and wisdom" than the impact of Sabremetrics on the assessment, selection, and deployment of MLB players. Sometimes it does take a paradigm-breaking maverick who is seeing different things in the actual data/information that exists.
I am also puzzled by your inclusion of "Charlie Wilson's War." Perhaps I misunderstand or am ignorant of the history, but I would summarize it thusly: a dedicated guy badly wanted to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. He consulted with some very smart guys in the CIA who believed that placing selected advance weapons technology in the hands of the Afghans would help them defeat the Soviet Union. They started with the Soviet version of the stinger, which proved immediately effective in extremely small doses, and escalated from there. That smart idea and that technology created unsusstainable losses for the Soviets, and they withdrew. Again, I may be missing thepoint of a "big brain" like you, but exactly how does that support your theme?
Finally, I understand your inclusion of "The Guard" based on the brief conversations among the bad guys about philosophy, but including "In Bruges," again, is flat wrong. You miss the director's clear point that Ken's interest in art and architecture is a wannabe desire of a not so bright bad guy played by Brendan Gleeson. I understand why you were misled by this, but strong arming this into a data point supporting your theme is ridiculous. At best, the example is inapplicable, and if you grant the writer/director their intended irony of Ken's "putting on airs," at worst, you are again (for the third time in a relatively short piece) simply wrong.
On the positive side of the ledger, your evisceration of "the Help," is both wonderfully done and solidly on point. Thanks for that.
I am a big fan of yours and agree with your core point about 95% of the time (though it may not seem it from this comment), but this is the most poorly advocated point of view I have ever encountered from your pen. Poorly, poorly done.
Cromulent| 12.2.11 @ 12:25PM
It wasn't Beane that changed the game. It was Bill James. Story goes that just recently the Yankees hired over 20 statheads.
Occam's Tool| 12.5.11 @ 2:20AM
Indeed. James' work on determining what really matters in winning has been brilliant.
Renaissance Nerd | 12.2.11 @ 1:13PM
Hollywood doesn't actually mythologize brains; there are very few portrayals of nerds that come anywhere close to reality. It's outsiders they love--that's the story they tell over and over, the outsider who made good or changed everything. When they portray a nerd, he's an outsider who only has to take off his glasses to be popular. They always cotton to the square peg, the loner/loser with big dreams, etc. The really funny part is seing Leninists or any other kind of socialist as the outsiders, when they've got control of so many institutions in America. Fact is 'outsiders' are really insiders, and they determine how the game is played. I've always thought it hilarious that Democrats point to there being institutional racism in America, as if they weren't in control of nearly all the institutions. Guess they would know--if there's racism, they must be the racists. Rather than all being Leninists, I reckon we all really have begun to see ourselves as outsiders. The increased media diet of today means we see weirdness and even freakishness all around; news programs always publish the exceptions, not the rule, so little by little one comes to think one is alone, or part of a very small group. It's Napoleon's concept of divide and conquer applied to the little platoons that oppose socialist slavers. Just think of how much people disdain 'Washington insiders,' as if only an outsider could ever change things. Hollywood deserves a great deal more respect as a foe than they are ever given.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:29AM
There is no such thing as socialist slavers. It's absolutely fine to dislike socialism but it's not ok to make up your own facts or definitions for preexisting terms.
Jack von Bauer| 12.2.11 @ 1:29PM
Possibly the most inane and lauded movie of the genre the author describes would be GOOD WILL HUNTING, in which a Harvard janitor turns out to be a math genius.
Wish I'd had a janitor's bucket when I watched that puke-inducing effort.
marshcope| 12.2.11 @ 7:01PM
Well, the smart janitor kid idea goes back to one Plato' dialogues (Meno?) in which Socrates finds a slave kid on the streets of Athens who turns out to be a genius at geometry after Socrates draws some angles in the dirt.
Jacob R| 12.3.11 @ 8:39AM
So your point is that because the Bible is great so was that movie with Micheal from The Office about Noah? (I mean it kinda tells the same story right?)
