“Here I am, sitting here, losing my shirt, and you’re telling me what you’d be losing.” — Walt Disney in 1942, explaining to a director why the studio had to cut sequences from Bambi. 

 In 1937, full of confidence and pioneering spirit as to what could be accomplished in the cartoon medium, thirty-six-year-old Walt Disney acquired the film rights to the children’s book Bambi, A Life in the Woods.  Written by the Hungarian born Siegmund Salzmann, under the pen name Felix Salten in 1923, Bambi was amongst the many books banned in Adolph Hitler’s Germany in 1936 (reportedly the usually animal loving Nazis, saw the Jewish Salten’s story of woodland creatures trying to survive the menace of man as an allegory for Jews trying to escape persecution).  Despite warnings from his artists that it lacked a sufficient plot, and his heavy dependence on the German market, Walt saw Bambias a great opportunity to animate animals with human personalities.  

Typically Walt laughed off the idea that there were any political meanings in his films.  The Three Little Pigs (1933)was seen by many as an ode to the Great Depression; The happy swine danced like the carefree people in the 1920s until the big bad wolf wiped out their houses with the force of the 1929 stock market crash. The usually Republican Walt never intended that the hard-working pig that lived in the brick house be seen as an endorsement of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Seven years later, a columnist fumed over Fantasia. In hermind, the film’s climactic scene, where the devil damned human souls into a volcano, meant Disney was saying we were all helpless against Nazi demons.Perhaps the wildest accusation had been made three years earlier when a left-wing newspaper writer had written that in Disney’s Snow White,when the seven dwarfs had taken down the wicked queen, it was a clear triumph for a miniature communist society.  Walt no doubt would have been taken aback to find out that many people in the modern green movement would later cite watching Bambi as the beginning of their interest in environmentalism.  

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Over the course of the past few decades, entertainment produced in Hollywood, news commentary written by feminized journalists, and propaganda spread by political action groups focused on protecting the environment have dealt a near death blow to masculinity via their all out demonization of guns, hunting, and manliness in general. And over the course of the past few weeks, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has single-handedly used her television show (Sarah Palin’s Alaska) to reverse this trend and restore manliness to its rightful place once again.

She did this first by clubbing a halibut to death after catching it in Alaskan waters, and secondly by shooting and field-dressing a caribou on a more recent episode.

Along the way, Hollywood elites, news outlets, and groups like PETA have literally come unhinged. Aaron Sorkin, who went took pains to stress that he’s involved in “film and television,” went on a profanity laced tirade against Palin for her caribou hunt. Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald bemoaned: “Most disturbing is the way [Palin] seems to enjoy causing suffering to other beings.” And the animal rights’ group Defense Of Animals, issued a statement that said: “Palin’s complete lack of compassion as demonstrated in this snuff video is disgusting.”

These handwringers certainly are an intolerant lot, aren’t they? (more…)

I’d never felt compelled to comment on anything at The Huffington Post before, though they routinely posted items so vitriolic and egregiously idiotic as to tempt me. I’m more of a Corner (at NRO) or a Big Hollywood type of reader. But via Big Hollywood, I came across a piece by Aaron Sorkin denouncing Sarah Palin (as if I even had to complete that sentence).

I took a look through Sorkin’s article, which had all the symptoms of Palin Derangement Syndrome: aggressive name-calling, a hysterical, breathlessly upset tone, and extreme paranoia regarding her ability and willingness to retaliate against anyone who even sneezes in her direction. But one part in particular caught my eye:

“I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.”

I can’t imagine he got so upset over John Kerry blowing away birds with a shotgun some six years ago, but never mind. I can’t confess surprise that he’d essentially state that he gets happiness out of hunting accidents, because anyone who has seen a few episodes of “The West Wing” would know he thinks of conservatives and those who hold differing world views as effectively subhuman.

What struck me, though, was that he boasted about his inability to discern degrees of right and wrong between shooting a caribou and a dog-fighting operation. On one hand, you have someone legally shooting an animal with a rifle. Even assuming it lived past the gunshot, it’s not going to be around very long, and can be then transmuted into nourishment. On the other hand, you have a guy who illegally ran a sadistic game that meted out immeasurable cruelty to animals, even allegedly participating in the execution of the animals.

