Old Movies

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When I was a kid, we did not have cable, mostly because it did not exist, at least as we understand it. Cable TV existed as far back as the 1950’s, but it was not common and the selection was no different from over the air offerings. It has been a long time, but I recall we had two network channels we could reliably receive over the air and two or three minor channels. UHF channels were local and played mostly re-runs of old shows and some local broadcasting. VHF channels had the national network offerings.

From the vantage point of the 1970’s, “old” TV shows were mostly things from the 1960’s, but old movies from the 40’s and 50’s were common too. In other words, if you wanted to peak back in time to the previous eras of American culture, you could reliably go back a decade and selectively go back a few decades. Bad old TV shows like Get Smart and Star Trek would go into syndication, but bad old movies were just forgotten. The old movies that were shown on TV were usually the good ones that people liked.

What that meant is if you wanted to know what it was like to live in 1945, you had to ask someone who was alive in 1945. You could get a little taste of it from watching old movies on a Saturday afternoon, but that was a stylized version. To really get a feel for the age before color movies and television, you had to rely on the fading memories of grandma and grandpa. Of course, this was true for all of human history until recent. It’s why old people are good at telling stories about the old days. They’re built for it.

Today it is different. I watched The Thomas Crown Affair the other night off the Kodi machine. This was the 1968 version with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. There was a remake of this in 1999 with Pierce Bronson. I had seen the remake a few times, but I never saw the original. In fact, I did not know there was an original. That’s a bit of interesting cultural data right there. Just about every movie produced over the last twenty-five years is either a remake or made from a children’s comic book.

What I found remarkable about the movie is something I notice whenever I watch old movies and that is the maturity. A movie about the cat and mouse between a male and female today will have at least half an hour of rutting and humping, along with some explosions and lots of vulgar language. The modern presentation of male-female relations is so crude, that porn makers of the past would have been offended. In the old days, the film maker and audience expected a more sophisticated portrayal of sexual relations.

That is the other thing that turns up in old movies and television. Hollywood made assumptions about the cultural awareness of the audience we don’t see now.  In the Thomas Crown Affair, there is a long scene around a chess game. It was supposed to be a stand in for the sexual tension between McQueen and Dunaway. It’s a bit ham-handed, but vastly more sophisticated than anything you would see today. One reason is the typical viewer today knows nothing about chess, so it would be lost on them.

Part of that is due to Hollywood relying on international audiences to make money. You can’t expect to make money in China or India when your film is full of essential references to Anglo-Saxon cultural items. When you make films for the universal culture, you are making movies for a culture that does not exist. That means the goal is to remove cultural references, rather than rely on them to tell a story. There can be no subtlety and nuance without common cultural reference points understood by the audience.

The main thing that jumps out in old movies is the respect people had for themselves. The reason Steve McQueen was a star was because he played a role that was something men could aspire too. He would never have played a homosexual junkie or some other type of degenerate. People knew these sorts of people existed, but they expected them to be on the fringe of their lives and therefore on the fringe of their stories. Watch old movies and you see references to degeneracy, but it is always oblique.

Again, this goes to that respect for the audience. Just as the audience did not require thirty minutes of sex scenes to know the male and female were intimate, the audience did not have to see the gritty details of degeneracy to know it existed. The old movies assumed the viewers were adults who knew about the reality of life. Today’s film makers have to assume the viewers are retarded and need everything explained. Movies in late empire America are made for the recently arrived, provincial barbarians.

Finally, the thing that makes watching old movies worth the time is they offer a window into that long forgotten country of our ancestors. Unlike when I was a kid, young people don’t have to rely on old people telling them stories of the old days. Today, you can watch anything and everything ever made by Hollywood, even the bad stuff. Young people can watch YouTube clips from that country where humor was still legal. Most of it is crap, just as today, but it reveals what it was like in the bad old days.

More important, watching those old movies and TV shows, you can’t help but notice the early signs of poz being introduced. The stuff from the 1970’s is much more degenerate than the stuff from the 1960’s. In the 1980’s, the dumbing down becomes obvious as the makers started courting non-white audiences. It’s a good way to see how where we are now did not happen overnight. It was a long, deliberate war waged with patience and purpose. The fight for freedom will be long and require patience too.

188 thoughts on “Old Movies”

  1. The best movies (highest quality not simply favorites) were in 1939. Oh, and I do believe it’s “peek” not “peak” in this case? “if you wanted to peak back in time”

  2. Do you really think there will be a fight for freedom in the soon to become future, or ever again? A fight for Freedom that’s on a large scale, on the big screen, starring Bogie ? Here and there, frequently, promptly extinguished will be all there ever will be. But then our maker has known that from the beginning.

  4. I was flipping channels a month or so ago and I stumbled on some bad James Bond spoof with a female lead. Can’t remember the title. Took place in Europe. I only watched a bit of it, but what hit me is how normal and attractive everyone was, even all the extras at some carnival. It’s so depressing when compared to today’s freak show. Watching old movies, to see the decline in Western Civilization is just painful to see in pictures.

    Can’t remember the title but I think it had a young Gen. Zod in it from Superman II.

  5. Z notes that these days big budget movies need to be pitched to the international market, which requires eliminating uniquely Anglo-Saxon cultural references. On the other hand, US movie makers must actively acknowledge many Current Year Mandates not shared by the rest of the world. I’m thinking in particular of a comic book movie that was a commercial and critical success in the US but a relative bomb internationally.

    It paid off as much in Diversity Pokemon Points as in cash, but I still doubt that we’ll ever see “Black Panther 2: Vibranium Boogaloo” .

  6. The reason most films after 1965 became more obviously poz was because the Catholic Legion of Decency had lost its influence on keeping the Jews of Hollywood in line. From 1930-1965 when the Hays Code was enforced, you see the Golden Age of Hollywood. Wholesome women, healthy relationships, beautiful songs and clothing, criminals get their just punishment, etc. If Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn had made a movie like the type we get today about transgendered people, homosexual relationships, etc. the Church going public would’ve boycotted the film at the behest of their Bishops and it would tank the box office.

    Thing is you have to have a solid, 90% Anglo-Saxon, Protestant-Catholic population to have nice things and the Legion of Deceny and the end of Catholic influence on Hollywood storytelling was just one more example of the world we lost after the “Sexual Revolution” of the 60s.

  8. If you haven’t tried it, and you’ve cut the cord, watch the movies and TV on the digital subchannels on the over-the-air broadcasts. Old westerns are the staple, but there are a lot of great old shows to watch from the last 40 years. I’m fortunate to have line of sight to the transmitter on the mountain, so not everybody can get 40 OTA channels. But the picture quality is pretty darn good HD content for sports and decent standard def on a digital signal for the old shows.