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:27AM
The only thing that's truly disgusting here is that a janitor->genius is so awful of an idea that it's worthy of your precious puke. This movie is in the spirit of AMERICAN DREAM. What's wrong with that? How can you imply that janitors are unintelligent? What do you know about their lives that you can judge their intellect? Heartlessness at its horrid best.
Zero Establishment| 12.2.11 @ 1:32PM
Thanks Mr. Bowman for this. You guys should put out more articles on the "cultural marxism" of our times which I would argue supersedes any economic problems we have. This attacks the very foundation of our beings and society as a whole first and foremost and all other problems are a result of this.
I have to part with a Lenin quote since you brought him up today, "Destroy the family, you destroy the country." I'm sure he's grinning sheepishly in a pleasing way at us from his confines in hell now.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 7:54AM
Obviously you have no idea what he meant by that quote. Why don't you worry about your own leader and your own country and family instead of making up fantasies about someone being in hell? Worry about your family members and pray that they are not in hell themselves for the sins they may have done. How vile!
Ken (Old Texican)| 12.2.11 @ 1:41PM
Leninists? Shoot 'em! Discuss later.
Jacob R| 12.3.11 @ 8:40AM
Thirty million babies would have been saved if we had!
Red Phillips | 12.2.11 @ 4:10PM
Jack in Wi beat me to it. I was going to point out that neocons aren't Leninists, they're Trotskyites.
Quartermaster| 12.2.11 @ 6:46PM
And, contra the village idiots Claire, OWG and MikeD, necon is not code for Jew. While some of the most prominent neocons are Jews (e.g. the Kristols and the "Pod people"), the majority of them are not Jewish. Most of the neocons are clowns when it comes to foreign policy, alas.
Margie| 12.2.11 @ 8:44PM
Mike D is not a village idiot~ he's a truth teller. You don't happen to appreciate that for some reason.
Occam's Tool| 12.5.11 @ 2:23AM
Ya could have fooled me, Quartermaster. Buchanan and Taki are quite antisemitic.
Jack in Wi| 12.3.11 @ 12:51AM
Red with all due respect: Both Trotsky and Stalin claimed to be Lenin's heir. That is a what a big part of the fight was always about. The fight continues to this day.
Wayne| 12.4.11 @ 2:47PM
I think both are dead, unless maybe you think the fight continues in hell.
race_to_the_bottom| 12.5.11 @ 1:07AM
That's right. Neocons were mostly trots when they were younger. You know the old saying, ascribed to Hoover, I think, of "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"? It is said that the Stalinists altered that to "a chicken in every pot and a pick in every trot". Apocryphal, I think.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:14AM
Don't kid yourselves people, neocons and liberals don't measure up to either.
gary siebel| 12.2.11 @ 6:20PM
"honorary doctor of thinkology"
I'll have to co-opt that one for my own use. However, I will probably deprive "thinkologists" of the credit for it's invention.
Movies, like tv, if you don't like what's showing, do something else.
POST American| 12.2.11 @ 8:57PM
"This 'new' Russia resembles nothing
so much as a giant collapsed America.
One must forever prefer the old Russia.
For all its cruelty and barbarism, it
did, undeniably, have its streak of
splendor. A streak of splendor
redeems it all."
-D H Lawrence
1922
---AHHHH yes, Vladamir Ulyanov --aka
'Lenin', yet another foreign sourced, USURY
backed, 33rd degreee Free--MAY--SIN
'revolutionary' at the service of 'the age-enda'.
That KEY doctrine 'The destruction of ALLLL
that was', somewhat concealed by the
oft repeated 'Order out of CHAOS'.
--------------BRILLIANT!
----------------YES, let's 'look' at LENIN.
---------------------------YES! -----YES!
Let's COMPLETELY look at Lenin,
his associations and sources, and his
awesomely genocidal programme in
light of our own 'Agenda 21'.
