The Irrepressible Rothbard

September 1991

I’m beginning to think it’s all a long-range leftist plot. First, they tear down our love and admiration for our own culture, by preaching cultural relativism and the irrationality of ethics. “All cultures are equal,” there is no trans-cultural morality, and therefore (and self-contradictorily) it is immoral to count your own culture superior to others. That’s Phase One. And pushing this line and converting everyone to it, comes the Phase Two sockeroo: there are, after all, moral principles and trans-cultural norms, but what they teach us is that our own culture and values are evil: racist, sexist, heterosexist, et al., and ad nauseam. Morality exists, after all, but what it teaches is that we have been immoral all along, and everyone else is superior: a transvaluation of values. Phase One is the necessary softening up process for Phase Two, a process we are now undergoing.

This summer’s cinema is rife with PC, spearheaded by a new trend. Psychobabble, for decades marked by the sickening treacle of “I’m OK, You’re OK, Everyone’s OK,” to get us off our ideas of moral norms, has now shifted gears into a new, far more directly vicious phase: “Middle-class, middle-aged, achieving, white males [MMAWM] are definitely not OK,” as a matter of fact, they need the figurative or even literal equivalent of a shot in the head. A direct, brutal, and vicious assault on MMAWMs in our debased culture are not quite ready for that. It has to be done, then, in the sugar-coated pill of “comedy,” bitter and widess pills which apparently our downtrodden Atlases, the MMAWM, are ready to swallow without seeing the danger or the assault. In that way, the prosperous, unheeding, American bourgeoisie are happy to pour in the dollars to finance their own destruction.

The two particularly vicious anti-MMAWM “comedies” are Regarding Henry and What About Bob? In Mike Nichols’ Regarding Henry, vicious go-getting lawyer, Harrison Ford, is redeemed by being shot in the head. Now a quasi-vegetable, he therefore becomes a dopey, loving, childlike, good human being, because of being deprived of most of his humanity. This sickening story is so blatant that it strikes even liberal critics as idiotic, so that there is at least a chance that this rotten movie will not be a hit.

Unfortunately, it seems that the other horror, What About Bob? has become a hit, helped by the fact that the vicious leech is the genuinely funny Bill Murray. In this movie, successful, uptight shrink Richard Dreyfuss is literally driven insane by patient Bill Murray, who, in the guise of sweet, loving worship of his shrink, turns Dreyfuss’ entire loving but simpering family against him. Once again, evil is the MMAWM who is figuratively shot in the head by Bill Murray, and in fact Dreyfuss is never really redeemed, but remains permanently destroyed. The fact that of all MMAWMs, shrinks above all often deserve to be eviscerated softens us up, but should not blind us to the radical evil of this movie.

Other summer hits do not quite reach the moral depths of these two films, but are sickening in their own right. Thelma and Louise celebrate females achieving power and, “liberated” and on the road, committing violence against hated maledom. Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood manages to ruin the Robin Hood story by substituting gritty mud and “realism” for adventure and romance, by filming the movie in greys and browns, by sticking P.C. blacks and feminists into a medieval English drama, and by having the Good Guys of Sherwood Forest speak terrible English in flat Midwest and California accents, while the Bad Guys speak in English accents. As one reviewer pointed out, this leads one to believe that these are American colonials somehow stuck in a time warp in the middle of Merrie England. Where is Errol Flynn now that we need him?