It seems that over the past several decades, we haven’t been able to avoid having the “moral relativism” mantra pumped into our brains. Sometimes it’s subconscious (being planted in our minds from under-the-radar messages in the talkies of Tinseltown) and sometimes it’s less subtle than Johnny Depp’s awful pubic-hair goatee. How does this resonate with the American people, however? Do most of us believe that a majority of the worlds issues are really just shades of grey?

Well, if you look at the movies that have had great success in our country (The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc.) it would appear to be just the opposite. All of these movies have a very clear-cut right and wrong, good and evil. As it would seem, most Americans actually really like to see the good guys… Beat the bad guys! What a nation of simps!

The truth is that evil is a part of human nature. Not only that, but it’s a part that most decent folk like to see conquered as early and often as possible. Sure there are plenty of murky films that blur the lines of right and wrong in a “study of the human condition.” They’re practically released weekly… But they hardly end up being box-office smashes.

Why? The whole moral relativism shtick is tired, old and Americans aren’t buying it anymore. One needs only look to Hollywood’s domestic abuse, divorce, and drug addiction to see that it doesn’t work.

What really chaps my buttocks though, is when a Hollywood high school drop-out tries to paint middle-American conservatives as simple-minded for putting some “cut and dry” issues on the shelf. Listen, Tinseltown, we understand the complexities of life and examine our moral dilemma’s just as as in-depthly as you do. The only difference is that at the end of the day, we have the testicular fortitude to decide where we line up. The only reason one wouldn’t would be due to one of two things:

1.) You lack a fuzzy pair.
2.) You lack the common sense to understand how the real world works.

Take your pick.

Now Hollywood, I know that making a decision using a moral compass and better judgment may feel foreign, perhaps even painful to you, but you may want to give it a shot. At the very least, you’ll be able to produce more financially viable moving pictures that resonate with the American people.

And Sean Penn, if it doesn’t work out, you can always get another divorce.

In other words, had Tiger Woods lectured schoolchildren on the importance of preserving the institution of marriage, marital fidelity and not being promiscuous — you know, the kind of healthy behavior that’s key to a happy life — she’d be giving him all kinds of hell right now. But, since he only cheated on his wife…

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Does that kind of thinking make any sense to you?

It does if you see the design behind it. The left wants to shut the right up, especially those trying to uphold traditional moral standards. And in order to silence those who would stand up for such things, with the help of popular culture and the media, they’ve managed to turn the world upside down into a place where you’re better off not trying to do good than risking the stigma of hypocrisy.

Because he was a drug abuser, was it wrong for Elvis to speak out against drugs? Of course not. Regardless of their personal habits, any role model using their perch to promote healthy behavior deserves credit — even a drug addict.

But I guess in Joy Behar’s world she’ll give a murderer credit for not preaching against murder, a drug abuser credit for not preaching against drugs and here she is giving Tiger his props for not being one of those types who speak out about upholding traditional moral standards … even though the world would be a better place if he had.  

It’s an impossible trap the left has set for us. We’re all human and we’re all destined to slip. But that’s the plan — to create an environment where only the sinless are allowed to speak out in favor of upholding morality. And since no one is sinless…

But who’s really on the side of the angels? 

Those who extol the virtues of a world where no one demands standards and values; where Roman Polanski’s forgiven because he would never dream of telling someone else not to anally rape a child; where no one strives for anything more than the cowardly pursuit of dodging the “hypocrite” label..? 

Or the imperfect ones, the “moral hypocrites” who at least try to do some good?

The Founders of this nation understood full-well that a nation of liberty could not long survive without a strong moral foundation.  If government exists to control people, then limited government naturally would control them very little.  The potential upside was tremendous.  If allowed to live free, a human being might pursue their own interests to the betterment of all of society.  Freedom means a man might strive, risk, and fail, but it also meant that he might strive, risk, and succeed.  As this process played out over time, it might well become the single greatest engine for innovation and wealth creation in all of human history. 

