Hollywood doesn’t seem very interested in the life stories of conservative icons unless they’re slandering them as in Oliver Stone’s hit piece on George W. Bush called “W.” which was released (sheerly by coincidence) a month before the 2008 presidential election.

Stone is currently working on a documentary series about Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other fiends which is, in his own words, designed to educate the American people so we can learn to “empathize” with them. Well isn’t that just ducky? I can hardly wait to be taught how to empathize with Hitler and Stalin.

In recent years we were treated to biographies like Steven Soderbergh’s heroic homage to Che Guevara, the murderous villain whose face can be seen on numerous t-shirts at your local hipster joint. And who could forget the Ed Harris tribute to the poor misunderstood genius Jackson Pollock? He revolutionized the art world when he wasn’t getting drunk and abusing his wife.

The 1996 film “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” made some interesting points regarding the first amendment but otherwise portrayed Flynt as a victim of censorship and therefore some sort of hero. Couldn’t Director Miloš Forman find a better subject for a movie about free speech than a pornographer?

There’s a movie about Howard Stern but no movie about Rush Limbaugh, a man whose story of overcoming addiction and deafness is the very stuff great biopics are made of. There’s a movie about the Marquis De Sade but no movie (other than a television film) about the life of Pope John Paul II — a man whose leadership was pivotal in the liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism. There’s a movie about John Wayne Gacy but no movie about John Wayne — who’s as popular today as ever! Julia Child rates but not Margaret Thatcher?

Has anyone noticed that there’s not a single decent film about the life of Ronald Reagan? Is his life story not compelling enough? He only brought down the Berlin Wall, won the Cold War and led America to one of its most prosperous ages. Not to mention that prior to his political career, Reagan was a movie actor so well regarded by his colleagues that he was elected to leadership roles in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940’s.

Am I crazy for thinking that William F. Buckley’s life story would make a great movie? Here’s a man who spoke Spanish and French as his first languages and didn’t begin to learn English until he was seven, yet went on to become known for his brilliant writing and speaking style. Buckley had tremendous wit which he displayed on television as the host of “Firing Line” for over thirty years. Imagine the challenge to an actor to convincingly imitate Buckley’s distinct mannerisms and way of speaking. Buckley worked in the intelligence industry for the CIA and then went on to found National Review, a conservative political journal of unmatched regard.

Speaking of National Review, Heaven forbid anyone in Hollywood make a film about someone like Whittaker Chambers. An American Communist and Soviet spy, Chambers ultimately defected from Communism and became one of its fiercest opponents. He was befriended by William F. Buckley and was part of National Review’s founding editorial board. He was also responsible for identifying former assistant to the Secretary of State, Alger Hiss as a Communist spy in 1948. That’s a pretty compelling story.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Whittaker Chambers?

Maybe someone should make a movie about him.

Because televised news has been rendered obsolete by technology (who needs Christine Amanpour when every citizen has an HD camera, YouTube, and Twitter?), I turned to the Internet to keep up with the events transpiring in Iran.  I logged into Twitter and found this massive “Twitter-grid” of people in Iran and people around the world communicating.  It went something like this….

#iranstudent:please help.they are attacking the dorms.

#crzygrl:EVERYONE WEAR GREEN TOMORROW TO WORK AND SCHOOL

#iranstudent:my god.  where is help?  they will kill us.

#Evlhaliburton:this is just like US in 2000.

#iranstudent: please send troops.  they shot my friend.

#Evlhaliburton@iranstudent: i hope this isn’t just hype.

#crzygrl@Evlhaliburton:no way to tell.  yeah, just like 2000 LOL.  Go LAKERS!

#Evlhaliburton@crzygrl:  LAKERS!

#iranstudent: we need help!  please world help!  where is Obama?

#Evlhaliburton:  OBAMA!  LAKERS!

I kid you not.  That is almost verbatim.

The “net” generation lives in a bubble of entitlement and leftist ideology.  No one is expecting people in their mid-20s to have all of the answers and make tough decisions.  That is the period in your life for self-discovery, experimentation, and risk taking.  As you age and settle into your 30s you start to develop heightened responsibility and your critical thinking skills fully take shape.

Yet, at some point, politics became “cool.” That’s great and all, and I encourage civic responsibility, but something has been lost along the way.  Part of being politically active, either working to support a candidate or movement, or voting, is to be informed.  It is your responsibility to educate yourself so you can make responsible, informed decisions.

The “net” generation naturally goes to the Internet for knowledge.  Bad idea.  Uninformed, tech savvy, indoctrinated young people spread information to other tech savvy, uninformed, indoctrinated young people.  This information is treated as fact.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The left loves this.  The entire Obama campaign was about this.  A huge pool of uninformed, yet arrogant voters is what the left has been working to create for decades.

Politics is a highly intellectual, highly nuanced pursuit.  YouTube some Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley clips and contrast that with the discussions on the Rachel Maddow show.  Then really depress yourself and contrast Maddow with the trolls in the  comments section on this website.  Wanna be suicidal?  Compare this website to the Huffington Post comments or Al Gore’s CurrentTV.

