How Long Can You Live In The Past

... and have any hope to be able to contribute to the present?

The WSJ has an article today about a new TV series which deals with the struggles of a female comic in the 1950s.

There, that's enough of a description. From that, you can probably derive the entire series. The penultimate paragraph of the article has this tidbit, which will be a surprise to precisely no one.

For the second season, “Maisel” will further explore gender dynamics in comedy...

My first reaction was to roll my eyes at one more lockstep show shoving progressive cultural talking points in my face. I thought about how utterly irrelevant the show was for dealing with the big issues of today - illegitimacy and its attendant pathologies, declining rates of marriage and Europe and Japan's unfolding demographic disasters. That's when the whole prog nostalgia obsession hit me. They're like middle-aged high school jocks, endlessly replaying their glory days in any way they can.

Great things were accomplished in the past. The environmental movement put an end to unchecked pollution, the civil rights movement stopped racism and feminism allowed women to pursue whatever path in life they wished. Just like the jock's faded glories, those problems are gone now. This is 2018, not 1964.

Here's something from today. It has 68,000,000 views and the artist, Kendrick Lamar, played the halftime show at the NCAAF championship game this year. That degrading dirge is part of the dominant culture in 2018, at least the one outside of the elite's bubble. It's not a healthy culture at all. Are the progressives trying to help? Nope. They're stuck in the past, looking to play the 1964 league title game against Central High one more time, throw one more winning touchdown pass, date that cheerleader again.

When you tell them it's no longer 1964, that's when they scream "Racist!" and "Sexist!" at you. Like the overweight and balding former QB, forever defined by the trophies on his rec room shelf, any suggestion that those days are gone is met with rage and denial. Sadly, they have the power to enforce that denial on the rest of us.

It's not just that we're bombarded by the elites' monolithic point of view, it's that they are, as the song goes, living in the past and demanding we do so as well.