Andrew Clavin critiques modern culture’s avoidance of truth, from Hillary Clinton’s falsehoods about Islam to political correctness replacing "retarded" with "special," arguing it denies human brokenness. He ties this to his memoir The Great Good Thing, contrasting Christianity’s moral depth with leftism’s empty dogma, and uses 50 Shades of Grey as proof of feminism’s distortion of gender dynamics. Clavin’s thesis—Jesus Christ and women’s underpants—asserts words shape reality, while campus censorship stifles self-knowledge. The episode ends with a defense of The Iron Giant, praising its honesty amid Ted Hughes’ tragic personal history. [Automatically generated summary]
Hillary Clinton says Muslims have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
I don't actually have a punchline for that.
That may be the punchline.
I'm not sure.
Trigger warning.
I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, we're back.
It's Thanksgiving week and today we're going to talk about Jesus Christ and women's underpants and how when you put them together they tell you everything you need to know about political correctness.
So just keep those two ideas in your mind until your head just blows up and then ask your spouse to clean up and put the pieces back together.
No, that covers just about everything that I'm interested in, Jesus Christ and women's underpants.
And it really will tell you exactly what you need to know about political correctness and what's happening on our universities and what's happening in our political scene.
But first, before we get to that, I feel like I should apologize for the fact that I vanished last Thursday.
I said tomorrow I'm going to come back and talk about all this stuff.
And then I was gone.
It was like one of those lifetime TV movies where the little boy wanders down the street and you don't see him again for 10 years.
I mean, it was exactly like that, except everything was totally different.
But what happened was we, as I keep telling you, we are building these amazing, amazing studios.
And on this day, some new equipment arrived.
I think this is our three-dimensional time-traveling video machine so we can have holographic interviews with figures from history.
And they were installing this.
I was actually at a meeting at J.J. Abrams' company, Bad Robot.
And if you've never been in Bad Robot, have you ever been in the waiting room?
When you're sitting in the waiting room, you'd love this because he's all about nostalgia, right?
So his waiting room is just littered.
It's a museum of crappy little toys from the 1980s and 70s.
And he invites you to leave, if you have one, to leave, you know, things.
So if you have like, there's a little Captain Kirk doll or whatever, you know, you can leave it.
I was going to leave my inflatable Uhuru, but I sort of thought that that was maybe inappropriate.
But, oh, like you don't have one.
But you sit there and you're just surrounded by what is essentially Abrams' imagination, all these little toys and games that I can remember from being a little kid where every TV show had a board game that would come with it, and they're all in there.
And so I was looking at this and waiting for this meeting and then got in my car to drive back.
And in LA, for those of you who don't live in LA, a woman in a car dealership explained this to me, that everywhere else on earth, they describe how far away they are in terms of distance.
So you'll say, I'm about five miles away.
I'll be right there.
I'm like five miles away.
That's what you do in a plane, too, because there's no traffic.
You say, hey, we're 10 miles out.
We're 10 miles out.
But in LA, that makes no sense because you have to talk in terms of time because Bad Robot is maybe seven miles from my house.
That's an hour and a half.
At four o'clock in the afternoon, that is an hour and a half in LA.
So you're an hour and a half away.
So I'm driving back and I use my time in the car to think about things like this, what I'm going to talk about.
And I'm just filled with all these images from his collection because it really is cool, I have to say, all these toys and things.
I love those things.
So it's really fun and it's filling my mind with things.
And I get a phone call from the office telling me that we're putting in this equipment and the studio is just completely useless because all these workmen are there and all the hammering is going on and so we're not doing your show.
So all this stuff I was going to talk about last week, I've completely forgotten it just went completely out of my mind.
It was so profound.
It would have, trust me, it would have changed your life.
You would have heard that show on Thursday.
The show that I was going to do on Thursday was the show.
It was going to be when you heard that, you were going to go like, ah, I've got it.
Now everything looks different.
And I'm filled with hope and joy and peace.
And sorry, it just slipped my mind.
So that's the first thing.
My apologies.
That was why I did not show up.
I got a bunch of letters and tweets about it, so just to let you know.
