The key to understanding much of liberal thinking is to grasp the interplay between the concepts of guilt and victimhood…
We are told, for instance, that all of us are guilty as Americans of consuming a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, as well as polluting and despoiling the planet. This guilt is shared by other rich, white, nations; who are equally beholden to the Third World; thus the need for, “A North-South Dialogue.”
That the actual pollution generated by China, India, and other developing countries exceeds that of Europe and the U.S. is ignored by most schemes to limit global warming/climate change, like the Kyoto Accord, which exempts those developing countries from its limits on carbon emissions.
To the “progressive” mind, the record of reaction and repression abroad of the U.S. is more than matched by the actions of the American government and business here at home.
As a recent letter writer to the Kansas City Star said, we need to remember “our country’s dark and shameful history” (as if this form of national self-loathing was universal among all thoughtful and well-informed Americans!).
But what good does seeing yourself as the villain do unless you have victims to feel guilty over?
Here is where the Left’s allies in the culture wars are so valuable. Consider the unending stream of popular entertainment in which African-Americans are portrayed as saintly and long-suffering martyrs and whites as vicious and sadistic racists. Think “The Color Purple”, “The Butler”, “Amistad”, “The Help”, “Twelve Years A Slave”, “Lincoln”, and others too numerous to mention, stretching back 50 years to weepies like “Lillies of The Field”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “Raisin In The Sun”.
Now of course, we have a whole new list of victims that we should feel guilty about-gays, Communists, and the transgendered. The obvious way to catch up to our guilt quotient is to serve up some combo-specials. In other words, think of people who are victimized for multiple reasons.
I mean it’s nice that film maker Thomas Anderson came out with a documentary, “Red Hollywood”, about blacklisted film makers of the nineteen forties and fifties. That’s so retro, though.
I want my Stalinism up to date.
Who cares about a bunch of white guys whose martyrdom consisted of going to Europe to produce movies for low six-figure sums, instead of the mid-six figure sums they’d made in Hollywood?
The New Yorker is only too happy to oblige. Consider their profile of the black jazz singer Nina Simone, “A Raised Voice.” Claudia Roth Pierpont, who wrote the piece, describes how Simone and her friend Loraine Hansbery, the author of “Raisin In The Sun”, loved to chat; “It was always Marx, Lenin, and revolution-real girl talk!” Tee-hee!
Simone referred to the U.S. as the “United Snakes of America.”
In 2001, she worked a tirade against George W. Bush into her ballad “Mississippi, Goddam!,” and encouraged the audience to “go do something about that man” during a Seattle concert. At another public appearance she asked; “Are you ready to smash white things? To burn buildings?”
After Simone became too sick to perform she did not return to the U.S. but died in France in 2003. Her ashes were scattered in several African countries.
Why does the writer think we find this person’s life story moving or inspiring?
Is it assumed we as white Americans will automatically feel guilty and apologetic towards Nina Simone as a black woman and a Marxist?
Nina Simone
The best example of multi-tasking victimhood is the playwright Naomi Wallace.
Ms. Wallace hails from the Blue-Grass State, where her father was a “gentleman farmer,” her mother a Dutch Communist activist. She attended Hampshire College, a hippy-dippy, radical chic bastion in Massachusetts. (An alum of neighboring Amherst College swears that conservative grads of his school actually underwrote the founding of Hampshire so that it would draw the radical/stoner element away from their alma mater!)
Ms. Wallace was the subject of a flattering profile in The New York Times in 1997. It described her first play, “The War Boys”, as dealing with “three young men hunting illegal immigrants on the Texas-Mexico border for bounty.”
Her second, “In The Heart of America,” is about “a pair of gay marines who get caught in the internal viciousness of the gulf war.” The third, “Slaughter City,” is about a strike at a meat packing plant. More recently, in 2007, the Guardian, the British leftist paper, described her play, “Things of Dry Hours,” as a depiction of the travails of black communists in Alabama in the 1930’s.
Lyn Gardner, the Guardian columnist, says it’s about, “a forgotten part of US history; when poor blacks came together to found an indigenous American Communist Party, a move that could have led to a different and better America.”
