Without commentary, I offer for your reading pleasure a bit of a Washington Monthly piece on Culture11 and, as it happens, Big Hollywood:
It was a grimly funny coincidence that around the time Culture11’s financial well was running dry, another Web site sharing its subject matter debuted to much greater fanfare in the right-wing media than Kuo’s project ever received: Big Hollywood, an entertainment and politics blog created by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Los Angeles–based Internet entrepreneur who helped launch both the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. Beneath an angry vermillion-colored banner, the blog offers recurring features like the “Celebutard of the Week”—tracking the latest vapidly liberal political utterances from the likes of Cher—and clips of the best conservative moments in film interspersed with rote breaking news from the entertainment industry. It’s supposed to eventually host cultural musings from such notable film critics as House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor; commenting on a scene in the new thriller The International in which the characters shoot it out in the Guggenheim Museum, one Big Hollywood contributor coos approvingly, “I love seeing modern (phony) art destroyed.”
But for all the bluster of all-caps headlines like “GLOBAL WARMING PROPAGANDA SINKS ‘UNDER THE SEA 3D,’ ” it’s a far less courageous site than the comparably nonconfrontational Culture11; beneath the patina of combativeness, it’s really just a support group for 24 fans. What Big Hollywood does isn’t criticism, or reporting—it’s ideological accounting. And its failure to get its arms around the culture in which it is swimming is symptomatic of the broader failures of the conservative movement. For decades, the Nixonian notion of the silent majority created a strong temptation for conservatives to simply wall off the parts of society that they didn’t like or understand, secure in the belief that there were more people on their side of the wall. Ballot for ballot, this may have been true in the 1970s and ’80s, and even into the ’90s. But if you build a border fence, it’s difficult to see what’s happening on the other side of it. Which is why in 2008 the Republican Party awoke to a world in which it was losing every politically important demographic battle and had essentially ceded the field on issues like education, where it hadn’t contributed a new policy idea since the school voucher, and energy, where the best plan it could come up with was a renewed push for offshore drilling. Big Hollywood’s mania for ideological categorization stems from the same mind-set—shared even by some of the smarter reform conservatives—that produced the Bush administration’s disastrous loyalty-over-performance hiring practices: the instinct to see everything, from the Sundance Film Festival to NASA’s atmospheric research programs, as just another battleground. What Culture11’s editors got right was the observation that, regardless of what you think of the world as it is, you can’t figure out how to wrestle with it until you understand what’s actually happening in it.
Please do comment.
Comment by sdferr on 3/24 @ 3:50 pm #
angry vermillion, before anything
tw: offenses oun
Comment by War Damn Eagle on 3/24 @ 4:23 pm #
Yeah, Culture11 was REALLY courageous – they even dared to trash Sarah Palin!
Bunch of Andy Sullivan wannabes.
Comment by Spam Heap on 3/24 @ 4:35 pm #
Hmmm. That second paragraph sounded like a stump speech to the bubbas:
“Where I come from, they say you can carry a pig five country miles, but if you put him down, he’ll probably run.
Now, I don’t know why they say that, but I expect it’s because of fluoridation of the water.
That’s why I, for one, am in favor of prayer in schools….”
Though, really, it’s more an inversion, starting with the notion that Hollywood does “ideological accounting.” Pardon my while I cry bullshit. Hollywood, as part of the propaganda arm of the Democrt Party, sets the ideology, or used to, anyway – they’ve taken an awful pounding over all those anti-troop movies, these last couple of years.
And, far from walling off “the other,” “Big Hollywood” is engaging directly, with a clear idea of what’s going on.
Et bloody cetera.
Comment by Gordon on 3/24 @ 5:16 pm #
There is an off-beat Christian publication called the Wittenburg Door. It’s irreverent and sarcastic and features the writing of Joe-Bob Briggs.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but there is definitely a place for it. Without having seen Culture11, it would seem that this would fill the same role. One which I would probably like but may never get a huge following.
The author obviously has a gripe against BH and has probably not spent too much time actually reading it. The site is authored by people engaged in the culture.
Comment by geoffb on 3/24 @ 5:19 pm #
Short take. Projection, flavored with envy.
tw: casual listener, I swear this captcha thing is semi-sentient. Or it could be like a good fortune teller, allowing the us to read our own intent into something.
Comment by Kevin B on 3/24 @ 6:24 pm #
Which is to say that in 2008, 52% of those who voted elected Obama and he had big coattails so therefore all the left’s ideas are validated ‘cos we won so suck it up, losers.
So when, in 2010, we get the slaughter of the incumbents, then the right can turn around and say “the left has walled itself off from the parts of society that they don’t understand and it’s policies are stuck in the 1900’s”.
Well actually, we can say that now.
Pingback by Get Defunct Outta My Face [Dan Collins] on 3/25 @ 1:25 am #
[...] Douglas has up a great post on the demise of Culture11 and the disastrous prescriptions for a denatured conservatism: There are lots of young [...]