Oscar epics and the battle for America.
Prediction: The pro-capitalist people who make this magazine are pissed off that movie studios realised people like to see tits and geared their movies that way in order to make money.
There's a stock photo of a girl holding a clapper with nothing written on it. This person evidently has little idea about making movies.
The article begins by naming Ben-Hur, Titanic,, and The Return of the King as the three highest-oscaring movies of all time, and then we get this delightful sentence:
Oh Bacchus, this is going to be whining about societal progression since 1959. As an antidote to the stupidity to come, here's
the most popular scene from Titanic (I would mark this as NSFW, but if your job allows you to watch videos on the Internet, naked Kate Winslett is probably acceptable).
This is followed by a couple of paragraphs comparing Ben-Hur to the 1969 Best Picture winner, Midnight Cowboy, and using this to show how American society changed over 10 years, though the way the article is written it sounds like Midnight Cowboy came out at the very start of the hippie movement, rather than the end.
And, as you have probably guessed, this article takes a complaining tone, the writer clearly imagining that the 50s were a time of great awesomeness while the 60s were all about a concerted, Orwellian effort to purge the conservative point of view from society. Let's take a look at the specific claims made:
- Prayer was banned in public schools. Oh for Toth's sake! Attention conservatives: PRAYER HAS NEVER BEEN BANNED IN AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND ATTEMPTING TO MAKE IT SO WOULD VIOLATE THE FIRST AMENDMENT. What the Supreme Court ruled was that a teacher, as a government employee, could not in their capacity as a teacher lead students in prayer as that would favour the religion in which the teacher was praying (probably, but not necessarily, Christianity) above those of others. America has a pretty significant Jewish population, and I doubt many Jewish parents would appreciate their children being forced to partake of Christian religious rituals. However, if a kid, or a group of kids, wishes to pray in a school, this is prefectly allowed, due to the very same amendment which prevents teachers from conducting prayer - banning kids from praying violates freedom of religion.
- In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court declared abortion on demand to be a “constitutional right.” Actually, this ruling established that a woman's right to privacy extends to having an abortion. Abortion on demand is an unfortunate side effect.
- Excessive violence and sex on TV and in movies became the norm This is all a bit subjective, isn't it? What to one person is excessive is to another reasonable, and to a third person would be considered tame. Take Japan, for instance. Japan is a country in many ways more in line with American conservative values than America, yet its TV shows are on average significantly more violent than contemporaneous American shows.
- while Christian and conservative characters were reduced to the brunt of jokes. Be glad they're just laughing at you and not seriously saying you're a mentally ill paedophile.
Here's some other things that happened in 1960s America which conservatives opposed:
- Black people won equal rights to white people.
- American Indian Movement founded.
- Second-wave feminism gets started.
At his point, the article brings up rising divorce rates as a result of the 60s counterculture revolution. Fun fact: the first state to introduce no-fault divorce was the right-leaning Oklahoma, in 1953. Yes, that's 1953, not 1963 - four years before Ben-Hur hit cinemas. Every other state followed suit, with the last to introduce it being that bastion of conservatism, New York, in 2010.
Still, most states didn't introduce no-fault divorce until after 1969, so let's see how that has affected things, eh? The portion of marriages that end in divorce has increased by approximately 2 percentage points. Yeah, no-fault divorce has really led to sky-rocketing divorce rates. (People who claim that the rate of divorce is skyrocketing commonly cite the number of divorces in a given year being an ever-higher portion of the number of marriages in the same year; however, the number of new marriages has been on a general downward trend, which skews the results).
What has really happened is that divorce has ceased to become taboo. This hasn't significantly increased the rate of divorce, but the shame and social stigma that was attached to it in the 50s has been mostly erased, so we can now talk openly about it and so we perceive it far more. The difference between perception and reality is at the heart of quite a lot of nonsensical rhetoric by everyone on the political spectrums and majorly impedes our ability to actually get things to work.
Oh, and this is good:
This quote is the standard libertarian railing against government intrusion under the guise of providing aid to the vulnerable, coupled with the insinuation that if only it wasn't for single parents and regulation, the economy would be in a grand state. Newsflash guys - the present buggered economy was caused by too little government regulation, not too much. Minimal regulation coupled with insignificant taxes on top incomes resulted in an insane orgy of lending and freaky property deals that nobody actually understands which channeled 80% of the money into the accounts of a small élite, and this system finally imploded when all of a sudden everything was too expensive for anybody to buy and sales evaporated. US debt came not from trying to keep single-parent families clothes, fed, and sheltered, but from refusing to take more than a few dollars a year from millionaires in the good times and then nationalising the biggest companies in the bad times, presumably on the grounds that even more unemployment is the last thing America needs at the moment.