But it came with great risk.  To give man this freedom meant to largely leave him alone.  Government could not overly interfere in his decision making, other than to ensure that he did not, in his pursuit of his own freedom, encroach unduly on the freedom of others.  In fact, it might be said that our Founders saw government’s exclusive rightful job as providing just that much protection to its citizens — protecting their freedom from those that would rob them of it.  Of course, that meant that government’s first job was to restrain government, that great and historic robber of liberty. 

The problem with so limiting government, however, was that a government that cannot force people to conform to ideas they do not hold, cannot rob man unduly of his freedom to act on his own will, and only has a limited means by which to prevent a man from robbing the freedom of his fellow man.  In order for man to live free from outside law, he must first have a strong and predictable internal code.  It is that code which would provide him the majority of his regulation.  Government would only have to concern itself with behaviors that violated that personal norm.

Of course, the Founders did not arrive at this conclusion in a vacuum.  Free from the constraints of governmental religion, the Founders had actually read the Bible.  While many churches attempt to act as mini-governments and control men, the New Testament makes clear that, “It is for Freedom that Christ has made us Free.”  The Apostle Paul proclaimed that the “Power of sin is the law.”  That, “law came that sin would increase,” but that Christ had, “Set us free from the law of sin and death.”  What does this mean?  It means that there is a natural, inherent evil in man that causes him to rebel against any authority.  Paul says he did not even know what it was to covet, but then the command came saying “thou shalt not covet,” and sin in him, that inherent flaw, seized the opportunity afforded by the commandment and wrought in him every covetous desire. 

In other words, rules (laws, external governance) do not make man better.  On the contrary, they make him worse.  But, taught the New Testament, Christ was the author of a New Covenant in which the written code no longer had power.  Instead, God had freed man through the sacrifice of Christ and now offered man a New Life in which Christ lived in the man, writing his laws upon our hearts.  It was only in this state, free from external governance which wars with our internal flaw — but given a new, personal internal righteousness that is Christ, that man was truly living the life God desired. 

Whatever your religious belief, you can see how revolutionary this line of reasoning is, and how directly it impacted the Framers of our Nation.  If God made man free, then he should be free indeed.  It is the inner goodness that would make him good, not external law.  This was an idea so important to our Founders that they almost all spoke about it.  Washington even dedicated a portion of his Farewell Address to the idea:

“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.  It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

Free men must be moral men.  Immoral men must be slaves to external regulation.

Which brings us back to the events of the last several weeks, and an examination, not of Roman Polanski’s moral choices, but of our moral health as a society.  There is good news and bad news.  The overwhelming public sentiment in the wake of Polanski’s apprehension in Switzerland seems to be in favor of his arrest and extradition.  The majority of people recognize internally that drugging and raping a child in your care while she cries, says no, and asks to be taken home, and then fleeing justice, still qualify in the hearts of most American’s as abhorrent behaviors. 

Of course, one might think that this would go without saying.  It is a common belief that in prisons, hardened criminals and even murders won’t tolerate child-rapists.  Even people whose own moral codes are tolerant of extreme violence and crime know that raping children is especially evil.  Here we find the bad news. 

Apparently many prominent people in the arts and politics are blind to such wanton acts of depravity that even convicted murderers acknowledge.  The danger here is readily apparent.  The Hollywood community that believes Roman Polanski does not deserve to be punished for raping a child, or that having sex with anyone of any age who is crying, saying no, and asking you to stop is “rape-rape,” are the very people who pride themselves in setting the trend for the rest of us.  And the politicians around the world who are coming to the aid of this predator are the same men and women who believe they have the authority to define the external laws that they would see regulate us.  That means that while we may all commonly agree that raping children is evil, the trendsetters and external morality regulators out on the leading edge of society do not think it is evil, and they are working tirelessly to bend our morality to their own through art and law.

Now, it might seem a bit far-fetched to say that a few actors in Hollywood supporting a brilliant, tortured artist could possibly lead to a culture that is so morally bankrupt that they cannot identify raping children as evil, but consider how rapidly common morality can change when the trendsetters and politicians take a strong stand.

