« MCLU: Sex Offenders Deserve Privacy, or Something | Main | Yes, I Know »
April 28, 2009
Needed: A New Culture
Until recently, I had not heard of author Andrew Klavan. After watching this video, I picked up "Dynamite Road," and was hooked from the first paragraph: "Killing the girl was worth forty-nine points. In a lot of ways, it was the easiest job the man called Ben Fry had ever had." It's not a book for everyone, as it contains some strong language and violence, but if you like books about gritty private eyes, it's a great read.
Klavan is a rare creature - a conservative who works in the entertainment industry. He also writes a column at Pajamas Media, and his latest is thought provoking.
We need to build a New American Culture, and turn our backs on the culture of the state. We need to stop according respect or credence to reviews and awards that are used as social engineering tools to force the culture into anti-American state worship. We need to build an infra-structure of funding, review attention and awards to give praise, purpose and prestige to those artists who stand outside the MSM’s climate of opinion.Klavan's words remind me of a quote by C.S. Lewis who said something along the lines of 'what we need are not more Christian writers, but good writers who are Christian.' I don't quote that to suggest that only good art can come from believers, but I like the sentiment behind the statement. Too often, conservatives and Christians tend to isolate themselves from culture or create art that is too overtly political or religious while ignoring the fact that art needs to be good on its own merit in order to effectively communicate whatever message the artist is trying to send. As the abject failure of anti-Iraq war movies shows, preachiness doesn't work.It would be wrong to say too much about what such a New American Culture would look like. Individualism is the very essence of both conservatism and art. But I think we can say that such a culture would reflect and uplift the values and perspectives that made the west and America the greatest and freest places on the globe; it would put forward an image of man as our founders knew him to be, flawed and sinful yet capable of striving toward dignity and salvation through self-reliance and sacrifice.
Of course, the left will attempt to deride such an endeavor with the tired caveat they always use - creative people are free thinkers, and for that reason cannot help but be liberal...conservatives are simple thinkers while liberals are abstract...blah, blah freaking blah. The sad attempts to tie creativity to ideology are almost too transparent and desperate to take seriously. My three-year-old daughter has the ability to copy pictures she sees quite well, which I guess makes her liberal. But she also hates to share her toys (take that, socialism!) and her response to watching a wolf take down a baby caribou on Planet Earth was to say "The wolf is getting a snack," which of course means she's going to be a conservative.
Or perhaps I could just realize that trying to stuff my daughter into an ideological category based on her likes, dislikes and abilities is absurd. Artistic ability is not dependent upon one's feelings on taxation or social issues. Some people can draw, sing, write or play instruments, others cannot. Such abilities have nothing to do with one's particular views on political issues, nor should they.
What I like about this article is that Klavan understands culture matters. Art matters. It's time to re-engage and just maybe, start to gain ground and eventually win.
Cross-posted at the Greenroom.
Posted by slublog at April 28, 2009 08:32 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.slublog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4156
Comments
We've already won. The darkness just doesn't understand.
Posted by: Dan Pete at April 29, 2009 06:54 PM