I laughed out loud when I read that both Tina Brown and Ann Coulter suggested that Sarah Palin “brush up” on her politics.  It’s pretty much accepted wisdom that Sarah Palin needs to spend the next three years in the Political Science department at the University of Alaska.  Roger Simon made the same point in the LA Times.

Seriously Dudes and Dudettes?  That’s what she needs to do to win elections?  Do you see who the nation just elected?  Do you watch MSNBC?  A lack of competent intellectual capacities is not a road block to the hallowed halls of power or media acceptance in today’s society.

Sarah Palin would win a landslide just being herself if she allowed me and John Ziegler produce a “reality show” that follows the Governor and her family around 24/7.  Don’t air it on a news network but on TLC or BRAVO.  Make it just as “real” as the other scripted reality shows out there.  After one season Sarah Palin would have a substantial lead in any poll.  After two seasons, people would be asking “Why can’t Sarah Palin be president NOW?”.

To win we must acknowledge that the field of battle radically changes the strategy.  In a perfect world we would elevate the discourse.  Move it back into the realm of William Buckley debating Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand grilling Phil Donahue.  In this arena, a purely intellectual discussion, with collectivism challenging liberty; capitalist, free market ideology wins hands down.

The other option is to keep politics down in the mucky muck.  Politics for the Hot Topic crowd.  If we keep it there, we have to play by the rules set by the left.  They pulled it down here so its on their terms.  There is no “high road” in this world.  People and personality trump ideas.  I don’t think Reagan would have thought a Facebook page dignified enough for a president and I doubt Nixon would have been “tweeting” his peeps from his Blackberry, but for modern politicians it is essential.

Palin vs. Letterman is the first time in a long time that I saw conservatives properly use the media.  Palin and her people played it perfectly, boxing not only Letterman but all of his supporters into a corner.  The most rabid anti-Palinites were forced to make silly or offensive or silly and offensive comments that further discredited their position.  Taking the high road or showing that we can “take a joke” would work if we weren’t in the mucky muck world.  To allow ourselves to be the punch-line, reinforcing fallacious stereotypes and ignoring one sided political correctness is a bad plan.

Too often conservatives fight their battles on the wrong field.  It’s disastrous to attempt to explain the “invisible hand of the free market” in a 140 character “tweet.” Conversely, nothing will be more embarrassing than a “bona fide” conservative trying to be cool by uploading MTV style videos to YouTube.

Either way, the debate would be better served if politics just stopped being cool.  Real politics is about historical data, economic models, and fundamental principals.  People, as they are in Iran right now, pay the price of political mistakes with their blood.  It’s not a game.  It’s not cool.  I just don’t see that happening any time soon.  But I can hope.

So kids, come on.  Stop blogging about this and that.  Stop tweeting your friends about political issues.  Go play Warcraft or something.  At least if you make the wrong call in a video game I don’t have to pay for it with my savings and people don’t have to pay for it with their lives.  You screw up Warcraft and a couple of Orcs bite it.  I can live with that.

In addition to wearing the above listed hats, Derbyshire has also written a strange and wonderful little novel called Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, a book described in the New York Times as, “a bouncy, Capraesque tale of midlife crisis, romantic confusion and spiritual regeneration.”  (The Times review was so favorable that it puts the conceit that conservative authors can’t get a fair shake from the liberal media in a good bit of jeopardy).

I asked Derbyshire about Coolidge, the writing of which he recounts with both fondness and exasperation, with decided emphasis on the former.  He claims that writing fiction puts one in a state of “aesthetic bliss” (to paraphrase Nabachov), the prime virtue of which is an expansion of perspective that “…separates you from the everyday world.”  He tells me that writing a good novel gives one a pleasure many times that of reading a good novel, which, if true, must be a high state of bliss indeed.

Concerning modern poetry, Derbyshire tells me that “most of it is rubbish,” and leftist rubbish at that.  Concerning the New Formalists, he seems somewhat ambivalent.  The New Formalists, he says, are “not that formal,” and, in any case, “…art has to change, and some changes are dead ends.”

In prose, Derbyshire sees the prospects for conservative authors as not altogether bleak.  Like Michael Blowhard, he points out that while mainstream fiction tends to be tied to the Academy, and therefore liberal, in genre fiction the story is something else entirely.

Bill Buckley, he notes, wrote tons of excellent spy novels, starting in 1976 with Saving the Queen, the beginning of the long running and popular Blackford Oakes series.  Tom Clancy, best-selling author of political thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, is a decidedly center-right author who has reportedly given large sums to the Republican Party.  Science-fiction superstar Robert Heinlein was a Goldwater libertarian – in fact, Reason magazine said of Heinlein in 2007, “As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to [Ayn] Rand.”

