Monday, June 20, 2005

Nobility of the Image 10

So, the media is “liberal”. Who cares? They’re also the entrenched elite that liberals claim to oppose. The perfect example of this is Michael Moore. Liberals love Michael Moore’s films and cannot seem to understand why working class people don’t love them. After all, Michael Moore speaks in a dumbed-down way and he is fat- shouldn’t those stupid, fat Middle Americans love him as one of their own? Almost no liberals ever pick up on the fact that Michael Moore’s films invariably ridicule the working class people he claims to triumph. Every single film contains a core in which the “hicks” get theirs. Sure, it may be unfair to ambush some $7.00/hour secretary at work and make her look stupid in a major motion picture, but gosh, that’s insightful social satire for you!

The worst example of this was the morally reprehensible film Bowling for Columbine. I remember when the Columbine massacres happened watching a television preacher admonishing his audience. “This happened because society has strayed from God! This happened because we do not pray enough!” What gall the man had! What sort of Pharisee exploits the suffering of others to push their own agenda? How dare he tell people whose children were murdered that they got what they had coming to them?! What a monster!

Yet, this was the same reason that Michael Moore made Bowling for Columbine- to let these people whose children were murdered know that they got what they had coming because they don’t agree with him about the arms industry. And this shows how deeply the Nobility of the Image resents these people. They literally expect them to “learn a thing or two” from this sort of paternalistic hate-speech directed against them.

And this is “leftist activism”! What about a film like “Super-size Me” which sneers at McDonald’s explicitly, and the working class people who eat at McDonald’s implicitly? And yet, what do we expect in a society that cannot see outside of capitalism? Of course class-based snobbishness would be held up as “leftist”. Of course, the left would turn its guns on Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and the like. Don’t get me wrong- these are exploitive companies. But, is there any doubt that the left’s “activism” is little more than sneering class-based superiority?

Or what about a feminist establishment that expects working class women to worry not about the fact that the factory owner won’t let them take bathroom breaks, but about the fact that Sharon Stone and female executives don’t make as much money as rich males, or that rich white women still find it hard to say “pussy” in mixed company?

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