The storyline of the movie The Book of Eli is a cross between I Am Legend, Fahrenheit 451, and a B-movie western. In post-apocalyptic American wasteland, a strange wanderer named Eli (Denzel Washington)—who is a cross between St Francis of Assisi and Mad Max—carries the only surviving copy of the Bible. His task is to bring it to a destination (unknown even to himself) in the West where God told him to go and where the Book is most needed.

Along his lonely way, Eli stumbles into a town resembling those of the Old West. The leader of the town is a self-appointed, ruthless leader named Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman who is simultaneously a cross between Mickey Rourke from 9 ½ Weeks and Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler, as well as the whole process of evolution between the former and the latter. Carnegie is an evil megalomaniac who sends his lowlife savages in search of the Book, convinced that possession of a copy of the now-extinct Bible can help him spread his rule and establish control over degraded humanity.

In case abusing his concubine, killing some people, and treating the rest like dirt was not enough to convey that Carnegie is a bad guy, we are shown that his favorite read is Mussolini’s biography. Yet, with all the weight of culture going against him, Carnegie is the only person who had managed to forge some semblance of a settlement with brewing elements of potential civilization.   His wild town—reminiscent of an Old West settlement but surrounded with cannibals instead of Indians—is the only semi-safe and positive place in an otherwise out-of-control and collapsed world. He is assembling a hierarchical society and he needs the Book to bring, as he thinks, “all the weak and wounded” under his dominion. His intentions are sinister and self-serving, but he seems to be the only person who understands the real power of the Book and its ability to transform and civilize the brutally egotistical and animal nature of disintegrated humanity . . . while at the same time correctly assessing any man’s, including his own, inability to re-create functioning societal interactions without a binding belief system. (more…)

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America. (more…)