Derbyshire could have added Dean Koontz to his list, the best-selling author of science fiction, horror, and suspense novels who as a young man worked for the Goldwater campaign, and who in 2008 was the subject of a favorable write up in National Review in which he was referred to as a “compassionate conservative.”  Or Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer (Jurassic Park) who in recent years outraged the liberal establishment with his frank and devastating critique of global warming orthodoxy in his novel State of Fear and in his address to the National Press Club in 2005 titled “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming,” the text of which is to be highly recommended and may be found in full at Crichton’s official site.  (Mr. Crichton has sadly left us, succumbing to throat cancer in November 2008.)

So genre fiction can be welcoming waters for conservatives.  In poetry and drama, however, Derbyshire concedes that conservative authors may have a tougher time, especially in the theater, where “it will always be easier to put on a left wing play.”  Nonetheless, he says, “…conservatives can be poets and dramatists…the reign of the Bohemians is over.”

Ultimately, however, Derbyshire is of the opinion that political correctness rules in the big publishing houses, and that editors “enforce it ruthlessly.”  The silver lining is that “publishers want to make money,” and fortunately there is no shortage of openly conservative authors, O’Reilly, Coulter, et al, who have shown that there exists in North America a vast purchasing audience for “right wing” ideas and opinions.

Andrew (last name withheld), a New York based literary agent, agrees.  He has been in publishing for 16 years, four of them on the editorial side, the balance spent representing authors across the ideological spectrum.  Though conceding that “no question biases are there” in publishing, nonetheless Andrew insists that there are plenty of liberal editors who can and do rise above their prejudices and work with conservative authors.

Andrew insists that the success of conservative non-fiction authors proves that the situation of conservatives in publishing is “healthy,” though he concedes that “most novelists lean left.”  Why that would be so is a topic that we didn’t have time to get in to, but Andrew, who describes himself as a left-leaning centrist, hopes that “more conservatives gravitate towards” the arts and literature, because there is a need for “thoughtful books from both sides” of the aisle.

During my discussion with Andrew, the subject turns to the fear of many conservative authors that they will be ostracized or blacklisted for their views.  As an example, I ask him about the harsh reaction to David Mamet’s recent political conversion.  “Oh, yes, that was unfortunate,” he says, though Andrew correctly points out that ostracism is a phenomena that knows no ideology per se.

Tomorrow we will examine Mamet’s fascinating political coming out, and ask what it means for conservatism in the literary world.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters --Part one, two, three, and four.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

William F. Buckley was Uncle Mike’s favorite and we frequently were subjected to long dissertations.

Thank God for Uncle Mike.

When we were younger my cousin Michael and I would put on political skits. This was in the 60s and I must say we were ahead of our time.  I like to think that we’re still ahead on some things — most recently when the economic crisis first started my cousin provided insights that only now some are talking about. He was WAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE, which is why I want to share his voice with you.

His latest piece, “The Horror……the Horror” is a good starting point. Then I suggest you go back to his blog “The Law of the Bad Premise” and share his stuff with your friends.

So a little about my cousin; he graduated number one in Columbia Business School, was a partner at Shearson Lehman Bros, CEO of CIBC Oppenheim Worldwide, ran an eight billion dollar hedge fund, another eleven billion dollar hedge fund, and is just shy of his Poli-Sci PHD.

I hope you enjoy — Robert Davi  

The Horror……the Horror
by Michael Rulle

The Anti-American Left is Born

For the second time on this blog site I quote Karl Marx’s satirical critical witticism of Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Perhaps, like Marx, I too can add a twist to this aphorism. Oscar Wilde said that “life imitates art more than art imitates life”. Lets see if I can sew the giraffe’s head onto the elephant’s body. How about “All great artistic themes in history appear, as it were, twice. First as a tragic representation of profound truth, second as real life absurd farce”.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard heads down river in search of an Army operative, Colonel Kurtz, who had gone very much off the reservation. In a paradoxical morality play, Kurtz had become so distraught by the horrors war had rendered, he rebelled by endlessly recommitting those same horrors, but without the false pretense of purpose or meaning. The death and torture machine Kurtz established down river was visible to all who approached, as heads, corpses and skeletons lined the entrance to his encampment. Willard fittingly releases Kurtz from his self inflicted psychic hell by hacking him to death with a hatchet/machete while Jim Morrison sings “this is the end, beautiful friend”. Brando/Kurtz memorably leaves this movie-world’s stage straining out the whisper “the horror….the horror”. Apocalypse Now – Kurtz Dies

I am pretty certain you have already figured out where I am heading, but, hey, lets just get on with it. Apocalypse Now, surely one of the great movies of the last 50 years, definitely caught and reflected the historic change in this country’s intelligentsia’s values and morals that occurred during the Vietnam war. A new anti-American, anti-military world view was born. Kurtz, who was identified early on by his superiors as a future leader of the military, was the logical final perfect product of this inherently corrupt system. Killing for killings sake. Evil beyond all evil. A giant genius had lost its way.

You can read this post in full here.