The Backswing Is Still In Its Early Phase

A "Culture War" Observational

   For the vast majority of my time spent as a genre fiction storyteller, I haven’t had to make much effort to avoid either overt or subtle socio-political messages in my material. That’s largely down to my conscious efforts to imply themes or concepts or musings centered more on the ideas of family, honor, duty, sacrifice, or just plain adventure, at least insofar as my fantasy works are concerned. With the Amelia City Stories, well, most of that is angled toward my own perception of ‘poetic justice’ combined with a heavy dose of pure madness and nonsense.

     This is not to say that the entirety of my collective body of work is utterly devoid of socio-political indicators; “Empty Prayer”, one of my Amelia City novellas, is founded upon the concept of being falsely self-righteous, and the deserved consequences of using one’s religion as a cudgel against people. “Art is Life, Until It’s Death” has a quiet note of ‘trans people don’t deserve to be mistreated’. In “The Glove of Shadows”, one of my early Tamalarian Tales of the 5^th Age, the menacing and capable Ignatious Stockholm, a scarlet-furred world beater of a werewolf, informs his boss at around the 70% mark that he is, in fact, a homosexual. This aspect of his character is not something I spend a great deal of time on, and I never end up making a big deal out of it; it’s just a small part of how he lives his life. While it has been a long time since I finished writing that novel, I can still recall that that had been a key point I had wanted to convey with that character, that their sexual/romantic inclinations did not have to be the central focus of who they were as a person.

     I published that book in 2009. That story is 15 years old now. Let that sink in.

     There are a few other minor examples I can point to, especially in more recent Amelia City offerings, wherein I took the opportunity to take a small jab in terms of cultural messaging. In “Unnamed Vengeance”, the entire tale is a cautionary tale about being involved in the pro-abortion camp and activities. “Do No Harm” is an unapologetic snarl against a cohort within the psychiatric care field that seems determined to allow adolescents to mangle and disable themselves permanently in the name of gender identity politics. The non-genre tale I published on my Substack entitled “Pushed Too Far” is a warning to the entirety of the hardcore political Left that at some point, they’re going to push the collective Right so far with their constant nagging, cancellations and demands and revocation of rights that the Right will finally fight back, and in a manner that they don’t expect; in that tale, the Right doesn’t engage in overt violent pushback, but rather, they start to corral liberals and lefties into their beloved metros and large suburbs, then systematically cut them off from the traditional network of the supply chain, which is largely supplied, operated and worked in by the very same conservatives and right-leaning folks whom the Left has denigrated and dismissed for the last couple of decades as less than human.

     It’s the approach of, “I don’t have to fight you, I just have to starve you out.”  This is a thoroughly inhumane way to approach the whole ‘Culture War’ phenomenon, but it seems to be the only response that lefties will get through their heads at times, and we’ve seen some headway being made in the video games industry, the film industry, and the television industry with this approach. We’ve even seen in a few times in sports! Remember the whole ‘Pride Night Event’ issues in the NHL last year, when a small handful of players said that they weren’t going to participate in such horseshit? What happened? Simple; ticket sales to those games cratered, ratings plummeted, and the jerseys of the players who loudly proclaimed they would not comply with the Rainbow Mafia’s agenda pushing sold like hotcakes, even if they were not top tier talents.

     Not to be outdone by such things, Bud Light literally said, ‘Hold my beer…..and boycott it’ with the whole Dylan Mulvaney debacle. The folks who were pissed off by these moves didn’t attack people in the streets, or set things on fire, or attempt to de-person or un-bank anybody; they just replied with, “Okay, so, I’m not going to buy your product or service. Seems easy enough to me. Now fuck off until you change course.”

     I don’t mean to be the harbinger of any sort of overarching doom and gloom to the folks who’ve been ham-fistedly pushing this leftist/liberal agenda harder than Sisyphus with his boulder, though downhill and with the clear intent of bowling over everyone who evenly mildly disagrees with their cause du jour, but they need to receive this message loud and clear- this is only the middle portion of the start of the backswing from a not-insignificant portion of the general populace writ large.

