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The Next Target for the Left’s Cultural Purge?

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As Confederate Flag hysteria reaches new heights, some have begun to wonder if the television series ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ will be memory-holed from our culture. Beyond featuring a car with the Confederate Battle Emblem on the roof named the ‘General Lee,’ the Dukes of Hazzard was a celebration of rural southern culture. Back when the southern states were solidly Democrat, the national culture was a lot more supportive of southern culture. Only since the south has turned red has the media culture turned against them.

There was another show in the 1970’s that was iconically liberal; M*A*S*H. M*A*S*H was steeped in the left-wing ideology of the time. War was never the answer. Patriots were buffoons. The communists were the good guys. Women were strong and empowered. All of the pieties of the 1970’s Hollywood left were on full display.

Nowadays, M*A*S*H would run afoul of the PC Police.

  • Alan Alda’s Captain Hawkeye Pierce (a 1970’s Liberal icon) would be a serial rapist by contemporary feminist definitions of the word.
  • The character of Corporal Max Klinger would be deemed offensive to the transgendered because his cross-dressing is intended to demonstrate mental illness.
  • In early episodes, there was a black character whose name was, I am not making this up, “Spearchucker.”

One generation’s liberal pieties are the next generation’s abominations. It demonstrates what a fickle, emotion-driven beast modern liberalism is. It’s not based on a set of proven values, but on whatever is trendy at the time.

One can foresee a time when all pre-Obama television shows and movies (except maybe for scifi shows and things set in “alternate realities”) are simply banned lest people be reminded how free and prosperous America was before Obama.

A bitter Klinger
A bitter Klinger

Comments

  3. The character of “Spearchucker” was in both the book and the movie as well. In both, he is the ringer brought in to win the football game.

    Soon after he arrived at the camp, he was asked where his name came from and said that he received the nickname while in college since he threw the javelin.

  5. Humor is always the first victim of prudery and Progressives are nothing if not generators of hate lists. They are equipped with hair triggers tripped by points of view which do not coincide with their own. Then they go supersonic in a style of humor which mocks, degrades and demeans those they have chosen for scorn.

    Did you read that Bristol Palin is pregnant again with no marital mate in sight? Cue the Progressives. Bring David Letterman out of retirement. Let Bill Maher pontificate and scorn. You see, the Bible thumping Wasilla hillbilly is a regular mink and her mother has some nerve to promote morality and pretend to be worthy. Fie on the lot of them. What makes “those” people think they can run with the likes of any Progressive you can name? The elite is not required to tolerate the trash of society. The elite are so above and beyond them that it is an injustice to even infer parity with them.

    So, the more Progressive we become, the tighter the rules are wrapped on what is permitted to be “funny.” Apparently attack humor is always acceptable so long as a majority of the audience gets pleasure from it. The applause-o-meter can justify about anything in the Progressive world. But humor that rankles the Progressive is pure evil hate speech.

  6. “In early episodes, there was a black character whose name was, I am not making this up”

    Isnt it a good thing that we view this as unfunny now? Thank goodness that society has progressed to the point we find it unacceptable to degrade US service men based on their race. Step by step society is getting better. Not there yet. But closer.

  8. That’s funny, littlelettermike, because you and yours regularly degrade black academics as “acting white”, black conservatives as “Uncle Toms” and “race traitors”, and successful black people who don’t hew to ghetto culture as “sellouts”.

    You are a racist, littlelettermike.

  9. I am going to rebut with Firefly as the best TV series of all time. *puts fan boy back in the deep, dark hole he belongs*

    I also rather doubt we would be allowed to keep scifi, I mean the real stuff. Asimov pretty much nails the whole “safety is our top priority crowd”. Heinlein, yeah, I do not even need to go into that one. Jules Verne always had some new fangled science trumping the superstitions of the day. Even H.G. Wells, who was a socialist, accidentally said very true things about the nature of knowledge’s fragility. Bram Stoker flat out asserts that all that is good is in the furtherance of human understanding.

    That and scifi is a fun thing to read, we cannot have that.

  10. CthuluDreaming. the irony of Firefly is that Mal and Co were confederate, small government types. Given JossWheton’s social warrior status, it’s amazing he wrote it.

  11. My supposition is that Tim Menear, who was the brains behind the first bit of Buffy–when it was good, actually wrote it. Joss just knows the right people and a cash cow when he sees it. He may be a raging SJW, but he knows what sells.

  12. “Back when the southern states were solidly Democrat, the national culture was a lot more supportive of southern culture. Only since the south has turned red has the media culture turned against them.”

    Back when the southern states were solidly Democrat, no one would have used the word “red” as a synonym for “Republican” or “conservative.” Red used to be the color of communism and leftism (and still is in most countries). Blue was associated with the Union Army, and nobody would have called Democratic South “blue” back when it was Democratic. Around 2000, however, some media dweeb started our current red/blue political color scheme, and no one seems to remember that it is anachronistic to project that scheme back into previous eras. Talk about “memory holes”!

  13. Ian F., the Red/Blue for Republican/Democrat was started by the media, but it was 1980, they all agreed to use those colors on their electoral maps. The colors were chosen randomly (Can’t remember if it was a coin flip or drawing). I don’t think there was any reason other than those colors are patriotic and show up well on TV.

  14. John in Indy, I was 18 in 1980, I can tell you that red and blue were not consistently assigned to one party or the other until 2000. I think they assigned red or blue to each party in alternate presidential election years. But the use of “red” as a synonym for Republican/conservative, and “blue” as a synonym for Democrat/leftist, did not begin until 2000. Nobody was calling conservative states “red states” in, say, 1990.

  15. M*A*S*H was steeped in the left-wing ideology of the time.

    Hmmm… I’m not sure that my parents, both of them Republican-leaning retired military officers and both of them M*A*S*H fans, would completely agree with this — the show’s spoofing of military bureaucracy rang true for them, quite apart from any considerations about the righteousness of war.

    (And my mother would most emphatically disagree with the implication that “strong and empowered” women are representative of left-wing ideology.

  19. Ian (#14), I think you’re right about the dates. My cynical mind thinks the red/blue choices were made by lefties to blunt the hitherto strong association of red and communism/socialism. But it does allow the continued idea of “blue good, red bad”, according to their politics, in the popular subconscious.

  20. I read a story in Analog magazine some years ago: A graduate student had used a time machine to travel back to the early 21st Century to see if he could verify his theories about why no literature from that time period survives.

    What he discovered was that there were a large number of interest groups who were eager to take offense at any writings that went against their preferences. One example was drug warriors censoring any written pieces that contained the word “horse” or any other word that might be a slang term for some drug, regardless of context. When you had enough of these groups all looking for reasons to censor written works, the only thing left that failed to offend anyone was stock tables and other financial tables.

    Just sayin’