Beat Thy Enemy III: Celebrity Culture

Barack Obama did not bring us to this first circle of hell on his own. He was aided and abetted by 1) an education system with a relentless propaganda agenda, 2) a media oligopoly that has completely abrogated its First Amendment responsibility and 3) a celebrity dominated culture that is largely a product of the first two. --Prologue, Know Thy Enemy

Thus far we’ve seen how the Education System has been turned into an enemy of the people and discussed how ordinary citizens can take it back. We’ve also scrutinized the Hollywood-Big Media cartel and considered how conservatives can break the syndicate’s stranglehold from both outside the tent and inside the tent.

We’ve examined how the emergence of the celebrity culture, a by-product of  50 years of education and media indoctrination, has created a largely vacuous society.

In this, the final installment of the Know Thy Enemy/Beat Thy Enemy series, we look at the process required to neutralize the effects of this false idol cult. It won’t be easy; the number of inane people in search of ever more inane celebrities to follow and emulate has reached the epidemic stage.  When it looks like we’re starting to run low on current cult-figures of questionable character and achievement, we just create more out of thin air.

Or, in the case of the Kardashians, fat air.

It doesn’t seem to matter that most celebrities, including those of the new ruling class, are so inconsequential intellectually and artistically they could technically be classified as a hoax. The true believers, groupies, and devotees comprise a new class of social x-rays, in ways that Tom Wolfe never intended.

I mean that in the best way possible

There was a time when celebrities represented all the best superficialities that life had to offer: fashion, style, manners, carriage, and glamour. 

Today’s Tinsel Town ornaments are more likely to be grungy, ill-mannered, uncouth boors (not be be confused with the new celebs of the ruling class who are likely to be well-groomed, well-dressed, ill-mannered boors). Yet children, of all ages, still want to be just like them.

Until we’re successful at dismantling the alarmingly off-course education system and dangerously biased media complex, the brainwashing of citizens young and old will continue unabated. I’m doubtful we can stop this insidious cult of the superficial dead in it’s tracks, but we can beat it back. If everyone grabs a stick and starts beating; hard, about the head.

If we prevail in our efforts, critical thought will once again be an integral part of education and engrained in the collective intellect. When that transpires, people will no longer take their cues on how to think and vote from clueless celebrities and agenda driven infotainers. They will once again be able to differentiate truth from the specious argument. And the once-again educated citizens will be able to spot and reject pandering, agenda driven appeals aimed at their emotions rather than their brain.

If people begin to think for themselves again they’ll stop accepting “received knowledge” from the media.  That means that the media will stop giving liberal artistes – of both the Hollywood and Washington D.C. persuasion - so much air time and stop treating them with such deference. That’s  a Win-Win: the power of the entertainment/ruling class celebrities is diminished and we won’t have to listen to them.

If we prevail, people will never again accept schlock “consensus” science as proof of anything. Instead, they will require more from what passes as “scientific” research. They will  demand answers to the three M’s behind the “research:” motive, methodology and money.

Yeah babe, it’s not the money; it’s the amount

Should our side prevail, no one will ever again say “I wonder what Cheryl Crow thinks I should be doing to save the planet?”

If we prevail, people will cease paying attention to the antics of Sean Penn as he employs all the diplomatic skills he learned in acting class to curry favor with socialist tyrants on our behalf. In fact, if we prevail, people might even consider his behavior treasonous.

Should we prevail, no American will abide Canadian Jim Carrey’s inane tweets and tunes about our right to bear arms. And by the way, I see he recently discovered that “thought is responsible for if not all, most, of the suffering we experience.” Really, Jimbo?  Then I assume I can put you down as agreeing in principle that guns don’t kill people? Apparently thoughts do; would you like to outlaw them too? That would fall under our First Amendment right to free speech, which they don’t have in Canada either.

If we prevail,  people will once again be able to analyze data, not just accept it as fact. When that happens, they won’t have to rely on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to educate them on the scientific principals of hydraulic fracking.  Maybe their newfound critical thinking skills will even cause people to wonder why the Saudi Arabians funded their movie in the first place.

And should we prevail at beating the beasts back, the newly educated citizenry will not be knee-jerked into boycotting companies that frack for natural gas just because Susan Sarandon and Yoko Ono combine their choral skills to plead “Don’t Frack My Mother.” Because by then people will understand that Susan and Yoko know precisely as much about fracking as they do other economic, environmental and social justice issues.

I can’t promise that reforming the education system will necessarily improve the overall quality of entertainment offered by Hollywood, but I’m certain there will be a greater variety on offer. I realize that replacing school indoctrination with critical thinking skills doesn’t guarantee that young people won’t still choose to go to crappy movies, attend crappy concerts and download crappy songs. But I have to think they will be a bit more discerning about the selection of their President than they are about a simple weekend diversion.