Also, I would like to do a couple of quick advertisements for myself, which I always forget to do, so I'm going to put them right at the top of the show.
I have a piece in the City Journal.
If you don't read City Journal or go on their website from time to time, you're really missing out.
City Journal is an indispensable magazine.
It's the Manhattan Institute's magazine.
And the reason I love it is it's just about stuff that works.
It's not about ideology.
It's just about they tried this in this city and it didn't work.
And they tried this here and it didn't work.
And they cover the arts and they cover all kinds of things, but it's all about stuff.
It's all about things that are real, things that are true.
It's not just stuff that I like and stuff that, you know, I don't like you and I judge you and this kind of thing.
It's just we tried this in this city and now it looks like Detroit and we tried it in this city and now it looks like Dallas.
What's the difference, you know?
And their 25th anniversary came along and so they asked me to write the back of the book piece, which is just a kind of think piece.
And I wrote about moving to LA and what that means to me because I don't really like cities.
I've spent a lot of my life in major, major cities moving from one to another, but I'm only really happy outside of cities, so I talk about why I moved to LA.
It's called Impopulous City Pent.
And if you know where that comes from, you don't win anything, but you're smarter than you should be.
But it tells you in the article why it's called Impopulous City Pent.
So it's about that.
And it really makes, I didn't mean this to happen, but Victor Davis Hansen has an amazing, amazing article in this City Journal 25th Anniversary, where he talks about the difference between living in the city and living in the country.
And I wrote to Victor afterwards and I said, what I liked most about his piece is it made my piece seem more profound.
Because if you read his piece and then you read my little piece at the end, you think like, oh, wow, Clavin's really thinking deeply.
But, you know, it's just, it's an illusion thrown up by Victor Davis Hansen.
The other thing is I noticed, no one ever tells me these things.
But I've been talking about my memoir, which is coming out in September.
It's far away, The Great Good Thing.
And I noticed for some reason, you can now pre-order it on Kindle.
You can't pre-order the actual hardback book, but you can, I don't know why, but you can pre-order it on Kindle.
It's very helpful to me if you're going to read it on Kindle.
It's really helpful to me if you pre-order things.
So if you'd like to read it, it's the story of, it's kind of the story of my life, but it's the story of my life seen from the perspective of why I became a Christian.
And it explains it entirely.
And it was really interesting when I sat down to write it.
What I was thinking is, I hope this makes sense because otherwise I'm going to have to change my mind.
But as it turned out, it actually made perfect sense.
So it turned out I wasn't as far off as I thought.
Anyway, you can pre-order the great good thing.
It's called The Great Good Thing.
A secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
That's what it's called.
And so you can pre-order that on Kindle, not yet in Hardback, but I assume that's going to happen soon.
All right, enough about me.
Actually, this whole show has a lot of me in it.
I've got a lot of videos of me, me, me, me.
So it's my show, and we're going to talk about me, because that's what I'm interested in.
Me, Jesus, and women's underpants.
You know, I spent this really interesting weekend because, you know, we talk about politics here.
We have to talk about politics.
And the reason you talk about politics when you do a show every day is politics changes.
I mean, there's always something new.
But I always try to talk about politics from a cultural perspective.
And the reason, the thing I love about culture, culture, meaning the arts and how we live, but especially about the arts, the thing I love about the arts is that politics is really the worst of humanity.
It's the fact that we are here to kill each other and seize power over each other and take advantage of each other and lie and cheat behind each other's back.
And how are we going to build a structure that keeps that from happening so badly that it just devolves into chaos?
But by the very nature of politics, the worst people rise to the top and do the worst possible things because only the people who want control over other people run for office.
So you always look at countries and think, why did this psychopath with a machine gun get to be el presidente, you know?
And why is Barack Obama the president here?
Why are the people who are least likely to give us good governance?
Why do they rise?
Because they're the only people who are interested.
The rest of us want to leave each other alone, but these guys rise to the top.
And so politics is very frustrating.
But the thing I love about the arts is that, you know, when Jesus said, love your neighbor, you know, I'm always tempted to think like, you've never met my neighbor, or you wouldn't say that, you know.
