My wife — the smartest, wisest person I know — has a saying: “Since nothing will make you happy, I’m done trying.” Her point, and it’s a good one, is that there’s no reason to try and satisfy those who refuse to be, those who are more interested in complaining than anything else. This is something I’ve always tried to avoid when it comes to what I have to say about Hollywood. Yes, we most certainly are engaged in a political and cultural war with the entertainment industry — a war they started — but ”Hollywood” isn’t a single person or thing or studio. Like the terms “Big Business” and “Big Labor,” “Hollywood” is a kind of shorthand both sides use to identify a political adversary. 

But there is a nuance to Hollywood that can be found among the many right-of-center types and reasonable liberals who really do want to do the best work they can and make a butt-load of money in the process. And it’s for their sake (and ours) that we have acknowledge and appreciate when Hollywood does right by us. We simply have to prove to those watching and wondering that it is profitable to satisfy our complaints — that’ we’re not going to move the goalposts.

Thus far, right-of-center America has done an absolutely marvelous job in this respect. While anti-American junk has flopped at a forever-pleasing 100% rate, well-made films that speak to our values and beliefs have been almost universally embraced. “300,” “Gran Torino,” “Taken,” “The Dark Knight,” Fireproof,” “Blind Side,” “Battle: Los Angeles,” and “The Book of Eli,” have not only done well at the box office, but in some cases much, much better than expected because word spread throughout Middle America that this one’s for us. With social media, especially the miracle that is Twitter, a fire can start that completely circumvents the corrupt MSM and has an immediate effect at the box office.

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Johnny Cash was punk rock. The birth of rock came when Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Cash toured small towns and set the youth on fire. Parents were outraged. The long dippity-doo hair atop gyrating men “dancing like the negroes”  before frothing young girls set mainstream culture against this rebellious little movement. It was our first smell of anarchy and it scared the establishment.

Johnny Ramone

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air. (more…)