    I still don’t understand why, if eyeballs = advertising $, there aren’t more cable outlets renting out digital subchannels to send their programs OTA. Maybe it’s in their contract with Comcast that they can’t. But I’m not gonna pay to watch Fox News. If they sent it OTA on channel 21.4, I’d most likely tune in more than I do now (which is zero since I dumped cable). There’s an amazing amount of bandwidth that can reach huge swaths of geography fairly cheaply going to waste.

    Anyway, I got at $20 RCA antenna at Walmart, and never looked back. My wife and I get a kick out of watching old programs, as well as the NHK broadcasts that show up on a subchannel of public Television. I pay for none of it. The more cord cutters leave the market, the more I hope we’ll see technology getting back to basics.

  9. I will admit to not having seen many pre-hays code movies. The ones I’ve seen are Elmer Gantry, Miracle on 34th St and West Side Story.

    Elmer Gantry has a subtle “look at these stupid fundies” vibe to it but its hard to know if thats the movie or if its the book it was based on. Miracle on 34th St has a sort of snarkiness that seems more in tune with 1977 than 1947 but its hard to detect unless your jaded like me.

    West Side Story is probably the most blatant out of all of those listed. Countercurrents wrote an article about it going even more in depth. Like they mentioned that “Gee Officer Krupke” was them using freudian arguments to avoid getting in trouble.

    • There’s a very good pre-Hayes code version of “The Maltese Falcon” that I’ve always thought more than holds it own against the famous Bogart version:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maltese_Falcon_(1931_film)

      The effect of the code is very subtle and basically amounts to the movie being as blatant as can be about the sexual relationship between Spade and Brigid O’Shaunessey. There’s a scene showing her walking out of Spade’s bedroom in the morning. When the made the Bogart version under the Hayes code all they could do was imply the relationship.

      • Actually the sex in Maltese Falcoln is so obvious a blind man would understand it. IRC, you see Bogart and Astor Kiss, fade out, then the shot of an open bedroom window in the AM. Then the two together in her apartment eating breakfast. Its also made obvious that “Joel Cairo” is Gay. I suppose some people would need a big sign saying “I’m gay” or a scene with someone sucking his dick. But to everyone else its made clear when Cairo has tickets to the opera, a perfumed calling card, and the character is played and dressed in a Gay manner by Peter Lorre.

  10. When I was a kid “Chitty Chitty Bang Ban”Sound of Music” were rotated onto television, every other year, right before Christmas. One reason I saw both those movies so many times was because you only got one chance, then you had to wait two years. You made sure you didn’t miss it. Another was “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. It played once. After Thanksgiving, in November, IIRC. We created our schedule around that evening.

    • Our church would always have their Christmas play on the same night the majestic “Grinch” aired! Off we would go, whisked away in auntie Beulah’s tiny Nash.

      I still remember the agony. Such suffering! The endless wait, all for naught!
      The Grinch is one of, if not the, greatest masterpieces ever made.

  11. This is interesting re: old films & the creeping subliminal poz. There is a very interesting youtube channel called BlackPilled that I HIGHLY recommend as he basically dissects movies from the 90s—> and shows all the subliminal (((messaging))) that is baked into the film.

    It really shows how wonderfully subversive these people are. It is sort of what Z is doing with old films, but in reverse. You can plot the trajectory of ruination if you read between the lines on enough media on a long enough time line. Check him out, some really fascinating stuff he breaks down.

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvaHgYcWAAcn5D54w4Dqezg

  12. Us old people should just enjoy our coin and die. Trying to make the future we wont see better is illogical…

  13. “Gone with the Wind” is one of America’s great classics. You should watch it again and pay attention to just how applicable the story line is today. It’s also one of the few no one could remake today.

    • The book is excellent too. It’s got an unjust reputation for bodice-ripping, but it’s a solid piece of literature. Margaret Mitchell comprehensively researched the antebellum South, and that is palpable.

    • Read the book. Quite a view of history written by Margaret Mitchell a southern women in the mid 1930’s about the 1860-70’s. Read it the second time last year and kept expecting my door to be busted down by Fed goons for bad think.

  14. “He would never have played a homosexual junkie or some other type of degenerate.”

    Nah, only decent people you could aspire to, like contract killers, con men and bank robbers.

    Some negro seems to be claiming to be “Steve McQueen” these days.

    Of related interest:

    https://www.counter-currents.com/2016/04/st-steven-of-le-mans/

    Or, for what it’s worth:

    “Newman was able to satisfy his need for man-on-man sex with McQueen, who was still hitting on him. Once Newman agreed to meet Steve in a cheap hotel in Long Beach, where McQueen said, “I’ve got every horny woman in Hollywood trying to get me to f*ck her. I need a break, a different kind of action now and then. You’re the kind of change I have in mind.” This sort of clandestine activity between the Hollywood rivals went on for years.”
    https://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2011/11/part-4-paul-newman-meets-steve-mcqueen.html

  16. Ah, nostalgia. I was taught chess by a rather pneumatic babysitter c. 1970. There was no sexual tension that I recall, but I was just discovering that some girls had aspects which offset their terrible, and terribly contagious, cooties. Anyway, I wonder if she was adding a play to her nascent playbook based on the original Thomas Crown Affair? Plausible. She certainly bestowed a timeless gift on me with chess. Sadly, it’s hard to find opponents with the skill and patience for an occasional game. I loathe speed chess and find that online is not as satisfying; so my abilities languish in crystaline mediocrity.

  17. One thing that jumps out from the films made prior to the mid sixties is the meticulous care taken by the directors and cinematographers to present films with aesthetic qualities. Directors like Ford and Lean made very beautiful films because audiences responded to that beauty. By the 70s, little attempt whatsoever went into making a film aesthetically pleasing. Do film makers today even care? Has this art been lost?

  19. Speaking of movies:

    “This country was built on, in my opinion, genocide of Native Americans and slavery. That’s the foundation of this country.” – Spike Lee

    Should have picked our own cotton.

    • I love how it’s always “built on”, giving the speaker an air of historical expertise. These are just outbursts cloaked in solemn-speak. All they mean is, “I’ll NEVER forgive whitey.”

      • giving the speaker an air of historical expertise.

        Just like when they want to insert Hitler in the conversation: “This reminds me of something we saw in the thirties,” as if drawing such a comparison is supremely sagacious in its deep political and historical insight

        EVERYTHING reminds you of Adolf Hitler, you doofus! Nothing reminds you of Cromwell, Henry IV or Cardinal Richelieu, because the ONLY thing you know about history, is that Germany was a Nazi country and they wanted to kill all the Jews and Adolf Hitler is the only historical person you can name.

    • Should’ve left Hitler alone.

      According to their own mythology, we saved them, yet look at how they repay us.