This is after the Stalinist show trials, the betrayal of the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Hungarian Revolution, the crushing of Czechoslovakia, Solzhenitsyn, the fall of the Soviet Union, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, the boat people of Vietnam, the dungeons and torture chambers of Castro’s Cuba…none of it matters, because their heart was in the right place.
What is required now of public intellectuals is 1) they hate their native land, 2) worship at the altar of Marx and Lenin. (Even those who are squeamish about the latter tag employ their thinking and vocabulary, which is why anti-American rhetoric sounds like it was written by the staff of The Nation, even if it’s coming from Iran, ISIS, or Putin’s Russia.)
Nowadays, though, you have a further hurdle to clear-the LGBT certification of political correctness.
Trust The New Yorker to get ahead of the pack on this one!
First, we have a revival of that iconic treasure, the 1966 documentary “Portrait of Jason”, which the magazine says is about; “a gay, black, self-described hustler, he invents the medium of performance art. Meanwhile he presents, with a disconcerting exuberance, an agonizing capsule of an age of ambient racism, homophobic persecution, and moralistic hypocrisy.”
Then there’s “Stardust”. By the “veteran” choreographer David Rousseve, “it tells the story of a troubled gay African-American teenager through projections of his confessional text messages…a ten member company peppers sweeping, body-flinging modern dance with hip-hop posturing.” (New Yorker review, 8-11 & 18-2014)
Finally, there is “Choir Boy,” a recent (2013) play about a prep school attended by “boys of color.” (Not colored boys, please)
The New Yorker summarized the plot as the gay hero singing the school anthem at graduation while another black student hisses “faggot.” The gay hero refuses to identify his tormentor in an act of racial solidarity trumping sexual identity. Surprisingly, The New Yorker is critical of the playwright for, get this, “capitalizing on his blackness and gayness” and “not asking anything of his soul as an artist.”
The answer is obvious; Mr. Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright, should have made his protagonist black, gay, and Communist (and maybe from Alabama).
Then we’d have something!
Well said, Mr. Sutherland.
George Orwell wrote, “There is no enemy so evil that it would cause them to take sides with their own government.” He was writing about left-wing English intellectuals, but his observation describes the American left’s vile approach to their own country, as well.
Dead on the money Mr. S.
The Propaganda, lies and fabrications fostered on the expected demographic attending such movies as “The Butler” (Which would include the rest of your list and, as far as I can tell, the entire genre.) is not just the expected confirmation bias delivered from the liberal momma bird into the waiting mouths of young unsophisticated chicks not yet out of the nest, it is a pure, unambiguated race baiting incentive that encourages division and, most importantly, permission for that ever so holy, “Propaganda of the deed”.
Here is a list of the fabrications in “The Butler”.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/16/the-butler-fact-check-how-true-is-this-true-story.html#
That ever present malevolent bedrock of hatred that is polished and proudly displayed every day in the streets of America, starts off with lickspittle Hollywood cretins like Jamie Foxx telling an audience at Saturday Night Live he just made a movie where he gets to “Kill all the white people” and ends with the deaths of 7 white folks on 127th and Wornall. There is an absolute straight line reference from Hollywood’s incessant portrayal of whites as evil, stupid, nefarious in a false narrative, that is part THE “Narrative”.
This years Academy Awards, will no doubt, go to the fine folks who have teamed up once again, to make another great movie. “Selma”.
I suffer no white guilt. In my opinion, the government doesn’t pay any attention to the color of my skin. They are an equal-opportunity rapist. I don’t have the time or the desire to worry about who they are screwing the worst/best.
I realize that America has to wear a whole plethora of bad sh_t. There has been some God-awful treatment of alot of people. Those of color and otherwise. But, that wasn’t any of my doing and I’m not going to own it. For those that do, enjoy it.
excellent piece jim bwh.
but you have racists like chuckles always at the keyboard rady to spew hate
and his own victimization to the few reader who actually read his garbage.