But the thing about the arts is that the people who make them are, like you and me, broken, miserable, lost, dishonest.
And yet, this incredible beauty comes out of them.
One of the things I watched this weekend was what I was going to say is I had a lot of people drop in on me from out of town very suddenly, which was great, but it meant we didn't get to go out too much.
We were home a lot.
So I actually saw a lot more TV than I usually see.
And I was watching this documentary on Showtime called Listen to Me, Marlon, which is about Marlon Brando.
And Marlon Brando is a revolutionary figure in acting.
He's the reason we have guys like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman and all these naturalistic actors.
Before that, we had guys like Bogart and Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy who were almost more literate.
Their job was to read the lines.
But then there came this revolution, and Brando was one of these guys, and they come along from time to time who, Andrew Breitbart was like this.
Andrew Breitbart used to joke that if it weren't for the internet, he'd be out of work.
And I would say, well, actually, that's how people become great men, is they happen, they just happen, or God arranges it so they are born at that moment when their particular skills are necessary.
And I used to tease him and say, if Fred Astaire were born today, he'd be running a dance school in Albany.
But he was born at that moment when that kind of dancing represented something.
And so Brando was one of these guys.
He was not just a great actor, he was a wonderfully talented actor, but he was also really good looking and very heroic looking.
And so he represented that change from the one kind of acting to the naturalistic kind of acting we have today.
And some of his early performances, if you've never seen On the Waterfront, Streetcar Named Desire, amazing performances.
And then of course later on to another generation, he became the godfather.
And if you saw Last Tango in Paris, it's kind of a dated, silly movie, but his performance is unbelievable.
I mean, it's just one of the, it probably defines the next generation of performances.
And he was just a miserable guy.
And his mother was an alcoholic and his father was abusive and his mother left when he was like seven years old and it just devastated him.
And he was just this hungry, empty guy with this enormous talent.
And because he was so miserable, as time went on, he became enormously fat.
I mean, when you see him in youth, he's like, you know, Thor.
I mean, he's got this great body all built up and all this stuff.
And then in the end, he was just this completely bulbous wreck of a human being.
And he made these tapes to self-hypnotize him, to hypnotize himself, where he would talk about how, you know, listen to me, Marlon.
I want you to think about losing weight.
I want you to think about the weight dropping off.
And it's just so pitiful.
I'm watching this show, and it's so pitiful to see this guy with his kind of cheap, trite insights that he had into life, and he'd sit around and say, well, you know, movies are just stealing other people's fantasies.
And you think like, so what?
It's like, I like the movies, you know, so I'm having a fantasy.
You know, why is that a problem?
And it ended up, it ended up his son killed somebody and went to prison and then his daughter hanged herself.
I mean, that is, or killed herself.
I'm not sure how she did it.
That's truly a failed life.
I mean, that is truly, for all his success, a failed life.
And yet, out of this broken, broken creature comes this incredible insight, incredible beauty, performances that just capture something about the human spirit.
And I really do believe when Jesus says, love your neighbor, that's what he's talking about.
That is there inside us.
And artists are just these people who actualize those things that we have inside us for all our brokenness and all our misery and sin and cruelty.
And it's just, to me, it's an amazing thing.
And when you see the world through the lens of the arts, it becomes a lot less a matter of despair and a lot more of a matter of celebration.
So that's one of the things I like about it.
And sitting around, just interesting, we did get to go out one day.
I have to tell this, this is off topic, but one story that we went out to one of these comedy clubs, an improv club.
And of course, when I go into an improv club, if you take the next three people sitting next to me and add their ages together, you get my age.
I mean, that's, you know, I'm the oldest person who's ever like passed by the door of this club, who's ever walked past this club.
And really interesting, packed with 20-year-olds.
And I love, one of the things I love about LA is these aspiring, talented kids who come pouring into the city with all these dreams.
Steve McQueen's Comedy Club Story00:04:35
And if they're really, really lucky, they'll fail completely and go home and start a family.
And if they're cursed, they'll succeed and become drug-addicted egomaniacs who never learn anything that matters about anything.