    • Ever notice that those so concerned about the “theft” of this country not only seem quite content with continuing to benefit from the stolen goods but want to invite the rest of the workd to take a share of the loot?

  20. Excuse me for being out of it, but what exactly is “poz”? I can get a sense of the meaning from how it is being used here, but what, more specifically, is the derivation?

    • Poz, queer slang for “HIV Positive”, there’s apparently a subculture of men with this disease engaging in sex acts.

    • Poz or pozzed is anything degenerate Leftist. It’s now started to be used more casually to mean anything aggressively Leftist (regardless of sexuality/degeneracy). Technically comes from gays with AIDS or gays purposely contracting AIDS.

    • Infected with cultural AIDS;

      The disease is not only killing, but becoming the sole focus, of the host’s life, and is virulently contagious.

      • Makes sense. I did find the HIV definition of poz online and guessed that might be the origin of its use in this context, but the connection seemed a tad indirect so I wasn’t sure. Thanks!

  21. As a GenXer I enjoy watching the old Johnny Carson bits on YouTube, specifically from the late 70s into the late 80s when I used to watch it as a kid. It strikes me now that most of these old guys that looked like my Grandfather (and yet were only in their 50s and 60s) were vets of WWII and Korea, and seemed to be both reminiscing and celebrating their good fortune to have made it through some hard times. They were having a genuinely good time because they had the same experiences in combat.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVDs_z1G95c&t=826s

    Note how Winters refers to Ed McMahon as “Colonel” and they joke about their time in the service. None of the dopes in popular media now have a lick of sense of community or service, and it comes through loud and clear in the stuff they produce.

    • A commenter at Heartiste had something to say on the subject.

      High IQ, High T (Europeans)
      – Men: die Herrenvolk
      – Women: virtuous, inspiring

      High IQ, Low T (East Asians)
      – Men: diligent, passive
      – Women: cash register for soul

      Low IQ, High T (Africans)
      – Men: virile, destructive
      – Women: “de mule of de world” [Z.N. Hurston]

      Low IQ, Low T (Southeast Asians)
      – Men: amiable layabouts
      – Women: airhead sexpots

  23. It’s interesting to watch the slow creep of poz. As you mentioned, it started a long time ago. Beginning in the mid- to late-60s, film-makers started injecting gratuitous “normal negro” characters, even if only in the background.

    In “Alfie” with Michael Caine, I noticed the scene where Alfie is at the hospital after his child is born. The camera distinctly shows a black couple in forefront, happily holding their baby. No chance that was an accident.

    In other movies, you see black characters in the background portraying middle and upper-middle class jobs, such as doctor, accountant, lawyer, etc. The message is clear: Blacks are just like whites.

    (Of course, that’s always been the hubris of the Cult of Equality. Good Whites assume that PoC will want to be just like them. Not just equally smart, but given freedom from Bad Whites, PoC will become Good Whites in blackface. PoC will naturally act like Good Whites and assume Good White cultural values because Good Whites are so very, very good.)

    Anyway, that seemed to be poz 1.0, showing blacks are just darker versions of whites. They dressed, spoke and acted like whites. Starting in the 1970s, you saw poz 2.0. Blacks became sassier, looser versions of whites, but still underneath were just as smart and capable as whites. Think George Jefferson. Again, blacks were whites with an accent.

    Poz 1.0 and 2.0 still saw white norms as the best for all. Whites could learn to loosen up from blacks, but white civilization was still the desired goal.

    Not sure when that ended, but at some point, we moved on to poz 3.0, where blacks and other PoC were better than whites. They managed to overcome our prejudice to be successful, whereas whites just coasted on their privilege. You also have introduction of the magic negro to help us poor whites understand the world.

    Poz 4.0 seems to be outright hatred of traditional whites.

    • I think you can make the case for normalizing non-whites in films, based on decency and common morality. “If we are going to have this minority population, let’s make sure their culture is always in support of the majority culture.” Creating black characters that are doing things that whites would do helps anathematize the minority behavior and normalize the majority behavior.

      That’s not what happened. We quickly shifted from the scene with the nice black man working hard in the office, to scenes where whites are embracing degeneracy and gutter culture. We’ve moved from scandalizing the majority culture to terrorizing it.

      • True. The 1970s seemed to be the turning point in film, with filmmakers having their characters increasing embrace the various less civilized sub-cultures and rebel against the traditional, WASP culture.

        Perhaps that was the result of Jews and non-WASPs such as Coppola, Scorsese, Kubrick, De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman , etc., taking over from traditional American actors and directors.

        • I don’t think it was so much the Jews, Italians or other non WASPS. (ok, I’ll give you the jews). The unsolvable problem with the pop arts in a free society is creators HAVE to create. And that means create something fresh. (Not necessarily “original”, but fresh takes, evolving angles, inverted sentiment.) You can’t have 50’s movies forever. People get bored. We put creative types in charge of making us unbored. That means they had no choice but to make Doris Day into a sexy slut at some point.

          I’m not a movie maker, but I can imagine how hard it is. Especially when those on the Right demand continued creativity but only within the parameters of decent Christian values. OK, the creators gave you sixty years of that. The creative well ran dry. Time for a change. The 60’s had to happen. We all like Midnight Cowboy and Goodfellas right? They’re degenerate as hell.

      • All antagonists in modern flicks are now white men. POC are always brave and altruistic. In the rare case where a white man is redeemable you will find that character perishes; Elysium, Bushwick, Bird Box. My wife rolls her eyes when I point this out because it is not wrong to show a courageous black doing something courageous but what are the directors/producers/writers saying about whites?

    • The Magic Negro has been around since at least poz 2.0, if not poz 1.0. The Cay was written in 1969. And Stephen King’s books are full of them too.

      • King’s “The Shining” has the quintessential Magic Negro character played by Scatman Crothers. Morgan Freeman often plays that kind of character. He even played God in “Bruce Almighty.” It doesn’t get any more magical than that!

        • Now Freeman has a show on NatGeo called the “The Story of God.” I wonder if he’ll do an episode on himself. He might as well be America’s new God.

        • Morgan Freeman also played the Magic Muslim in 1991’s “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves”. He was so wise and kindly compared to those savage Crusading Christians.
          Poz, everywhere.

    • The Blacks are better than Whites came rather early. In “Heat of the Night” Sidney Poitier (1968) is so superior to all the degenerate rednecks he’s forced to help, you wonder how he can stand it. Even as early as 1950, there’s a movie called “no way out” where pyscho, ignorant cracker Richard Widmark tries to go after noble Dr. Poitier. Hollywood did an incredibly successful job in the 1950s and 1960s in associating any sort of racial/religious prejudice with stupidity and nastiness. “Racists” just weren’t wrong – they were stupid, ugly, evil, greedy, and all around bad. And it worked!

