The fight for the culture may not always seem urgent, but it truly is. Arguments are won and lost in hearts and minds long before they’re ever decided at the polls. The arts not only reflect the conscience of the hour, they also shape the conscience of the age.An earlier paragraph elaborates:
We fret because we fear that ignorant people — especially the young — will take leftist art as truth, essentially giving the Left the power to rewrite history and reality in the American mind. Perhaps the next generation will come to believe that Oliver Stone’s absurd but well-made JFK tells the true story of the president’s assassination or that American operatives and soldiers routinely committed the sorts of atrocities depicted in Rendition or Redacted. As former ambassador Joseph Wilson boasted about the contrafactual heroic impression given of him and his wife, Valerie Plame, in the new film Fair Game: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember the period.”He goes on to cite examples of how the fare to which Americans are exposed on the screens of their theaters and televisions is shifting rightward along with the mood of the country. Here's part of his brief:
For the last few years, movies promoting the Western ideals of self-reliance, morality, and faith have scored at the box office — see The Incredibles (“If everyone is special, that means no one is”), The Blind Side (“Who would have thought we’d have a black son before we knew a Democrat?”), and Toy Story 3 (a takedown of the nanny state). They have also been more innovative and creative — 300, Gran Torino, No Country for Old Men — than the products of the desiccated and outmoded Left.I don't know if Klavan is just indulging in wishful thinking or has spotted a genuine trend, but his article may interest those who need a reason to hope that maybe things are indeed getting better.
Our best novelist (Tom Wolfe) and two greatest English-speaking playwrights (Tom Stoppard and David Mamet) are now all open about their political conservatism. And new top-notch mainstream TV shows (Justified, Blue Bloods) have arrived to offset the lefty Law and Order and Jon Stewart.
Our culture reflects our view of both God and man, and the view that is too often promoted in much of our music and films is that there is no God, and man is just an animal with brutish appetites whose satisfaction is the path to happiness and fulfullment.
It's a view of man that glorifies the base, the crude and the vulgar while denying that there's anything particularly noble or sublime about being human. This, of course, is precisely what one would expect from a culture that no longer believes that man is created in the image of God and made a little lower than the angels.
I hope Klavan is right about the wind shift, but I need to see a more consistent turn of the weathervane before I begin to celebrate.