Whatever a person’s personal feelings about homosexuality, it is beyond dispute that, with some few and specific exceptions, for most of human history homosexuality has been considered immoral by most people.  And yet, it is equally clear that our culture is moving quickly toward a position that not only sees this behavior as morally acceptable, but that sees the very belief that homosexuality might in fact be immoral as itself being immoral. 

This fundamental shift in a common moral-view has happened very rapidly.  It has only been eleven years since Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet on primetime, an act widely associated with the death of her show.  In 1997, America just “wasn’t ready.”  Contrast that with 2008 when the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation determined that 42% of HBO’s primetime hours were dedicated to depicting the lives of homosexual people (ABC was the highest rated non-cable network at 25%).  And of course, Ellen herself is back, and one of the biggest stars on television. 

It isn’t just in the media.  There is a nationwide movement to legalize same-sex marriage and brand as hate-speech any opposition to homosexuality.  Even Bill Clinton has changed his mind on the subject.  According to a recent Gallup poll, only 48% of Americans currently see homosexuality as immoral.  The exact number who see it as being moral.  That number keeps moving, and only in one direction.

Now, again, the point is not to debate the morality of homosexuality itself, but to demonstrate just how rapidly a common moral position can shift, for better or for worse, when the media and politicians lead the way.  In the case of homosexuality, thousands of years of moral structure are reversing themselves in a window of only forty or fifty years, but for most of recorded history, the age of sexual consent was much younger than our current law would allow.  In fact, the common age of consent across numerous cultures throughout most of the last several thousand years has been the age of puberty, typically thought to occur between the ages of12 and 14 (Shakespeare’s Juliet was only 13 when she decides to marry Romeo). 

If the trendsetters have been successful in altering the common moral position on homosexuality in so short a time, even with all of human history working against them, how much more quickly might they succeed in altering the common view of sex with thirteen-year-olds with almost all of human history behind them?  And if they succeed here, what lines are left for them to cross?

To be sure, moral absolutes have always shifted with time.  When our forebears took slaves, it was certainly not morally good, but the absolute moral disparity was perhaps not clear before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  Before that great document, many forms of slavery and servitude existed in the world, and most everyone lived at some point on that sliding scale.  The complete slavery of black men and women was only an extreme level of the general tyranny and oppression that marked all men. 

Only after the signing, when the natural rights of man were declared loudly as being from God, and violations of those rights were declared unnatural acts and acts of war, was black slavery in this nation truly singled out as a special breed of crime, and not a degree of crime.  In other words, it is only in the presence of good that evil is clearly seen.  The question is, who should a society look to for guidance in judging common morality?  God and philosophers; or government and movie stars? 

As Jefferson pointed out, God has the power and right to force his beliefs on us and yet made us free, the government has not that right, and yet seeks to wield that power over every aspect of our lives.  The media seems obliged to help.  One thing is certain, if we ignore the former, then as Washington warned, we will be slaves of the latter.  If so, we will all be sons-of-bitches for it.

Our Governor Tom Strickland has a plan to balance the Ohio budget. Here it is in a nutshell: “Let’s gamble our way to prosperity!” As a comic my natural instinct is to ridicule this idea and to highlight the fact the Governor is ignoring that four times in the last twenty years the voters, by a wide margin, have refused casino gambling.

In addition to our Governor thinking that gambling is the answer a new group of casino gambling vultures is waiting in the wings and trying to get yet another vote on the ballot.  Governor Strickland is taking advantage of a loophole in the lottery law to call slot machines “video lottery terminals.”  You remember the lottery, don’t you? It was going to solve all of our school finance problems. To paraphrase Dr. Phil, “How’s that working out for you?”

Among the reasons given for this overriding of the will of the people are jobs! Gambling will create jobs. Fair enough–we can always use more jobs for Ohioans. The second thing we often hear from these people and politicians who support slot machines at racetracks and building casinos is that even though they are personally opposed to gambling, they don’t want to “tell people how to run their lives” or “legislate morality.”

When politicians say they don’t want to tell us how to live our lives with a straight face it is funnier than anything I have ever said on stage. That is exactly the point of all government. But, in the spirit of fairness I will take the supporters of gambling at their word and say we need something for Ohio which will create jobs, bring maximum revenue to the state, and not worry about telling people how to live their lives or what moral values they should observe.