      • It actually started in the late 1960’s with the replacement of the “Production Code” with the G, PG, R, X, rating system AND complete collapse of Conservative/Religious authority. Before that institutions like the American Legion and the Catholic Church were big on making sure Movies were “clean” and
        “patriotic”. But by the late 60’s everyone just wanted to “let it all hang lose”. By the early 70’s you have Marlon Brando – the great American Actor – swearing and having simulated sex onscreen – to the applause of all the film critics. I don’t even think Marlon Brando said anything more raunchy than “damn” or “Hell” onscreen prior to 1967. Of course, in real life he had a mouth like a sewer and was delighted at the new “Freedom”.

      • Good observation. To Kill A Mockingbird falls under this “so superior to all the degenerate rednecks.”

  24. That was hardest part about the Red Pill, being aware of the narrative has taken the enjoyment out of TV and movies for me, my wife can still watch some of it, but it’s funny when we’re watching CBS Sunday morning and she rolls her eyes and sarcastically says oy vey.

    • Yeah my wife mentioned the other day that CBS This Morning was on at a doctors office. She couldn’t believe how awful it is. At least guys like Brokaw and Rather *pretended* to be fair.

      • So many places have TVs. Doctor’s offices. Clinics. Car dealerships. Barbershops. Airports. Pretty much anyplace you have to wait. Even some gas stations make you watch a video as you pump gas. It’s starting to feel like 1984 with all the screens. I keep a small packet in my pocket that includes earplugs and Bluetooth earbuds, so if I’m getting my car fixed I won’t be stuck listening to CNN.

        • The gym I go to plays music over their sound system. It is almost always rap, hip-hop or some kind of feminist screeching. The only inspiation it provides is suicide. I don’t like to wear headphones or earplugs so I try to get out in 30 minutes.

  25. Gotta hand it to my parents. They loved all the old movies and old music. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s. I guess most parents were listening to Neil Diamond and Fleetwood Mac, which is fine. But I was getting to hear The Platters, Montovani, and Nelson Riddle. I probably saw most of the movies that were made in the 40’s and 50’s by the time I was 17. I’d go to friends houses and couldn’t believe the raunch they were allowed to watch on Showtime. Not only allowed, but would watch WITH their parents.

    When I was about 9 to 13, on the local cable channel they’d play old movies every afternoon. At commercial breaks they’d have a host with a spinning raffle wheel who’d talk to callers. I wonder if every city had a show like this. I still remember the stilted station promo: “YOUUU are watching Field Communications, INNN Detroit.”

    My dad is starting to lose it a bit. He thinks that whatever the era the movie is showing is the era it was made. Like if he watches The Godfather, he’ll think it was made in the 1930s.

    You guys should watch the epic Giant. Rock Hudson, Liz Taylor, James Dean, Dennis Hopper. Texas. Oilmen. Mexicans. Politicians. East Coast wife vs. Southern husband. Rich man vs. poor man. Heavy drinking. Fist fights. Nuff said.

    • Back in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, we had Bob Dale on TV on weekday afternoons, here in San Diego. He would run old movies and Laurel and Hardy shorts, and do the bit about everything you were seeing, like they do now on the old movie channels. The thing was, he was an older guy, he knew these people in the movies, he had grown up with them and had it all down from living it, not simply from having read about it. Bob Dale turned out to be a big teacher of mine, though we never met.

    • The raffle wheel and “your Daily Dollars!” You betcha!

      Since Central Valley CA had a lot of Japanese farmers, we also had the special treat of Tokugawa-era sagas on the weekend after cartoons.

      Remember when cartoons were Saturday mornings only, then the command was, “go outside!” (Or, horrors, do chores)? And Flintstones after school!

      Anyhoo, all I remember of those lush shogunate sagas was the endings.
      They always ended with a maiden collapsed on her lover’s grave, a bottle of poison clutched near her lips, staring into eternity with one tear upon her lovelorn cheek.

      • Alzaebo, the Kurosawa movies are always great. For a change of pace, try the “36th Chamber” movies. What Asian teenagers were probably watching when their parents weren’t looking.

        • A thrill was “Shanghai Triad” with China’s gorgeous Gong Li.

          1920s gangland China was tuxedos, spats, and limousines, back when White culture directed the Narrative, uplifting the world.

  26. I once asked my son what he thought happened during the fade-out in the bookstore scene between Humphrey Bogart and Dorothy Malone in “The Big Sleep”. He replied, “My generation makes whole movies about what happened during that fade-out.”

  27. When the fourth millennium Chinese historians manage to reconstruct software enabling them to play the thousands of archeological remnants of capeshit superhero movies from the 21st century, what might they conclude?

    • George…That the archaic society they are studying fell prey to some sort of epidemic disease that caused mass hysteria and delusion—the effect of which is illustrated in the movies they have resurrected, which show a complete separation of “understanding” from known, observable reality.

      The result of this mass delusion was the decline, collapse and inevitable extinction of Western society in who’s place other lessor societies took root—and a “Second Dark Age” descended for two millennia until the great expansion from the East took place.

  28. Two examples of what you mention, both of which hold up well: Detective Story from 1951, a film noir with Kirk Douglas (still alive at 102), is about an abortion, but it’s only hinted at, indicating what a horrible crime it was considered. And the Big Sleep from 1946, a flim noir with Bogie and Bacall, where the character Geiger is a homosexual pornographer, but it’s also done obliquely, when both things still were a crime. Children seeing both films had no idea what was going on.

    • The Big Sleep was Raymond Chandler’s first big book. Read the thing. Yes, it is flawed, and has some big stereotypes, but the pace and the rhythm of the writing, the detail and the precision, it was something that hadn’t been written in quite that way before, and which has fallen away since. The excellent movie came from an excellent piece of writing.

      Modern writing is ponderous by comparison, even before you introduce all the SJW elements.

      • The excellent screenplay for Double Indemnity was also written by Raymond Chandler. He was English, by the way.

  29. One thing you have not touched on are cartoons. When I was young, I watched TV a lot as little was known of its debilitating effects on young minds, but also the quality of the content was “better”. The cartoons then were not made for TV or specifically children, but rather pulled from the stuff made for adult audiences as filler between double features. Like night and day. Betty Boop, Popeye, and the like. Assumptions of knowledge, i.e., cultural literacy, were the norm.

    I remember one cartoon where the audience was taken into a library and the view passed over the dust covers (and therefore titles) of the books on the shelves. The illustrated covers became alive and the characters acted and spoke according to the story in the book. Most often spoofing the content or story line. The “joke” was completely incomprehensible to a viewer not having read the book and familiar with the content therein.

    Wow, just wow. How we’ve degenerated. We are indeed a country of ignorant louts.

