The Unwinnable Culture War
Because controlling all three branches of government can't make you cool.
While Elon Musk continues ripping out the wires of government so that it runs as well as Twitter, the nominal President Donald Trump is doing what really matters to working-class Americans: taking over the Kennedy Center. Explaining the decision to oversee a performing arts organization Trump said, “We don’t need woke at the Kennedy Center,” although when pressed for specifics, Trump elaborated, “I got reports it was so bad. I didn’t want to go. There was nothing I wanted to see.” So to sum up: I heard it was woke (whatever that means) and that means it’s bad so I’m taking it over. He later said, “We took over the Kennedy Center…it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”
Again, what this means specifically is unclear, but I can make some guesses from right-wing reactions to Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance. I suspect it means no more people of color winning Kennedy Center Honors while Trump is in office.
Despite amassing so much power that we’re now in a constitutional crisis, right-wing actors remain mad because they don’t control mainstream culture. Kid Rock will not be invited to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show presumably because the NFL would like people to applaud afterwards. The biggest movie in America will not star Kevin Sorbo, and there’s no Oscar nomination coming for a documentary about a white guy feeling persecuted.
For some, this unwinnable war is a terrific brand opportunity. You never want to win because that would end the grift. Instead, you go to your local theater and then do a 43-minute YouTube video about how Barbie made you mad. You manufacture as much outrage as you can about Bud Light doing a single sponsored post with a trans influencer. An audience feeding on their victimhood will never get enough of this stuff.
For others, they genuinely think that anything outside their preferences is an abomination. As with other realms, culture is an area not to share space but to dominate. The thinking goes, “If someone outside my tribe is succeeding, I must therefore be losing.” I’m not thrilled that Carrie Underwood performed at Trump’s second inauguration, but this is also not a personal affront to me in any way. Whatever culture the right seeks to uphold (and as far as I can tell, it’s about whining about being “canceled” and then using that as a badge of honor so you can claim victimhood rather than accept blame for any harm you caused), it hasn’t gained any traction in decades because these people are not cool.
They will never be cool because genuinely cool people don’t care if you think they’re cool. They don’t need to assert it, and they certainly don’t need to badger you about the things you like. The thought of, “Well, this isn’t for me, but I’m glad others are enjoying it,” would never occur to them. They need to win, either by taking on feelings of persecution or by erasing anyone they deem a competitor, and that’s why, at least as far as culture is concerned, they will continue to lose.
What I’m Watching
Since February is Black History Month, I endeavor to watch more films by Black filmmakers about Black life. However, since it can be difficult to know where to start, I’ve found Slate’s New Black Film Canon article from 2023 quite helpful. I’ve been slowly working my way through it over the past two years, and I’m currently about 70% of their list of 75 films. Of what I’ve seen so far, there hasn’t been anything here that made me question its inclusion, and more importantly, I’ve found quite a few gems that deserve their wider recognition. For example, we all know Shaft is a classic, but you should make time for Gordon Parks’ previous feature The Learning Tree. There’s no shortage of acclaimed Black films from the 90s like Malcolm X, Juice, and Devil in a Blue Dress, but don’t miss out on Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. or Mo’ Better Blues. My goal is to watch the remaining 22 movies on this list by the end of 2025 even though a few of the titles are a little tough to track down (e.g. Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Spook Who Sat by the Door).
I also saw Paddington in Peru, which opens in U.S. theaters this Friday. I was a bit worried since the director of the first two Paddington movies, Paul King, wasn’t returning, and it had been seven years since the glorious Paddington 2. I will say up front that Paddington in Peru is not as good as the first two movies, but it is by no means a whiff. It’s still funny, charming, and good-natured. In an ideal world, we’d get a new Paddington movie every two years with a veteran actor or two cast as the antagonists.
What makes Paddington in Peru a slight step down is that it’s too much of an adventure quest. Paddington (Ben Whishaw) and the Browns make their way down to Peru to look for Paddington’s Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), who has gone missing. This somehow becomes a search for El Dorado, and while the idea of “Indiana Jones but make it Paddington” isn’t a bad one, it also isolates Paddington in a way that diminishes his key attribute: his kindness. He’s not mean, but his ability to build community through good deeds doesn’t really work in a jungle setting. There’s still a nice message about found families, but it oddly made more sense to put Paddington in a prison than the Amazon.