If the State of Ohio gets into the gambling business we are getting into a crowded field. Michigan, Illinois, West Virginia, Indiana and Pennsylvania already have casinos and slots so let’s find some new markets to tap without regard to morality that will raise some serious cash and create tons of jobs.

Let’s sell dope! We can be the first Government to get in on the ground floor of what we all know is a high profit business. Forget trying to get a few Hoosier farmers and Kentucky rednecks to come over here and pull a few handles on our one armed bandits, I’m sorry, video lottery terminals. We will have the entire world’s crackheads and heroin users making a beeline for the Buckeye State. Besides the jobs in manufacturing and the distributing of the product our tourism will be off the charts! We will also have to hire a lot more cops, prison guards and drug counselors! Jobs for everybody!

Of course when other states see how much we are raking in they will start selling dope too so we have to be ready for our next non-judgmental venture: pornography! I can see a chain of state run “gentleman’s clubs” that stretches from Cleveland to Cincinnati and from Toledo to little old Ironton! Of course, with the government running them they may not be what you have come to expect from private sector clubs. In that sense, it would be kind of like government healthcare.

In today’s Hollywood a famous liberal filmmaker could hire a hooker while shooting a $100,000,000 studio feature film, secretly charge it to the budget, snort coke in his trailer between shots and drop E at night without any real concern for condemnation or job loss if he’s caught, because, well, he never proclaimed to be on the side of good in the first place. Whereas a famous conservative Christian filmmaker (pretend with me here) caught doing the same thing would be ridiculed and kicked out of town for the hypocrisy of it all since, by being Christian, he openly admitted that kind of behavior is not the most desirable for himself and doesn’t set a very good example for the fans.

What if this same mentality were applied to other shared parts of society?  Could a Hollywood liberal drive his or her gas guzzling, Obama bumper sticker covered SUV through every stop light, plowing down innocent pedestrians and then when stopped by the police simply use the argument “I never said I believed in red lights, therefore I do not have to stop at them.” ?

What the majority of cultural conservatives really want is to reinstate traffic lights in pop culture and most of them set to merely flash yellow. But since Hollywood/MSM liberals thrive on the constant green light for their bizarre behavior from an adoring public in order to stay in power within the town, they must work overtime to keep any kind of national consensus emerging on what is morally good and bad in pop culture.

To quote the Apostle of Common Sense; “Art is like morality. Both begin by drawing the line somewhere.”

And nothing could be worse for the Hollywood/MSM power players than a clear definition of right and wrong because when you’re a profitable purveyor of smut, scandal, lopsided political propaganda and art without lines — the last thing you need is smut, scandal, lopsided political propaganda and art without lines going out of style.

A successful talent manager with a list of star clients once pulled me aside at a party and whispered into my ear “hey, nobody likes a guy that always tells the truth.”  He wanted to sign me as a client and was trying to help me work my way through the system by learning to be dishonest when it paid.

So in my experience this “avoid the truth” mindset is precisely why Hollywood/MSM liberal attacks never end when a conservative or Christian does anything wrong; because they are a fearful living reminder of the truth that most of humanity still wholeheartedly embraces; men are fallen and must fight against their natural urges to become ruthlessly self centered and above the law.

If elite media neo-liberals can succeed in getting more people to speed through the red lights and play by their twisted non-rules then there really is no limit to how far they can sink this nation.

Every once in awhile an action film comes along that revives. That proves that — no matter how strong the political correctness of an age, no matter how pale and pathetic its notions of masculinity, no matter how much Ritalin is force-fed to little boys, no matter how many toy guns, xylophone mallets, and Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots get banned from stores and playgrounds — there are certain aspects of the male soul that are inviolate, and certain primal yearnings that are evergreen. Taken (2008) is one of those films, and its release last week on DVD and Blu-ray should be heralded by lovers of all things red-blooded, hairy-chested, and morally sound.