  30. I also find old media interesting. It’s helpful for understanding our ancestors and their history as they understood it themselves.

    Watch any World War II movie made before 1970 or any Civil War movie made before 1940, and it becomes clear that the people who lived those experiences undertstood them very differently than we currently do.

    You’ll notice the Union soldiers are never in the business of liberating the slaves, nor does the word “Holocaust” ever get mentioned, although in the modern telling, you’d think those were the entire point of those wars.

    I expect eventually those old movies will just disappear, after Our Betters realize they contradict the preferred historical narrative.

    • Very true. My father fought in WWII and was proud of his service, and thought that we were most certainly on the right side, but I never heard him mention the Holocaust, except to say that he was hearing too much about it on television.

      • My Dad was also a WW 2 vet. The Holocaust had nothing to do with why he was there. I never heard him mention it.

      • My father lived in occupied Europe. He had a few insights on the Holocaust as it occurred in his country. He never denied this Holocaust, but his knowledge was not very positive as we view it today. I’ve always considered it best to keep such to myself.

        • Hasn’t it been exaggerated though?

          Was it still the Holocaust if there wasn’t lampshades and soap?

          That’s what it was sold as, in the 70s and 80s to school kids in America. Now those two particular elements are regarded as confabulations.

          • There is so much that we are finding out was false. The lampshades and soap, “geysers of blood”, escapees raised by wolves, repeatedly eating and defecating diamonds, cremation smoke that varied in color depending the nationality of the bodies, victims saved at the last minute when the nazis “ran out of gas”, using a diesel engine from a Russian submarine to drive the gas chambers (except Auschwitz which supposedly used hydrogen cyanide).

        • “He had a few insights on the Holocaust as it occurred in his country.”

          Care to share? Does it contradict the Holocaustian faith?

          • Sis, born in ’35, was in tears as she tried to give up her rubber dolly during a war drive. The man gave it back to her, saying gently, “honey, I don’t think we’ll need your doll.”

            As half of the men in family served, I was raised on Depression and WWll stories. Not one mention of “the holocaust”, even though we took special pride in Mom’s German-Jewish ancestry.

            What Sis did remember, though, was Pearl Harbor. She recalled the men around the kitchen table muttering darkly, “FDR did this,” since all were Democrats who had voted for him.

    • People are always remarking how Blazing Saddles couldn’t get made today, but what would be far, far more forbidden are Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy. And a lot of the actors in those shows were WW 2 veterans.

    • Disappeared? Not that far fetched. We’ve done such with modern stuff like “Song of the South”. Stalin would be proud.

      • I fully expect more movies with “problematic” scenes and characters to disappear into the memory hole.

      • I’d never have seen Song of the South, if if wasn’t because of the reports of it being blacklisted.

        All hail the Internet! Hail!

    • If the left manage to completely banish their opposition, you can bet they will quickly move to destroy any old films which show how white society looked prior to the sixties. Forget about Gone With the Wind. They will be trying to deep-six films like Sunset Boulevard and shows like Leave it to Beaver. Such glimpses into the past will raise a lot of uncomfortable questions for the new ruling class. Can’t have that.

  31. My wife, kids and I regularly watch old movies. We’re always pointing out differences between then and now. Men were masculine and women were feminine. In the old movies it’s common to see things like John Wayne playfully slapping Maureen O’Hara on the butt in “The Quiet Man.” Luckily I’m not married to a woman who’s offended by that scene. My wife thinks it’s great. (Single guys, take note–chicks dig the assertive, masculine man.)

    One of the first things everyone notices is how well people dress when you see city street scenes, especially in the 1940s. And the whiteness and the lack of fat people. Most people are slim and trim. There’s just an overall classy, clean and neat appearance that’s been lacking for quite a while.

    Initially my kids were skeptical about older movies, especially the black and white ones. After I got them to watch “Some Like it Hot,” they were sold. Some of their favorites we’ve watched recently include “Strangers on a Train”, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard.”

    • It’s interesting to me that back when The Honeymooners came out Jackie Gleason was considered an enormously fat man, and I even remember myself considering him very fat when watching reruns of the show in the ’70s, but you look at some stills from the show now, and he’s barely portly by today’s standards (and gosh, wasn’t Alice a looker?):

      https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-10-01-1475346066-9346751-ArtCarney.jpg

      https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zZlChIHmQkc/ToId_hGshUI/AAAAAAAAAGI/XfCMFd0JNaU/s1600/The+Honeymooners.bmp

      • Try this at home if you have been out of high school, say, 25 years or more: think of the fattest people you knew. Now look at their pictures.
        The biggest people in my yearbooks aren’t much bigger than the average teenage/young adults that I see in my practice every day.

      • I loved all his threats to Alice when he’d get fed up with her, never could get away with that today, “To the moon Alice!”

      • Vizzini, you’re a good egg, here and over at Instapundit, and I like you, but you’re kinda wrong about Ralph Kramden’s size. Jackie Gleason was a funny, funny man, and an enormous talent (heh), but he was clearly fat even by contemporary standards. I’ll include a link to a piece in Time magazine about Jackie Gleason in 1960, when he made “The Hustler.” It says that Gleason weight varied from his “slim” of 220 to about 284 at his fattest. I also remember a monologue he made about having “185 lbs suits” (aside: ok, not bad for a man 72 in. tall) and “250 lbs suits.” He then hits the audience with the zinger: “This is a 250-pound suit. I mean, the suit is 250 pounds… I weigh 290!” The crowd loved it.

        http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,827215-3,00.html

        • OK, fair enough. Maybe it’s that the outfits he’s wearing in The Honeymooner are well-tailored to him. I know there are definitely times I see where he’s heavy, like in Smokey and the Bandit era, but his slim weight, 5’11” and 220, isn’t really very fat. I mean it’s fat, but not strikingly so. Anyway, I don’t mind being wrong on the internet, so maybe the photos I posted are from one of his “slim” periods and not representative. 🙂

          I guess also part of my point isn’t that he’s not fat, but that he made a career out of being the big fat guy. It was part of his schtick, as you relate from the joke he made. And now, 5’11” 220-290 guys aren’t remarkable anymore. We live in a very fat society.

    • That’s how I know some of what was portrayed was real, you see photos of just people on the street, candids, etc., and these guys are legit dressed well, people are slim, some of this stuff is real. People may say it’s just movies, but we have evidence that it was more than just movies.

      • Hoyos;
        You are correct. Another interesting example: Look at the guys in the pictures of the early ’30s’ breadlines. They’re almost all wearing *hats*. Only stopped in the mid-60’s. Kids with no hats, OK ’cause costly, and they’re kids. Mature adults in any sort of public occasion with no hats, very low class.

