Thomas Lifson is editor and publisher of "American Thinker." A self-styled recovering academic, he holds three separate advanced degrees from Harvard, where he taught all three fields, in addition to visiting professorships at Columbia University and Japan's National Museum of Ethnology.
An expert on Japan and veteran management consultant, he turned his focus from strategy and organization to political and social analysis in the wake of 9/11, founding American Thinker in 2003.
Thomas Lifson
Changing An Industry Culture
by Thomas LifsonThe Hollywood culture that overwhelmingly favors the left and demonizes conservatives is a huge problem for conservatism, but not a hopeless one. The amorphous mix of values, concepts, stereotypes, assumptions, and expected behavior that make up a group culture is not unchangeable, but rather constantly responds to internal and external forces. And the good news is that the planets are rather favorably aligned to influence the tide in Hollywood culture.
All businesses, even in show biz, have no choice but to respond to their environment or perish (if they can’t get a bailout, that is). Compared to, say, the steel industry or the auto industry, nudging the entertainment industry culture into better alignment with the broader culture (and reality) is not so tough. When you are in the popularity business, you care about what other people think; when you must catch trends, the readiness to change must be comparatively high.
Fortunately, a lot of thinking has been done over the last several decades on the subject of influencing organizational cultures. Businesses realize that unless their organizational culture is consistent with their strategic objectives, they are likely to fail in getting people to change the way they work when circumstances demand new behavior. But increased emphasis on such matters as quality, cost, innovation, and the other sorts of objectives that managers must move their employees to achieve, cannot simply be imposed by fiat. Employees have to own the new behavior (as the parlance has it), and getting them to do so requires forcing the group culture to change.
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A French Film Metaphorically Dares To Stand Up To Islam
by Thomas LifsonA really good movie thriller speaks to the secret fears of the public. Classics like Jaws and Psycho confront dark corners of the soul where lurk unconscious primeval fears. Others, like North by Northwest have an ordinary man caught in a nightmare scenario, struggling against mysterious opponents, and in the end finding not just escape but triumph. Still others, like Charles Bronson’s Death Wish series beginning in the 1970s, show an ordinary man standing up and fighting back against a widely-perceived threat (in this case against a huge rise in violent crime in the 1960s), fulfilling a manhood fantasy for a large movie-going demographic.
But for a French film director today to address the fear of the rise of Muslim violence, it would be necessary to operate at a purely metaphorical level, staying away from anything which might suggest a connection to politically incorrect hate-mongering against Muslims or Islam. After all, France locks up people for what it regards as inciting hatred. Keep the subject matter overtly unrelated, but throw in some telling symbolic details allowing viewers to realize what the game is.
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