29 October 2006

Sometimes We Can Make Time Go Backwards

I see on the blogs that Bill O'Reilly went on Oprah to shill for his new book about the cultural war between the Traditionalists and the Secular Progressives:
Bill: You know, we have our military fighting for our country overseas. We at home have to fight for our country. Do you want to be Denmark? Do you want to be Holland? That's what the S-Ps [secular-progressives] want. Anything goes: euthanasia, legalized narcotics, unfettered abortion, on and on and on and on. Look, when you and I were growing up, what kind of music did we listen to?

Oprah: I listened to The Temptations. …

Bill: What are the kids listening to now? Ho's. Glocks. Drugs. We've come a long way, haven't we? … These are the kids at 9, 10 …They know all about it. There's no more Temptations. They're obsolete. How about movies? What did we go to see? We went to see The Blob. Steve McQueen running around going, "There's the blob." We had a lot of laughs. Popcorn. Now they have a chainsaw guy cutting off people's arms. That's what kids are seeing. Oh, we've come a long way, haven't we? This country is under siege.

Oprah: But this is a country that allows The Blob and also allows chainsaw movies because this is America.

Bill: I'm not advocating a ban of chainsaw movies. Alright? I'm telling you it's bad. That's what I'm telling you. It's bad. So is gangster rap. You know it's bad. You've got an unsupervised 9-year-old whose parents aren't around thinking that he's going to go out and sell a couple of vials of crack, that's bad. Where is the counter influence? S-Ps don't make any judgments on behavior. S-P's don't want any restrictions on what you can or can't do. Yeah, we live in a country, that's allowed. It's bad. People have to start to make judgments.
I was thinking about this cultural war this evening, when my wife and I watched About Last Night. The movie is 20 years old, and what has happened to movies in the mean time is shocking. The movies have gotten much smaller. Characters in About Last Night smoke, they smoke dope, they have anonymous sex and there is a middle portion of about 15 minutes in which we watch a montage of naked Demi Moore and naked Rob Lowe having sex. They just don't make 'em like that any more.

So in this one area, we have pushed back against inevitable Progress. We haven't won the war, but here's a battle we did win.

1 comment:

David said...

Two quick additions:

1. The movie is fundamentally conservative in its treatment of sex before marriage and the problems of rushing into a sexual relationship.

2. There's also a scene in which Elizabeth Perkins, playing a kindergarten teacher, is reading the Christmas story to her students. ("And then an angel of the Lord descended upon the Virgin Mary.") Maybe she teaches in a Catholic school, but she goes on to explain what a virgin is, and that she is not one.