What I’m Reading
I finally finished reading Demon Copperhead. The slow-going wasn’t the quality of the material, but it is a tough read in terms of its content. If not for Barbara Kingsolver’s beautiful writing and deep empathy for her characters, this could play as tragedy porn or merely a thought experiment working off David Copperfield. Instead, it was as richly rendered as any novel I’ve read in recent memory, and I eventually realized that part of my hesitancy in turning the page was so that no more misfortune would befall these characters. And if I feel so much for fictional characters, then I need to have more empathy for their real circumstances. I know it’s easy to write off Appalachia as hillbillies and rednecks, and there’s undoubtedly a racial component here of who is deserving of empathy. But my caring about people of color in impoverished rural areas shouldn’t negate caring about anyone in poverty regardless of skin color. Kids shouldn’t go hungry. Dickens knew it. Kingsolver knows it. It’s disgraceful that not every American knows it. Also, I’m not a believer in capital punishment, but for the Sacklers I might make an exception.
I’ve now moved on to slightly lighter reading: Batman ‘89. The premise here is basically, “What if Tim Burton kept making Batman movies?” so this functions as a follow-up to Batman and Batman Returns. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
In other reading:
Good-bye, Pamela Paul by Andrea Long Chu [Intelligencer] - In addition to being a glorious takedown of Paul, a dimwit who blessedly no longer has a sinecure at the nation’s biggest newspaper, I love that Chu seizes on the bigger issue here: “the far center.” Paul represents a coalition of people who claim to love liberty as long is it isn’t troubled by justice. They are the people Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cited as “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” Or, as Chu puts it in the case of Paul, “One gets the sense that politics has gone off, like a cell phone, in the darkened theater of Pamela Paul’s mind. It is worse than wrong: It is rude.”
Do Democrats Have a Plan? by Isaac Chotiner [The New Yorker] - Usually, if you’re about to sit down for an interview with Chotiner, you’re dead and you don’t realize it yet. You’re in the jaws of the beast, and arguably the most skilled interviewing working today is about to chew you up as you sputter over your dumb ideas. However, this is not one of those interviews. Speaking with Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, there are good insights on what Democrats are doing right, where they could improve, and which strategists can be ignored (I particularly liked when Schatz says, “Oh, David Axelrod, James Carville. I mean, those guys have not been in the trenches legislatively or electorally in a full generation. And there’s a cottage industry out there of Democratic strategists. But in order to be a Democratic strategist, you actually have to do politics currently and not just podcast about it.”). Schatz makes a good argument that Democrats should work to prevent harm rather than waiting on polling to see if they should act on anything.
Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government by David Roth [Defector] - First off, “Greasy Beavises” is a great way to refer to unelected children working for DOGE and wrecking everything in their path. But more importantly, what we’re seeing right now in this silent coup (and that’s what it is when people with no oversight come in and run things independent of any public input) is that it’s far easier to destroy than to create. We know the government isn’t perfect, but Elon Musk and his goons have no interest in making it better. Their actions won’t feed anyone, house anyone, or ease a single burden. “That concept,” writes Roth, “just is not real to them in the way that their own hunger is; none of the people they'd immiserate or incinerate would or could ever matter as much as whatever they want at this moment.” The only question now is how long will it take to rebuild what these idiots have carelessly destroyed?
Voting for the Mayor Who Promised to Blow up the City Doesn’t Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing up the City by Mike Drucker [McSweeney’s] - Pretty self-explanatory.
What I’m Hearing
I liked the latest Maintenance Phase about “blue zones,” which are areas where the population supposedly lives longer than average. This is a good data episode where Michael and Aubrey get more into the methodology and why both the health recommendations and the debunking of blue zones have issues.
What I’m Playing
I beat the main story in Sleeping Dogs, and it wasn’t bad. It looks like a film adaptation is still in the works, this time with Simu Liu tapped for the lead role. While I remain wary of video game movies, Sleeping Dogs clearly draws its inspiration from the Hong Kong action films of the 80s and 90s. If that’s where Liu wants to take his adaption, I’m interested. As for the game, I’m currently puttering around checking off achievements and getting to the DLC.
Also, should there be a scene where Liu’s character shoves a bad guy into an ice chipper? I say yes. We have to respect the source material.
