If you ever visit Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood website, you already know that a recurring theme for many of BH's authors is the necessity for conservatives to bring their ideas into popular culture through movies, books, television, music and other media. At first glance, this would seem to be a Sisyphean task. Hollywood, publishing, popular song, magazines-all these industries are dominated by soft-headed soft-hearted leftists. The sheer volume of tedious knee-jerk liberal crap put out by American pop culture has to be discouraging for right-of-center creative types looking to make art that displays their values.
While all of the above is true, conservatives have something in their favor when it comes to reclaiming the high ground in the American culture wars. It is that government remains decidedly uncool in popular media. Think about your favorite movies, books and television shows. Are the protagonists in even 1/4 of them big gubmint types? Are the heroes in your beloved films living in public housing or on welfare? Are the lead characters in your backlog of DVR 'ed TV shows employed as paper-pushing bureaucrats in some federal agency? Glancing at the fiction books stacked on top of your toilet, are your bathroom library tomes populated by men and women dependent on the various liberal do-gooders and bleeding hearts? When you pop a CD into your car stereo do the songs that serenade you to and from the supermarket urge the listener to start collecting food stamps because that's the hip thing to do?
Chances are, almost no items on the popular culture menu that you or anybody else in America consumes have the message that dependency on government is the hip thing to do. Sure, you may get a message that right-wingers suck. Hell, the eight years of the Bush presidency was one long pop-cult whine about how conservatives are the spawn of the devil. Even then, leftists in the media couldn't create mainstream art that revelled in the glories of relying on the federal thumbsucker apparatus in order to survive.
Government is fundamentally uncool and dependency on government is about as fashion-forward as dreadlocks on an albino white dude. Just like the rarity of pasty uber-crackers rocking Bob Marley's hairdo, it's hard to find the producers of mass media pushing for people defined by their tight relationship with government because it is lame. Even Hollyweird and the rest of the pop culture goof balls understand this, which is why they don't usually make material that sends that message.
Conservatives have a great deal of work to do if they want to get their messages into the mainstream media. But on a basic level, America loathes the idea of being dependent on government. This means that the Right's job is not as tough as they think it is. America is largely sympathetic to many conservative values. It is up to creative people within the conservative movement to overcome their nervousness about lefty media dominance and start creating quality entertainment that reflects traditional messages about the role of government.
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