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Pop Culture
May 20, 2016, 06:59AM

Conservatives: Stop Attacking Artists

It’s why people hate us.

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Another conservative has attacked Lena Dunham. This time it’s National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who in a National Review story launches a jeremiad against Dunham, an actor, director, writer and activist.

It’s a tirade that would be considered excessive by Cotton Mather.

Conservatives need to give the Dunham-bashing a rest and stop attacking artists. It’s hypocritical and makes us look like philistines. Williamson itemizes Dunham’s privileged background, down to her doctors, where she lives, and the summer camp she attending as a kid. Williamson accuses Dunham’s parents of “child abuse” by being over indulgent with her. He calls her a liar and her writing “gutless and passive-aggressive.” This paragraph is representative of the entire piece:

Lena Dunham may truly be the voice of her generation: The enormous affluence and indulgence of her upbringing did not sate her sundry hungers—for adoration, for intellectual respect that she has not earned, for the unsurpassable delight of moral preening—but instead amplified and intensified her sense of entitlement. The Brooklyn of Girls is nothing more or less than a 21st-century version of the Malibu Barbie Dreamhouse, with New York City taxis standing in for the pink Corvette. Writers naturally indulge their own autobiographical and social fantasies, from Brideshead Revisited to The Lord of the Rings, but Girls represents a phenomenon distinctly of our time: the fantasy not worth having.

I don’t mind Williamson’s criticism as much as the dogmatic ability to concede that Dunham, the director of an acclaimed film, a bestselling book, and the writer and director of the TV series Girls, has done anything difficult. Reading Williamson I had a memory from when I was in college and my brother was an actor. It was 1988 and he was starring in How I Got That Story, a play set in Vietnam and for which he’d win the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Washington Actor. I remembered the night I saw the play, when I was backstage and saw my brother come off stage after his curtain call. He was drenched in sweat from head to toe. A stagehand tossed him a white towel.

I realized right then that acting and directing is hard work. So is writing a book. What Lena Dunham has accomplished, not only with Girls but also with her film Tiny Furniture and the book Not That Kind of Girl, require exceptional skill and dedication. I don’t think Dunham is right on any political or social issue, right down to her choice in clothes. But there’s no doubt she’s a talented and hard-working artist. How many films has Kevin Williamson directed? Or scripted?

There’s a pretty big irony here. You have artists who attempt to create something that can have a huge financial playoff, but requires a lot of sweat and long, tedious days. It’s like starting a business. Opposing them is the conservative pundit who owes his career to his family or who has his feet up at a fully-funded Washington think tank lecturing actors on the meaning of struggle and hard work. In their own way these conservatives are a version of the special snowflake students they criticize on college campuses. Both have established an ideological cocoon around themselves that doesn’t allow for different ideas or the acknowledgement of the struggle of those they disagree with.

If the left does own the popular culture, it's because, unlike us, they worked hard for it. For the entire 20th century, beginning with James Joyce’s Ulysses, liberals have been the great artistic entrepreneurs. They founded magazines like The New Yorker and movie studios like United Artists. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and in 1940 spent 18-hour days filming Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg, playing until they had blisters. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. Punk rockers toiled in basements, risking destitution for the chance at creating something immortal. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.

It’s the language of film, television, music and novels that touch people’s souls, providing them with the myths—both real and fake—that shape and guide their lives. We all have a pantheon of artists who helped make up who we are and what we love. Growing up I went from Marvel Comics and the genius of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to The Lord of the Rings and Dostoyevsky, from the Who to Philip Glass and Beethoven. Artists become like lovers to us, providing vision and compassion and the thrill of breaking into new spiritual and aesthetic territory. I always say that one great film is worth a thousand position papers from the Heritage Foundation.

As liberalism grew ascendant in the popular culture of the 20th century, conservatives simply began reacting to it. We did not support artists or attempt to make films of our own. To some extent this is understandable: the left's cultural revolution is hegemonic, and it’s necessary to respond to it, and that can be a fulltime job. But at some point, after yet another piece bashing Lena Dunham—or Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn or Ben Affleck—we look less like brave critics and more like ignorant and envious knuckle-draggers. 

Discussion
  • Disagree that attacking artists is why people hate conservatives. Some people hate conservatives and they no doubt hate that conservatives attack those whom they think of as artists. Most unlikely they'd change their view of conservatives if conservatives ignored Dunham. Listing Dunham's success doesn't prove she's an artist. I asked a retired English prof what he thought of Tom Clancy. He replied he doesn't read porn. Was John Wayne an artist? Depends on who you ask. Would liberals refrain from attacking "American Sniper" because Eastwood is successful and must therefore be an artist and nextly therefore not be attacked? Part of Dunham's activism involved a fake rape accusation against what was very likely an identifiable individual at Oberlin. No reason not to attack a person who does that, successful television series notwithstanding.

