Two Faces of Conditioning

They proved that this could be turned into that in the minds of millions of Americans in the blink of an eye merely to sell more of a product that kills its consumers. Doesn't matter. Content simply does not matter. Image is everything.

If they could so deftly shape masculine and feminine expression in the name of a duplicitous and deadly commerce why couldn't they also have the ability to reshape these things to suit a revolutionary aim to destroy a cohesive society?

If we could stop seeing these issues as liberal vs. conservative and red state vs. blue state and instead see the manipulation as the blatant and cheap marketing scam that it is, perhaps we can save this culture.

A century of oversized capitalism's fraudulent social programming has made a mass-cultivated populace so pliable that it passively accepts the Cultural Marxist assault on traditional human norms.

Predatory capitalism and Marxist collectivism: Two sides of the same tyrannical materialist coin.

Our demise as a free people has literally been sold to us like Coca-Cola.

Bob Crane and the Color Orange

I believe that at its heart "Auto Focus", the 2002 Paul Schrader film on the murder of "Hogan's Heroes" star Bob Crane, is a very Catholic film. If you can separate the gratuitous nudity and strong sexual content from the overall story what you get is a devastatingly spot-on morality tale about the dangers of casually drifting into a life of error, or, as Catholics would call it, sin.

Crane, played remarkably well by Greg Kinnear, is above all a nice guy. Early in the film he winningly chirps, "Eddie Cantor once told me likeability is 90 percent of the battle. And we was right!"

Note he is not talking about being a good guy. He is talking about being a likeable guy. Big difference.

Crane's "likeability" opened the door to temptation as he slowly but surely threw himself into the near occasion of sin. "Auto Focus" unflinchingly documents this process and its consequences.

It's a fine film and I recommend it highly to those who can get past the sexual vulgarity. This description seems particularly spot-on:

This is a remarkable, delicate and disturbing film.
With its depictions of 60's and 70's lifestyles and
fashions and its brilliantly disquieting atmospheric
shift between the decades, the film is unquestionably
one of the most well thought-out period pieces to be
seen. But this is just the brilliant visuals of the
film. They underscore a far more interesting and
darkened theme. As an essay on man's descent into his
own personal hell of sexual addiction and societal
abnormality, "Auto Focus" perhaps stands alone. There
is a layer here, a seemingly nearly translucent one,
that is peeled back to expose something that lurks not
deep within us, but just beneath the polite exteriors
of our public personas. Given fame and money and a
partner in crime, Bob Crane wallows in his addiction
to sex, pornography and women.

The way the director contrasts the bright polyester leisure suit decor with the tired, dirty soul of America in the 1970s is nothing short of brilliant. The last half-hour is a visceral descent into personal darkness as revealed by the main character himself and the scenery that surrounds him.

As Crane is enveloped in this secular squalor, he seems to dwell on where he's ended up and how he got there. And he makes a rather cryptic statement about the meaning of the word orange.

This has always struck me as a comment of some importance.

As this interview with director Schrader reveals, the dialogue did in fact come from the real Bob Crane himself:

There’s a very interesting conversation that Crane has with his son towards the end about the word “orange.”

That came from Bob Jr., who overheard his father having that conversation with another man late into his life, when [he] didn’t quite understand what had happened. But Bob Jr. took it to mean that his father was at a point where he was trying to figure out some real basic sorts of things. That things had hidden meanings. So I used it there.

Here's the quote from the film:

The color orange. But what is it, really?

The color?

Yeah. But that's it. Just tell me, what is orange?

I don't know.

That's my point. You take it for granted. You don't think about stuff like that.

I believe I understand what Crane was getting at, and I'll tell you why.

Let's start by referring to one of my favorite scenes in literary fiction. It is from Walker Percy's 1977 novel "Lancelot". The book is set in corruption-plagued Louisiana and at one point Percy gives the best description of the very moment a childhood ends that I've ever read:

I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a "reform" administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state's insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened up the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.

[. . .]

At the sight of the money, a new world opened up for me. The old world fell  to pieces - not necessarily a bad thing. Ah, then, things are not so nice, I said to myself. But you see, that was an important discovery. For if there is one thing harder to bear than dishonor, it is honor, being brought up in a family where everything is so nice, perfect in fact, except of course oneself.