If we successfully fix the mess of the education system and effectively address the disequilibrium of the media, the culture of celebrity will begin to diminish. Stopping the constant onslaught of false ideas, fallacious premises and debauched values will weaken the influence of celebrities who deal in the business of false ideas, fallacious premises and debauched values. People who rediscover the joy of thinking for themselves are likely to be a bit more discriminating in their idol worship: both the celluloid variety and the political sort.

We may eventually come around to the point where idols again represent something worth idolizing, even if that something is only superficial. I’m okay with  pop-culture celebrities being admired for their style; as long as we expect our political class to be more substantive and hold them to a higher standard of intelligence, character and behavior.

And occasionally, perhaps, we will be fortuitous enough to get both style and substance rolled into one; and the media will no longer have the power to persuade you otherwise.

I have a dream

So I have a dream. I dream that we fight until we prevail; that the country remains a bastion of intellectual and economic freedom, that people continue to be independent in spirit and action, our economy once again begins to grow, people prosper and we all grow stronger. In short, I dream that America survives and remains, as it has for over 200 years, to be the world’s last, best hope.

 

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. – Ronald Reagan

NOTE: This is part of the “Know Thy Enemy/ Beat Thy Enemy” series --

Prologue

KTE I: Education

KTE II: Media

KTE III: Celebrity Culture

BTE I: The Education System

BTE II-A: The Media (attacking from outside the tent)

BTE II-B: the Media (conclusion; operating within the tent)

BTE III: Celebrity Culture

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Cross-Posted on Patriot Action Network

Beat Thy Enemy II: the Media (conclusion; operating within the tent)

“Politics is downstream from culture. I want to change the cultural narrative.”

Long before most of us begrudgingly acknowledged it, Breitbart knew that in order to change the cultural milieu, conservatives must – to borrow a phrase - be in the world, if not of the world.

He knew that to beat the enemy, we had to infiltrate the enemy’s bunker and operate from inside the tent. That hasn’t happened.

Why is it there are no significant conservative voices in Hollywood? There are two theories. The first is the Hollywood version and it goes like this: “conservatives are simply not suited to the creative arts. They’re too left-brained to be as creative as their far more imaginative right-brained liberal contemporaries.” The implication is that storytelling is the exclusive purview of open-minded, non-judgmental liberals who empathize with the human condition. And by inference that means that story telling falls well outside the scope of close-minded, conservative bigots and oppressors of the poor. Hence, Hollywood’s official verdict: conservative writers and artists either self-select out of the creative industry, or they wash out because they just aren’t good enough.

The conservative take on the situation is understandably quite different: “Hollywood, because of its unremitting leftist tilt is uncomfortable with conservative values and creates an exclusionary and hostile environment for writers and artists who make their non-liberal leanings known. In turn, that makes it impossible for conservatives to get referrals and make the kind of connections required to survive in the industry.”

Knowing how significantly the odds are stacked against them, conservatives may indeed decide to let reason dictate their priorities and simply opt out - choosing to pursue a  profession more likely to provide financial security for themselves and their family rather than  “following their bliss.” Being left-brained they may conclude that is a more rational choice than waiting tables in LA while waiting for their big break.

Refuting the Hollywood version is a bit complicated because of the fact that many conservatives and liberals actually do think differently. Conservatives do tend, counter intuitively, to be left-brain dominant which means their fallback thinking process relies on logic and facts. Liberals (especially the Hollywood breed of  “creative” liberals) tend to be right-brain dominant with a fallback thinking process that relies heavily on feelings (intuition) and imagination.

Beat Thy Enemy II, The Media (attacking from outside the tent)

Breitbart knew instinctively, as people in Washington, D.C., and most other places did not, that movies, television programs and popular music send out deeply political messages every hour of every day. They shape the culture, and then the culture shapes politics. Influence those films and TV shows and songs, and you'll eventually influence politics. -- Byron York

As I documented in Know Thy Enemy II, The Media, one of Conservatives’ most formidable enemies is the Hollywood-Big Media Cartel. It is an irrefutable fact of life: this infotainment complex defines pop culture and permeates every aspect of modern life. Nothing short of the state sponsored educational indoctrination system even comes close to the impact it has on how America thinks and lives. Today we look at what can be done to loosen that grip.

The Big Media Cartel is run by leftist ideologues who believe their province extends far beyond simply informing and entertaining. With ideological messages embedded in everything from songs to sitcoms, citizens receive continuous reinforcement of leftist precepts. If you’re skeptical, Ben Shapiro’s book, Prime Time Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story, will disabuse you of any doubt.

Primetime is a well-researched tome on the media’s closed loop system of liberal messaging. Shapiro calls it the “Celluloid Triangle,” comprised of special interest groups, government and Hollywood. He documents how this ménage à trois has operated since the early days of television to infuse entertainment programming with liberal causes and messaging; a ruse otherwise known as propaganda. Tracking the journey of the media/entertainment industry from its original news/entertainment platform to its current role as America’s zeitgeist maker is instructive, although not particularly surprising if you’ve been paying attention.