So they're all there, these hopeful kids, watching these improv standing on stage.
And somebody made a comment on stage about how his mother had lost her job or been consigned to a part-time job because they didn't want to insure her.
And someone in the audience, a kid in the audience, went, thanks, Obama.
And there was like a smattering of laughter.
And I know that that's anecdotal, but that would not have happened five years ago in a room full of 20-year-olds in LA.
I mean, it was a really, really different thing, a real sense of the sign of the class.
Anyway, most of the time, because I was at home entertaining people, I was watching TV, and I have all these movies that they send me and movies from Netflix and all this modern stuff.
I wind up watching Bullet, which is made in 1968, and it was on Turner Classic Movies.
And now, have you seen Bullet?
No, you haven't seen Bullet?
Bullet is like a definitive classic.
It was the first modern car chase in a movie.
Very, very famous.
Just the other day on Blue Bloods, this modern TV show, they had a whole show about the car, the Mustang, the 68 Mustang, which was famous for this car chase, you know, being stolen.
It was a whole plot.
So this is an iconic car chase, an iconic moment in film.
And Steve McQueen, who became an icon himself because of this, because he was super cool and super macho, and he just became what, to kids like me, I was a little kid when this movie came out, he became the image of masculine cool.
You know, he was.
And I'm watching this to go back because we remember these things differently.
I've seen it since it came out, but we remember them differently than there are.
The thing that really, really struck me about it, in 1968, the hippest dude in the room, this is Steve McQueen.
There is no man cooler than Steve McQueen.
Truly, nobody has ever walked in front of a movie camera who had more inherent cool than Steve McQueen.
And what got me about him is he's so polite.
He is so polite.
He's so sweet and protective to his girlfriend.
A word never comes out of his mouth without a please and thank you, ma'am.
And yes, that's so kind of, you know, he's just like a figure.
It was like a figure from another planet.
And he's sophisticated.
He goes out.
It's about a cop.
You know, it's a cop story.
But he goes out with his friends to a jazz club and he's obviously very cultured and all this.
And the movie is about the fact that as a cop, he deals with murder and death and how coarsening it is to him and how it threatens his relationship to his girlfriend.
And I just, after I watch that, I'm channel surfing, and I notice on one of the cable TVs they have 50 Shades of Gray, which I've never seen and I've never read.
I read like a paragraph of it because I did a parody of it called 50 Shades of Barack Obama, and I read it to steal the style of prose.
But I'm not that interested in this.
But I thought, gee, you know, everybody talks about this.
I ought to at least take a look at it.
So I recorded it and just pressed the button and zipped through it, you know, at high speed.
It's possible I slowed it down for some of the sex scenes a little bit.
But basically, just kind of, and I was, I got to say, I'm not going to say I was shocked because I knew what it was about, but I thought it was about what the British call a little bit of the slap and tickle.
That's what the British call it, you know, where they're smacking each other a little bit.
This guy is a full-fledged sexual pervert with this room full of hideous equipment that he draws this woman into, and this is a fantasy, you know.
So we've gone from Steve McQueen, who just can't, he just can't get enough of being kind to his girlfriend and protecting her from the horrible things that he sees to this.
The fantasy is that you meet this guy who is really just a coarse, sick, low individual protected from his coarseness and sickness by the fact that he's so wealthy.
He's so wealthy that it all seems kind of smooth and he's handsome.
You know, he's got the six-pack and all this stuff.
But he's tying her up and literally whipping her.
You know, it's not like soft core stuff.
I was really, I made me feel kind of sad.
It made me feel sad for women.
And I, as you know, I blame feminism.
I think that feminists, by talking women out of their natural selves, have forced the impulse to be with a strong, protective man and twisted it into this image of this abuser.
I mean, it's sad that people are looking at that for their sexual fantasies.
I mean, I know we all have untoward sexual fantasies.
I'm not saying, but that you would go to a movie that you would pay to have that fantasy on the screen.
I don't know.
It just seemed a little bit of a change.
Empire Of Lies00:15:07
All right, let's talk about the Empire of Lies.