    • My grandfather introduced me to so many of the old great movies, Treasure of Sierra Madre, Murphy’s War, Vikings, Sahara, Key Largo, Lady in the Window, etc.

  32. Wasn’t the inferred meaning in No Country for Old Men about how older men remember the past and what we had, and knowing that find this world unacceptable and deeply debased.

    I have given up on tv and cable many years ago but now Netflix is just terrible and pozzed. So it goes.

    • The only old books that have survived are the ‘good’ ones. There was quite a lot of trash as well. I am reminded of a line in Chesterton’s “The Everlasting Man”:

      “When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.”

  34. Things were getting pretty degenerate in the pre-code days. That’s why the fags in charge celebrate those movies. Read some of the biographies of people like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabel_Normand and you come to the conclusion that at least a certain amount of poz has always existed in Hollywood. Mae West was a coal burner. The code cleaned things up, and actually contributed to making the portrayals of adult interactions more, um, adult. Restrictions on what could be said and shown turned what could have been cheap, bawdy entertainment into so ething more artistic. The irony now looking back is that the artistic freedom that the industry sought ended up making it less artistic.

    When we get in charge we need to reintroduce a lot of those old rules. We’ll end up with better movies.

    • There have always been degenerates in society, and actors and actresses have always been prominent among the degenerate. In previous generations they were wise enough to treat such people as an equivalent social class to prostitutes.

      • Given that historically speaking many actors/actresses *were* prostitutes probably helps to understand why they were treated as such. Now we pretend that the casting couch doesn’t exist. #MeToo!

      • If only they stuck to the degeneracy, but today’s actors seem to be too busy saving the world and educating their fans to engage in quality debauchery.

    • @cursedsalad has a thread on Hollywood’s subversive history.
      The Hays Code was created specifically to counter the rising degeneracy by the film industry’s vaudevillian creators.

  35. We were told the 1950’s sucked. That was the first Anarcho-Leftist/Progressive lie. Art, music, and film-making were at their zenith in the late ’40’s, through the ’50’s, and even into the mid-’60’s. It’s all been downhill ever since.

    BTW, if you want to get a glimpse of life in “fly-over” America circa 1955, watch the classic film “Picnic.” A way of life now gone forever.

    • Picnic: That’s a movie that’s always stuck with me. Set in rural Kansas, a sweet and wholesome time that’s gone forever. Another older movie where the manly man (William Holden) got the girl. (Kim Novak). It’s interesting that the liberal movie critic Roger Ebert hated “Picnic.” Ebert also loved the movie “Pleasantville” which skewers the 1950’s. (Blackpilled from youtube recently produced an outstanding analysis of “Pleasantville.”)

      • Yes, you could make the argument that the modern US peaked sometime between 1940-1965. There were plenty of disturbing trends even then, but the United States of 1957 make the current version look like a low-rent toxic waste dump. I lived through the tail end of the “Picnic” era, and yes, it was as good as it looked.

          • I was a teenager then, and yeah, it was a great time. A simpler time where our main focus was on girls, concerts, sports, drive-in movies. No political correctness, no celebration of homosexuality, very little diversity. One of my best friends was one of only a couple of Mexicans in my high school. He fit right in with us, because what else was he going to do? There weren’t any Mexican groups to hang with and identify with. The same goes for the one Japanese kid in my school.

          • The 1970’s certainly had their good points, but it wasn’t as much fun as it looked. Crime was exploding, the homicide rate hit an all-time high, bombs going off were a weekly occurrence, communism was expanding in a frightening manner, Carter made Obama look like George Patton, and STD’s were becoming much more common, with AIDS waiting in the wings. But music was better, chicks were thinner and happier, relations between the sexes were much easier and more natural, and your average hippie would have been horrified by the SJW phenomenon. So I personally preferred the era immediately previous, but no one is saying there weren’t some good times…

          • The 50s were a great time to be a kid, the 60s to be a teen-agers, and the 70s to be in your 20s. Everything went downhill on 9-11-01. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

        • I date the peak to be September 1962 when JFK made his “moon speech” at Rice University. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot wrong with JFK. But at least he wasn’t a toad for the Israelis. Obviously, somebody didn’t feel that they were treated well by JFK and thought they’d get a better deal with LBJ.

      • American Beauty was my generation’s version of deep seated anti-American propagandist crap. It even starred Kevin “Gaycey” during his pre-pedio days. The last lines of the movie are rather telling. “You’ll understand someday.”

    • Carl;
      Well, one thing for sure, most events moved slower in the ’50s than they do now, particularly in politics. Of course, events unavoidably get spliced together in movies about any historical period in the interests of ‘keep ‘er movin’. The waiting periods between them are edited out. But I was a young man then so any waiting seemed interminable. Might be selective memory.

      But one date a week (if you were lucky) was the norm, maybe two in college. You had to work or study the other nights. So maybe it’s not just selective memory.

      • Doesn’t it kill ya when kids talk about how horrible it must have been? It was freer than any kid today can imagine. They’re like “What do you want, to go back to the 50s?” Heck, yeah..! And so right about hippies being appalled at PC. We were all “Be mellow.Don’t blow my high. What’s with this hostile dude?” and people think it was SJW heaven, when it was nothing like SJW. We carelessly threw around the word “love” like today they throw around the word “hate.” Ahhhh, I was actually still lovin’ it till the new century. Then everything started changing at warp speed. And yeah, buddy, stay off the lawn.

    • Read the LEFTist intellectual’s intro to the Fellowship of the Ring … I think .. the current paperback printing (though I think the Intro was written for an early 70’s re-release). No attempt to moderate his absolute hatred of 1950s/60s America. Toxic was one discriptor used. Can’t recall his name at the moment, but I looked him up and he was part of that smug, destructive intellectual / creative set. Funny how the intervening decades have shown his ilk not the be the underdogs of the fellowship, but rather those in league with Mordor.

    • I hadn’t heard of Picnic, but the still images I found through a search make it look fantastic. I’d urge people to take a look.

    • Oh, brother, I am so with you on that. I dreamed the other night that I was time-travelling. I knew I was, as I was collecting all the magazines, papers, flyers, ‘cos they had these great, Americana, vintage ads….They said it was the year 1949, and I was in a town called Wowee, Alabama. Vivid as heck.,..

  36. “The fight for freedom will be long and require patience too.”

    Au contraire, Z. I think that fight, when it happens, is going to be short, brutal, and spackled with blood and feces and guts spilled across the ground. The problem is we accepted all of this without fighting. We just let Leftie walk all over us out of fear that we might offend him. And ya gotta admit, he was pretty good at turning our good intentions, chivalry, and altruism against us. What else could we do? We were builders, not cultural warriors. Most of us just wanted the good life of a good day’s work, supper, and then a spot on the couch in front of the tube to enjoy it all.