We Will Keep Our Money, Thanks

     Myself and many other folks, far more influential in the online critique space, have tried time and again to point out that many of these intellectual properties and consumer goods are, at the end of the day, luxury purchases, completely and utterly unnecessary to our day-to-day function and/or survival. Are you a beer company that has decided to insult your core conservative customer base by taking on a theater kid playing pretend at being a ‘girl’? Okay, well, there’s plenty of other beers to chose from, some of them aren’t brewed or distributed by A.B. InBev, and if that doesn’t work, oh, right, consumption of beer products altogether isn’t necessary for sustained existence. Maybe I could stand to hold off on the useless calories for a bit anyway, much as you can stand to hold off on getting your hand into my wallet, Bud Light, good call.  Are you a video game developer or publisher who consults with a ‘Narrative Consultation Service’ whose core goal seems to be alienating the long-standing audience that has kept the entire industry afloat since the late 1980’s, and you’ve decided to let them lecture said audience in the pre-production AND marketing AND distribution phases, as well as insisting that the Kafkatrap deployment of “If you don’t buy and praise this digital slop that you don’t technically own anyhow, you’re an istaphobic phobophobe” is perfectly fine and dandy? Well, I have either a back catalog of other games to play, or, well, plenty of other entertainment options available to me, thanks. Keep your Sweet Baby Stink, your Kim Belair, and fuck right off, I don’t owe you my patronage or defense.

     This is merely the gentle-handed approach of deciding that one doesn’t wish to partake of a product or service. That in and of itself is easy enough for the Agenda Pushers to ignore or hand wave away, because in its most passive form, they can conjure up a dozen different excuses to explain the drop-off of interest or purchases. However, when this withholding of funds is coupled with loud and plainspoken explanations regarding why the audience is not going to buy in, well, they can’t very well let that simply stand, now can they? No, they have to flail about like donkeys with cattle prods shoved up their backsides and set to ‘Tesla Would Blush’ in response, howling their indignation and presumptive insults and denigrations toward those who would deny them their moneys like usual.

     You can make the most intersectional thing in all of God’s creation, but guess what? If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell, simple as. You can’t lie your way out of that.

Who Watches This?

     The Marquis De Sade had a few ‘quirks’ when it came to his personal bedroom playtime preferences, to put it mildly, and it is largely thanks to his mad scribbling on the topic that the people of the world have an understanding of sadism and masochism. What does this have to do with the current television and film scene? Well, I think his essence must be riding pretty hard on the psyches of anyone who has sat down and consumed more than the average amount of the slop being offered up to us as viewers in the streaming television and cinema audience the last few years.

     Some culture critics peg the start of this phenomenon at around the 2016 mark, with the all-female attempt at a “Ghostbusters” film. Featuring a cast of ladies who themselves probably aren’t averse to ‘pegging’ as well (gotta love wordplay), this soulless and lethally un-funny, unimpressive endeavor to feminize a franchise that wasn’t even couched in the concept of masculine energy in the first place started a trend in film and television that even to this day hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down in terms of production, though the audience engagement and enjoyment has nosedived harder than a Kamikaze pilot spotting an aircraft carrier off the coast of the Hawaiian islands.

     BANZAIIIIII!

     The box office returns for that piece of cinematic putrescence were not great, to say the least. Ditto the 2019 retry of “Charlie’s Angels”, a film which was touted quite loudly by its director and by promotional ‘experts’ as “Not for men”. When the movie subsequently bottomed out in ticket sales so shamefully that, were it an Edo Era samurai, it would have committed ritual seppuku, the backlash from said director and her coven of shrieking supporters came in the form of the question, “Why didn’t any of you men come out and support our girlboss film?!” Well, we collectively replied, you told us from the outset that the damned thing wasn’t for us, so we just took you at your bawk and steered clear, you feckless clutch of hens!

     In terms of ratings for television and streaming, we’ve also seen a sizable host of programs get the green light, get produced, get shoved in our faces with The Message TM, and then flop and flounder around like a fish yanked out of the water and dropped unceremoniously on the floor of the boat. Here, Steve, give me that club….

    WHACK!

     Okay, here’s the filet knife, get to work.

Anyhow, with the Covid 19 pandemic flatlining everyday normal operations of living, Disney took the opportunity with millions of people being stuck at home to launch their own streaming service, Disney+, which, admittedly, had already been in the works. One of their early in-house productions for the service? ‘Willow’, a series loosely based upon the fantasy favorite from the halcyon years of Ago, but updated with all sorts of modern socio-political messaging and activism, to the point where the thing crashed harder into viewer apathy than the Kool-Aid guy if he snorted an 8 ball of coke before hearing “Oh no” three times behind a particle board wall. This amalgamation of poorly written and badly acted dross was so pathetic that Disney yanked it from existence in order to claim a tax write-off, which, if we’re being honest, likely saw them get more money back in tax break incentives than the entire fleet of Star Wars toys associated with the Sequel Trilogy has managed to garner from the clearance sections of every department store, toy store, and Ollie’s in existence.