Many, many years ago, I did an interview with a guy who since became my friend, Peter Robinson, and I had just written a book called Empire of Lies.
I'm not going to play the clip of it.
It's too long, although I like to look at it because it's many years ago, so I look at it, I feel like Bruno Mars.
I want to kiss myself.
I'm so pretty.
But Peter, who is a great guy, and if there were any justice and we didn't live in a crazy society, his show would be on PBS.
If you compare the interviews he does on Uncommon Knowledge to Charlie Rose, there's simply no comparison.
Peter is far, far, far and away better than that.
But he's a conservative, so he's not going to be on NPR or PBS.
And Peter said to me, what is this thing with you and lies?
You know, why Empire of Lies?
And I had just written an article for City Journal again called The Great White Lie or The Big White Lie.
He said, why are you always talking about lies?
And I said, well, you know, leftism has failed in every particular.
It has failed to describe the world and all its programs that it instituted from the summer of love in 68 to the fall of the Berlin Wall were proved wrong.
Materialism, atheism, anti-capitalism, communism, they all collapsed.
Being soft with criminals, they all fell apart.
We're reliving those days now because we didn't learn that lesson.
But from 68 to 90, when the law came down, all those things were proved wrong.
So that all that they had left, they had the choice between changing their minds, looking in the mirror and saying, we got it wrong, and lying.
And they chose to lie.
Let's take a look just at what Hillary Clinton said.
It's just a very brief cut of what she said about Muslims.
Let's be clear, though.
Islam is not our adversary.
Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
Right.
Now, an obvious lie, right?
There's no way in which any of that is true.
I'm not condemning all Muslims, obviously.
That's obviously not what we're talking about.
There is a cancerous strain that seems to have spread far and wide through Islam, probably the Wahhabi strain, where that is incredibly violent.
It is what terrorism is about.
It is about the Koran.
It is about this reading of the Koran.
It is about the fact that Saudi princes kept themselves in power by selling this stuff to the people.
And so it spread like a plague.
There is simply no way you can separate this.
The Democrat Party ran this insane ad attacking Republicans for you.
Now, you won't be able to see this if you're listening, but what it has is it has a little card that says Republicans are blaming all Muslims for terrorism.
And then it plays the video of them blaming all Muslims.
Listen to the Republicans blaming all Muslims, and then listen to where the Democrats turn to get wisdom on Islam.
We are at war with radical Islam.
Radical Islamic terrorism.
You do have a problem with radical Muslims.
Radical Islamic jihadists.
Radical Islamic terrorism.
We do not fight against Islam.
We fight against evil.
The world turned upside down.
You know, it's like, first of all, they're lying.
They say they're condemning all Muslims.
You heard them yourself.
They're lying right in front of you.
It's like, who are you going to believe?
You know, them or your lying ears.
You can hear them saying radical Islam.
They say it again and again.
Every single one of them says radical Islam.
And the card, the credit, the title card says they're blaming all Muslims.
That's oversimplistic and wrong.
And then they quote that guy that they love so much, George W. Bush.
They had to actually shave the Hitler mustache off him before they could put him up there to spread the wisdom, the wit and wisdom of George W. Bush sent to us by the Democrats.
So the idea is this.
Political correctness is the theory that lying is virtue because the world has no nature and you can lie it into being good.
So you can lie about it.
They're sitting there lying right in front of you.
They're saying things to every single person.
There's not one person who listens to Hillary Clinton, not one person who saw that ad who didn't know they were being lied to.
But 50% of them think, yes, that's right.
50% of them think, thank you for lying to me.
Now I'm a better person.
Thank you for getting me to lie.
Now I'm a better person.
40% in a new poll, 40% of millennials believe that there should be censorship if the thing that you're saying offends minorities, okay?
So this is what's being taught to them in school, that there is virtue in being censored.
There's virtue in changing the words you use to refer to people.
And by the way, don't despair about this because remember that the people of the 60s who brought our culture to its knees and the people of the 80s, the generation of the 80s that rebuilt this culture under Reagan on Wall Street were the same generation, right?
It's just a difference of who rose to the top.