    I think Leftie is going to be horrified and shocked at the fury and violence when that civil war comes, I strongly suspect we will shock ourselves too. We’ve never fought before, lefty took our compliance and his moral superiority for granted. He’s still doing it, just keep watching the Democrat clown show and their cretin women. He still can’t figure out how Trump beat him in the last election. The mass media can’t figure out why they can’t sell subscriptions anymore. It goes on like that, because all those institutions that Leftie subverted are starting to crumble – even Hollywood.

    That racial/cultural separation you crave is going to happen one way or another, it’s just a matter of time and who gets the better of it.

    • No more deference and chivalry. Just banned a big lefty from our family get togethers. No more soft baiting and snide inferences while we are expected to maintain composure. Helps that it wasn’t family, but getting to the point that family will only include right wingers.

      • One of my all-time favorite Thanksgivings was the one when my brothers (now ex) wife, the skinny vegan dance teacher with the “may I speak to the manager please” haircut, decided to poke the tiger at Thanksgiving dinner. Around the table is roughly 240 years of activity duty military experience, combat, support, medical, you name it. So, she starts in on her “the military is a bunch of wife beaters” class warfare stuff, and everybody was kind of patient because it’s Thanksgiving. Then, one by one, people started in on her. Quietly, kind of one-at-a-time, and so she starts hitting the wine bottle again and again.

        A few hours after dinner, I had forgotten about her by this point, my brother is looking for her. I just laughed and said, “bathroom”. She was passed out cold by the toilet while we were hanging out watching football as a family in the living room.

        There’s just nothing better than a happy ending.

      • Good on you.

        Thats one part of this that I have never understood: men willing to breed with women who don’t share thier culture, values, beliefs, etc. and those who, for the short term reward of sex or status, allow their hearth and home to be subjected to entryism. Convergence follows close behind.

        Inviting the virus into your home is easy. Killing it with fire without burning down the family home is hard.

        I’ve culled most of the leftoid death cult from my life. Cost me in some ways but my life is much better now.

        The lies they bring with them are toxic and often seem innicuous, like radon, until one day you get cancer.

        My brother in law is kind of a pile of crap husband. But he’s a total shitlord and a former green beret shooter. So in the triage of familial and social delineation leading up to the great awakening, i’ve come to appreciate certain attributes more than others.

    • What is there to fight for? Are you going to fight for some anti-vax Mom with her transgender vegan kids. I’m not. The only thing worth fighting for at at this point is your own life so when the mass famine comes you can survive and prove that your genes deserve to be in whatever age comes next

      • Moms who don’t want doctors sticking their kids with needles full of stuff they don’t know what, are likely LESS inclined to have the same medical establishment messing with their kids’ sex, not more so as posited in your post.

        In any case, those are separate issues, vaccination and gender reassignment.

        • It’s hyperbole pointing out the overall degeneracy of the culture and why I wouldn’t defend it.
          However, anti-vax moms are more inclined to be Liberal and Liberal families are more likely they produced transgender children.
          The kids I have the most faith in would be the one that was raised by at anti-vax Mom and started getting vaccinations at 18. There are more and more of them and it actually does give me hope for the future

          • Sorry, Whitney, but over-aggressive vax schedules, along with over pharma’d psych meds in pregnancy, may have everything to do with the epidemic of tranny madness.

      • Agree. The sooner we all accept that what is coming is 1000 years of darkness, beginning within our lifetimes, the better we will be prepared. White men will always prevail. The reason we are concerned is, we wish it was our children or our grandchildren who benefitted, not our children 30 gens out. But that is not our choice.

      • The Anti Vax Mom is closer philosophically to us than most as she doesn’t trust the establishment

        Health Food nuts are also like that and there are even Right Wing health food stores out there.

    • I’m not sure there will be a bang. Where are the stories of fathers killing degenerates in the bathrooms with their daughters? This weird Eloi-nihilistic-Churchian morality whites have adopted seems to have replaced our spine. The right has the means but the left has the will.

      • Where are the stories? Watching how the media has evolved over just the last few years – I’d say the “stories” are out there – they simply don’t publish them.

        I remember a few years back right here in MA there was a story where some guy brought his young son into the bathroom – and the kid went into one of the stalls. As the father watched – a guy in the next stall over started doing that foot under the stall divider thing (it’s apparently some “signal” for gay men). The father pulled the guy right out of the stall and started beating the hell out of him.

        The MA Attorney General at the time – Martha Coakley – made a comment about the case and said ” we don’t encourage self help in the Commonwealth – the father should have called the police”.

        If I remember correctly – she took a lot of heat for that.

        I’d argue that the “stories” are:

        A) simply not being reported by the media.
        B) not becoming stories in the first place because if there are beat-downs occurring – men are smartening up and simply not reporting them at all.

        The “don’t talk to the cops” thing is spreading. When people like Coakley make comments about “we discourage self help” – I don’t think it makes people less likely to beat up pervs – it just makes them less likely to go the cops about it afterwards.

    • Don’t know if there will ever be a fight, but it is amazing how many conflicts/wars/fights that were supposed to be over quickly and decisively turned into long, drawn out wars lasting years.

      If there is a fight, you can count on it being far longer and more destructive than you believe.
      That is the lesson of history.

    • I agree…its going to be short and brutal. There are many of us wondering how all this will play out. I think many of us, especially Vets are unwilling to cross the violence line until really pressed. We’re not ANTIFA and still put faith in the Constitution. However once it is clear that this thing is/has spilled out of control then all bets are off. Its only my opinion but the White Left will fold once punched in the mouth. I’m not sure what our restive minorities will do. Will they see this as their chance to grab the brass ring…then I think Z’s idea could be true. Members of the Weather Underground said that it would be necessary to kill 20-25 Million Americans to see their revolution work. If these bastards force me to take up arms inside the States I’ll be keeping that in mind. There can and will be zero accommodation with the Left.

    • As others have speculated, you are likely very wrong. You simply have to ‘play the tape through’ as they say to figure this out:

      1) Patient zero- Some event triggers ‘The Happening’ that bifurcates the country along our current fault lines. Both sides see violence as the only solution.

      2) Media goes into overdrive painting /ourside/ as racist, homophobic, misogynistic, etc etc etc. like they do today but also throw in the caveat that ‘punch or shoot a Nazi is morally ok’. Propaganda 24x7x365 are pumped into normie heads about how dangerous we have now become.

      3) And this is the KEY POINT to all of this– Police and/or military are mobilized. They want their paycheck and their pension. The fantasy of the military and police suddenly stepping over on moral grounds is just that, fantasy. Historically speaking there were many trigger men who did not agree with their amoral orders, they fired anyways. Until you understand this critical point, the rest is LARPing and mental masturbation. You will be shot down like a dog with impunity by a mix of conflicted white males and orcish barbarians.