Anyway, the article says the current economic situation is like Titanic. Wait, what? How do you figure that? This analogy makes no sense at all, and the article doesn't even try to explain it - the author just asserts it is true without ever bothering to tell the reader what the heck he is blabbering about. There's something about how there's a disaster in Titanic and also an economic disaster currently ongoing, but there is no effort to link them. Also, in 1997, America was doing very well under Bill Clinton, so if the movies are supposed to reflect the state of America when they were made, the attempted connection to the credit crunch is the most false analogy I've ever seen since 'DNA carries information, therefore it must have been created by an intelligent being!'
The author goes on to assert that the economy basically depends on the strength of the family - after all, broken homes take up welfare money instead of earning it at work. I can't find any reliable breakdown on how social security money is paid, but I suspect a good portion of it goes to two-parent families and unmarried, childless individuals who are either unemployed or who work hard but don't earn enough to live on.
I'd like to tell you a story. 51 years ago, a baby was born to a single mother in Hawaii. His parents spent little time together, and divorced when he was three. This woman didn't have much, and while she did later remarry, she didn't spend much time with her new husband either, and basically raised her son alone.
However, the boy worked hard, and managed to get a degree in law from Harvard. He spent several years working with the poor of Chicago to try and improve their lot.
As you have probably guessed, he's president today. Hence, I'm inclined to listen to the president when he talks about the plight of the poor and waht should be done; if nothing else, he personally knows what it's like to have nothing and to live in a broken home.
Did you know that government assistance to low-income earners is actually a central idea in Milton Friedman's vision of a capitalism economy? Yeah, Friedman, hero of the free market, argued that everybody should be guaranteed a certain minimum annual income on the grounds that if the masses have more money, they will spend it and generate commerce, thus stimulating the economy and hopefully increasing everybody's income.
The article cites a study done by a dude named Pat Fagan, whose FRC profile claims he double-majored in sociology and social administration while attending UCD even though Irish universities don't operate on that system. Anyway, the results otained from the study are based on reasoning even more flawed than belief in homeopathy. Fagan takes real statistics on unmarried couples and, admirably, restricts his analysis only to those couples where the girl and the dude have a good, supporting relationship. He then concludes that the girl will be better off marrying the dude on the grounds that her earnings and whatever welfare she might get are less than the dude's salary plus whatever she might get after marrying.
Can you see the flaw here? For some insane reason, he assumes the father would contribute none of his earnings to supporting the mother and child unless he was married; if he had ever encountered an unmarried couple with a child, he would be well aware that this is bollocks. In reality, the father uses all his income to pay the bills and support the family whether he's married or not, and guess what - people are still in poverty!
To show how wrong-headed these people are, consider America vs Finland. According to the group Fagan works for, approximately 33% of children born in America are bastards (figure cited in the previous linked article). In Finland, the figure is around 40%.
When you look at child poverty rates, you find that about 23% of children in America are in poverty, compared to about 5% in Finland. Clearly, factors other than marriage are responsible for child poverty.
Based on this false premise, the author argues that welfare should be cut and let churches pick up the slack. Also, churches must be free to do good work without government interference.
Churches do a lot of good work, but what makes you think they will do more if welfare is eliminated? Sure, taxes would fall, but I doubt the high earners would give all their extra income to their local church to spend on charity, and even if they did, how could they be sure the money would reach those who need it the most? In fact, even if they did, this would merely result in a concentration of wealth in high-income areas which, given churches tend to operate on a local basis, would be less likely to reach those in lower-income areas who really need it. Government beaurocracy is bloated and inefficient, but you can't just cut it out entirely and expect churches to pick up the slack.
Oh, and the author then has the gall to insist the government stay out of the schools! The government owns and operates those schools, and pays for them with everybody's tax money you know - that means they get to dictate how they're run and have every right to keep them secular. If you want a school free from government regulation, send your kids to a private school like all the other millionaires.
And then he moves on to The Lord of the Rings, where he compares the conservative movement to the Fellowship, a small group of plucky individuals who bravely stand up to Sauron and Saruman. That's actually a rather apt comparison - while Tolkien explicitly disavowed and allegorical subtext in his novel, the nature of Sauron and especially Saruman is clearly influenced by the encroaching of modernity and technology on his rural home.
BUT... my memory of the book is a little hazy, but didn't Aragorn prior to reclaiming his throne sneak into Minas Tirith and heal a bunch of people? Sort of like the government providing aid to the needy?
Anyway, there's some more vague stuff about how the Lord of the Rings movies teach us about perseverance in the face of adversity and overwhelming odds, but that applies to everybody regardless of political persuasion. It's a bit odd that the author thinks conservatives are less outspoken than liberals; I'm an outsider, and I perceive American politics to be a lot of conservatives shouting very loudly until people break down and give them what they want. The again, I'm rather liberal, so I might just be succumbing to the hostile media effect.
The second page of this article has a lame comic strip about two lads who literally bump into each other while texting. Kali, this just screams "middle-aged man trying desperately to look hip and cool".
Huh, barely a mention of tits.
Next time I feel like updating, we'll take a look at America's founding fathers.
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