Hot off of the RSS wire comes this little blurb from the NYTimes:
Conservative groups have turned the documentary “March of the Penguins” into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.
I read the article which basically points out that conservative groups, both political and religious, are urging their members to check out the film. Evidently, it’s the hottest thing since last year’s Passion of the Christ. Actually someone was quoted as saying “Passion of the Penguins,” which I thought was a little ridiculous given that it compares Jesus’s suffering to the 70 mile walk endured by penguins several times a year.
First: Since when were we in a “culture war”?
Second: Now does any film involving (semi-)monogamous relationships and traditional “family values” become a rallying-cry for one fictitious side or the other? Because, if so, I don’t want any of it. I want to watch both March of the Penguins and Spongebob.
Seriously, maybe their is no cultural divide, or “culture war” in this country. Maybe, instead, our media providers think that we are all too stupid to have nuance and shades of grey in our lives, so everything is portrayed in the starkest bi-tonal way. You’re either “pro-marriage” or “anti-gay”, “pro-abortion” or “anti-choice”. Maybe if we can classify everything in to one of two boxes, we can then pack up everything that our majority society doesn’t want in one box and then toss it in to the cultural landfill!
You’d think that, with several hundred television channels, thousands of newspapers, and millions of websites, it would seem that there’s enough room in our modern media for a little bit of respectful disagreement. Every day, millions of people harboring disagreements of thought or virtue interact without staging another pointless duel to the death in our bloody culture war. Liberals and conservatives, religious-folk and agnosticites conduct business, eat meals, play games, have sex, raise children, and engage in the thousands of other activities that are the real “culture” in our country. And somehow, without the patient tutelage of a mass 24-hour newsmedia, we’ve managed to run this country of ours for several hundred years without any culture wars.
Get real. There is no culture war. People disagree now probably no more than they ever did, that’s just a story we’re being told. Just like teenagers are no more sex-crazed than they were a century ago despite MTV, or politics any more vile. The world is a messy place of blurred lines and uncertain distinctions. But it is our relationships with people, the “human” in humanity, that allows us to continue on despite significant, and hopefully permanent, idealogical division.
