Last Crusade 47: Lust of the Eyes
We continue the exploration of strategies to undo the ongoing corruption of civilization. Here, we will look at how to reclaim popular entertainment.
There are three basic means to corrupt an institution.
The least effective means is coercion. It is usually reserved as a final step, to solidify informal power gained by other means.
Before coercion is persuasion, which, in this case, is more rightly called temptation. This is when whatever the evil policy being espoused is openly endorsed, and is promoted on the basis of positive incentives, that is, on the basis of being reasonable, or inevitable, practical, rewarding, or lucrative.
Rhetoric, bribery, peer pressure, and so on fall under this means. Such things are used only when the corruption is accepted as a legitimate option, and can be discussed openly.
Before persuasion is subversion. Persuasion is only feasible when the evil is in the open, and is being presented as a reasonable alternative to the good. Before that point, when the evil cannot be named, deception, propaganda, and misdirection are the tactically sound means to move society closer to the brink. Confusion, indifference, and spiritual deadness is a necessary component of subversion.
The proper strategy to retake lost ground is to replace coercion with rule of law; to replace rhetoric with reason and temptations with incentives to virtue; and to uplift and glorify our ideals and institutions rather than demean them.
The same three strategies apply to retaking the Cinema, which is one of the most insidious, far-reaching, indirect and effective strongholds dominated by the Enemy.
Coercion is called for both in the short and long term.
As said before, ‘Get Woke go Broke’ does not work when China, as a monopoly, can pour an endless stream of resources to nullify the will of the American audiences; resources, that is, stolen and extorted from unimaginable volume of slave labor.
To defend against such lopsided influence requires political action to restore the American audience the sovereign power of its ticket money.
Political action is also needed to restore censorship to the standards proper for a Christian society.
The creeping approach of pederasty into modern cinema, and the endless parade of politically correct tokens, not of racial minorities, but of persons who are “minorities” only in the sense that the sexual perversion or gender dysphoria afflict relatively few souls, means that at least some clear standards of censorship must be embraced, alien as this seems to the modern mind.
The United States had perfectly robust political debates in all the years when obscenity was both against custom and law. Obscenity has been against federal law since the Comstock Act of 1873, and, under Anglo-American common law, has been held to be punishable at law as a breach of the peace since the year 1729, in Dominus Rex v. Curl (2 Str. 789, 93 Eng. Rep.). Censorship as a legal concept to promote the virtue of the citizens of a republic or the subjects of a monarchy date back to Roman times. This concept is not new, nor untried, nor are the dangers and necessarily limits unknown.
While it is commonplace for the confused modern mind to dismiss obscenity standards as arbitrary, and and to regard the laws as ineffectual for preventing the spread of public vice, it is interesting to note that conception and infanticide, as promoted, for example, by Margaret Sangar, were condemned by obscenity laws of their day.
Censorship is not the elastic “community standards” which censor only political thought displeasing to Big Brother.
However, legal censorship, as written in the black letter law, is nothing if the spirit of the time will not support, sustain, and promote it.
There is no law in the United States against using swearwords, albeit there are FTC regulations forbidding their use on radio, and, at one time, those rules held sway.
Nonetheless, before the corruption of the language by vulgarities indented by the Enemy to demoralize and erode the atmosphere of civility necessary for public discourse when women and children are present, while not against the law, even the use of vulgarities now regarded as comically mild, such as the “Damn” uttered by Rhett Butler in the famous final scene of GONE WITH THE WIND, was a breach of civility, and was discouraged by the firm custom of that generation. No black letter law was needed. The incentives of public shame and private rebuke were sufficient.
Censorship cannot be reimposed at once, as it was not removed at once, but gradually, as a matter of custom, living as a spirit of the time before it can be written as a black-letter law.
This requires a return to decency, which in turn requires the conversion of sinners to Christianity, because Christianity moreso than any other religion in history, made both human life and human sexuality sacred and glorious, and tamed its destructive wildness into the spirit of romance as seen in our poems and plays and songs, and into the institution of monogamy, of which no single institution has been a source of more human happiness in any land or any generation.
Before censorship can be imposed, persuasion must be successful. Incentives are also called for.
Artists since before Orpheus strummed the lyre or Homer sang have been ready to venture beyond what is traditional, acceptable, or safe. Even the strict Victorians allowed their artists and sculptors to depict nudes, a privilege granted no one else. So, the artistic community, even in a healthy society, will always tend toward more and more daring and titillating portrayals of morally questionable behavior, because art requires drama, drama requires conflict, from which all the sins of man cannot be severed.
