A sad commentary on American arts and entertainment

My grandkids, or the younger ones anyway, were been bugging their parents to see Dumbo, the latest Hollywood remake. My recent illness gave me an excuse not to be part of a family outing, but when they descended on the ole homestead and mentioned that the movie was playing in nearby Fort Mudge, and they thought I needed to get out of the house, I was trapped. Trapped like a rat. So I went. Great modern animation and special effects, kind of a lame, PC (pro animal rights and "inclusivity") version of the original story. Harmless, gormless entertainment.

When I see movies like this and the remake of Alice in Wonderland, well done though they may be, I can't help but wonder if no-one in Hollywood has any new ideas. It seems today that all we see is remakes in movies and remakes on TV. And some of them, extensions of franchises that are well past their best-before dates (Hello Star Wars!) are truly dreadful. Where's the creative talent, the imagination that begat the original movies, which were themselves adapted from stories that some truly talented writers devised a hundred years ago?

This is hardly a new thought. Here's what Brooks Atkinson, one of America's leading drama critics, had to say, nearly seven decades ago.

Something elusive and intangible seems to have drained the vitality out of the theatre and perhaps out of American arts as well. No one knows the reason exactly. But could it be that the spiritual climate in which we are now living smothers art that is really creative, and that the emphasis on public expression of all kinds is toward meekness and conformity? [My emphasis. Walt]

People are playing safe. They hesitate to say what they think. The intellectual and artistic life of the country has been flattened out. ...ignorant heresy-hunting and...bigoted character-assassination are succeeding. The hoodlums are in control here as well as in Russia, and the theatre begins to look as insipid in the one place as in the other.... We cannot expect to have vital art in our theatre if we emulate totalitarian countries and yield the control of cultural life to the Yahoos and hoodlums.

Quoted in William Shirer's Midcentury Journey, 1955. That was well before Mr Atkinson or Mr Shirer had heard the expression "political correctness", but political correctness is what is described in the emphasized words. Political correctness is killing not only political thought but also our collective imagination. We have become a society where original, non-conforming thought is the greatest of all sins. Sad.

Postscript: I can't get over how, the older Danny DeVito gets, the more he looks like me!

Some prescient thoughts about "safe spaces" and the American media

Walt here. As Ed. told you, I'm a bit under the weather [clear and cold. Ed.] but the news that the Mueller report is likely to prove a colossal dud cheers me up enough strengthens me to attach the keyboard for awhile. What follows are excerpts from penultimate chapter of a book which I'll identify at the end. [No peeking. Ed.] Your task is to guess the date on which it was written. The picture of the author may help. Or not.

"The world is full of dangerous ideas, and we are both naive and stupid if we believe that the way to prepare intelligent young [people] to face the world is to try to protect them from such ideas while they are in college. Four years in an insulated nursery will produce gullible innocents, not tough-minded realists who know what they believe because they have faced the enemies of their beliefs." [Quoting Dean Wilbur J. Bender of Harvard University]

As a people...we could all stand a little more education. ...I did not get the impression in my travels up and down the country...that we were very well informed either about the world or our own land; nor did we always grasp the very issues on which our existence depended. The public opinion polls piled up evidence of our ignorance. Even Dr. Gallup...confessed that "today for the first time I am concerned lest lack of information lead the American people to decisions which they will regret."

...the amazing thing was not that the good people could read a newspaper and listen to the newscasts daily and still be so ignorant, but that their daily journals and news broadcasts were of such an amazingly low quality that the millions who read and listened were bound to be left in almost total ignorance of what was going on in the world.

...Have our newspapers lost a sense of their historical function to keep the public informed about the issues of the day? asked Dr Gallup. "Have they begun to worry too much about having the most popular comic strips and the most complete sports pages, and too little about keeping their readers interested in, and informed about, the important problems of the day?"

The author is William Lawrence Shirer (February 23, 1904 – December 28, 1993) an American journalist and war correspondent. The book is Mid-century Journey, published in 1952. Next time you hear some libtard preach about "safe spaces", read them the quote from the Dean Bender. It seems there are no more Dean Benders at Harvard or any of America's other institutions of higher learning, but that just shows you how the left has taken control not just of our media, but also our educational system [Is dis a system? Ed.] and virtually every aspect of our daily lives.