And the Pain Train hasn’t hit the end of the line, ladies and gentlemen, don’t even think it! Between “The Book of Boba Fett”, “Asokha”, “Obi-Wan” and “The Acolyte”, we have yet to see a Disney+ Star Wars show that isn’t Andor show any signs of artistic integrity, source material respect or farther reaching potential. I really wish I could count “The Mandalorian” as a success, but between the unceremonious firing of Gina Carano for daring to think and speak outside of the strictures of the Blue Church and the imbalanced mishmash of the third and final season, which hey, ALSO saw a male lead in Din Djarin hand over the role of Badass Namesake of the Show to a woman (awful lot of that going on in television, film and video games since the Ghostbusters 2016 team did it), I don’t think I can do so. Andor is a painful one to land on, too, given that, well, viewers familiar with Star Wars history already sort of know how it’s all going to end.

As a last little throat punch here, we really can’t overlook what has happened to another long-standing IP that has been mangled thanks to the Wokie Slacktivist crowd over the last few years injecting it with their mutagenic nonsense, and that is Doctor Who. When the role of The Doctor was announced to be finally getting handed over to a woman, there was some skepticism from long-standing fans, yes, but they were willing to hold steady and give Jodie and company a chance to impress them and win them over. “The Doctor is The Doctor”, these fans said evenly. “Let’s see some Doctor stories; it really shouldn’t matter one way or another if the Doctor is in the meat suit of a male or a female, right?”

Oh, how wrong those fans turned out to be, and how quickly. I cannot be the only person who felt the urge to dig his eardrums out with a sharpened soup spoon when Lady Doctor said, almost directly at the camera and the audience, “I’ve had an UPGRADE”, as if to imply that by dint of swapping cock for clit and pecs for tits, the Doctor was suddenly launched into another stratosphere of relevance, competence, capacities or efficacy; as if to say that by the lone alteration of being housed in a biologically more feminine body, as opposed to being a more masculine one, the Doctor was automatically made ‘better’.

And guess what, folks? The messaging didn’t get any less eye roll-worthy from there, terminating at the end of her run with an episode that completely and utterly undercut any and all mystery surrounding the regeneration cycle of the Galifreyans and the fundamental nature of their alien culture and practices surrounding said cycle, reducing it all down to an accusation that the Time Lords were a race of evil colonizers who stole this ability from a defenseless girl-child in some distant galaxy…..

No, I’m not kidding. Over forty years, hundreds of episodes, millions of pages of screenplay, radio play, short stories and novels, all undone in a couple of episodes, because Modern Message Is More Important.

Counterpunches Don’t Always Land; They Don’t Have To

     Anyone familiar with combat sports that include striking, be it traditional boxing,  muai thai, kickboxing, savate or mma, will be familiar with the concept of ‘The Counterpunch’. In theory, the counterpunch is optimally used by one combatant moving with the motion of an incoming blow, thus reducing its impact, whilst simultaneously throwing their own oppositely angled strike, utilizing the combined movement force of the attacker on top of the power of their own individual strike to deal a profoundly powerful counterstrike while sustaining minimal damage themselves. The best in the business can do this without taking any damage whatsoever, completely avoiding taking a hit while almost less than the blink of an eye later delivering a punishing attack. A good example: Connor Macgregor v Jose Aldo. When Aldo came in with that short left hook punch he likes to open the second minute of a fight up with, Connor not only leaned less than an inch out of the way of getting hit at all, he used the sudden shift of his total body weight back onto his forward leg and pivoted in order to amplify the pounds per square inch of impact force in such beautiful sequence that when his own counterpunch landed, Aldo’s spirit could almost be physically seen leaving his body for a moment before landing on the mat brought it crashing back down into his flesh!

     As gorgeous a shot as that was, though, most counterpunches don’t land cleanly, if they land at all. Culturally, one can look to efforts like the animated “The New Norm” from the folks over at The Daily Wire, or “Run, Hide, Fight”, a film about a school shooter whose massacre is put paid to by a scrappy and resourceful young woman who manages to fight back. The movie in this example was “Just Okay” by even the more conservative supporters and viewers of the effort, and “Norm” was panned by animation and fiction critics from both the Left AND the Right, as well as plenty of folks who feel politically homeless.