He’s the victim…didn’t you know it….my African American friends don’t
think of m as evil….they know who’s after them.
chuck is just a mad raging bull filled with hate and anger against everyone
and everything that he feels has ‘held him back” in his life.
he’s had every opportunity to do whatever he wants to do in life…I just
think the man is lazy and waiting for the feeding off the tit of the government
just like the rest of the people he hates so much.
but great article …..I’m not a victim….I’m not looking behind my back…
I live my life and am happy….others are filled with rage and anger
that life dealt them a bad hand….
luckly there are millions more like you who don’t suffer.
poor chuck!!!!!
Yo yo Harley mah brutha man. You be throwin dat shade on dat racist craka. That blumpkin you gave me was the bomb. Come on over and get all my used FUBU so you can front wid all yo hipster peeps at da Starbucks where you be wurkin.
Damn! I just realized, you didn’t mention Suthlands article.
Nice picture advocating the beating of woman. Especially well done in light of the Ray Rice video. Totally refutes everything in your post. Ignorance like that is what is making your brand of conservatism a dying breed. Thank God your generation is dying off.
The photo in question appears to be from a left-wing site and to be a taunt to sexists/ chauvinists who would supposedly like to “punch” or” beat” pride,dignity.or any other form of empowerment out of women. I assume that Hearne modified it to substitute smugness as the distinguishing characteristic of such people(it looks like the girl was at an Occupy Wall Street rally),rather than the usual self-congratulatory(and self-pitying) tone the phrasing of such captions have. Do you know where it came from? I’d also like some explanation of where the “United Snakes of America” image came from and what it means. That Obama,Bush,and McCain are all reptilian creatures? Irony is lost on you apparently,but your reply was so nicely phrased that I thought your should get another chance to explain yourself.
Yes, most if not all of the purple critters in DC are reptilian and were hatched from eggs, not live birth. What is so hard to understand about that?
Are they all morally equivalent,i.e. without “redeeming social value”? Is this really “The Land of The Thief,Home of The Slave”? If so,what is worth preserving about such a debased and hopeless society ? If we’re really beyond redemption,which is the unmistakable message, why do we even bother resisting Putin, ISIS,and the Iranians?
Bread and circus? Fuel for the ravenous appetite of the Congressional Military Industrial Complex?
A mix of both?
If you believe that the only reason we’ re in the current war with Radical Islam is for entertainment value(bread and circuses) or to line the pockets of the “military- industrial”complex, no discussion is possible except to remind you what happened thirteen years ago. Unless you think that we brought 9-11 on ourselves,which confirms everything I was saying in my post several times over. The tenor of your comments recalls Emerson’s phrase “the cheapness of unearned cynicism”.
No Dwight, it is well earned cynicism. I trust my federal government about as far as I can throw it.
I have different thoughts on 9-11, but blowback is a bitch when you go dallying in foreign wars for economic and personal reasons (Sandbox war redux??).
Hey everybody! Remember that one time the war criminals Bush/Cheney lied to the American people about weapons of mass distruction in Iraq and led us into a pre-emptive war where tens of thousands of American service men/women were killed or injured and trillons of U.S. dollars were wasted? Good times!
As one of your self-styled “public intellectuals ” please rest assured that I neither “hate my country” nor “worship at the alter of Marx or Lenin.” I do however take great exception to your broad and somewhat clumsily drawn generalization of liberal thinking. Just as I would never suggest that all conseratives believe and espouse the worthless propaganda of “artists” such as Dinesh D’souza, so should you about the ones you named above. Your closed minded article only reinforces the negative stereotype of your brand of outdated, out-of-touch, and narrow-minded conservatism. I mean citing a documentary from 1966, and article from 1997 to illustrate how the modern liberal thinks is quite a stretch and rather disingenuous at best, don’t you think?
The documentary from 1966 was considered worth reviving and being favorably reviewed in 2013.(It was revived in the 70’s as well) It had an important role in shaping attitudes to this day,as the glowing encomiums to it show. The playwright,who was profiled in such a favorable way by the NYT in 1997, still is considered one of the best in the business and has had more well received plays produced here and abroad. These are mainstream views,widely shared by the dominant cultural elite. There is nothing marginal or fringe about them.