---------------------LET'S BEHOLD LENIN.
Autumn| 12.5.11 @ 8:05AM
Only a heartless individual would find old Russia to have even a grain of splendor. Innocent kids were lined up on the streets of Yekaterinoslav and shot to death by the orders of the tsar, and that is just one example! What about royals sending common people to fight their wars while the country starved. Lawrence was very cruel . Did he walk in the shoes of people from Old Russia to have found anything splendid about it? Running one's mouth sure is easy!!! I wonder if people like author of the article, Lawrence, and many other who had commented here actually have a heart? Or has it been replaced by selfishness and greed?
JmsA| 12.3.11 @ 12:01AM
Socialist idealism particularly clings to the mind when thus taken abstractly, only to soon dwindle upon the realization of its sordid particulars. In their insatiable lust for power they're wont of embracing that for long a proven failure and the destroyer of hope, freedom, and the fullfillment of mankind.
marshcope| 12.3.11 @ 6:10AM
I suppose one could go back to the bringing back to England of Charles II to fix things up when Cromwell's son proved to be a dud, or the anti-federalists in 1788 distrusting what GW and Hamilton had in mind for the US. There is a youtube video of Hitler in 1932 speaking in Hesse, ranting that things in that state were a mess due to there being 36 political parties; vote for the NSDAP and We will get rid of all these political parties that are not working for You. There is another utube video of AH at one of the Nuremberg rallies speaking to a room full of party members, with him telling them that they are an elite group who are going to lead the lumpen german people to the thousand year heaven, which sounds like something being said concurently in Moscow by Leon, or Joseph. The point, I suppose of my rambling, is that that someone is always going to make things wonderful, if you dumbos just let us do it.
IzeHavitt| 12.6.11 @ 1:23AM
While reading the article and it's subsequent posts and/or rants, I concluded that I ought to offer the following for consideration: If you really want to change the world, a good start would be for all of you to read The Book Of Proverbs, and especially ponder Proverbs 3:17b.
Jacob R| 12.3.11 @ 8:47AM
The problem is that everyone is always calling for everyone else to start being more moral.
These relativists aren't the threat they're made out to be. Very few people actually believe that nothing divine is at stake in the world. But we all do believe that we secretly know what's best for everything and everyone. So we might even hang out with relativists in power and even help them destroy religion because we know that we know what's best better than some old man in Rome.
And you know, man always does so well when he decides that he knows what's best better than any man in the world. (Lucifer tried that right? But a rich hedge fund manager believes that his hedge fund is more powerful than "these old fairy tales".)
Ed| 12.3.11 @ 11:07AM
Like everyone else -- intellectuals come in Good, Evil, and somewhere in between. C.S. Lewis and Charles Murray have both written about the need for really bright people to get a sound grounding in Morality and Natural Law. Otherwise, you could end up like fictional characters like Voldemort and Moriarty, or real people like Lenin, Alinsky, and Goebbels.
On the other hand, intellectuals have served in the OSS, CIA, NSA, MI-6, and MI-5 in all of the wars since 1939, and have saved our bacon on numerous occasions. American and British code crackers helped to win WWII and have also served in the Cold War and the War on Terror.
Solzhenitsyn wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But ,the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
race_to_the_bottom| 12.5.11 @ 1:10AM
We have our Goebbels clones. They work for Fox News.
Margie| 12.3.11 @ 7:28PM
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?
"I the LORD search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings."
Like the partridge that gathers a brood which she did not hatch, so is he who gets riches but not by right; in the midst of his days they will leave him, and at his end he will be a fool." Jer. 17:9-11.
Thanks to Jesus, we are able by His Grace to be justified by faith.
"Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through Him we have obtained access to this Grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the Glory of God." Rom. 5:1 & 2.
Dipesto| 12.3.11 @ 9:50PM
Re the Leaders and the Followers; I listened one time years ago to Reverend Ike on the radio telling his congregation to go out and buy things because God will Provide; "I bought a Cadillac last week. I bought it for You. And it runs just fine."