OK, so his dad was a crook and most of us can't relate to that, but what a riveting way to describe that moment in a child's life when he leaves one world and enters another. I remember my Ah! moment myself and I can still feel today how total the change in my perception was. It was the first out-of-the-norm bad thing to happen in our family, something all children unavoidably experience one way or the other, be it through the death of a relative or whatever. I distinctly recall feeling before the traumatic event that the world was specifically created just for me. Grass was green just so I could run through the green grass. The branches of the trees in our backyard were shaped as they were just so I could climb them. And so on. And then this thing happened. And in an instant the feeling that the world was made just for me and my personal enjoyment was gone, never to return. I didn't lose anything real or tangible, rather I lost an illusion. A pleasant, innocent illusion to be sure, but one I had to lose eventually.

Now imagine losing your world as an adult. Not just an illusion, but your very world itself.

Which brings us back to Bob Crane. Locked into a personal prison of sexual excess and compulsion, I believe Crane had an adult Ah! moment and it is reflected in his thoughts on the word "orange." Just as small children have a strong sense of the proper order of things, so too does a man. And here is a man who found himself so trapped in error that he had seen everything in his life fall out of place. He wants his world to have the natural order we all take for granted with the word "orange". His loss is no illusion. It's tangible. It's real. And it is caused by his own actions.

This is what sin does to us. When we sin things fall out of place. If we seek repentance and vow to amend our ways, we can restore our world and its natural sense of order once again.

But the incorrigble sinner will discover to his horror that after a while his whole world will spiral away from him. I recall times when my friends and I would hear about the perpetrator of some particularly heinous crime - a child molester, rapist, murderer, etc. - and wonder how he could do it. Not the crime itself, as we all know that human beings are capable of the most depraved behavior imaginable. No, what we wondered was how he could wake up the next day and tie his shoes, comb his hair, brush his teeth. You know... how could he do all those normal little things that regular folks do every day?

Well, Bob Crane answered that question. He can't. Not like he did before. The same applies to any kind of persistent grave sinner. The man who becomes consumed by his sins finds his world so knocked off its axis that he loses the simple certainty in life that can be found in the word "orange." You can't just take such things in life for granted. They don't just fall into place. That's all gone.

This is how completely destructive unrepentant serious sin is to a human life. This is how fully it warps the sinner's very existence. This is how utterly lost the man steeped in sin is.

Orange.

It's really a very profound and quite shattering observation.

A Feminist Epiphany

An old-guard feminist finally figures out that sexual liberation is one gigantic buffet for the very kind of men who would never respect a woman in the first place:

In my day, the rules were there for us. Back then there was no abortion and no pill, and my friends and I knew that what we called “going all the way” could ruin our lives. It is not that we didn’t have physical sexual longing, but we went out with guys who understood that there were ways to satisfy -- and it wasn’t oral sex. We kind of could be satisfied through touching; we could be physically satisfied with what we called petting. I went out with a lot of guys, and there was an understanding. I was never pushed to go all the way.

Not a hint of an apology though. Not a drop of "Hmmm, maybe we were wrong about all of this and maybe we've made things far, far worse for those who came along after us."

Once again, we see that being a liberal means never having to truly stand up to the consequences of your own actions.

They're Forgetting One Voice in Particular

The emotional opinion piece in the New York Times is starkly titled, "My Mother's Abortion."

The author focuses solely on individual experience and personal feeling to justify and drive her support for this abomination:

Recently, I heard my mother reveal her experience to four friends who are devoted to protecting women’s right to choose. Strikingly, two of them revealed that they had had an abortion, and the other two had close friends who’d had an abortion. None had told my mother before.

What the movement for reproductive rights needs is for the faces of freedom to emerge from the captivity of shame. To my mother’s generation, I ask: Speak openly about the choices you have made. To all women: ask your mothers, grandmothers, godmothers, aunts, sisters, daughters and partners about their reproductive histories. Show that abortion has myriad faces: those of women we love, respect and cherish. You have the power to cement in the minds of your communities and families the importance of reproductive freedom. You have made decisions that are private, even anguishing, but the weight of this political moment demands that you shed light on those decisions.

Well, we're leaving one crucial individual experience out of this, aren't we, Ms. Reproductive Rights Warrior?

Too bad we can't have one of the victims of this mass infanticide file an opinion piece from the Great Beyond charged with personal feeling and fitted with the stark title:

"My Mother's Abortion."

