Culture War

Reihan Salam, guest-blogging, along with two compatriots (and with incredible unpopularity, I might add) for Andrew Sullivan, has an interesting post about the culture war. Be forewarned, he's not the clearest blogger on the block. Kevin Drum admitted that he couldn't understand about "half of what [Salam] writes", to which Salam replied: "I spent the first several years of my life speaking an impenetrable patois of Bengali and Brooklynese; my desperate pleas for food or water were answered only by puzzled expressions and, in time, utter indifference. That I survived is a minor miracle. That I remain incomprehensible is a minor tragedy." I despised all three of Andrew's guest bloggers (not, of course, as people, merely as poor substitutes for the frequently infuriating man himself) until I read that post. The rarely-glimpsed husband half of Biscuit does hysterical accents, and I plan to start him working on a Bengali-Brooklyn accent immediately.

Anyway, Salam shoves way too much into this post about the culture war, and at 8:30 in the morning, only halfway through my coffee (and how did it become 8:30 anyway, we woke up with toddler-clock at 7:15 -- what have I been doing for the last hour?), I can't unpack it all. But there seem to be some interesting thoughts there. It is just disingenuous for Republicans to bitch and moan all the time about how Hollywood is so corrupting. Hollywood is extremely big business and its products are consumed in huge quantities by Americans themselves in addition to being exported for the world to consume. Those secular Jews in Hollywood who hate Christianity and like anal sex often do give a lot of money to Democrats, but their products conform to the same standard that all successful and mostly unregulated products do: they make what sells.

Anyway, I'll add 'thinking about this stuff more" to my list of future topics to post on. First I have to read the Tom Frank book everyone's talking about. I am too cheap to buy it, so I'm on the library waitlist for it.