Going through the news and what passes for entertainment today is a pretty grim process. It seems it’s woke wreckage and infantilism all the way down. But if you let the mainstream media and the progressives in New York and Hollywood blind you to what else is out there then you’ve played into their hands. Admittedly, it is work to “find the good” but it’s not an impossible task.
I’ll confess, I often fall back on complaining about how bad things have gotten and longing for the good old days. But that doesn’t help anyone. And in my defense, I do reviews of books, movies, tv shows and country music. I do get a small but steady search traffic for those things and so I can claim that I do my small part for increasing the knowledge base of people interested in “finding the good.” But I think it’s a good idea to put together information in an organized form and maybe supplement it with some comments. After all I am what the idiot children call an “opinion leader” which I guess is a synonym for opinionated jerk. So here goes.
First things first. I believe in owning physical copies. I buy paper books, CDs and DVDs. I think some of the things I like will be cancelled by the industries that own them and will disappear. And now we see Disney putting warnings on their old movies and publishers eliminating Dr. Seuss. Well, okay. Of course, I’ll need to buy a good supply of DVD players. But they’re so cheap that it’s reasonable to do. I’ve got a few hundred DVDs and a few hundred CDs and I used to have thousands of books but I pared that back a good deal and now it’s a few hundred of those.
And owning the physical copies means if I want to watch “The Sting” or read “Huckleberry Finn” I don’t have to search for a streaming service that hasn’t cancelled these works because they use forbidden words or ideas. That’s enormously powerful. And convenient. Most of the streaming services only possess a small fraction of the “good” things you might want to see or hear or read. Just yesterday I read that the BBC is going back and expurgating the “racist” dialog that they’ve discovered in John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers” tv show. John Cleese is a pompous fool who now regrets the thought policing that he and his generation introduced. But I have the DVDs for that show and if I want to be reminded of when he actually was funny, I can watch them, so-called racism and all!
The next thing that you can use when looking for the good is chronological. Basically, anything created before 1960 is probably free from systemic cultural poisoning. Now granted there were plenty of leftists even back then but they had not captured the arts completely. So, for instance, if you look at the book or movie awards from those years you will note that most of the books and movies are readable or watchable. There are of course exceptions. But compare that to the winners of book and movie awards today. For me an Academy Award from the last decade or so is almost a guarantee that the movie is unwatchable psychobabble or celebrates disgusting sexual deviancy. Nowadays it takes a review from someone I trust to get me to watch a movie or read a book.
So, I’ve gone on for a page with generalities. In the next installments of this series, I’ll pick one area and provide some recommendations on things I’ve found that are good. But just to get the ball rolling I’ll throw out one recommendation.
Modern television show: “Justified”
Here is a show that ran from 2010 to 2015 that was based on stories by Elmore Leonard, a truly great crime writer and running to almost eighty episodes and there isn’t a bad episode in the bunch. That’s pretty rare. Timothy Olyphant, Nick Searcy and Walton Goggins give highly entertaining and nuanced performances and even a racist, sexist homophobe such as myself will admit that Hollywood didn’t screw this show up somehow. Camera Girl and I have re-watched this series every few years and we still enjoy every episode. I hope I never wear out the fun of watching it.