On the Passing of Jean Stapleton

The death of Jean Stapleton, who played lovable dingbat housewife Edith Bunker in hardcore leftist Norman Lear's groundbreaking 1970s television stitcom "All in the Family", has led to an outpouring of doe-eyed, feel-good nostalgic mourning. Even posters on conservative-leaning websites like Free Republic express sadness and fond feelings for this seminal character in American television.

Once again, I hate to trash the recently departed, but this woman was a key part of a cast of committed liberal ideologues whose very goal was to destroy the America they lived in, a goal they have largely accomplished. Creator Norman Lear never hid from the fact that his very purpose was to use his television shows to advance an agenda:

Entertainment matters. When Edith Bunker, on Norman Lear's All in the Family, was nearly raped, and when Bea Arthur's character, on Norman's show Maude, had an abortion, Americans across the country felt enabled by fictional characters to grapple with taboo topics, in their own ways, at their own kitchen tables. In the weeks after cool bad boy Fonzie, on Garry Marshall's series Happy Days, got a library card, the number of Americans getting library cards increased by 500 percent.

Today, the makers of some movies and television shows deny that entertainment can function as the country's agenda-setter and unofficial curriculum; they see no connection between what they put on screen and plagues like smoking, body dysmorphic disorder, addiction and gun violence. They don't buy the notion that audiences significantly absorb values and attitudes from entertainment, or that people believe that the "facts" depicted in fiction are actually facts. But other writers and producers do step up to the responsibilities that come with their storytelling power. Many of them have taken advantage of a free Lear Center resource - a program called Hollywood, Health & Society - to learn what's accurate from some of the country's top medical experts, and they've been using that knowledge to make their stories realistic without compromising entertainment value.

So much for the notion that conservatives are paranoid about the propaganda they see everywhere on television. And just what did our dear Edith help popularize to the American people in the 1970s?


a. Atheism and the outright mocking of religious faith:

b. Homosexuality:

c. Transvestism:

d. Mutilation as birth control:

e. And, of course, via the "All in the Family" spinoff "Maude", child murder:

Other episodes routinely painted white men as idiots and racists and highlighted every form of racial and feminist grievance under the sun in a blatant attempt to foment discord and difference. All with the goal of destroying any semblance of a unified culture. But it is the episodes above that really show the ugliness of this "beloved" sitcom and its loathing for the traditional values of its viewing audience.

Just as the number of Americans getting library cards surged after that episode of "Happy Days", the number of Americans turning to the Culture of Sexual Death after watching a wildly popular and hence influential show like "All in the Family" was bound to increase. Jean Stapleton in the role of Edith Bunker helped make this happen. She helped shape the dismal and depressed culture we have today. Please excuse me if I don't cry along with all the other mourners because this very destructive woman has passed.

The Weightless Elephant

Self-described "devout Catholic" Paul Ryan now says he supports homosexuals adopting children, disavowing his previous voting record on the issue:

RYAN: Adoption, I’d vote differently these days. That was I think a vote I took in my first term, 1999 or 2000. I do believe that if there are children who are orphans who do not have a loving person or couple I think if a person wants to love and raise a child they ought to be able to do that. Period. I would vote that way.

Gotta love the "period" part. Like he's taking a strong stand on something instead of just blowing in the wind.

It's bad enough that we have the most corrupt politicians of all time. But do they have to be so awkward and flat-out bad at concealing their corruption? 

Supporting Homosexual Marriage Will Give You Diabetes

As someone who tries to live a healthy, organic lifestyle, I have noticed more and more that in our culture today one is allowed to say things about people's eating and fitness habits that you would never get away with saying when it comes to people's sexual habits.

Take diabetes, for example. Diabetes is a too-common affliction in America today. But even if you disagree with what the following people say, what is interesting is that they are saying these things with no scolding from the usual suspects: mainstream media powers, grandstanding politicians and airheaded celebrities, et al. Nobody is calling these people bigots or haters or anything of the sort. And, in fact, there is a lot of truth in what they have to say.

To start off, there are people who say they are born with a genetic predisposition to diabetes but that is being rejected as a main cause by the burgeoning natural health movement in this country today:

The incidence of diabetes has skyrocketed in the past couple of decades, but is takes centuries for genetic drift to occur in a population. This means that the increase of diabetes in Americans is not due to changes in the genes. Instead genes are being turned on and off all the time by the environment around them. The food we eat has the greatest impact on what is turned on and off and research is showing that exercise, toxins, and stress also have strong influence.