The artistic community cannot and will not restrict itself to the wholesome and traditional, unless their patrons and paying customers have a clear standard, promptly enforced. The customer has a duty to uphold public decency which cannot be delegated to another, or shirked.
Not only must the ideals of human decency, chastity, and normal sexual behavior, love and romance, and so on, be defended in the academic areas where they have been entirely defamed, the artistic spirit in Hollywood must be broken as with spur and whip to serve what is highest, best, brightest, and holiest in the human spirit, in nature, and in heaven, rather than churning out ghastly torture-porn and eyerollingly dull wokescold propaganda.
As the American consumer regains the sovereign power over extensive industries the anarchist-globalist-plutocrat alliance slowly but surely usurped from us, we must take care to use that power, not just for our short term satisfaction, but also in loyalty to the longterm and abstract goals we prize. The Enemy has held a sick vision or worldview before its partisans for decades, if not centuries.
This vision is a secular utopia, one where, once religion is abolished, all acts shall be licit; once government is abolished, all men will live together in peace, like angels, without law or need for law. Once economics is abolished, poverty, want, and scarcity of resources will softly and suddenly vanish away, and wealth pour from the clouds for no reason, and all will be rejoicing in an endless festivity, neither marrying nor being given in marriage.
The other promises are merely idle or silly. It is lust, the lust of the eyes glaring at what others possess, which provides the main appeal of this utopia. Living without church and state, where all goods are free, may appeal to an intellectual. But the selling point of the utopia is the lifelong worldwide orgy, like the paradise of Mahound, complete with houri.
This vision is never openly promoted. It is merely implied, merely adumbrated, merely offered as hints. No one sets about, in the subversion stage, to say that divorce and adultery are better for women than monogamy and true love — stated baldly, the proposition is risible. Instead, stories portray marriage as dissatisfying and empty dead ends, and divorce and adultery as glamorous and practical, harmless to children, and not deleterious to the community.
In the subversion stage, no one tells the young men not to remain virgins until marriage, indeed, no one speaks of virginity and marriage at all, except perhaps to make it the butt of a joke. Men will naturally sin; they need no urging. All they need is not to hear what the wages of sin are.
Hence, all that subversive movies, books, and shows need to do is to portray life at the Playboy mansion, where the restrictions of religion are forsworn, as glamorous, and to hint that such a life awaits us all, once we toss away the irrational restrictions imposed by Victorian maiden aunts.
It is done subtly, over long periods.
Little surprises and sucker punches have been sneaked into popular entertainment at every level, and without pause or let, for more years than suspected.
I remember reading a superhero comic where, as a throwaway line, a giant image of Ken Starr was jokingly cast by a psychic illusion as a nightmare sufficient to terrify and disperse a crowd of random people — as if we were all perjurers and adulterers. Routinely I hear words from Bush or Trump put into the mouths of supervillains. These funnybooks are aimed at the young, who are unlikely to catch the specific reference. But the mood, the unspoken assumption, the bias of the writer can pass into the soul of the audience almost without their awareness.
Can we not erect a healthy vision of the world to do the same?
The process of subversion by such slow degrees is often likened to boiling a frog. His primitive nervous system cannot register temperature, except by the relative change, so that if the heat creeps up slowly enough beneath the pot, it can be raised to a boil without the frog ever registering the pain.
We need not act so slowly, because we need not necessarily hide our longterm goals. One must boil a frog slowly, but a refreshing plunge into an ice cold mountain stream can both clean the flesh and shock the sleepy soul awake.
Most parents want their children to be raised decently. They would prefer decent books and shows be available, if it were possible.
The promotion of sexual deviance to children is not something being done at the behest of the general public, but through institutions, schools and libraries and especially the entertainment industry, that are thoroughly ‘woke’ that is, so corrupt they can no longer perform their core functions. The schools cannot teach, they are too busy promoting sodomy. The entertainment industry cannot make movies, they are too busy preparing boring ‘Mary Sue’ stories means to spread and glorify the feminist wokescoldery.
Pressure groups and activists groups for every form of sin and evil can be found at large in the public, using whatever influence they can garner to lure or shove or pressure or persuade the immense worldwide propaganda apparatus called Hollywood to favor and support their causes, from communism to atheism to sodomy to pederasty to animal rights to anti-fracking. Such is their right in America, but those who support truth, virtue, beauty, and goodness must do likewise.
This column will not detail how to begin such a movement or how to fund and organize such a thing. Political action and consumer advocacy has a long and storied history in this nation, and most adults can find advise on how to do embark on such projects from wiser heads than mine.