At one point it was the people tearing everything down and at the other point it was the people saying, gee, tearing everything down was fun, but now I want to support my family and make a bazillion dollars and here's Reagan.
Great, you know, let's all hit Wall Street.
So don't think when you hear about what millennials are doing that you're looking into the future.
Youth and ignorance are synonyms.
I mean, they are synonyms.
When people get older, they learn stuff and they get wiser and their situation changes and they move along.
So this is not definitive.
But while I was watching, I watched a little bit.
I didn't get to see too much of it.
I watched a little bit of Ben Shapiro at the University of Missouri and I was looking at the faces.
He packed that room and I was looking at their faces, just yearning, longing for someone to speak simple truth, say something that reflects the world that I see in front of me.
So now, my theory, as you probably have garnered by now, is that we are a Judeo-Christian culture and nothing we think can exist outside of that.
Even if we oppose it, we oppose it on its own terms.
And leftism is Christianity without Christ.
Leftism is all these vague concepts that come from the Gospels but taken out of the context of the theology that makes them make sense.
So what did Jesus say?
Jesus says the things that go into a person's mouth don't defile him.
It's what comes out of his mouth that defiles him.
In other words, the dietary laws are not as important as the words that come out of your mouth.
Why?
The things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart and these defile him.
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.
These are what defile a person.
Which brings me to women's underpants.
Okay.
So in other words, the things that you say are reflective of something inside you.
If you don't say them, it's still inside you.
They don't go away because you change the words.
When I read the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, I'm a big fan of Gillian Flynn's and I think that the funny thing about her is she's an okay thriller writer but she's an excellent social satirist.
Gone Girl is really a book about marriage and about the false ideas of marriage and how they hide our natural egotism and narcissism.
And the plot is good.
You know, it's a good plot.
It's her best plot.
But it's really not the plot that she's writing about.
She's writing about these people.
And in this, she has a scene where somebody says, women hate the word panties.
And the character says to the reader, Google it.
So I did.
I thought like women, I didn't know that.
Women hate the word panties.
And in fact, this comes up.
This is a big discussion.
And I found particularly this one woman, Sarah Fenton, writing in The Atlantic.
And she says the problem with the word panties is it's too sexual.
And this, every man knows, is true.
Every man, when he hears the word panties, has a little zing.
It's not a big thing.
It's not a pervert thing where you're going through people's drawers or breaking into people's houses and going through their drawers or anything like that.
Just a little bit of zing.
And I can prove this to you.
Turn to your boyfriend or your husband and say to him, do you feel a little sexual zing when I say the word panties?
And if he says no, you're married to a liar.
That's how it works.
All right.
So the word panties for men has a sexual charge.
And the woman in The Atlantic tries to figure it out.
Well, is it because it sounds like panting?
Is it because, you know, it sounds like this?
No, it's because of what's in panties.
It's because when you say panties, it's a word.
It has a meaning.
It has a reference to life that we invest, you know, we invest that word.
It's like a vessel.
It fills up with the meaning.
And we think about that when we hear the word men get this little zing.
Okay.
I moved to England.
I lived in England for seven years.
They don't have the word panties.
They have the word knickers.
Now, when I hear the word knickers, what I think of is the three stooges playing golf.
They're hitting each other over the head with golf clubs.
All right.
So for about six months when I was in England and I would hear the word knickers, I could feel that that little zing, that little sexual zing was gone.
It disappeared because knickers didn't mean panties to me.
Okay.
Within six months, less, when I heard the word knickers, I got exactly the same feeling because it had come to mean that thing to me.
Okay.
There are two theories about language.
One is that there is no such thing as reality, especially no such thing as inner reality.
There's no such thing as manhood.
There's no such thing as womanhood.
There's no such thing as a state of being female or a state of being male.
There's no such thing as morality.
It's just the way you feel.
It's just the way you've been taught to believe.
And so there's no reference point that can't be changed by simply lying it away.
You can lie it away.
If Bruce Jenner gets up and says he's a woman, if you can just stop everybody from saying, excuse me, excuse me, but doesn't he, if he takes his skirt off, doesn't he, excuse me?
