Bookworm Beat 10/15/19: Warren, Modern Art, Project Veritas, LGBT craziness and more

Elizabeth Warren’s hubris, the decline of Modern Art, Project Veritas videos, radical LGBTQ and the church, and urban Leftism — it’s all discussed here.

Bookworm Beat Obama Brennan double standards insane leftists(This is a companion post to the No. 24 Bookworm Podcast which I uploaded yesterday. The content is mostly the same, although not identical. It won’t matter much whether you prefer to read or listen.)

Elizabeth Warren’s dangerous hubris. The other day, during my No. 23 podcast, I noted that success has gone to Elizabeth Warren’s head. She’s no longer the soft-spoken, mousy law professor I remember from the mid-1980s. Instead, she’s a nasty, aggressive, anti-conservative politician. Even Saturday Night Life has figured out that Warren is no longer Ms. Sweet Granny, but instead thinks she’s the Don Rickles of politics:

I had in the back of my mind when I mentioned this change the fact that Elizabeth Warren reminded me of a movie character undone by her own hubris. I just couldn’t remember which character.

Then it hit me: Elizabeth Warren is Lina Lamont, the mean, stupid, beautiful, vocally challenged silent movie star in Singing In The Rain who is completely undone when she allows unwarranted praise to go to her head. For those unfamiliar with the script, Debbie Reynold’s character, Kathy Selden, has a lovely singing and speaking voice which is used to dub Lamont’s voice in her first talkie ever. (One could say that Lina’s borrowed voice is the 1920s’ version of Warren’s victim signaling with other people’s victimization to advance her own career). Anyway, here’s the clip of Lina’s downfall when her ego gets the better of her:

The other character Warren reminds me of is Ethel Mertz. When the foursome in I Love Lucy travels across country to go to Hollywood because of Ricky’s career, they end up in Ethel Mertz’s hometown. There it turns out that the townspeople believe that Ethel is the star. The Ricardos and Fred are willing to go along with the charade right up until Ethel’s head gets too big, at which point they take an amusing revenge. The following is a very poor quality video, but it does tell the story:

Why is modern art awful: Dennis Prager has long had a beef with modern art, the awfulness of which he believes reflects the decline in modern society. Here’s a cute Will Witt / Dennis Prager video along those lines:

I have my own theory. Once upon a time, art had two functions: representational and religious. In both cases, the artists strove for technical mastery and aesthetic purity. That makes sense, if you’re a portrait painter and this will be the only picture the family ever has of Mom and Dad, it better look like them. And if you’re working for the greater glory of God, you bring your best to the table. Even if you’re not yourself religious, your patrons certainly expect exquisite craftsmanship and great realism, whether depicting Biblical scenes, the glories of Heaven, or the horrors of Hell.

All that changed with two things: Cameras and the Enlightenment. The artist’s role as the person visually recording the world around him became as passé as the carriage maker’s role became with the advent of autos. If you’re no longer useful for making a costly portrait or landscape scene, what are you good for? And more importantly, who’s going to pay you. Likewise, with the rise of the Enlightenment, the focus on religious art faded. Moreover, the Enlightenment also coincided with increased literacy, so people could read the Bible without it needing to be interpreted through pictures.

Artists were left with two choices: Make Statements! Or make things pretty. They ended up mostly dividing into two classes. Statement makers labor for the self-styled intelligentsia who, like the subjects of the Emperor and his New Clothes, delight in showing their high status by seeing something where nothing exists. Meanwhile, ordinary people, who will pay for something they find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a pretty mouse pad, a cool paint job on their car, or a charming piece of wall art.

Because I used to visit Los Angeles regularly, I wrote a few negative posts about the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, all of which sort of touch, in one way or another, on the points I just made:

“Social mobilism,” or the anti-Americanism of modern American art *UPDATED*

Modern Art — rebelling against aesthetics, taste, God, America, and basic drafting standards

Illegal immigration propaganda at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

The new Project Veritas video is anodyne, but we know more will come. After great fanfare, Project Veritas dropped the first of its CNN exposes yesterday. It is, as you will see (or have already seen) fairly anodyne:

We already knew that Jeff Zucker hates Trump, that the CNN network is staffed by fellow Trump haters, and that the network eschews reporting the news in favor of non-stop attacks on Trump and his supporters. It’s nice to see our ideas confirmed, but it’s  not a bombshell video by any means.