The disadvantage we may never overcome, of course, is that wealthy patrons among the plutocrats and permanent donor class of politics, the media elite, and so on, can outspend and outwait any grassroots effort. More than sporadic grassroots action is needed. Major political figures, philanthropic organizations, think tanks, and businesses eager for positive publicity must be persuaded to join in such efforts.
If the National Rifle Association can sustain a large scale and endless assault on the Second Amendment, a citizens committee organized for the promotion of public decency could also. Such things were at one time common: you have no doubt heard of them denounced with sneers and mockery by everyone from James Joyce to James Branch Cabell to Mae West.
Well, the forces of corruption won a signal victory over Hollywood, and in a matter of two generations, decent films were a thing of the past, and Red propaganda was commonplace. Now it is anti-America, anti-White, anti-Christ propaganda, and a studied replacement of all beloved long running franchises with wokescold and dreary mockeries. We have lost STAR WARS and have instead THE LAST JEDI. Instead of Narnia, we have THE GOLDEN COMPASS. Instead of Gandalf the Gray, we have Dumbledore the Gay. Instead of enduring classics, we have dumpster fires of tasteless, plotless, dreary, puke.
Can the trend be reversed? Well, the when the clock is wrong, it must be turned back, or else the time will never be right.
Certainly it is harder to build a tower than to knock it down, but the work can be done, one brick at a time, with one hand holding the trowel, and the other hand wielding a sword. The work is slow because the Enemy will send minions to tear the bricks away as they go in.
No laws of history are written in stone. No set of economic incentives make anything so inevitable or so likely that some other set of incentives cannot reverse the tendency.
The Enemy speaks always and forever as if History were a goddess who takes sides, and separates her blessed children on her right side from those cursed with eventual defeat and obscurity, banished to her left, the wrong side of history.
Nothing could be further from the truth. History is not a science like physics, because human beings are not inanimate atoms controlled by atomic forces. Each part of human history is decided by the free will of the men who act, by their grit, determination, luck, and the situation on the ground.
A crusade to uphold public decency, to restore civilized standards to film, are no more unlikely or absurd than an American Marxist party, except that we need not hide our long term goals behind absurd sounding slogans, as the Marxist party called Black Lives Matter needs to do.
Conservative artists must make art, and conservative patrons must buy and support it. Those who say art is innately anarchistic and progressive, ever seeking creative hence new forms, merely misstate the case. Love songs are as old as songs, and art only has drama when it adheres to strict forms, and when it speaks to eternal truths.
Hence, the third and final step is the conquest of Hollywood by those among us with wealth, time, and talent to create profound art and popular entertainment. We must start film companies and find financial backing explicitly designed to exclude SJWs.
Frankly, the only way under the current legal regime to do so that I can see for discriminating against leftwingers, anarchists, and perverts, without running afoul of the Civil Rights Act, is to form the company as a conspicuously as a religious organization, and put a bishop or something in charge of it. This would allow the companies to stand by a rule that they hire no one in any capacity who is outside what the Church would accept as presenting himself for communion, namely, no one who supports abortion or has had one.
The Civil Rights Act must be repealed. The authority of the federal government to intervene in the private sphere among vendors and employers, establishing de fact quotas based on victim group status is the paramount cause of identity politics. Without this well-meaning but legally insane abomination, so alien to the American spirit, the corporate culture would not be and could not have become so unamerican, and that includes the corporate giants running the entertainment monopolies.
Whatever the original intent of the Civil Rights Act, by making discrimination, an invisible mental act, the basis for legal action, or, in other words, a thought crime, one grants to elected officials and unelected bureaucrats an arbitrary and dangerous power, that can be, and, as it turns out, has been, used to make any thoughts displeasing to those in power illegal.
The current state of the law, under the wording of the Civil Rights Act, allows the state to compel active cooperation with sins forbidden by human and divine law through all prior generations. The Christian cake-bakers or wedding planners or reception hall landlords are so rare that activists must take extraordinary pains to be found by activists, and harassed by the law, but the law, as it currently stands, offers religious men no clear right to avoid active cooperation with grave moral evil.
Perhaps, indeed, discrimination by Democrats and the Jim Crow laws against Blacks should be outlawed. The most obvious and direct way to do this would be to outlaw Jim Crow laws, that is, to leave each busline and sandwich counter free to serve any customers, or hire any employees, each owner as he sees fit.
A next most obvious way would be to outlaw Democrats. Treason is illegal, and sedition, at times, has also been.