How amazing!  We are no longer doomed to have the same diseases as our families!  But here is the catch… many families pass down their lifestyle which will in turn impact susceptible genes. So if you parents are overweight, sugar-loving, couch potatoes who have ripe gene environments for diabetes and you also love sitting around eating doughnuts and Coke, then those genes will be turned on in you too. The nurture is more important than the nature.

In other words, your genes may make you more susceptible to fall prey to diabetes but your own actions are far more meaningful.

Even trendy organic grocer Whole Foods agrees that it is human behavior that is the culprit here:

Instead of combating plagues, we are combating a mindset of complacency about health. Many people haven’t been properly educated about their health, while others still chalk up their diabetes to: “it runs in the family.” However, research shows that while people may inherit a susceptibility to diabetes, they do not inherit the disease itself—making healthy choices and prevention more important than ever.

Thus we have a large and growing group of citizens issuing dire warnings about a serious health condition that may or may not have a genetic predisposition but is mostly caused by correctable human behavior that a leading natural health doctor says is known to increase one's chances for an early death:

Not only does type 2 diabetes increase your overall risk of heart disease, the condition can also bring on fatal and non-fatal heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events an average of 15 years earlier than in those without diabetes.

From the above we can conclude that making poor choices with one's food appetite has dire consequences. Changes in behavior are strongly encouraged.

Imagine if there was a growing natural health movement that applied this same mode of thought to those who make poor choices with their sexual appetites.

These three details that we have shown are considered to be unacceptable when it comes to diabetics are never seen as a problem when it comes to homosexuals today:

1. Homosexuals claim they are indeed "born this way" and thus powerless to change "who they are."

2. Homosexuals choose to ignore the health consequences of their actions.

3. Homosexuals are statistically more likely to die earlier than those who engage in natural sexual behavior.

Fact: Unnatural eating habits cause disease and death.

Fact: Unnatural sexual habits cause disease and death.

Is anyone out there going to seriously attempt to argue that the sexual urge is stronger than the urge to eat?

No?

Then it is a matter of overcoming distorted appetites.

Compulsion is not "orientation". 

It is weakness that needs to be overcome.

God did not intend for us to engage in homosexual acts any more than he intended us to eat absurd amounts of toxin-laced, heavily-processed artificial "food".

You can do both. You can have a powerful urge to do both. But that does not make it natural or right.

I have a friend who had what can only be called an addiction to Diet Coke. His compulsion was so strong he was drinking a 12-pack a day. Does that mean he was born to drink Diet Coke and any attempt to overcome this unhealthy habit kept him from "being himself"?

Of course not. That's ridiculous.

His appetite was distorted.

My friend struggled with his compulsion, made many changes in personal behavior and eventually managed to stop drinking Diet Coke (it wasn't easy). He is a healthier person for it today. I congratulate him.

In a similar albeit admittedly more difficult vein, encouraging homosexuals to overcome unnatural compulsions that only warp and enslave them in a world of misery does not keep them from "being themselves". Quite the opposite.

Their sexual appetites are distorted.

We are created by God to overcome obstacles, not to give into them and embrace them.

Our modern culture rejects this. It not only embraces obstacles but self-identifies with them in a truly sick way.

Homosexuality, which is a form of unnatural sexual behavior, is celebrated as a lifestyle.

So it should be no surprise that diabetes, which is caused by unnatural eating behavior, is also being pushed as a lifestyle. It has its own magazine and you can even go to the American Diabetes Association website for "Dating with Diabetes" tips.

That last bit is eerily reminiscent of those "Dating with HIV" campaigns in the early days of AIDS.

Our culture today gives more attention to managing the negative consequences of unnatural behavior than we do to encouraging people to avoid the actions that led to the negative consequences in the first place.

This is a mindset that is corrosive to the health and well-being of all Americans and it has been brought about in a substantial way by the logic that accepts and promotes homosexuality.

Self-improvement is the hallmark of a healthy society. Working to become a stronger and better person mentally, physically and spiritually is the essence of what makes a productive citizen. 

Our culture has chosen the weaker way. It puts a priority on Empathy because it is easy and totally disavows Self-Improvement because it is hard.

It is a recipe for our destruction.