The subject matters chosen and the manner in which they were portrayed reflects a deep and abiding anger towards the heritage and values this country embodies. Diana Trilling, the literary critic,recalled her dismay when she asked a seminar of Harvard students she was teaching as a writer in residence about what they knew about the Spanish Civil War(a real political watershed for her generation). A young woman responded;”I don’t know much but I do know it was our fault !” In other words,America is not only always wrong but is the source of evil in the world. Can you name me one conflict in the last 70 years where the Left thinks the U.S. was on the right side? Can you tell me one chapter in American history which the Left does not see as part of an unending saga of repression and exploitation of minorities,workers,and women? Or are you like the First Lady,who was never proud of her country before her husband was elected ?
Again your reply illustrates my point. Why would you assume I would never be proud of my country, or would assume I would believe that America is always wrong? Being liberal means being open to new behavior or opinions, something you don’t seem capable of understanding. I would not be so bold as to presume my opinion of 70 years of American conflicts was definitive or above reproach as you appear to. I am quite capable of entertaining two seperate sides of every issue without making false or broad generalizations. Your attempts to pigeon hole me as a bleeding heart, America-hating liberal further illustrate why conservatism is on the wane in this country. Nobody is right all of the time. The world is changing, those who cling to their out-dated views and being left behind and passed over in favor of those who don’t just see the world in black & white.
I agree that nobody is right all the time.But neither is anyone wrong all the time either,let alone an entire country. Answer the question ! Tell me one conflict since World War II where you think the US was on the right side. Tell me one period in America history that you are proud of and think we have been a force for good in the world. Tell me why the examples I cited in my post are not representative of the mindset of many intellectuals in this country,regardless of your personal views. The instances I cited are not from obscure academic quarterlies or underground newspapers. You have to go no farther than the KC Star to see that this is a widely held worldview, held by the Establishment Press throughout the country.
Well said Shawnster. Dwight might say it in a bit more polite and intellectual manner than do others here, but trashing liberals in such a broad manner is both unfair and inaccurate. I claim to be a liberal mainly because I see the government as having an important role to play. In many areas of society, ONLY the government can play the role. Do we trust the private sector to police itself? To take the position that government is always the enemy is outrageous to me. Thank goodness the founding fathers did not have that perspective. Yes, they had a difference of opinion on the width and depth of government, but it was not the enemy. They met because the limited role of government under the Articles of Confederation wasn’t cutting it.
There are shades of liberalism just as there are shades of conservatism. Let’s not try to paint each other with such a broad and unforgiving brush.
By the way, Dwight, while I’m a member of the Left, I don’t speak for the entirety of the Left anymore than you speak for the entirety of the Right. To answer the question you posed to Shawnster, I think that in the overwhelming majority, if not all of the conflicts in the last 70 years, the US has been in the right. Certainly unfortunate collateral damage regularly occurs in conflict but I also think the US is a force for good in the world.
Guess I’m one leftist that doesn’t fit your model.
I am the guilty party on that pic.
I will say you’re major reaching Shawnster to correlate that goofy, sarcastic pic with Ray Rice and the beating of women.
Shawnster- What does the record of the Iraq War have to do with the reason why we were attacked on 9-11?( That’s the very argument you guys always make,albeit in a different context!) Dude- The reason we were attacked thirteen years ago was very simple. Bin Laden launched his jihad against the U.S because we stationed American troops in Saudi Arabia to protect it from invasion in 1991 by Saddam Hussein (and said so repeatedly). By doing so we committed sacrilege against the most sacred shrines of Islam in his eyes . Never mind that he’d worked with the U.S, in Afghanistan and offered to fight along side of us to defend his homeland. This is truly insane,i.e. he’d rather see his country destroyed rather than have it defended by infidels ! How the heck is this the fault of the U.S.(“waging wars for personal reason” or fighting in a”sandbox”) ? I talked to two young “progressives” at the time of the 9-11 attacks and they made excuses for Bin Laden:i.e.”He had his reasons!” So did Hitler,Stalin,Pol Pot, Idi Amin and every other mass murderer in history. This is the mindset of many on the Left,even if some of you (e.g.Stomper) are throwbacks to a Harry Truman/John Kennedy breed of fighting liberalism,who I have no quarrel with!