You know, if you can just shut that guy up and tell him he's hateful, then somehow Bruce Jenner will magically become a woman because reality has no substance.
If reality has no substance, words are dominant.
And then I have this tremendous power over you because all I have to do is call you a bad name and I've somehow reduced you.
And that's why you have these people getting hysterical on campus about the ways people talk.
But we conservatives understand that there are two kinds of reality.
Kant called it the starry sky above and the moral law within.
There is a reality outside that can't be changed and there is a reality of human nature that cannot be changed.
And words are just a rude tool that we use to try and describe that reality.
When I say tree, you get it.
You know there's a tree.
We know that there are things that might be trees, might be shrubs, a little bit unclear on the edges of things.
But right in the center, that word is a very definitive word.
When I say trees, you get trees, okay?
And when I say panties, you get panties.
And it fills up with the meaning that we know it has.
And the proof of this, if you need it from politics, is a word like retarded, right?
Retarded was a euphemism for words like moron and idiot.
Retarded is a lie.
Whether we're lying, retarded, it sounds like you're slow.
It sounds like you'll catch up eventually.
But you won't.
I mean, you have a disability.
It's sad.
You know, nobody's hurting you, insulting you about it, unless you live in a schoolyard.
If you live in a schoolyard, then the word retarded becomes an insult.
And so we change it again, trying to run away from that meaning.
We change it to the word special and try and empty it of all value whatsoever.
So then you have nasty people like Barack Obama making jokes about the Special Olympics.
You know, because special, we need that word.
We need a word to describe low IQ, something that's real.
We need it to insult each other with.
I mean, it's horrible, but there it is.
That's what we are.
That's what we're like.
These kids are running away from the truth.
These kids are running away from reality.
And they're especially running away from inner reality.
And when our administrators of these colleges kowtow to them, they're doing the opposite of educating them.
They're doing the opposite of educating them.
They're telling them that they can get away from who they are.
Now, this has nothing to do with politeness, which is a form of hypocrisy, a useful form of hypocrisy, where we speak nicely to each other.
It has to do with knowing thyself.
You cannot know yourself in a world where you're forced to lie, where you're forced to not say the things that are in your heart, even to yourself.
Even to yourself.
If you can't say them even to yourself, then you never know yourself.
You never know how broken you are.
You never know how sinful you are.
You never know how desperately in need you are of some kind of relief and forgiveness.
And that is the problem.
You never get to that point where you realize what truly defiles a man and who you truly are.
And these people are being kept in ignorance of that.
And that's why they show up so hungrily to hear any sign of language and truth.
So I did get to it, right?
Jesus Christ in panties.
It always makes sense now.
Things I like.
Stuff I like.
It's getting to be the family time.
You know, it's Thanksgiving, holidays.
So here's a kid's movie that I think is fantastic.
The Iron Giant.
If you've never seen this, it is just terrific.
It is based on, oddly enough, a book by Ted Hughes, who was the Poet Laureate of England.
He was married to Sylvia Plath, who, of course, committed suicide.
And Hughes' mistress also committed suicide, leaving the Nobel Prize laureate poet Seamus Heaney to remark, Ted is getting a little careless with his women.
It's like Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde had a terrible, it's a great joke.
He said to lose one parent is unfortunate, but to lose two smacks of carelessness.
And so Hughes was a very strange figure, but he did write this terrific book.
I'll show one scene.
Here's a scene.
This kid has found a robot, and the robot is living in his house.
And his mom, who's played by Jennifer Aniston, the robot is played by Vin Diesel, by the way, the mom is played by Jennifer Aniston, tells the kid to say grace, and the robot is in the background playing around in the kitchen, and the kid is trying to stop the robot from revealing himself while pretending to say grace.
Listen to The Iron Giant.
Would you say grace, please?
God, thank you for the food that mom has put in front of us.
And stop the devil from doing bad things.
And get out of here!
Satan.
Amen.
That was, hmm, really unusual, huh, Garth?
It's a terrific film.
It's really good.
But kids, you know, it's hard to find stuff that kids will enjoy, that you'll also enjoy.