SelwynDuke.com

Media Group That Showed 13-year-old Boys Kissing Now Considering Sitcom Involving Anti-Christian Bigot

By Selwyn Duke

He has been called “one of the cruelest, most vile political activists in America.”

And now he may have his own television show.

It was a first when ABC Family aired an episode of The Fosters in which it showed two 13-year-old boys kissing. Now Disney-ABC Television Group is considering another first: a sitcom produced and inspired by homosexual activist Dan Savage (shown), a profane anti-Christian bigot who once said he wished his political opponents “were all f***[**]g dead.”

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Hollywood Blast: Bursting Our Eardrums in a Background-noise Culture

By Selwyn Duke

“What did he say? Huh? Okay, well, pass the popcorn and put on the sub-titles.” This is not only a common experience people have with today’s entertainment; it also reflects something deeper about our culture.

It’s not often that reading a Washington Post article makes me exclaim “Thank you. Thank you!” But that’s precisely the reaction I had when imbibing a Friday piece by movie critic Ann Hornaday. Titled, in part, “How auteurs diss their audiences,” it criticizes a modern film phenomenon long a pet peeve of mine: background — or, should I say, foreground and all-around — music so ear-splittingly loud one cannot hear the dialogue.

I know you’ve noticed this. Most everyone has. My late father, a WWII veteran with hearing somewhat damaged by reports in training and battle, complained years ago already that actors in movies would “whisper.” I’ve been with other people who’d have to crank the volume of a movie up high so they could decipher the dialogue, and the commenters’ verdict under Hornaday’s article is unanimous. “I used to think I was going deaf,” related one reader. Numerous others said they’d wait till they could watch a film at home so they could turn on subtitles. For my part, I’m no fan of modern movies; there’s a good chance the work isn’t my cup of tea if the actors weren’t dead when I became alive. But I have watched enough of them to know that, despite my fairly acute hearing, I can only decipher parts of the dialogue and must fill in the blanks.

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The War on Men’s Wages

By Selwyn Duke

A market economy is absolutely the worst system in the world — except for all the rest. This isn’t just a play on Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy, it’s also true. Pity that we have to rely on those vice-ridden, flighty creatures called human beings to make decisions about what products and services we’ll enjoy. The only thing worse is having those decisions made by the subset of human beings called bureaucrats or politicians.

“Study: Hollywood execs have own 'war on women,' choking off major roles, salary from women,” reads the headline at Washington Examiner. At issue is a new report by the Women’s Media Center (WMC) — arch-feminista Gloria Steinem’s group — showing that in terms of warm-body count and amount of cold cash, women lag behind men in all corners of media and entertainment. We’re to find these data troubling and, as Time magazine wrote in a headline, “depressing.” In perhaps some comic relief, Time followed that note with the subtitle, “Jennifer Lawrence makes $11 million less than Adam Sandler.” Yeah, hey, pass the Prozac.

I don’t know, is it depressing that men do more dangerous jobs and suffer vastly more work-related injuries and deaths? Is it depressing that the whole workaday world, so unjustly dominated by men, was created by them in the first place? Is every difference among demographics that doesn’t happen to benefit “victim” groups to be thought depressing?

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Ducking the Real Issue on Duck Dynasty

By Selwyn Duke

This past December, the Duck Dynasty television show became “duck and cover,” with the forces of pinkness going nuclear on its patriarch, Phil Robertson, after he uttered some words about the most victimey of victim groups. For those who missed the story, the saga began when GQ interviewer Drew Magary asked Robertson what he considered sinful, prompting the bearded born-again Christian to say (as presented by GQ),

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.”

The response was quite predictable. While the Bill Clinton impersonators, W.C. Fields acolytes, gilded Gordon Gecko Wall Street warriors, and the idolater and swindler lobbies were mum, the homosexual activist group GLAAD was anything but glad (never mind gay), calling Robertson’s comments “vile” and extreme. The result was that A&E, the station carrying the Duck Dynasty reality show, did duck and cover and quickly announced an indefinite suspension of Robertson. To his credit, however, Robertson stood by his beliefs, and his family and formidable fan base stood by him, causing A&E to cave and reinstate him on December 27. And all’s well that ends well, right? Not so fast.

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Homosexuals Get Duck Dy-Nasty

By Selwyn Duke

When I saw the headline yesterday about how “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson had commented on a certain sexuality-defined group, I wondered how long it would be before he got the “treatment.”

I saw the next headline no more than a few hours later.

In case you haven’t heard, the faith-filled Louisianan wound up in hot water after being asked what was sinful by a GQ interviewer and offering the following answer, as presented by the magazine:

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God.”

Can you guess which of the above groups caused what subsequently befell Robertson: suspension from his A&E show?

Trashing Our Culture With Trash

By Selwyn Duke

A long-growing garbage field much larger than Texas is creeping toward the United States’ west coast, and parts of it will increasingly make landfall for quite a long time.

And one can’t help but think that it has come to the right place.

A new book by writer Charlotte Hays entitled When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? will be released this week, and, paraphrasing historian Arnold Toynbee, it issues a serious warning: “Society crumbles when it takes cues from the underclass.”

The author goes on to write in a New York Post article on the subject:

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Why the NRA is Right about Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Upstate New York’s Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It’s where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn’t changed much since he was born of Washington Irving’s fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I’d fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.

About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens — sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen — suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting “gangsta’” counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today’s recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC’s grungy East Village. Yet I’m wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close — a television set away.

Aurora and Romanticizing Evil

By Selwyn Duke

We may never know what was going though Aurora shooter James Holmes’s mind when he committed his heinous mass murder. We don’t know what kind of psychosis, or precisely what evil influences, he might have been subject to. What we do know is that, in wanting to be the Joker and not Batman, the villainous and not the virtuous, he reflects something prevalent today: The romanticizing of evil. And to whatever extent he was imitating art, this trend certainly is not art imitating life.

I remember when Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega was taken into custody by U.S. forces. Here was this fellow, who we’d seen giving fiery speeches from podiums and talking about killing political adversaries, now doing a perp walk in shackles. No longer the strongman, he looked neither strong nor like much of a man; it was as if he’d shrunk. He looked pathetic — like any dime-store thug in a mug shot. It was then that one understood what writer Hannah Arendt meant when, after observing Nazi war criminals, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

Evil people aren’t very interesting, but you wouldn’t know it from our popular culture. It serves up fantastical fiction such as the all-seeing serial killer Hannibal Lector, the superhuman Cape Fear criminal Max Cady, and the philosophizing hit men in Pulp Fiction. It certainly titillates and triumphs at the box office, but what, ultimately, is triumphing in the hearts and minds of generations weaned on such fare? What is their conception of good and evil? Which is more attractive to them?

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Imagine if the 2008 Obama Had Listened to the 2004 Obama...

 

When love was a warm toy gun

By Selwyn Duke

In a way, commercials can tell you more about how we've changed than history books. The other day I came across the following 1960s TV commercial on YouTube; it's for a toy set called the "Gung Ho Commando Outfit" by Marx. And it's a perfect snapshot of the America that, sadly, no longer exists.