Memory Hole Triple Feature
Or, How to Mob-Proof Your Mind
Tucker Carlson kicked off a kerfuffle in Canada last week after suggesting that America ought to “liberate” its neighbor to the north. I have nothing to contribute to discussions of geopolitical grand strategy, but I have seen way too many movies, and in this case the one I’m reminded of might have a lot to teach us today - not about Tucker, or Trudeau, but ourselves.
Canadian Bacon is by no means a good movie. It is a low budget, silly, 90s John Candy farce about an attempted American invasion of Canada. There are a couple funny scenes playing on Canadian stereotypes, including my favorite, an homage to a classic Monty Python Latin skit, with a Canadian language police twist: the police make the Americans rewrite their vulgar anti-Canadian graffiti… in French, to comply with both official languages.
Why bring this movie to your attention? Well, you may have heard of its writer and director: Michael Moore. Yes, that Michael Moore; before he made his famous documentaries, he made this. Needless to say, Moore has impeccable leftist credentials. Yet take a look at the movie’s central premise, played in the most over the top manner: that there exists a powerful military industrial complex in America, bent on manipulating the president and the people into war whenever possible in order to increase their arms-dealing profits. To such powerful lobbyists, per Moore, any period of peace is intolerable, and extreme measures must be taken to continually push the country into a new armed conflict.
Again, I’m not here to discuss geopolitics, but all I’m gonna say about that is that if someone tried to put out a movie with an identical message to Moore’s today, it would be immediately branded far right propaganda, probably secretly paid for by Russia, and everyone involved in the production would be permanently banned from Facebook.
Interestingly, the movie’s secondary concern – a running joke about the pristine beauty of Canada’s natural landscape compared to the trash/smog/pollution on the Buffalo side of the border – has also turned into a manner of right wing extremism. Our most leftist-run cities are awash in filth and literal feces, as the environmental movement today places far more emphasis on flying private jets to global warming conferences than on picking up litter in one’s backyard.
To recap, with a return to Tucker Carlson: some of “right wing extremist” Carlson’s recurrent themes include his attack on the military-industrial complex and his appeal for the environmental movement to return to caring about the great outdoors and re-beautifying our landscape. As you will discover, watching a 1995 movie by “left wing extremist” Moore, these ideas were once preached as gospel by the left. Now Carlson is perhaps their most hated enemy. Add Canadian Bacon to the memory hole.
A far better movie than Moore’s is A Thousand Clowns, from 1965, starring Jason Robards and Barbara Harris. It’s based on a stage play, the dialogue is fantastic, and it’s a perfect time capsule of New York City in the 60s and the quirky liberal types who inhabited it. It’s the story of a charismatic non-conformist who refuses to live by society’s conventions and is raising his nephew to follow in his footsteps. This meets with the great displeasure of the State, as personified by the rigid school system and its social workers, who conspire to take the child away from him. A characteristic line, from the uncle, explaining what he is trying to instill in his young charge: “I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair.”
Once again, an impeccably “leftist” film of its day, yet if it were remade today, it would be widely denounced as a “right wing extremist” attack on the school system and the government, and its cast likely labeled insurrectionists.
A Thousand Clowns is not alone. Movies about nonconformists questioning a conventional, one-size-fits-all method of educating children were practically a genre of their own in the 60s and 70s – we can even go as far back as 1958 for Rosalind Russell’s unforgettable turn as Auntie Mame. I am not trying to argue that everyone in those days homeschooled or unschooled their kids, far from it. Many artistic types, however, certainly did, and “liberal” Hollywood was all about questioning the conventions of school boards. Add Robards’s pitch perfect performance, and all those clowns, to the memory hole.
I promised a triple feature, and I deliver… Star Trek. You know, the one about the whales. It may be hard for young people today to believe, but I can assure you, I lived it: saving the whales used to be a big, big deal. It was such a big deal it comprised the plot of a Star Trek blockbuster, to say nothing of several other popular movies of the day (remember Free Willy?). Today, meanwhile, unprecedented numbers of dead whales are washing up on our shores, a leading suspect is environmentalists (apparently, the process of constructing offshore windmill farms may be disorienting whales), and the main voice sounding the alarm is… you guessed it, Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, all the Hollywood “save the whales” voices are notably silent. Time to add Spock, Sulu, and, yes, even poor Willy, to the memory hole.
I’m sure you can add movies or books of your own to a list like this. What is my point? I’m not trying to pick a geopolitical, environmental, or educational “side.” As the child of immigrants who fled Communism, I am very worried that we are heading towards, if not already in, a totalitarian moment – what Rod Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” How do you keep yourself, and your children, from joining the mob? One way, as I wrote last year about Jane Eyre, involves the study of classic literature: “we need to bring the moral imagination back to education and revive the private sphere of the virtues, or we may never have a free public sphere again.” Yet you don’t have to bury your nose in books all day; you can also inoculate your mind against modern ideological viruses while chilling out with a movie on your comfiest couch. The trick is to include a variety of movies from different time periods – yes, sometimes even mediocre 90s comedies – so that not everything you consume is from the same ideological ‘moment.’ All movies have a particular worldview, and it’s often entertaining, and invariably educational, to spot the worldview in a dated film – and makes it much easier to then recognize, and if needed to reject, the worldviews that creep into our daily life. Just a thought for the next time you need a good excuse to watch a bad movie. Have a great week, and good luck dodging all the propaganda!
I remember being young enough to feel badly every time I sprayed ANYTHING from a can, lest the ozone open further and destroy us all. Fear mongering has been the rule, not the exception, in my opinion. Once I heard G. Carlin state the truth (the world will shake us off like a dog shaking fleas), I realized I’d been scammed by the media. That was when I was a kid; I’m now clearly much older and dang it if I didn’t fall for media scam during covid - but thankfully not for long and at little risk. Now it’s chinas spy balloon. What will it be next week.
OMG! "totalitarian moment" - As Canada now seems to have acquired a dictator. Shutting down the truckers via quite harsh means was so un-Canadian. I would have expected a lot of chatter in the halls of Parliament and pleading from police and some requests to have more public meetings. Instead a totally angry press attacking the truckers who wanted to talk it out, like citizens. Then to go after the truckers money! Impossible in a free society.
The final straw is to try to disarm the public. Certainly most of the urban folk won't encounter many threats but the largest part of Canada can be quite hazardous. And every wise person knows disarming the public doesn't stop crime, even in jolly old England. I doubt the Mounties will be patrolling with nightsticks in the places they must go.
Surprisingly the voters in Canada (and Australia and NZ) voted themselves some safety instead of freedom. By now, they might understand they really got no safety but have lost some freedom. The invasion from the South was done via importation of some socialistic notions and a bit of woke.