      4) See 3 above– Epaminondas nailed it. Should this come to pass it will far surpass the brutality and carnage of the civil war. Because there are no ‘battle lines’ it will be a clusterfuck of neighborhood and door to door fighting while the US armed forces ‘sterilize’ the opposition by moving en masse at a slower pace.

      You have the mettle, resolve, and terrible purpose required for this? I do, but then, there are very few men in the world like me anymore… *shrug*

      • More like “Bleeding Kansas,” yes. Have some professional knowledge demonstrating that some Americans in the public service service sector WILL engage other Ameicans with deadly force Likely the police are more prone to adhering to such unfortunate enforcement directives than, say, Sheriffs (& deputies). which is why earlier this year we first saw reports of Soros funding efforts to meddle in Sheriff elections, and why Cal now has an initiative to do away with them in the counties.

      • Sorry dude but I disagree. I’m a 4 tour combat vet. I draw a pension…..I’m sure once the unpleasantness is resolved I’ll draw it again but if you think the majority of the military is going to fire on US citizens you’re sadly mistaken. Local law enforcement will eventually have to choose sides…I have little faith in the Feds, At least in the beginning. I suspect my current state (Texas) will secede and close her borders. Texas Military forces (that’s what they are called!) will do their best to maintain order until its clear whats going on.

        The US military in pieces and parts may cross over., stand down or support the other side. It will all depend on the circumstances. The issue is the slow erosion of rights that we have seen up until a few years ago… nobody is really paying attention…..now its accelerating so who knows. The media is being discredited on a regular basis and the Left is pushing for bigger violations of rights. The wheels are coming off, one way or the other.

  37. a culture that does not exist.

    Neither is “multi-cultural” an actual culture. A. Esolen made that point in his new book, Nostalgia –and repeating his point to his college class cost him his job as a professor, by the way.

    You are in dangerous waters, friend!

  38. One way to look at the cultural decline of the West is to model it as a slowly developing debilitating disease (think MS). It doesn’t much matter how you acquired the disease, and complaining about it won’t change anything, and a potential cure is vague at best; and yet, you have to do something because ignoring it won’t make it go away. History teaches that quarantine was often used in past societies when faced with these types of maladies. Only now, it is the healthy that must quarantine themselves from the sick.

      • The American Revolution succeeded in large part because the power base of the British Monarchy was located on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and was dispersed fighting other conflicts. Today, the DC-based Deep State has tentacles in every state of the Union, commands enormous resources, and has demonstrated that it can be as ruthless as the Gestapo or NKVD. They are also well prepared to crush a conventional revolutionary movement. You cannot beat them by battling against their strengths, but rather must focus on their weaknesses. And they have huge weaknesses.

        • I see the Deep State as more of a Clown Patrol. I find it difficult to believe that it can ‘crush’ anything, considered how it has hollowed out the potential organs of repression. They couldn’t even crush that rancher fellow, whose quixotic protest tied up nearly all BLA enforcement in the entire Western United States. You may not recall the Waco farce, where a bunch of religious zanies proved that wearing SWAT gear does not turn a Federal bureaucrat into a ninja.

      • Perhaps it beats cancer when one assumes a probability greater than zero of cure. I remember my mother who actually died of lung cancer. She never thought twice of refusing all treatment when (in those days) the odds of “cure” was less than 2% and the prolonging of life was measured in weeks to a few months with most of that time spent in misery.

        As we see from any number of comments here, the same thinking may indeed prevail wrt a hot conflict in a cultural civil war. I sense we are an older lot—tired and fat and often demoralized. War is a young man’s game.

        • Compsci, since today’s post is an exercise in nostalgia, perhaps it is best to take the WW1/WW2 attitude. You do your bit, the best that you can, and if you come out the other side, it is a blessing of sorts. If you don’t, it was for a good cause. Don’t overthink it, don’t worry about it. What will be will be.

          Germaine to this is the good literature and movies of the early-mid twentieth century. Missing, before and since, is this delicate interplay of initiative and fate, that you make decisions, you live by the decisions you made, you suffer the obvious consequences at times, and sometimes the heavy hand of fate squishes you or your loved ones like a bug for no good reason at all. The two World Wars and the Great Depression seemed to burn these attitudes into our culture back then, and they are gone now. Today it is all about squawking about “muh rights” on-line and calling people names. The movies and literature today simply do those things in a more subtle and sophisticated way. The old stuff is a much better guide for a good understanding of how we need to think about things.

          • Dutch, you make a great point. I might add too that as the years close in, there is very little to live for or expressed another way, very little to lose. That can make one very dangerous near the end. 🙂

        • Well rolling over for the bad guy does work. Just ask the Jews who rolled over for the Nazis or the Armenians when the Turks came for them.

          Point is, it doesn’t matter what we want. The opposition decides and so far they’ve made it clear they want us white people dead and gone. Consider how they demonized the Covington boys. for just standing there. The Hollywood elite were issuing death threats of all kinds and really wanted the boys murdered.

          And if Trump wasn’t in office, those kids would be in dire straights.

          The point is the Left along with the ruling class and monied people have turned on us.

          Being inert isn’t a option. You do your part in the resistance and if given a choice between going down fighting or being put into a oven, I know which one I’d take.

        • CompSci, you are correct that war is a young man’s game. However, guerilla/4gen war is anyone’s game. I remember from Gunny Hathcock’s memoir, there was a VC sniper terrorizing a FOB that he got sent in to deal with. VC was stalling or tying up thousands of ground troops, resupply, actually produced some casualties, etc. Turned out it was some old middle aged farmer with a $50 AK, he’d just go out to some random place in the jungle every couple days and fire a magazine of unaimed shots towards the firebase so the NVA wouldn’t kill his family. Stalled or delayed operations for weeks, cost US mil tens of thousands of 1960’s dollars: just one old fart with no skills or training. Food for thought.

  39. In the old days, the film maker and audience expected a more sophisticated portrayal of sexual relations.

    Have a look at Paul Newman’s character opposite Patricia Neal in Hud. Masterful stuff.

    • Agreed—if the story was written from scratch sort to say. The old Bogie film noir stuff of Sam Spade fame was pretty laughable when he played the detective. The banter between Bogie and Bacall is far fetched, if not totally unbelievable. On the other hand, Bogart—the man, did land Bacall—the 20 year old woman, who was about 25 years his junior. The marriage lasted until Bogart died in 1957 (?).

      On the other hand, Bogart in Casablanca (1942) is probably the “Hud” of that era.

      • The most romantic line in all of cinematic history remains:

        If you don’t get in that plane, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But soon and for the rest of your life.

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