Even a rather dim fellow could see the difference, but that’s assuming he’s not posse (more…)

***UPDATE 5:44pm: This post was edited for clartity.

The first thing I noticed about Aaron Sorkin’s hilariously bitter and angry HuffPo article aimed at Sarah Palin (but you knew that when I said “bitter” and “angry” ) is that in his profile photo Sorkin’s not wearing those asshole glasses he’s so famous for. How could he see the birdie? Another first is that for once Sorkin didn’t pull his usual schtick of reaching back to his ancestors to prop up his own personal bona fides, as though Grandpa Joe’s military service somehow makes this reformed (so he says) drug-addict some sort of super-patriot. However, we must admit that the removal of the glasses combined with the end of those rhetorical feasts on the corpses of his betters were both excellent choices — and we here at Big Hollywood applaud him. And so on to the business at hand…

What is it about Sarah Palin that so gets under Sorkin’s skin? Or is the cultural bigot so desperate for this year’s Best Screenplay award that his first mercenary impulse is to further ingratiate himself with the Hollywood elite by cruelly and publicly lashing out at this mother of five — and in turn all hunters and most of the Middle Americans who know and love them. 

Here’s how Mr. West Wing begins, by quoting a Sarah Palin tweet:

“Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.”

You’re right, Sarah, we’ll all just go fuck ourselves now.

A wiser man would’ve stopped there, but Sorkin is not a wise man nor is he a good man nor is he a thinking man. Instead, he goes on to admit he enjoys leather shoes and the taste of meat and the starflowers that pop off in his head as the cocaine hits the pleasure senses of his brain (that last part’s my own interpretation of the subtext), but…

What he hates is that Sarah Palin (and most every other hunter in the world) dares to enjoy the hunt.

I’m able to make a distinction between you and me without feeling the least bit hypocritical. I don’t watch snuff films and you make them. You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though…

Money quote alert…! (more…)

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The Mighty Ted Nugent (be sure to watch the clip above) declaring Sarah Palin one of his three heroes of hands-on conservation helped me to crack what I find so appealing about TLC’s “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” My admiration for the former governor notwithstanding, for over a decade now my reality show viewing has never left the delightfully disturbing and fascinating world of true crime prison breaks, forensic detectives, deadly women and wicked attractions. But I’ve come to like and admire the Palin family because seeing who they are and what they stand for celebrated in the current era of popular culture is such a rare thing.

Because I’m simplistic I tend to break the world down into three simple categories:

Category one is made up of those who keep the world safe: our military, police, firefighters. Those men and women who risk their own lives to protect the rest of us from the bad guys. Without them we have nothing.

Category two is made up of those who keep the world turning. These are our doctors and nurses and entrepreneurs and those who do the hard work of keeping us fed, our cars on the road, the toilets flushing and the air conditioner running. They don’t complain, they don’t whine, they have no sense of entitlement. And without them we have suffering.

Category three is the rest of us, those privileged to enjoy the luxury of being website editors, film critics, writers, journalists, professors and the like. Remove these people from the planet (and I include myself among them) and the world stays safe and keeps right on turning. We’d miss them, but do we really need them?

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There’s a new gold rush on but you don’t have to head to the hills of California to be part of it.  All you have to do is tune in to talk radio and jot down an “800″ number where a few of the big syndicated shows pimp for the gold merchants.  The ads for these companies are all over radio and television.

I have no problem with a host or show taking advertising from any product.  If Rush wants to run a few Obama ads, no problem. If Dr. Savage can sell ads to the ACLU, I say he should give his sales staff a bonus. I’m a capitalist all for making a nickel who believes in the old saying, caveat emptor – buyer beware.  Yet, it’s different when the host reads the commercial live.  This signifies a level of approval beyond “we let this guy buy ads on our show.” (more…)

Shooting animals is so “brutal,” especially if they are shot from the air, right? Slamming Sarah Palin for “casting aside science” and “championing the slaughter of wildlife,” one would think that Ashley Judd’s stance in a new ad on hunting is beyond reproach. After all, Judd certainly cares more about animals, right?

Yet, sometimes the emotional response isn’t the most responsible one. In this case, hunting is done to keep animals from dying from starvation and to maintain higher quality populations. The problem is that in the wild, animal populations go through what are called “boom and crash” cycles – animal populations expand to consume the available food supplies and when those are exhausted, the animals starve and the populations crash. Starvation also makes the animals more susceptible to disease. Hunters stabilize populations, and keep those problems from recurring.

Ironically, the hunters and Sarah Palin seem to know a lot more of what is in the wolves’ and their preys’ interests than the wolves’ supposed defenders. Shooting might not be perfect (despite the ad’s exaggerations, the wolf might not die instantly), but stabilizing the wolves’ population through shooting some animals is probably a less painful way for an animal to die than through starvation. In addition, starvation would have impacted virtually all the wolves, but only a fraction of the animals risk suffering any trauma from being shot. (more…)