Have you noticed how the people who did not build or create anything, yet who are in charge of all the institutions somehow, are absolutely committed to destroying everything they inherited? Exhibit Z is the new Indiana Jones movie. Yeah, let’s run that childhood memory into the ground like everything else. Why? Because like so much in our society, this fun franchise is now yet another stage for playing out the psychodramas of liberal wine women.
I love love love the idea that narcissist deadbeats with degrees in Marxist Self-Actualization are going to have to pay back their own student loans. Part of this is because I like the Constitution and it is nice to see that ancient document saved from being treated like a hobo treats a San Francisco sidewalk. But a bigger part of it is because screw these people.
Raiders of the Lost Art
There was once a movie called “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and it was fun. So were two of its sequels. But now, 40+ years later, a geriatric Harrison Ford has been paired up with a politically correct Mary Sue girl, played by some chick who had a Netflixuluazon show about feminists and who is beloved by the Hollywood crowd, and no one is going to see it. Not exactly no one, but nowhere near the number who once would have – me included. Imagine taking intellectual property of the quality of Raiders and turning it into a box office flop because, instead of making it for an audience of actual humans, you made it for your chick friends in the Hollywood Hills?
Imagine no more.
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The latest flick, “Indiana Jones & the Dial of Destiny” – the title just flows off the tongue, huh? – is a disaster and no one in Hollywood cares. Oh, they care in the short term that this and a bunch of other movies – many Disney-affiliated, BTW – have just flopped. Money still talks, but not as loudly as liberal culture. They will lose money to impress their pals. Of course, it’s not the exec’s money – they still get paid. It’s the big corporations’ money.
How long the studios’ corporate owners subsidize their performance art remains to be seen. Indy 5 is not the only box office disaster of this ilk but one of many. What is the problem with this new wave of loser movies? They are bad and unpleasant and we’re tired of them. It is not merely because of the surface wokeness, like the characters with non-binary pronouns, but because of how the whole mentality of that particular brand of college-educated white middle-aged wine woman wokeness that permeates them. Remember the mediocre chick with the Ivy League diploma who sank Bud Lite because she despised Bud Lite drinkers and hired a dude pretending to be a chick to show those cro-mags what’s what? That’s the vibe. These are not entertainment – they are two hours of whiny harpies nagging you.
Indiana Jones is a hero, not a heroine, nor a herox, but a hero, a man’s man beloved by the ladies and admired by the dudes. But under the tutelage of these pinko hens, now he’s a shambling old clown led around by yet another generic brilliant beautiful girlboss. Of course, it’s all unearned. The character’s brilliance is simply a function of giving the character the best lines in the script. The beautiful part is debatable too – this new chick whose name I don’t care enough about to look up and confirm is no beauty like Karen Allen or Kate Capshaw but the kind of hard five who does not intimidate the women now running the franchise. Remember how they tried to foist Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham on us? Same mid energy.
They are making movies about the world they yearn for. This new movie was made for the middle-aged wine women running the franchise, just like the new Star Wars dreck is. But unlike their liberal suburban women analogues, these execs do not need to work out their personal issues with bottles of screw-top Trader Joe’s chardonnay. They work them out by making movies that neuter the men and center the pseudo-women and thereby alienate the people buying – or not buying – the tickets.
I have no intention of going to a movie to be lectured on how I am a relic of the past. That’s what this is. Move over, wielders of penises, for you are being replaced and supplanted by 120-pound pixies who can still knock out a 300-pound Nazi with one punch! But I am not interested in being replaced or supplanted. I do not need some frigid crone explaining to me through the misuse and abuse of classic IP how I am over and done with and how I need to move over to let the barren blue harridans take charge. They didn’t earn the position they hold; they were handed them. And I’m not handing over my money to support their rewriting of pop culture. Nor, apparently, are many other people.
Pay Your Debts Deadbeats
SCOTUS broke the minds of a generation of chiselers with its refusal to “cancel” their student loan debts, as if Biden’s unsteadily scrawled signature could just make their obligations dissipate into the ether. In fact, the idea was to transfer the debt to the government, which means to the rest of us taxpayers. While they never put it that way – “I want you to pay for the stuff I got that will benefit me!” – that’s what it is, and everyone knows it.
I love that they are sad and angry at being denied. I am amused at their legal arguments, which consist of “But I want it!” But mostly I am happy that their pain will continue. Why? Because screw them and their selfishness and their gender studies degrees. One dork on the Twitters complained, and I paraphrase, that our suggestion for these victims of their own refusal to pay their debts is to work an extra shift at McDonald’s and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At the outset, I note that if a degree that you took out a zillion bucks to get qualifies you to only to flip Quarter Pounders, you made a bad investment. And I am not dissing McDonald’s – I worked at one right up to college. But what I really disagree with is the premise. I am not suggesting that these debtors work an extra shift at McDonald’s and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I am not suggesting anything. Their debts are not my problem, and therefore not my problem to solve. I don’t care what they do. Work harder. Cry. Do an interpretive dance about your money woes. I don’t care, because they are adults and they get to solve it. I simply refuse to solve it for them by giving them my money.
This, of course, makes them madder, which only makes me happier.
All I can say is that I hope they enjoy paying off their student loans as much as I did paying off mine.
Follow Kurt on Twitter @KurtSchlichter. Get Inferno, the seventh book in the Kelly Turnbull People's Republic series of conservative action novels set in America after a notional national divorce, as well as his non-fiction book We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America.
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