When this movie appeared in the doldrums of Hollywood’s off-season, it was expected to die a quick death in a marketplace filled with audiences either too sophisticated or too sophomoric to respond. Modern theatergoers, the theory goes, increasingly want their “heroes” to be either brooding Abercrombie & Fitch nymphets like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, feckless stumblebums like Ben Stiller and Paul Blart: Mall Cop’s Kevin James, quirky class cut-ups like Robert Downey Jr. and Johnny Depp, or silly video-game tough guys like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. When an actor does put some honest testosterone in his performance — Daniel Craig in Munich (2005), Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino (2008) — it’s inevitably to make a much larger point about violence breeding only more violence, all of it equally reprehensible, a product of way too many pesky males wreaking havoc in primitive bursts of knuckle-dragging temper.

 We are led to believe that if only The View and Oprah could become required therapy for guys, if only there were enough copies of How to Take the Grrrr Out of Anger to go around, if only enough Neanderthals were herded into sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training, then gee, what a wonderful world it would be. In recent years, only Sly Stallone’s lumbering but effective Rambo (2008) (tagline: “Heroes never die. . .they just reload”) has dared to flip a fully unapologetic middle finger at Hollywood’s human potential movement, offering up a wholesome, rejuvenating hero of implacable moral certitude bathed in the blood of his hated enemies.

Director Pierre Morel and writer/producer Luc Besson’s Taken follows in that film’s laudable footsteps, but significantly ups the ante by adding intelligent layers of real-world characterization to its steel-tipped judgments. The overarching villain in Taken is not a cat-stroking, monocled megalomaniac, nor a motley army of interchangeable third-world guerrillas, but an attitude. A NIMBY (”not in my backyard”) policy practiced by an entire assembly-line of well-imagined kidnappers, pimps, concierges, businessmen, cops, and Sydney Greenstreet sheiks — American, French, Albanian, Arab — all of whom are perfectly content to participate in and profit from the great evil of sex slavery as long as it’s not their daughters being fed into the meat grinder.

Social conservatives have long highlighted the very real plight of women and children across the globe being forced into prostitution (see Donna Hughes, Claudia Barlow and Big Hollywood’s Kathryn Lopez, all at National Review Online). But it’s the rare Hollywood action film that eschews absurdly convoluted plots of world domination or mass destruction in favor of a setup utterly chilling in its innate on-the-ground plausibility. In this age of Natalee Holloway-style sensationalism, what parents haven’t worried about their daughter heading off on a trip? Using this potent, universal fear as a linchpin with which to hold together the stunts, fights, and pandemonium was a stroke of genius, and elevates the audience’s emotional investment far above that of any other action film in recent memory.

As the film’s star, Liam Neeson, stalks through Taken’s miserable underworld of murderous degenerates and silky-smooth predator elites, he is continually faced with the gangland version of the same bureaucratic nightmares that so often terrorize our real workaday lives. “I sit behind a desk now,” a French policeman “friend” tells him by way of rejecting his pleas for help, “I take my orders from someone who sits behind a bigger desk. . . .my salary is X, my expenses are Y. As long as my family is provided for, I do not care where the difference comes from.” When at long last Neeson’s Bryan Mills, captured and defenseless, confronts the man capable of freeing his daughter with a nod of his immaculately coiffed head, the exchange is one that, but for the life-and-death stakes, could have occurred at any DMV or post office:

ST-CLAIR: “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

MILLS: “The last girl — I’m her father.”

ST-CLAIR: “Oh my. . . .”

MILLS: “Give her to me.”

ST-CLAIR: “I wish I could — honestly. See, I’m a father myself. I have two sons, and a daughter. But let me tell you something, Mr. whoever-you-are. This is a business. This is a very unique business with a very unique clientele.”

MILLS: “I’ll pay!”

ST-CLAIR: “This business you have no refunds, no returns, no discounts, no buybacks. All sales are final. Besides, discretion is about the only rule we have.” [turning to his henchmen] “Kill him. Quietly — I have guests.”

Translation: you didn’t fill out the right form/pay the proper postage/return the item by the deadline, so your daughter is going to spend the rest of her life as a burqa-wearing blow-up doll. I’m oh-so-sorry — next customer, please. . . .