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  • Enjoyed the piece although I think you miss one salient fact. Just because someone works hard and/or receives some acclaim, does not mean the product of said work/acclaim has any actual value beyond a then current trend. Just look at Trump books and Olsen twin movies. Sure they made a lot of money but where is the artistic merit?

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  • This is a good analysis and it's interesting that conservatives have lost so badly on the cultural front. Don't think it's really in their wheelhouse though so it was never a fair fight. There must be something in the liberal mind that makes them go into creative fields and something in the conservative mind that propels them elsewhere. As a counterbalance, though, you have the secular religion of sports in this country, and conservatives do much better here. Without sports, conservatives might he completely dominated in the culture.

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  • Key line: "acting and directing are hard work." Whether or not "Girls" is good (never seen it), its success tells us it's professionally made, with competent writing, directing, production and acting. Dunham, that spoiled helpless brat, does a great deal of the work involved. So how spoiled is she? Now whether conservatives should stop criticizing artists, or even Lena Dunham, is something I don't know. But Kevin Williamson ought to drop the idea that she's simply the product of indulgence. She's a professional in a demanding field and has done well for herself.

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  • Since when is doing well for oneself in a demanding field armor against criticism? You don't need to look as far as el Chapo to find guys who, although having done well for themselves, don't get a lot of love. NASCAR leaders, for example. There are 320 million people in this country, most of whom have some, at least, disposable income. You can do well for yourself by getting a dollar from one tenth of one percent of them every year. That said, Dunham did, in fact, falsely accuse a man of rape. Her artistry, presuming that's what it is, shouldn't keep others from noticing. The larger point, that liberals hate conservatives because conservatives criticize artists liberals like, is not well-supported. It presumes that, if conservatives liked the likes of Dunham, liberals would like conservatives. Hard to picture that. Various Hollywood conservatives have said it's worth your career, or at least a chunk of it, to be found out to be conservative. Anybody can be creative. And, in fact, it's a way to avoid having to deal with the real world, as long as you have a way to eat, too. That doesn't mean what's created has any intrinsic value, only that liberals are drawn to ways to avoid dealing with the real world. How's that for a blanket, Sub?

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  • Richard. Skipped most of your comment because the start showed you didn't understand what you were reading. I didn't say Dunham shouldn't be criticized. I did say that dismissing her as pampered and indulged didn't square with her resume. I was quite clear about this. You have only yourself to blame.

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  • Dismissing as pampered and indulged is not attacking? Maybe somebody else did the headline. One can be pampered and indulged if various supporters and investors stand to gain. However, the point about why people hate us so we should stop attacking or dismissing is the point. There's no evidence that stopping dismissing such as Dunham will make any difference. She can be pampered and indulged and still be hard-working and a fabulist, lying butthead. You used the term "artists", which is plural, a number of times. So we're "attacking" artists. Try to read your own stuff. Williamson may appear to you to be over the top about Dunham, but you went from there to "us", a plural form to "artists" a plural form. You were not at all clear in what you think you said. You were quite clear in what you said. The problem is that hard-working and financially successful types must be liberal because, say, Tom Clancy......hmm. Hard-working. Successful. Conservative.... Clint Eastwood. As Michael Medved says, conservative and family-friendly films make the money and hip, edgy, liberal films' creators give awards to each other. "The Passion of The Christ" was wildly successful, both financially and in terms of public awareness. Fortunately, Gibson got drunk and gave a cop a hard time so everything he did can be dismissed. Whew! That was a close one.

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  • Richard. Skipped your latest comment too. Reason: you are so confused you think I wrote the article to our left. I didn't. Not the article, not the headline. Look at the name under headline; it's not the same as the name on my comments. That's because Mark Judge wrote the article, while I, a different person, am offering my own views on the matter at hand. My views are similar to those of Mr Judge, but not the same.

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  • Hilarious.

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  • C.T. Missed the point: Unless dismissing as pampered and indulged is not attacking, you missed the point. Next. I figured the article was aimed at the right ("us") and was wrong. It appears the author thinks, as you appear to, that the left hates us because we diss their favorite artists. My point is...unlikely... but you're free to find something empirical which will prove the left would not hate us (the right) as long as we didn't diss Dunham and similar others. WRT her hard work and commercial success, lots and lots of folks have done something similar without getting the same approval for their resume. I noted Mel Gibson and Tom Clancy. Not getting the love on the left, are they, despite their resumes? It's the double standard thing. Now, I suppose you can diss Dunham's work--even if you leave out the false rape charge--and still admire her effort and success. That standard is not going to win a lot of approval if applied universally. But to the left's artists in general: Anybody want to try to prove that if we on the right quit dissing them, people will stop hating us? It's the subhead. An assertion without conditions. Jump right in.

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  • Richard, no. To say that one line of attack isn't warranted is not the same as saying that no attacks are warranted. This distinction shouldn't have I'm to be explained.

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  • I skipped the rest of your comment. That's three in a row.

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  • So that's why you keep missing the point.

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  • I think the point is that you're confused, and you get that across right out of the gate.

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