” Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.”
I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left’s war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston.
At one time, this would have been a heartwarming story – like the Brits and the Krauts playing footie in no man’s land at Christmas 1914. Why, look! Houston’s oldest surviving Confederate general is recognizing our shared humanity by taking his boat to rescue the children of his former plantation slaves! But we live in a sterner age, and the appropriate response to an offer of rescue from a vessel flying the Stars & Bars is to riddle it below the waterline and dispatch its cap’n to Johnny Reb’s Locker.
Elsewhere, the cultural hurricane swirls on. In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance. WREG-TV reports:
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “Gone With the Wind” will be gone from The Orpheum’s summer movie series, the theater’s board said Friday.
The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.
“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement.
As Scarlett O’Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day – Pol Pot’s Year Zero as Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words “Because it’s 2015.” Why have a “gender-balanced cabinet”? Because it’s 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: “Because it’s 2017”, and anything that came before must be destroyed.
Totalitarianism is a young man’s game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all “old white men” who’ll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it’s true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret:
Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow Belongs to Me!
Ah, but who watches Cabaret in 2017, never mind Gone with the Wind? From The New York Post comes an arresting headline – “Millennials Don’t Really Care About Classic Movies”:
A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s.
Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”
My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:
This is literally the cause of all our problems.
She means it:
You can learn almost everything about life from movies… You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or “Solution” Y… Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a “free speech on campus” subplot…
But you can only learn “almost everything about life” if you stumble across movies. Very few people seek out Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). For the ensuing third of a century, it was the sort of thing that would turn up on the Late Show when you weren’t quite ready to call it a night – or on a rainy afternoon when you were overly familiar with that day’s “Leave It to Beaver” rerun and weren’t in the mood for Merv Griffin. Now we live in an age where the haphazard rewards of “stumbling across” have been entirely eliminated: You programme your own tastes on your own device, and you can live within those constraints 24/7.