POST American| 12.3.11 @ 10:58PM
----------------------FINAL WORD----------------------
"Whenever an ideal, ANY IDEAL,
gets its hands on the levers of REAL
power ---you get PURE EVIL."
D H Lawrence
(essays)
---Glow-ball-ism
----Actuarial PSYCHO-pathy
-------'Free Trade'
----------and, MOST horrifying, YOU-genics
---------------------ARE I.D. --ALLS---------------------
Wayne| 12.4.11 @ 2:46PM
I still haven't seen proof of Obama's intelligence. What is the basis of the assertions? Can we see the proof. Without a teleprompter he resorts to hems and haws and poorly worded phrases. He misuses the languages and doesn't seem to know basic geography.
I would doubt if his IQ is above 100.
Margie| 12.4.11 @ 6:40PM
Like my Grammy used to say: It'll all come out in the wash.
When I became a Christian in my late teens and discovered this verse in the Bible, I realized that none of us get away with anything!
"The sins of some men are conspicuous, pointing to Judgment, but the sins of others appear later." 1 Tim. 5:24.
T H Huxley| 12.4.11 @ 7:02PM
You guys do understand that the main motivation of authors and Hollywood is to make a buck, which is what capitalism is all about. Producers don't put millions of dollars on the line to make a political statement. You don't have to go see these movies if you don't want to. I'd also point out that movies are make believe.
Do you people encourage yours kids to be anti-intellectual? Are you happy when your kids get an "F" in English, math, or geography? Does it bother you when your kids use words that are more than two syllables?
When I was a kid, most blue collar workers in my neighborhood read the paper, watched Walter Cronkite, which was real news, and looked forward to science specials on TV. They encouraged their children to learn, knowing that knowledge made them more capable of dealing with the real world. These people actually knew what socialism was, and they could tell you the difference among socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, and whatever other ism there was. And they knew propaganda when they saw it.
If you needed an electrician, would you talk to 10 of them and pick the one who knew the least? If you did, and your house burned down, you'd only have yourself to blame.
POST American| 12.4.11 @ 10:38PM
----------------------------UH!-----------------------------
-----------------NOSTALGIA SAP OP------------------
-----------------------RED ALERT!----------------------
'Chron---KITE', far from being some free floating
tribune, was, IN FACT, the voice of the owl
for rituals at Bohemian Grove.
Need we say more-----------?
Handy| 12.5.11 @ 5:30AM
Critiquing the critic. Bowman is simply unreadable. He needs remedial help, ASAP.
The adage that those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. And, those who are incapable of either become critics, is true. Bowman is proof positive.
His keyboard should be confiscated and he should be sent to a re-education camp. His columns are wastes of our time and unworthy of our efforts to comprehend them.
His need to display his vast knowledge of everything gets in the way of him ever being able to tie anything together.
Tenn Slim| 12.5.11 @ 9:24AM
"that we are all Leninists now, prepared to believe implicitly not only in the revolution that will change the world but also in the necessity for intellectuals and theorists to lead it. And how else, when you think about it, are we to explain not only President Obama, allegedly the brainiest president ever, but the desperation in the media at the multiple failures of his administration which we antiintellectuals were the first to predict? "
Therein lies the problem. Ideas w/o hard research, prior to change, w/o proper analysis, w/o honest guidance, are all doomed to fail, never to be implemented.
Our Founders showed the courage, committment, honor and intelligence to understand that the establishment of a Republic took all of the above traits.
NONE of these are evident nor ever will be in the Socialistic philosophy. Based on traits of relativism, it is impossible to garner honor, truth or even a semblance of justice from such.
Semper FI
wedding dresses | 12.6.11 @ 3:34AM
The adage that those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. And, those who are incapable of either become critics, is true. Bowman is proof positive.
His keyboard should be confiscated and he should be sent to a re-education camp. His columns are wastes of our time and unworthy of our efforts to comprehend them.