I love movies. I love TV shows. I’m not much of a fan of music, but the music I love – The Beatles, The Replacements, etc. – I love, too. And I recognize, as a conservative, the vast majority of the people whose work I enjoy absolutely despise me and my politics. I don’t care. The fastest way to be miserable in life is to allow politics to rule every aspect of it.
I get the instinct. When Supergirl flopped, I certainly felt the schadenfreude and enjoyed it. But it quickly passed. It did me no good whatsoever – I gained nothing – so it ultimately didn’t matter.
I didn’t make money through the Hollywood Left’s failure; they didn’t make a car payment for me or fill my fridge with food for my family. It was just people I find annoying experiencing a bit of karma. The appeal is natural, which is why there is a word for it (even though it’s in German). But it’s not a “good” thing.
There’s the same thing in reverse – when a conservative studio or actor has a hit (albeit with much lower dollar figures) – I see people get excited, like the next day there’s going to be a check in their mailbox for their piece of the action. There’s never a check.
The studios and artists you love do not love you back any more than the studios and artists you hate do.
My kids often ask me why they made some movie or TV show, especially sequels, and I give them the same cynical, but honest, answer as I would anyone asking anything similar: money; they do it for the money.
No movie or show is created out of passion or love of a cause, especially a political one. No song was ever recorded in the hope that it would never be heard by anyone but the recording artist. Those things are nice features, secondary parts of the equation, but a distant second.
Whenever I talk about some event happening in pop culture like a big movie opening or a major television event, I inevitably hear from people who say things like “I don’t ever watch TV,” or “I never go to the movies.” It all boils down to politics – they insist they won’t do anything that supports these liberals who hate conservative politics.
You can do that, if you want to, but it strikes me as the fastest way to be miserable all the time.
I get the sentiment, but what else do you do if you refuse to participate in the world around you? That’s the part I don’t get. If you don’t have any entertainment in your life, are you just miserable all the time?
Pretty much every actor is a lefty; most people in music are too – even country music, which sucks nowadays.
One thing about leftists, however, is that they make pretty good stuff. Conservatives do too. But like the leftists who can’t help themselves and MUST make their project or appearance about some left-wing cause, conservatives who seek to hammer a message into their work ALWAYS make something horrible.
If you’re a comedian, your priority is to be funny. If you’re a conservative comedian, your first priority is still to be funny, not conservative. Same goes for movies – the job is to make good movies, not conservative movies. Because the second you make something other than quality the priority of the entertainment product, you’ve lost.
But once you remove entertainment, or even the attempt at it, as a priority in your life, you have made your life significantly less enjoyable.
There’s also the fact that you’re removing yourself from a huge part of the culture, which you don’t have to enjoy but should at least be aware of, if only so you can counteract it. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to patronize it, but you need to be aware of it because it’s the only way to fight against it.
That being said, some of it is really good, really funny, and very entertaining. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying yourself, but there is something very sad about actively not. Self-inflicted joylessness is just about the dumbest thing anyone can do, aside from smoking. It’s the easiest way to be completely miserable. And it is absolutely unnecessary.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
