Midway in this midterm election year, the country seems to be at a political and cultural impasse. The news has not significantly changed in more than two months. Every day regurgitating the same questions.
The world is at an impasse partially because — validating the famous Andrew Breitbart refrain — “Politics is downstream from culture.”
Will Iran agree to a peace deal? My answer: It doesn’t matter since they won’t honor one. Maybe something positive can emerge. Though for once in my lifetime, I’d like to see America win a war with unconditional surrender instead of pushing for some nebulous agreement. I’ve read the country did that a couple of times in the past.
Will the Senate pass the popular Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act? No. The fact that according to Galluppoll 83 percent of Americans support government-issued photo IDs to vote — including 71 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of blacks — means nothing to the Senate leaders of both parties, Majority Leader John (“We don’t have the votes.”) Thune and Minority Leader Chuck (“It’s Jim Crowe two-point-oh.”) Schumer.
Will a once universally liked movie or music star blast President Trump? Like clockwork, as former Pretty Woman — now cringeworthy shrew — Julia Roberts did so pathetically last week at the Rise Up, Sing Out First Amendment Concert. “Breathe in all that hope, and breathe out all that fear,” she emoted in self-help guru style.
Will the latest entry in a film franchise or literary adaptation reject and repel the male appeal that made it originally beloved? Is the Pope Catholic? My answer to that one invokes Jack Benny’s response to the gunpoint threat, “Your money or your life!” — “I’m thinking it over.”
Of course, one of the faults of modern society is that there’s nobody like Jack Benny now, who made people of all races and both sexes laugh without an agenda. When I lived in Venice Beach as a working screenwriter, for two years I saw the same old black homeless man in the same spot being almost part of the scenery. One day, I was joking with some friends near his spot when I heard him chuckle. I looked at him like he’d just materialized. “You remind me of Jack Benny,” he said with a smile.
I nearly wept, realizing this lost soul so different from me had lived and loved and derived pleasure from a white Jewish comedian who would never be hired by Hollywood today. Because being funny is less important than being liberal.
Neither would a young Julia Roberts for a genre that no longer exists — romantic comedy — because girlbosses don’t need no toxic men. Thus, old Pretty Woman can try to stay relevant by slamming someone professionally akin to the Richard Gere character she finds happiness with in her star-making picture — pre-political billionaire Donald Trump (who found marital happiness with a real pretty woman). Gere ends up a shipbuilder in the film.
Naturally, Gere himself agrees with his old co-star. “We’re living in the darkest moment that I’ve ever experienced on this planet,” Gere said earlier this month at the Oslo Freedom Forum. What a rich actor like Gere was doing at the Oslo Freedom Forum, and what even is the Oslo Freedom Forum, are unimportant mysteries.
The key point is that the country has been in stasis for a while now. And stasis leads to boredom. So that Supergirl starlet Milly Alcock hailing her titular character as some sort of queer icon last week becomes just the latest yawn inducer. “Because she doesn’t live inside the binary of what we think a woman should be, that is what makes it so special and so exciting and so new.”
No, that is what makes her the latest tedious trad hero-to-cliché progressive mutation, defined by an actress spouting feminist theory as vacuously as beauty contestants used to remark on geopolitics, when the Male Gaze was a financial plus. Though it might have startled the two straight white men (Otto Binder and Al Plastino) who created the studious romance-seeking girl alternate to Superman hoping to attract more female comic-book fans in 1959, and succeeding.
The world is at an impasse partially because — validating the famous Andrew Breitbart refrain — “Politics is downstream from culture.” The audience demand hasn’t changed. Boys and men still want good strong male heroes, girls and women romantic pretty women. But they’re denied either by the suppliers who disdain them. Who incredibly would rather produce a liberal fantasy bomb than a traditionalist hit. And they continue to do this not by devising new works but by mutating the classics, trying to reshape them into the opposite of art.
Despite years of great rich work from conservative artists like Andrew Klavan, Larry Correia, Kevin Sorbo, Dallas Sonnier (Dragged Across Concrete), and, yes, me, very few are represented on the screen. And those few must function on a budget that would barely cover Milly Alcock’s drab Supergirl makeup (lest some sexist piglet might outrageously find her hot). For no visionary investors have stepped up to boost the culture like Elon Musk did free speech.
Only Mel Gibson could direct and produce an expensive Christian project like The Resurrection of the Christ, which he wrapped last month. That only because he made close to a billion dollars on the self-financed The Passion of the Christ, after every Hollywood studio turned the then superstar down. And this was before Hollywood became Hollywoke.
Nonetheless, this fall there will be a new Andrew Klavan Cameron Winter mystery, a new Larry Corrreia Monster Hunter fantasy, and a new Lou Aguilar Mark Slade-Neil Cork political thriller. All will be great, but they won’t be enough to prevent the potential nightmare headline this November — Democrats Take Congress. That would be a change for the much, much worse.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
The Left’s Trillion-Dollar Nightmare
Eastwood: The Last Man Standing
Hollywoke’s Last Gasp — Race and Gender Swapping