     The arena of the Arts has been a hostile place for most conservatives and Right-of-Center folks in the West for a long time, thanks in no small part to folks like the Moral Majority waggling their freaking fingers at anyone and everyone who wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool Jesus freak or mumbling Catholic self-flaggelator for a very long time. It is difficult to be artistically expressive when one has to worry if the community one deems their home turf are going to castigate or outcast them for thinking a little ‘weird’ or ‘out of the box’, after all. It fell for the last 50 years or so mostly to the Left to be the creators of Artistic projects that would inform and shape our culture, to provide for entertainment, philosophical introspection and exploration, and so on. That there had already been an infiltration into classically liberal Left circles by a clutch of Central Control Soviet types was not quite so widely known then as it is now, looking back, and it is perhaps because the rest of us weren’t yet beaten over the head by Barthes’s ‘Death of the Author’ that we weren’t looking into the notion of heavy-handed interpretation tactics to be properly on our guard for such nonsense and chicanery. The result here?  Marxist/Maoist subversive messaging was allowed to be layered into artistic endeavors and projects, starting with some of our most beloved classics of Modern Era genre fiction, like the workings of Ursula K. LeGuin (I love her work, but it doesn’t take much to figure out EXACTLY what sort of philosophies her works espouse on a subtextual level) or Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” (a charge he had vehemently denied for years, but which he has recently admitted he might have subconsciously taken in from the culture of his own youth, inadvertently peppering it into his own early narrative efforts).

     As the sayings go, “The Left Can’t Meme”, and “The Right Can’t Art”. For now, though, it isn’t vital that conservatives or the Right manage to craft their own wholesale Artistic Movement in opposition to the cultural projects currently bombarding us with the Left’s Agenda. Instead, what they might be better off focusing on is letting the current crop of Arts and Culture craftsfolk understand that, in the current state of most Western economies, they cannot afford to alienate every potential customer who doesn’t socio-politically disagree with them, because there just isn’t enough disposable income from their own niche audience to allow their projects to thrive, much less survive. If you want to make something that will be profitable, or even manage to skate by, the chances are good that you’re going to have to either convince or trick members of your ideological opposition into making a purchase.

      If you convince them, congratulations, you must have a quality product or service on offer, and that’s all the folks right of Mao really are after. If you trick them, though, you’d better pray to the pantheon of sexless They-ities you pray to that you aren’t found out for such subterfuge, because the backlash will not only be swift, it will also be exposed to anyone and everyone with ears to hear and eyes to witness.

Wrapping Up

     There are a few other points I briefly considered making here, but I believe they deserve their own time and attention, and examination with a more thorough breakdown. It’s probably for the best, anyhow; I have rambled on quite long enough on this topic, and I like to try ending these things with a summary that doesn’t stray too far afield. I intend to carry on that practice here, with a bit of a warning to the Lefties who have been in utter one-sided control of all entertainment and artistic mediums for the last fifty years or so.

     Don’t mistake me, either, folks; this last bit is a genuine warning, not a threat. Much as a whole lot of these folks deserve to be destroyed utterly when it comes to their Artistic endeavors and societal control methods, I don’t want to lose any scrap of Artistic potential that they might still cling hold of. That isn’t what God would want, to see His Gifts cast into the Void just because these idiots couldn’t aim said Gifts more appropriately. I want to warn them.

     The folks who make up the VAST MAJORITY of the Western potential audience, folks who aren’t completely brainwashed to listen and obey Leftist propaganda and/or cultural programming, they aren’t going to be endlessly forgiving. Most of them, I suspect, won’t do much more than walk away from your commercial offerings and give up on all forms of Art and entertainment until such time as someone from within their own ranks creates something for them, and they’ll support it whole hog, even if it isn’t top-of-the-line quality. Why? Because at least they’ll know that the person or outfit that created that product or service doesn’t ACTIVELY HATE THEM.

     But, and this is where the real caution must be expressed, there IS a small segment of this majority of people who, if they get the chance, will actually seek to utterly and mercilessly destroy you, financially, reputationally, and, in a very slim number of cases physically, because of what you folks on the Left have been doing to them and theirs for decades. Some of these folks have lived their entire 20-40 years of life under your cultural boot, and been denigrated, shat upon, and told that they’re awful, subhuman filth just for being naturally or instructionally inclined to disagree with your conclusions in the socio-political arena, or in the Artistic spaces of the world. They have grown to despise you, to resent you, and everything that you ostensibly stand for. If they come face to face with such Leftists, this small fraction of people will go out of their way to hurt them.

     I fear that if more effort isn’t put forth to come to a peaceable return to some semblance of neutrality in the Artistic realm, or at least to get back to making products and services that don’t actively hate one side or the other of the socio-political arena, then the middle and end arcs of this particular backswing of the cultural pendulum shift is going to be unimaginably brutal. From where I’m sitting, the trouble doesn’t like so much with the Right/conservatives and populists in the equation, because they’re mostly just letting nature take its course in correcting the balance of things. The trouble, as I can view it, is that so many folks on the Left refuse to admit to what they’ve been doing and take any responsibility for the Arts and entertainment spaces being left in the hellish states they’re currently in.

     Unless there’s some accountability taken, the folks to the right of Mao are just going to shrug their shoulders and step away, and let any and all Arts and entertainment die entirely if they aren’t made from among their own kith and kin.

Cheers!

October 4^th, 2024