But if, instead, the way meant to deter this discrimination is to grant politicians and bureaucrats the power to judge thought crime, this creates an inevitable incentive to corruption.
Granting the Federal government the right to compel buslines and sandwich shops to service customers or higher employees according to an unstated and ever changing racial quota, evitably leads and has led to corruption. The mandate against discrimination now extends to other identitarian groups, including groups of sexual deviants whose peccadilloes render them unfit to be patrons or employees. The madness has grown beyond forcing Hooter’s to hire male waiters. It is at the point where Boy Scouts, an organization specifically founded to teach boys elevated moral character, are forced to have pederast or transvestite or sodomite scoutmasters. It has forced transvestites into women’s locker rooms, and into the winner’s place in every sort of all-girls sport.
This corruption was foreseen. The generation who embraced the Civil Rights Act was warned at the time. The warning voices were shouted down and called racist.
Suckers.
Under the foolish wording of the Civil Rights Act, all other constitutional restrictions on federal overreach are now null and void. No speech is beyond regulation as hate speech, no church beyond prosecution when it preaches against sodomy, and no business is free to be run as its owner sees fit.
All the power-hungry need do is decree the thoughts of whoever obstructs their path to corruption are discrimination hence illegal.
Once the speech of everyone in favor of free speech is defined as hate speech, that is, unacceptable discrimination, the Civil Rights Act allows, if not promotes, forbidding free speech in the name of promoting correct thought.
Christianity now and has forever been the sole social force able to diminish tyranny and mob-rule alike. Despite being the source of our culture and common law, Christianity must be, and has been, misinterpreted to be in conflict with misinterpretations of the Civil Rights Act, so that the power-hungry can diminish its influence in society, and render its core tenants unlawful.
If you think I exaggerate, dear reader, an allegedly conservative justice ruled in a recent Supreme Court case that the law forbidding discrimination in hiring and firing between male and female also, by an elliptical bit of word play more akin to a pun or play on words than anything resembling juridical logic, also forbids discrimination against sexual perverts and deviants, provided the deviancy involved makes the plaintiff unable or unwilling to identify his sex.
Got that? If it is thoughtcrime to fire a qualified woman solely because she is a woman, ergo it is also thoughtcrime to fire a man who dons and dress and puts on lipstick, solely because he is not the woman he wants to pretend he is. In both cases, the word “sex” was somewhere something something in the legal decision, so therefore this was the original intent of the law, and what the legislators had in mind when it was penned.
Like all such legally-subversive decisions, there is, of course, not a single prior case, not even dicta, which can be quoted in support of this absurd legal arguments.
It is legislating from the bench, pure and simple.
The court has held that a law preventing discrimination against women, regardless of the legal intent of the lawmaker, as a matter of Constitutional principle prevents discrimination against insane people, provided their insanity is the hallucination of being a woman when one is not.
This type of insanity would not be possible if the entertainment industry had not, with remarkable diligence, since the 1950s, promoted the ungodly and ugly principles of the total pornography culture, especially the idea that all sick and abnormal sources of pleasure, provided only it is a sexual pleasure, are not only normal, and tolerable, but brave and glorious.
Sexual perversion is more than merely normal. The total pornography culture holds that neither man nor god has a right to forbid, deter, or even hold an adverse opinion on the question of whether sexual perversion, adultery, fornication, contraception, abortion, have deleterious effects, or violate the moral order.
I would have stated the idea to be that all private things between consenting adults was the dominant idea of the total pornography culture, for so it was propagandized to me from all sources, without pause, throughout my youth.
But, no, the normalization of sex with children, and the Democrat efforts to promote international human trafficking, including coercive prostitution or sexual slavery, renders that final restriction of waiting for consent between adults to be null and void. That is not what the Enemy is aiming at, and it is not where our culture is going.
Moreover, the savage accusation and persecution of menfolk who did indeed gain the necessary grant of consent, but the fornicatrix later conceiving regrets, nullifies the concept of consent. In the modern day, ladies cannot, as a legal matter, give informed consent to the sex act. Any man who fornicated with her can be accused by her later to be a rapist — an accusation she can make, or so it seems, with perfect impunity.
Hollywood cannot be cleaned while the general society continues to wallow in filth, nor will Hollywood cease making stories that glamorize fornication and adultery until the general audience returns to sanity, chastity, and the self-command of mature sexual beings, that is, Christian ladies and gentlemen.
Any society that demeans and denigrates motherhood and virginity, but at the same time forbids heaping shame on sluts, blasphemes against the Virgin Mother of our Lord.
Shall we reform the popular entertainment industry? We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
