Can't the New York Times Find a Better Stale Culture-Warrior?

Posted by Brad Reed, Sadly, No! at 8:58 AM on August 10, 2009.

Let’s say you’re Ross Douthat and you’ve been hired by the New York Times to be a sort of conservative ambassador into the Times’ liberal audience. Twice a week you have 750 or so words to make your case why liberals are wrong about all sorts of stuff, from economics to social issues to foreign policy. But instead of writing a cogent, persuasive essay you write something like this:

The Unfunny Truth

It’s been a melancholy summer for social conservatives. Their movement is fighting a rearguard battle in Barack Obama’s Washington. A cluster of family-values politicians — some of whom bunked down in the same Christian-sponsored D.C. townhouse — have spent the last few months confessing to extramarital affairs. And Sarah Palin … well, you know how that’s turned out so far.

Worst of all, nobody likes Judd Apatow’s new movie.

Don’t laugh. No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism. No recent movie has made the case for abortion look as self-evidently awful as “Knocked Up,” Apatow’s 2007 keep-the-baby farce. No movie has made saving — and saving, and saving — your virginity seem as enviable as “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” whose closing segue into connubial bliss played like an infomercial for True Love Waits.

I can only imagine the Times’ copy editors reading this while slowly shredding their own faces off with cheese graters.

“We’re paying him how much to write this shit?” they ask.

So yes, the New York Times is now paying top dollar for third-rate Konservetkult nonsense. And this piece of Konservetkultism is particularly bad because it defeats itself mere paragraphs later. Check it:

Both “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” were designed to hit this worldview’s sweet spot. There were threads of darkness in both stories, but for the most part they made their moralism look appealing by making it look relatively easy.

Still a virgin in middle age? Not to worry — you’ll find a caring, foxy woman who’s been waiting her whole life for an awkward, idealistic guy like you. Pregnant from a drunken one-night stand? Good news — the oaf who knocked you up will turn out to be a decent guy, and you’ll be able to keep the baby and your career as a rising entertainment-news anchorwoman. Frittering away your life on porn and pot? Fear not — your wasted twenties won’t stop you from being a great dad.

To sum up: Both “Knocked Up” and “40-Year Old Virgin” succeeded in making social conservatism seem hip to the youngsters. How? By presenting the audience with comically unrealistic scenarios that have nothing to do with reality.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who obsessively scans over dick-joke movies looking for secret messages that affirm my ideological worldview. However, Big Hollywood and other sites have shown us over the years that there are a lot of crazy people who apparently do this sort of thing on a daily basis. But here’s the catch — if I want this sort of low-grade wingnuttery, I’ll go to those sites and not to the damn New York Times. And look, New York Times, if you’re really intent on publishing cornball Konservetkult Kriticism, you might as well keep it real by publishing this guy:

GI Joe is AWFUL

[...]

This film was marketed as if it could be a pro-American “hoorah” kind of action film. Watching this film, I kept forgetting it was GI Joe. Then, I remembered an angry feeling caming over me. How could they ruin GI Joe? John Nolte said it best, “If it wasn’t for resentment I wouldn’t have felt anything.”

The end of the film leaves a door open for a sequel; in case Hollywood wants to offend America again (we can bet on that!). If Paramount green lights a sequel, let’s hope Michael Bay directs it. He may be a lot of things, but one thing he would never do is strip the patriotism from GI Joe.

As a youngster in the early 1980’s, I remember loving the GI Joe cartoon and action figures immensely. “GO JOE” rings through my head. “A Real American Hero” is what they have always been. That is, until Hollywood got their filthy paws on it.

There is nothing wrong with a group of people from different backgrounds working together, which is what our armed forces are anyway. But why can’t GI Joe still be an all American dream team?

Yeah, see, this is much better. You’ve got hilariously overwrought angst over the unfaithful film adaptation of a crappy ’80s cartoon. You’ve got a thinly-veiled assertion that foreigners are taking all of whitey’s jobs. And best of all, you’ve got a guy getting came on by an angry feeling.

This is how true wingnuttery is done, New York Times. If you want to generate the same level of authenticity in Douthat’s columns, I recommend printing them without running them through a spell checker next time.

Tagged as: new york times, apatow, douthat, crunchy con, culture warriors

Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently at Sadly, No!.