conservative – Moe Lane

As in, whether you believe in it. Background: Time Magazine’s done one of those admittedly heavily unscientific quizzes that promises to peg your ideology with no more than twelve, count ’em, twelve questions. Anyway, it’s going around, and I took it… to discover that I’m 63% liberal. Which is weird: sure, I’m a squishy moderate and everything, but still.

Then I realized that I had screwed up this question:

I wish the world did not have nations or borders and we were all part of one big group.

The answer, of course, was supposed to be Hell, no*. I firmly take the position that the United States of America makes a perfect world hegemon because none of us WANT the goram job; we just want to keep all those wild-eyed enthusiasts out there from getting the job – and in the process, presuming to think that they can tell us what to do. That never ends well**. Continue reading So… according to Time’s liberal/conservative quiz, it all comes down to American exceptionalism.

Gotta admit, I’m with my colleague and buddy Ben Howe on this one… with ‘this one’ being defined as A Movement on Fire, which is an upcoming film (maybe) that clearly wishes to be a Tea Party rallying cry, but instead comes across as… well. As Ben put it:

Instead of pulling people into a story that espouses the underlying tenets of liberty, it slaps them across the face with all of the subtlety of a campaign commercial. Rather than taking the viewer along for a first-person view of how our present can develop into their future, the filmmakers opted to skip directly to the bottom of the slippery slope without describing the tumble with enough detail to create a real connection for the viewer.

Continue reading Whither conservative art? – Note the lack of scare quotes.