by Leonard Pierce
For some unknown reason, probably because I hate myself, I decided I would watch every single one of the music videos featured in Gavin’s recent S,N! post about ‘Conservative Woodstock’.
Since they’re communicating a simple message to a simple people, these videos — all consideration of their aesthetic quality aside — all have a lot in common. They’re as overproduced as you can possibly get on a shoestring budget, they’re built around themes of thoughtless loyalty and vague menace, and they all consist of maybe a shot or two of the dope who wrote the song, and then a bunch of stock photographs* of patriotic imagery. And this is what I wanted to talk about.
*: Now, I know why they all used these same tired images: it’s because they don’t have any money to create actual content. That speaks in an ironic way to their status as the self-proclaimed ‘winners’ in a free market of ideas, but it wouldn’t be modern conservativism without a huge dose of hypocrisy: almost all of those images are copyright-protected, but they got them free off the internet instead of, you know, paying for them like a real capitalist. Didn’t Ayn Rand have something to say about producers and moochers?
“Didn’t Ayn Rand have something to say about producers and moochers?”
She certainly did … it’s a book called ‘Atlas Shrugged’ … for those who don’t know.
Ed
Yes, that was kind of the point of the…never mind.