Big Media is a tough nut to crack. Tougher even then the education system since at least in theory we the people own our schools. Here we’re dealing with a huge, private sector entertainment oligopoly which exists with the tacit approval and support of government administrators, legislators and regulators. It enjoys significant tax breaks, subsidies and multiple regulatory protections, yet is not answerable to the taxpayer. Their only responsibility is to their shareholders, consumers and, marginally, the FCC. The shareholders are happy as long as they are making money; consumers seem inured to the liberal messaging as long as Desperate Housewives airs in it’s expected timeslot and the FCC concerns itself primarily with wardrobe malfunctions and hate-speech; so there’s no pushback.

We have reached a place where one ideology (liberal) controls virtually all pop culture output; and so many people have already been indoctrinated by leftist precepts that they don't even see a problem. That is why, prior to his untimely death, Andrew Brietbart warned people over and over that “the Media is the enemy.”

There are two ways to attack the mediacracy¹ - from outside the tent, and from inside the tent. We need to operate in both theatres of operation but we begin from the outside since that’s where most of us reside. From this front, all of us can do something to advance the cause.

If you are a stockholder, divest. If you are a consumer, don’t go to that movie or buy the DVD, don’t watch the Sunday “news” shows – or any MSM news shows for that matter. If you find a show (or an entire Network) to contain offensive messaging, switch the channel, turn off the TV, write to the sponsors to complain about the content they’re supporting and let them know you won’t buy their products.

Because network/cable television is still ad-revenue driven, enough people complaining to sponsors and boycotting their products will have an effect. But for maximum impact remember to take your clues from the left: organized protests and boycotts by special interest groups get greater and faster results than do individual complaints. While the left invented professional grievance squads, the right has a surprising number of special interest groups (SIG) of their own that can be culled and employed for this purpose. (Note: it was the Veterans of Foreign Wars who finally wrestled an apology from CBS for its disgraceful Amazing Race incident.)

Beat thy Enemy: I, The Education System

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In the preceding “Know Thy Enemy” series - Prologue, I Education, II Media and III Celebrity Culture  - I’ve identified three sources which have exposed America to a very dangerous disease. The systemic cause is a virus that manifests itself as a malignant form of socialism characterized by increasing central government control and progressively insistent demands for “social justice.” It’s accompanied by irrational thinking and a loss of will to exert either individual  liberty or personal responsibility. As noted, exposure to the education system, media and the celebrity culture makes one vulnerable, especially the young.

Since we now know what ails us, and we know how it’s contracted, it’s time to clean up each contamination site and start the healing.

Today we’ll deal with the education system. A brief recap of the situation: we have a hardcore leftist agenda that has been incorporated and deeply embedded into the national education canon, curricula, texts and teachers training programs. The degree to which this indoctrination program is slanted in favor of the postmodern values of relativism, socialism and social justice and against the traditional Western Enlightenment values of  individualism, objective truth, reason, logic and capitalism is stunning. With teachers unions entrenched like a bad nail fungus and completely onboard with the social justice (nee anti-America) agenda, how do we unwind this Gordian knot?

Know Thy Enemy III: Celebrity Culture

Barack Obama did not bring us to this first circle of hell on his own. He was aided and abetted by 1) an education system with a relentless propaganda agenda, 2) a media oligopoly that has completely abrogated its First Amendment responsibility and 3) a celebrity dominated culture that is largely a product of the first two. (KTE Prologue)

III. The Culture of Celebrity

“ All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” -- Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of politicians

In today’s segment of Know Thy Enemy we look at the culture of celebrity and its contribution to pop culture.

Pop culture is defined more by what it is not – neither high culture or folk culture – than what it is. But an operative definition is “a commercial culture based on popular taste.”  Think Andy Warhol’s soup can art:

Clearly the man who predicted that “in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” knew a thing or two about the endurance of celebrity culture.

In 1968 when Andy made his famous prediction, “celebrity” was still a subset, rather than the defining aspect, of pop culture. And although it was considered  “low” culture at the time, to designate it as such today would elevate it to an unfounded level. Even in an era where everything from poverty to death has been assigned its own “culture” it still  seems oxymoronic to talk about “celebrity culture.” 

Whatever it is or isn’t, the celebrity element of pop culture dominates the landscape. To many, especially the young, its appeal is so compelling they would do anything to be famous. Anything, that is, aside from actually working for it. The Celebrity Dream has largely replaced the American Dream for this generation; and unlike the original, which contains a significant “work hard” component, the Celebrity Dream requires only that you be discovered for your own fabulosity.

This new version of the American Dream reads like a narcissist’s Craig’s List ad:  “Deserving swan, trapped in pond with ducks, ISO fame, fortune, and a really good agent.” It’s like the American Dream, only delusional.

In which I behold my own fabulosity