How Do You Turn It Off?

Sometimes you just need to get away from it all. All the negativity, all the leftist mantra, all the politics all the time. But how to do that?

It's hard not to get the 3-D disease (defeated, deflated, and depressed) by what has been transpiring in our country lately (actually longer than that, but that's another story). Watching the fabric of one's country unraveling is a horrible thing. Thanks to the left and its propaganda arms, the American news media and big tech social media sites, it is almost impossible to escape the ugliness. It is literally all around us, everywhere we turn.

We are exposed to it in all aspects of our daily lives, from businesses to unions, to schools, to professional organizations like the AMA. All areas of American life have been infiltrated with leftist dogma. As one conservative famously put it, "The culture war is over. We lost."

Major consumer product companies are onboard with critical racy theory and proudly say so. "Diversity training" has been going on for some time at these corporations, now they have stepped it up and have put it in high gear. The message isn't about inclusion, the message is white people are systemically racist and must stop "acting and thinking in white ways." Coca Cola teaches this. No surprise that Nike supports this, but so too do Bank of America, Google, Facebook, General Motors, Ford Motor, IBM, Levi Strauss, Netflix, Nordstrom, Johnson & Johnson, Gillette, Amazon, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, The Walt Disney Company, and many more. They are all activated political arms for left-wing causes and propaganda.

Sports teams have embraced it and demonstrate it on the field and on the court. The NFL has announced they will play the black national anthem before games in the coming season. Social justice messages will be on the backs of helmets and throughout the stadiums. We saw baseball players, coaches, and managers "taking a knee" in solidarity with the Marxist hate group Black Lives Matter last season. I assume baseball hasn't changed their political stance this season either. I wouldn't know firsthand, since I quit watching baseball altogether. And, of course, Basketball's allegiance is more to communist China that to America.

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Yes, listening to television news is bad, but it goes way beyond that, it's everywhere you turn. Once upon a time you could get away from current events by watching movies or sports or engaging in other activities, but no longer. the destruction of American culture is everywhere.

To begin with, let's dispense with the term "woke." Let's call it what it is. Being woke means nothing more than joining with the Marxist mob, engaging in their bullying tactics like cancel culture and censorship of ideas that don't conform to the leftist agenda. That isn't "woke" that's fascism. That's oppression. That's tyranny.

Back to my original question, how does one escape all the B.S. in our daily lives? I used to turn to the Turner Classic Movies channel for some relief but no more since they have become just another arm of the leftist push. They can't simply show a movie from the 30's, 40's or 50's anymore without inserting their politically correct intros and end tags.

They go into diatribes warning viewers before showing a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers picture of the racism, sexism, and homophobic nature of the film they are about to see. The fact that the TCM host does it with an arrogant, holier than thou attitude doesn't help either.

The other day I tuned into the last minutes of "Orchestra Wives" a cute little romantic comedy featuring some great 40's music including Glenn Miller's "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo featuring a knockout dance routine with the Nicholas Brothers. When the picture ended host Ben Mankiewicz came on and just had to tell us how the Nicholas Brothers were mistreated by bigoted Hollywood studios back then. The fact that the brothers were only used as a specialty act in films and never starred in their own movies was proof of just how racist things were.

Mankiewicz should know better. The reality is that studios used many specially acts in their musicals, both white and black, who never went on to be major stars in their own films. The brothers were fantastic dancers but that doesn't necessarily mean that they could act well enough to carry a movie on their own.

Yes, segregation and Jim Crow was real, but things were more nuanced than simply writing it all off to white man racism. The country was (and still is, I think) primarily made up of white people, therefore entertainment product was created for that population. Just as Japanese movies featured Japanese actors and Mexican movies featured Mexican actors, Hollywood made their films with white actors to reflect the majority of the population. Yes, it's just that simple.

So, what to do? I can still use classic movies as an escape from the ugly reality of today's society by just avoiding the TCM host intros entirely or playing the pictures from my own DVD collection.

I can't change what is going on in the world around me, but I can try to get away from it for a while. My sanity depends on it.

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