American conservatives have developed a culture of complaint. It’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that will prevent them from winning the culture war.
I recently posted a review of the book An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn. An Odyssey is an examination of The Odyssey, and timely in light of Christopher Nolan’s new movie. Nolan’s movie has been accused of being too “woke” and destroying a classic of Western Civilization. My piece on An Odyssey was an attempt to offer a more accurate and yet invigorating exegesis on Homer’s epic. Still, some commenters got angry—not only at Nolan, but at me. Here’s one on the movie:
It ain’t the Odyssey. Just a bastardized woke version of it chock full of race swaps and “representation” that shows zero respect to the source material or society, to the point that a Greek myth has no actual Greeks in it and Helen of Troy is a coal black woman who looks and acts like a shrieking welfare queen in the checkout line at Walmart. And that’s to say nothing of shoehorning in a trans idiot, passing off a hundred pound woman as a great male warrior who isn’t even in the original story. It’s an attempt to destroy yet another piece of western civilization by attacking it at its historical source, trying to turn it into just another wokescold screed. I hope with all my heart it fails miserably.
The comment then got this response: “Yeah! And reading this article was giving me a headache.”
I don’t disagree that much with the first comment—wokeness and mandatory DEI casting has ruined a lot of Hollywood movies. What got me was the comments blasting even my attempt to offer an alternative. In right-wing circles it’s verboten to offer any joy. One of the reasons I abandoned the left was liberalism’s relentless dour and buzzkill view of the world. I don’t want the same thing from the right.
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