This is exactly why it's proper to call our nation post-America

The movie industry has traditionally reflected the width of the spectrum of American public tastes. From its beginning, in any genre, there was a sliding scale of output, from works genuinely qualifying as art to garbage designed to deliver the most base and immediate gratification. In the 1920s through the 40s, there was a collection of "poverty row" studios putting out grade-B and below fare. In the 1950s, the "grind house" studios such as American International emerged to participate in the shaping of popular culture.

Any fantasy that the lower-end houses - or even the major studios, for that matter - put out was understood to be just that: fantasy.

Of course, as we know, Hollywood has gotten increasingly causey over the past several decades. But could someone in, say, 1990, have envisioned that those leading the charge would, by 2018, insist that any and all cinematic depictions of anything whatsoever conform to an utter fantasy about matters of basic biology?

The Political Correctness Police, starting with the perpetually victimized GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and a group called 50/50 by 2020, are trying to impose quotas on everything Hollywood does.

Leftist fascism is not on the march. It is galloping.

They are part of an open letter signed by titans of the Hollywood left that demands an "unprecedented cultural moment." They demand the entertainment elite "use its power to improve the lives of trans people by changing America's understanding about who trans people are." GLAAD claims there were no transgender characters in 109 movies released by major studios in 2017, and that there were only 17 recurring and regular TV characters out of 901. Hollywood is always lagging behind its idea of diversity.

Both major Hollywood trade publications -- first the Hollywood Reporter and now Variety -- have run major cover-story packages in the last month stacking up bleeding-heart anecdotes of the terrible injustice done to "trans actors," starting with the idea that "cisgender" actress Scarlett Johansson was going to play a transgender woman in the movie "Rub & Tug." The outrage caused the movie star to withdraw.

Stop for just a second. No one gives a damn about this except them.
"Transparent" series creator Jill Soloway, who identifies as "nonbinary" and prefers the personal pronouns "they" and "them," is now horrified that she cast Jeffrey Tambor to star in her transgender show. That decision "was born out of my ignorance," Soloway lamented. "I had to have my education in public."

On the other coast, well south of the Acela Corridor, a traditional stronghold of a much different set of values is casting off its defining institutional bond:

South Carolina churches are shedding thousands of members a year, even as the state’s population grows by tens of thousands.

In the place we call the Bible Belt, where generations have hung their hats on their church-going nature and faithful traditions, an increasing trend of shrinking church attendance — and increasing church closings — signals a fundamental culture shift in South Carolina.

At least 97 Protestant churches across South Carolina have closed since 2011, according to data from the Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist and Southern Baptist denominations. An untold number of other closings, certainly, are not captured by these statistics.

Many churches are dying slow deaths, stuck in stagnation if not decline. And if they don’t do something, anything, in their near future, they’ll share the fate of Cedar Creek United Methodist, a 274-year-old Richland County congregation that dissolved last year; Resurrection Lutheran, a church near downtown Columbia that will hold its last service on Sept. 2; and the dozens of churches that sit shuttered and empty around the state.

Read more here: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/article215014375.html#storylink=cpy

As we know, this is a civilization-wide trend that is just finally coming to that state:

The South is slowly catching up to national and European trends shifting toward what many call a “post-Christian” culture — that is, a society with characteristics no longer dominantly rooted in Christianity.

Studies and surveys have documented the decline of self-identified Christians and the rise of “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, across the United States for years.

The Pew Research Center describes the United States as in the midst of “significant religious change. ”The share of Americans who identify with Christianity is declining, while those who say they have no religion is growing rapidly.

Now, the argument can be made that the movie industry is similarly in decline. Box-office receipts certainly indicate that. And surely the heavy-handedness of the presumptive overlords is a factor. To the extent that people do still go to movie theaters, it's not to see the finger-wagging didacticism that the Oscar nominators insist we pay attention to.

But Hollywood is still influencing the culture more than Christianity. The social-justice offices in the nation's high schools are concerned about making sure the kids who resent the DNA they were born with don't get picked on, but Christians? They're pretty much on their own.

GLAAD thinks it's some kind of outrage that trans people aren't represented in the output of TV and movie studios in higher numbers, completely ignoring the fact that statistically speaking, people who resent the DNA they were born with are such a small percentage of the population as to be negligible. And outside of Christine Jorgensen an a couple of other high-profile instances of freak-show surgical mutilations, no one was talking about this ten years ago, not even people who had already decided that two people of the same gender could be married.

One of the last sticking points for me as I drew closer to genuine faith was this notion of a devil. I'd spent so many years as a secular agnostic (which resulted from my trying to find an ultimate answer in some kind of broadly defined "eastern thought") that the notion of a real force, a real being with a real intention, sort of a mirror opposite of God, struck me as - well, fantasy. Fantasy of the sort best suited to middle-or-low-brow works of cinematic entertainment.

But I saw trends like the two cited here and realized that as a civilization we were staring directly into the face of Satan.


Now, given that both the movie industry and Christianity are losing followers, what are people occupying themselves with?

Well, look around you. Take a quick scroll of your Facebook feed. People are obsessed with tribalism. Pushing for ascendancy of their own sets of confirmation bias and the trampling of any other.

Don't people still amuse themselves with sports, you might ask. Or music? Well, those arenas are likewise experiencing dwindling interest. And what's left of them is rotten with ginned-up outrage and self-congratulation. NFL stadium-attendance numbers declined at the same time as the take-a-knee phenomenon went mainstream.

As I noted in a post the other day,

I doubt that the Jessica Prois / Sarah Jeong / Ta-Nehisi Coates / Linda Sarsour / Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez types have a clear view of just what happens when the dog actually catches up to the car - that is, when the white, straight, Christian male is resolutely quashed and transgendered amputees of color hold a majority in Congress - but we can safely say that it has nothing to do with God being glorified.

They want society to become increasingly freaky, ever further removed from the obvious natural parameters to the way humankind - indeed, the whole animal kingdom; indeed, the whole world - is designed. That's not their concern. Their concern is being in control of whatever grotesque arrangement society is going to morph into.

In short, this is about power.  In fact, it becomes easier for the overlords to wield power if a sizable swath of the cattle-masses have been neutered or turned into monstrosities. The cattle-masses then have no frame of reference for what normal human existence is supposed to look like.

And what is raw power-lust except the illusion that one can assume God-like status?

And where does that notion come from?

Ultimately, though, the mockery will not- cannot - stand. Things will be set aright.

We can heed the prodding from the Father of Lies, but in the end, he doesn't win.

One will want to be on high ground on the day of reckoning, far above the destruction that will wipe the slate clean.

This is about as serious as it gets.