Lindsay Ellis, who has done pop culture reviews under the name The Nostalgia Chick, once tackled the topic of Disney and the presentation of culture and history. The term “Disneyfication” is usually used as a slur for any material where a work of literature or art ends ups being adapted into something with talking animals who break into song in order to make things more acceptable to mass audiences. Since the Walt Disney Company has made a good amount of bread and butter turning historic fairy tales into understandable stories while selling toys and trips to amusement parks, this is the most common criticism of their films. The changes made to Mary Poppins in adapting it for the screen are so notorious and caused such strife, the story behind the production was made into a film, which in itself has been called revisionist history. However, some of those works have become such an iconic part of our culture they’re identified with American childhood.
Ellis argues Disneyfication is the polar opposite of the MAGA ideology, while being somewhat similar in appeal with both relying on make believe and fantasy. Disney assimilates stories from a whole myriad of cultures (which is somewhat problematic on its own) into the emotion they’ve cultivated of childlike wonder and feelings of past comfort that come from their products. The MAGA sentiment is based on appealing to emotions of the past as well, ideas of comfort from a “way-things-used-to-be” familiarity, when the world was full of possibilities. But MAGA is based in a yearning for the past because of present-day resentments, which takes it into exclusions instead of assimilation. This mentality points out at the world and says everything would be better if we didn’t have all of these changes and all of the “so-called progress” of modernity.
After the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, in order to deflect from uncomfortable conversations about weapon availability, the usual suspects decided to argue the problem is actually changes to American culture. According to these brainiacs, it’s not the ability of crazy idiots to get real guns that’s the problem. It’s the fictional make-believe guns and lack of Jesus.
The governor of Kentucky decided it was time to talk about video games. Others decided the problem was lack of school prayer and a loss of good values. And the Idiot-in-Chief is now blaming video games AND movies and proposing a ratings system … even though the film and video game industries already has a ratings system, implying either Trump wants something even more idiotic than the current one, or doesn’t know the current system exists before proposing another one.
So, just for the moment let’s say these people actually believe their own bullshit, my question is what kind of America would these people argue is necessary in order to make things “right” and good? What would that place look like?
From Gideon Resnick at The Daily Beast:
At first, during the conversation about ways to prevent further massacres like the one that claimed 17 lives last week in Florida, the president connected video games to gun violence.
“We have to look at the internet because a lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed,” the president said. “We have to do something about maybe what they’re seeing and how they're seeing it. And also video games. I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”
And then the president pivoted to blaming Hollywood.
“You see these movies, they’re so violent. And yet a kid is able to see the movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved. And maybe they have to put a rating system for that. You get into a whole very complicated, very big deal but the fact is that you are having movies come out that are so violent with the killing and everything else that maybe that's another thing we’re going to have to discuss.”
For conservatives, almost everything can be solved with tax cuts and a "a return to family values." Even though they’re currently led by a guy who payed off pornstars and Playboy playmates to keep them quiet, somehow right-wing activists still have the gall to complain about culture as the source of tangential problems. In effect, instead of offering a vision of the future, or dealing with the realities of the present, they appeal to restore the past.
It serves a double purpose of side-stepping coming up with a solution while also playing on the insecurities of a voting base full of white resentment.
So, if you vote conservative, somehow they're going to restore the United States to the TV version of 1950’s America again, and every family is going to be like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Because back then, boys ans girls never had sex before marriage, no one ever did drugs, crime never occurred in the "good" white part of town, and Hollywood wasn't turning people gay. Of course, it's all bullshit, but it comforts some people to believe a lie.
Usually, the past wasn't as good as we remember it, and a lot of times the present is not as bad as we think it is. It’s just the clueless asholes we have to put up with makes things seem that way.
From Josh Feldman at Mediaite:
While talking about the horrific Parkland school shooting, CNN contributor Andre Bauer looked at the “cultural” angle:
“We have a culture thing here that we’re not discussing. I mean, when I grew up it was Andy Griffith and you never had school shootings and we still had prayer in school and we drove to school with guns in the car… Today, we are in a different time when the movie industry, the rap industry, radio in general talks about these things that are common now and we have almost desensitized it. Now we have to worry about kids eating Tide Pods instead of discipline. We go after parents who discipline their children. When I was in school, the principal had a paddle. It was called the Board of Education, and he used it on all the students. We have changed the mindset today and so it’s scary now that students would even contemplate this type of behavior. We have a cultural shift.”
You know what else we probably had when Andre Bauer was growing up? A real fucking president whose mental diarrhea wasn’t a daily spectacle.