That doesn’t worry me. I’m not saying “Is that all there is?” or “But there’s no there there.”

James O’Keefe trained at Andrew Breitbart’s knee. Breitbart, in turn, fully understood that the way to attack a Leftist target is to roll out the soft stuff first. You can pretty much anticipate the target’s defenses to that first (or second or even third) soft video, so you get the target locked in a seemingly safe position. That’s when you start rolling out the bombshells. I expect that, in the next few days, the Project Veritas videos will become increasingly hard-hitting and expose dirt about CNN that’s not obvious but that is really, really bad for the network. So stay tuned….

Last thoughts about the crazy Democrat LGBT town hall. It’s already been a week since the Dem candidates paraded on stage and showcased their LGBT virtue. I want to hone in on Beto, who’s become the id of the Democrat Party, saying out loud all the things the candidates wish to hide from the American people.

At the town hall and since then, Beto has made plain that, in service to the LGBTQetc. branch of the Democrat party, he is all on board with destroying traditional faiths. Buttigieg has consistently joined him in this, although less obviously. Beto wants to wipe Christians out financially. Buttigieg wants to bend Christian doctrine to suit himself, twisting traditional beliefs into a pretzel that no longer resembles the original faith.

None of this is a surprise to me. Long-time readers know that I’ve been saying forever that the hardcore radicals in the LGBT community have religion in their cross hairs. (Please note that I say “hardcore radicals” because I have no problem with those people who are not heterosexuals, but who don’t (a) politicize their sexuality and (b) attempt to force all of society to bend to their specific needs. I will continue my lifelong practice of respecting the individual when the individual deserves respect, regardless of that person’s sexual practices or identification. Someone who is in my face, being nasty, demanding, and determined to destroy long-standing, high-functioning societal institutions does not deserve respect.)

In Jane Eyre, when Mr. Rochester falls off his horse and Jane is unable to bring the horse to him, Rochester says, “If the mountain won’t come to Mohamet, then Mohamet must go to the mountain.” Traditional faith should be a mountain. There is no reason on earth (or in Heaven) that the mountain of traditional religions should bow to the LGBT crowd or, worse, that the weight of the American government and the power of the tax police should be used to destroy those mountains. Americans upset by Taliban fighters blowing up Buddhist statues should be even more upset by the Gay Mafia blowing up entire religions.

Leftism is an urban belief system. Two things I saw yesterday reminded me how urban Leftism is. The first was a post at Power Line telling how the Minnesota Appellate Court has accepted the green party line and is now insisting that dairy farms that want to expand must show how the increased cow farts from expansion will affect the environment — and no, that’s not a gag line, it’s real. Our food supply is now being held hostage to cow farts in Minnesota.

The second thing was this gif, which continues to insist that presidential elections in America are won and lost by numbers, not by states’ rights and the Electoral College:

Vote GIF

The striking thing about the map, of course, aside from its ignoring the constitutional Electoral College system’s meaning, is the way it highlights the weighty population in American urban centers and how blue those urban centers are.

It’s a reminder of my point that Leftism is urban. Let me count the ways:

  1. Marx envisioned an industrial, i.e., urban, uprising. It was one of the ironies of history that Marxism took off in rural nations (Russia, China, North Korea, etc.). What Marx hadn’t realized is that, once the cruel growing pains of industrialism ended, the workers’ lives would improve so significantly that Marxism was no longer appealing.
  2. To the extent Leftists embrace extreme environmentalism, that’s because they live in urban environments and have no idea how resilient, indeed, aggressive Nature is. Once you’re outside concrete jungles, you realize that constant expenditure of time, money, and energy necessary to keep ascendant Nature at bay.
  3. Transportation in cities is vertical: elevators above and subways below. When you drive through America, as I have multiple times of late, you realize how necessary the car is if one doesn’t want to retreat to pre-industrial isolation and starvation.
  4. In urban areas, people self-segregate, with no sense of a greater, organic community. You go to your “Save the World” meet-up, but you don’t know your neighbors. In bad times, in small places, neighbors are your support. In urban areas, it’s always the government to which you look.