Set against these smiling, Armani-clad, ever-so-reasonable slave traders is a man with “a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you,” a man of such singular purpose and moral clarity that we believe him when he promises to “tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to” to find his daughter. A lifetime of living far from the sterilized bubble-universes of political correctness and cradle-to-grave pampering has taught him that there is no negotiating with such scum, no possible penance or rehabilitation, no shrugging at or sympathizing with the worldview they represent. They are the enemy, the nemesis of everything he holds dear as a Judeo-Christian, as an American, and as a father. Against that evil, blood is the only disinfectant.

One of the chief joys of the picture is watching how each defeated villain squeals like a stuck pig and falls over himself to appeal to the hero’s mercy — the very sense of decency they never displayed while engaged in their own unfettered cruelties. “We can resolve this,” one pleads, as if trying to calm down an irate customer returning a defective blender. “I know how you feel. We should talk. We could work this out.” Each time, our hero sees these empty entreaties for what they are: the soulless cries of scorpions unexpectedly denied the use of their sting.

The frontier justice meted out is swift, brutal, and thoroughly satisfying — which means, of course, that the resulting carnage was decried by horrified movie critics as “lowest-common-denominator trash,” a “risible male-re-empowerment fantasy,” an “unsavory mix of sentimentality and high-octane seediness,” and a “post-Sept. 11 throwback to the most primitive movie melodramas.” My, my — how nice to see liberals bitching about a film getting an inappropriate PG-13 rating for a change! Meanwhile, those males around the country who remain proudly unreconstructed — and also, based on the audience I saw the film with, the women who love them — cheered as each doom-laden verdict was rendered:

“I believe you — but it won’t save you.” FFFFZZZZZZZZZ.

“You could have made this much less painful if you had been more concerned about my daughter and less concerned with your goddamned desk.” WHAM!

“It wasn’t personal!” “It was all personal to me.” BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!BLAM!

By the end, the hero’s determination reaches such a fever pitch that he doesn’t even spare a moment for the usual Hollywood banter with the arch-villain cowering behind his terrified human shield: “We can nego–” BLAM! A thunderous exclamation applied with diamond-sharp moral certainty, without a single iota of doubt or remorse. As it should be.

(from left: Jon Gries, Leland Orser, and David Warshofsky)

If there ends up being a sequel to this film, I hope they do it right. Leave behind the kidnapping meme and take on another of the many moral outrages to be found in the progressive multikulti worldview. Bring back Neeson’s three CIA buddies — portrayed by character actors Leland Orser (the real-life husband of Jeanne Tripplehorn, the lucky dog), Jon Gries, and David Warshofsky — and this time give them some real things to do and good lines to say. And for Pete’s sake, don’t have them betray each other, and don’t kill them off for cheap thrills — let them be heroes. Above all, keep the emotional core of the film real and honest, and do your best to drive the heterophobes and misandrists nuts.

Every action movie is filled with its share of stupid implausibilities, but there is nothing stupid about a father’s love for his daughter, and nothing implausible about the sex-trafficking nightmare portrayed in Taken. The legalize-prostitution crowd has gotten a lot of mileage out of putting a reasonable, libertarian face on the whole sordid business, reminding us that, after all, it’s “the world’s oldest profession.” Taken answers back with a growl: “No — the world’s oldest profession is father.” And fathers, for those who need reminding, are men. Males. X-Y.

At the end of the day, when all of the sensitivity/diversity/anger management/sexual harassment/conflict resolution training falls away, the male of the species is a killer, the keeper of a bloody heroic ideal that winds through our history and through our myths, back through Snorri Sturluson and Luo Guanzhong, Shakespeare and Malory, Virgil and Homer, and ultimately the Old Testament and beyond. Countless women and children owe their lives and happiness to the men who tread grim paths of death in their defense. Just as many owe their misery to the failure of some men to honor that age-old crimson burden.

The self-loathing ninnies in Hollywood can spend millions of dollars to make Greedo shoot first, or to airbrush shotguns out of scenes. But such pale attempts at enforcing nanny-state ethics amount to little more than spitting into a merciless wind, the harbinger of a hard, isolate, stoic truth that has never yet melted.